Faith Tempered By Truth

Intro

I thought our vacation was about to ruined right off the get go

This past summer, Tabitha and I were headed down to my favorite place to vacation, the Smokey Mountains,

there is something that speaks to my soul there, or perhaps my blood since it’s the same general area my Dad grew up, and much of my family is buried

However, we decided to take a trip to visit and stay a bit at my Aunt and Uncle’s house just outside of Nashville

On the last time before we left, we decided to go and get some ice cream form a local shop that was highly praised!

Phone Fell out of Pocket, seemed to get run over, was facedown, with road pebbles on the front, and it was also raining!

Thought the Screen was going to be shattered for sure, but there was nothing wrong with it!

So what is tempered glass, how is it made, what makes it stronger?

Tempered glass is made through a process of heating and rapid cooling, which increases its strength and safety.

It is 4-5 times stronger than traditional glass due to the treatment process

It also won’t shatter, but breaks into tiny blunt pieces

It is also much harder and scratch resistant than normal glass

It is fascinating how it is made!

It is heated to around 1200F, and then rapidly cooled by high pressure air jets

The outside cools and hardens faster than the inside, which is what helps make it much stronger than normal glass

There is basically a tension between the inside and outside, which gives it the tempered nature

Things can go wrong

However, it is not a perfect system, even the best factories are running at 85-95% success rate in making it

There might be defects in the glass that causes them to shatter with the heat

One of the most interesting things is that if you do not do the cooling correctly,

If the cooling process is not rapid or uniform enough, the surface may not achieve proper compression, making the glass weaker than fully tempered glass.

Wait, it can become weaker than normal glass!?!

Another thing that can go wrong is when something called nickel sulfide is in the tempered product, these are a natural part of normal glass, but can cause tempered glass to randomly shatter even years later!

To avoid this some mfg heat soak the glass once it is tempered

This is done at 280C, and the compromised pieces will break under the heat

So what does tempered glass and it’s great protection have to do with you and I and this crazy book of Jude?

Well, tempering is never an enjoyable thing

God allows challenges, trials, and discipline to refine, strengthen, and shape us for His purpose.

God says it this way in Isaiah 48:10 “10 Look, I have refined you, but not as silver; I have tested you in the furnace of affliction.”

Tempering for glass comes through extremes of heat and cold, and much of the same comes for our faith!

What Jude is talking about here is faith that is tempered into a strength by being tempered by the truth

The truth is what guides us, it is what challenges us, and it is what forces us to grow!

Facing wickedness and false teachers is part of the tempering process of our faith, and it will involve extremes of hot and cold

FAITH

Now to remind ourselves, our theme is what?

Faith, Hope, and Love!

Since we’ve been zooming into faith these last few weeks, I put together that acronym of FAITH

Fear

Mat told us about Jairus’ daughter, and how we can utilize the powerful presence of Jesus to overcome our fear of whatever life throws our way!

Allegiance

The Rich Young Ruler really challenged us with a question of our faith

Do we have faith in Jesus, but add things here and there? Can we really serve Jesus and something else?

The answer is a definitive no, we cannot serve Jesus and money, our families, our career Goals, our schools, or even something like our dreams and aspirations

What Jesus demands is allegiance, since we are his subjects and he is our king! He gets all of our lives, and then he controls where they go!

If we won’t give Jesus something, then it means that he doesn’t have our allegiance, our trust, or that we are not fully, and faithfully trusting in him

Hospitality

Last we talked about Hospitality, Kingdom Hospitality, which shows us, how we care matters immensely

Kingdom Hospitality is about welcoming others with the love of Christ, just as a lighthouse provides guidance and safety. It’s not about personal convenience but about intentional care for others, especially fellow believers.

So today we cover the last two letters of our acronym, I and T.

Imminent

Imminent means something is close, near at hand, fast approaching

The reason this is here is because, one way we hold onto our faith, and allow it to grow and be tempered by the trials we face, is because we don’t have to be the judge, jury, and executioner!

When we stand for what is right, God sees that and knows that, even if no one else does!

It is easy to look at Jude, and see a lot of the text dedicated to the bad guys, the false teachers, the bad examples, and think that that is the main theme of Jude, but it is not

Jude tells us at the beginning that he wants us to contend to the faith, and even if you standing up for the faith doesn’t work, it’s ok, God knows

Since one of the key aspects of our faith is the imminent return of Christ!

Christ will return, and that is part of our faith, as well as our hope, which is all rooted in God’s love for us!

Teaching

The final letter is T for Teaching

The call Jude has for us is to not model our faith on what we not ought to believe, but what we should believe, holding on to the Gospel preached by the Apostles

Jude understands that false teachers, bad Christians, hypocrites, wicked members and leaders in a church is going to be part of the experience before Jesus comes back!

Yet, Jude is not telling us to build our faith on that, but to build it up by holding to the Gospel, keeping the main thing the main thing!

In essence, you shouldn’t build your marriage on not getting a divorce, but if you do the good things and the work, you will end up avoiding those things by and large

So Jude wants us to know holding to the imminent return of Christ, and allowing our minds and thoughts to be shaped by good teaching will help us avoid the pitfalls of bad teaching!

FAITH

Faith- Fear has nothing on Jesus

Allegiance- Our most foundational loyalty must be to Jesus

Imminent- Christ is returning soon, so keep on holding on!

Teaching- Good teaching is what we should thrive off of!

Hospitality- Stems from our love for God, the faithful teaching we are getting, and so it is seeking to love others, particularly those inside the church!

Call to Contend for the Faith (v.1-4)

So who is Jude?

Jude opens up saying he is the brother of James, and a slave of Christ!

Jude is a shortened name of Judas, and so we can gather that this Jude is in fact the 1/2 brother of Jesus, and full brother of James

Yes the James that wrote the book of James!

In fact, his family said he was crazy and so they set out to restrain him, saying he is crazy! (Mk. 3:21)

We have his name show up later in Mark 6:3 “3 Isn’t this the carpenter, the son of Mary, and the brother of James, Joses, Judas, and Simon? And aren’t his sisters here with us?” So they were offended by him.”

So when Judas, aka Jude, sees his brother dying on the cross, and then raised from the dead, he and James totally change course, and support him, and become key pillars in the early church, supporting the apostles, and spreading the gospel!

He is mentioned in a positive light in by Paul in 1 Corinthians 9:5 as one of the Lord’s brothers

We don’t know the exact church he was writing to, but we can easily see this is a church issue at any church you might go to!

People are always trying to take and use the leadership in a church, whether formal or just popular leaders, to run church according to their desires

Jude wants those who are part of the church, who are called and deeply loved by God, to keep pressing on!

He wants mercy, peace, and love be multiplied unto them!

Unfortunately, Jude’s initial desire of writing is not able to be done, since he needs to address the poison that has been influencing the church!

What Jude says is that we need to contend for the faith that has been delivered to the saints, by the saints

That same faith is what we pass down and evangelize about!

So what does contend actually mean?

Contend means to wrestle with, strive for, grapple with, in our modern usage can even mean oppose

On a nicer side of things, it can mean assert, maintain, hold to, etc.

What is very interesting, is that this is the only time this word is used anywhere of anything in the NT!

But if we look at the root word, the root of this word is agon, which means to struggle, to fight, and if that sounds familiar that is because it is a word we use today: agony/agonize!

If you want wonder what this is talking about 1 Timothy 6:12 “12 Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of eternal life to which you were called and about which you have made a good confession in the presence of many witnesses.”

The literal greek there would be translated as “-Struggle- (agon) the good -struggle- (agon)”

My friends, faith is not easy, it is not simple, it is a battle, it is warfare!

If you run into a well meaning Christian that says well faith is simple, you have to pause and wonder if they have really thought through and walked out their faith!

The concepts of faith are simple, the act of living it out, and having it incorporate every cell of your being? That is hard

The same also holds to snide atheist that say derogatory things about faith and ‘you just believe it because you listen to your pastor’ etc.

Let me tell you the most wonderful truth held in this single sentence in this obscure book of Jude about contending for the faith

First, Scripture is encouraging you to do so! Other translations make it clearer like NET:

Jude 3 NET

3 Dear friends, although I have been eager to write to you about our common salvation, I now feel compelled instead to write to encourage you to contend earnestly for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints.

God is not asking you to have blind faith, he is not asking you to turn off your brain, I am not asking that either!

What is commanded to us is to fight, wrestle with our faith!

There are always things that you will have questions about, and wonder how things can work in Christianity

Things like why did God command apparent genocide of the those who lived in Canaan?

Why is there Hell, is it not unjust for God to throw us into Hell for eternity?

What about slavery? Why didn’t God just outlaw it?

Suffering and Evil in the World if God is Good?

I encourage you to look into these things, you don’t need to simply go to the pastoral vending machine for answers!

I will certainly help you and give you my thoughts, but there are various ways and understandings of these commonly stumbling blocks

Part of contending the faith is working through difficult questions that come up, and there is nothing wrong, or incorrect about questioning these things, it’s part of contending for the faith

The word that is the verb version of contending?

Contention. If you are contending for something, like faith, there will be contention with the thing you are contending against.

Secondly, this means that as you contend with your faith, your faith can mature and your views can change

Maturing is coming to be gracious to others, to knowing that people might come and end up on different sides of an issue

It means that you are alright knowing that not everything is a true vs false teacher issue, some things are just different options

This stems from things as small as your preference in Bible translations

To bigger things like what role do women in ministry have, can you baptize babies, how do you baptize, etc

When you are able to contend for the faith, what it really helps you understand is that your faith is not a brittle, unmovable box that you have to try and fit all of life into

What your faith is a working through of life

You know what God says about certain things, and you know who God is from his word

So you can deal with struggles of modern day life, using a book from 2000-3000 years ago!

For instance, if you are contending for your faith, you know that Jesus says do not repay evil for evil, and do not seek vengeance for it is God’s to repay, and do not murder

So if that is the case, how can we deal with criminals being killed by the death penalty?

There are multiple ways that good Christian brethren have thought through this and pretty much all of the views are viable

But the key is that you are thinking of this through the ideas of faith, rather than politics!

To put it in another way, often we struggle with that rigid faith, because we treat the Bible like a dictionary, open a page, find the definition, and that is that

I think Scripture is more interested in being a framework of wisdom that allows to engage with the world as it changes rather than being a static immalleable ideas from ancient times

It allows us have a framework that is able to be adjusted with the times, and apply our faith to modern times and contexts

However, it takes a lot of time and effort to contend and apply our faith to our lives

Corruption of False Teaching (v.5-16)

Part of that struggle and what tempers our faith is that we are always fighting against false teachers wanting and wooing us into false doctrines

Jude lays out quite the list from the OT, which reminds us that false teachers are not new, but as old as Satan

He was after all, the first false teacher!

So we have two major category examples from the OT

The first is the people of Israel

God did so much for them

He gave them the great leader Moses

He appeared and led them out of Egypt with the 10 plagues, walking through the sea, the tornado of fire protecting them, water and food being provided for them, God appearing on Mount Sinai

What did they do about it?

They grumbled, and complained, made a calf idol at Mount Sinai, and it all went down hill from there!

It got so bad that God said that of all the people who saw his miracles in Egypt, only Caleb and Joshua would go into the promised land!

The second set is of supernatural beings, angels, or demons, and the people of Sodom

This is pulled from Jewish history and Genesis 6, in which Angels are going and rebellion from their created place and even having sexual relations with women on the earth!

They are judged accordingly and placed in waiting for judgement

The final example is Sodom and Gomorrah, and the sexual immorality they commited

They tried to attack and rape these angelic beings, which of at least one seems to be Christ himself (The Angel of the Lord)

Both of these stories are about violent rebellion of God that leads to sexual immorality!

This is what the false teachers are doing!

If you want to see if a person is a false teacher, one easy test is their views on sexuality!

Think of how many cults have started and suddenly the leader is able to have multiple wives, or sex partners!

Jude says those people are so out of touch with any idea of contending for their faith, that they might as well be day dreaming about the reality they think they are experiencing

They defile their flesh

That is their sexual ethic is loose. God forgave us, so let us experience his grace by living like the Devil

They reject authority

This is of course they are rejecting the authority of the leadership God placed over them in the church

They slander the glorious ones

This is a bit weird but seems to be speaking to God’s angels, and his messengers. Angels do help us after all

Then Jude tells a story about Moses’ body, and this ancient Jewish retelling of Moses’ death and burial, but the point being that if one of the top angels of Micheal did not use his own power or authority, but relied on God rebuking the Devil, what does that say about us?

What it shows is that these false brethren are in fact like wild animals, who maybe talk and act just enough like a Christian that you might confuse them for one

It ends up saying the same thing

They are like Cain

They kill their ‘brothers’ with their wicked actions

They are like Balaam (The one who was a prophet of God but tried to curse God’s people, and had his own donkey rebuke him!)

They lead the people into sexual immorality

They are like Korah (rebelled against Moses)

They rebel against their leaders, and by attacking the leaders, they end up attacking God himself!

Their actions betray any possibility of their lip-service confession of Christ

What Jude wants the people to know is that these false teachers who embody all the worst of the OT examples, will be judged, Christ will return, and his return is Imminent!

Temper Your Faith & Rescue Others (v.17-23)

As interesting as that section of the OT stories of wicked people are, Jude wants to ground them in the truth, rather than on what to avoid!

They need to know, those people will be coming, and they will be doing wickedness, and Jesus knows of their wickedness!

These people are simply the foretold ‘scoffers’

While we might be surprised they are in our churches, and not outside the walls of our church, the devil will try any number of tricks to bring down the church

So if we want to temper our faith, we cannot be like those from the OT, or those poisoning the church to death now!

So if we want to avoid the pitfalls and really contend for our faith, unlike those false teachers among us, what do we need to do?

Build up your faith

There is a proactive element in this!

We need to be purposely building our faith, otherwise we will regress!

It means reminding ourselves of the basics of the gospel, our need for the gospel, and the power of the gospel!

Ultimately, you will be able to strengthen your trust in Jesus, and move into deeper faith as you learn to lean into trusting him more

Pray in the Spirit

Part of that trust is prayer, building the relationship you have with God!

Now this is not praying in tongues, but it is praying and allowing God to direct your prayers, who you should talk to , who you should encourage, etc

It allows God to be part of your life, and keep him as a major part of that, regardless of what happens

It is regular as well, and it is a two way discussion, you let God talk and lead you

As you pray by submitting to God’s leading, and what you see in Scripture, it allows you to see the needs and commands that God will give you

Keep yourself in God’s love

This is really a combination of everything, if you seek to build up your faith, seek to grow in prayer, and seek to show mercy, you will stay in God’s love

We can never lose God’s love and support, but we can walk away from it, but we can have a muted experience of it by letting other things get in the way of it!

Have Mercy

If you haven’t noticed at this point, God saves us, and it is never meant to be a you and Jesus thing alone, there is always outward action that accompanies the work God has done in you

Showing mercy is one of the greatest weapons God has by his church, we are oft not great at using it!

Mercy breaks the hard hearts, and it strengthens the weak hearts

When we are contending for our faith, we come at various points of difficulty, and oft in those Satan tries to make us walk away from the faith

If you are able, don’t scorn those who are contending, but help them, and encouraging them in prayer, Scripture, and presence!

People don’t need more shame piled on them, the devil does that enough, they need the grace and mercy to know they can be honest and real, and that will transform people

To put it another way, that is a way to show that Kingdom Hospitality we spoke of last week!

We just have to be careful that we don’t get caught up in too much of what we can handle

In trying to save the person from drowning, we can’t be pulled into the water ourselves!

God’s Unbreakable Support (v.24-25)

The final greatest part of this letter is the benediction

Even though life is hard, and church might be difficult, full of people that are two-faced, liars, and as wicked as the OT Examples, we can trust in God

Our tempering relies not on our ability, but our standing in Jesus!

He is able to protect us from stumbling, allow us to stand blameless before him (purposely said not perfect, but without blame!), and with great jubilation

I love that this word actually can mean with shouts!

Like when we get to heaven, Jesus and the angels let out a shout that you made it!!!!

Since Jesus is our Savior and he deserves all the glory, majesty, power and authority of all time!

Application

We talked about tempering glass, and about our our faith should be tempered as well

Going through trials, temptations and the difficulties of life, gives us an opportunity to strengthen our faith!

When we face difficulties, and false doctrines, it allows us to be resilient in our faith, it is able to adapt to an ever changing world with the timeless principles God gives us

Yet, there is a very real danger, the same process meant to strengthen our faith, can cause our faith to weaken

If we have poison in our doctrine, or in the people in our lives, it will actually undermine the trials, and lead us away from faith

Just as improperly cooled tempered glass, or glass with impurities will shatter rather than be strengthened

It is only by relying on God that we are able to endure the tempering process of our very souls!

God has our best interests in mind, but sometimes it is difficult, hard and seems like God has abandoned us or doesn’t care, but that is not the case

Jesus didn’t have it easy in this life, and if we seek to be like Jesus, we won’t have it easy either!

Philippians 3:10 “10 My goal is to know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings, being conformed to his death,”

How is God using this to temper and helping me contend for my faith?

Work/School

Doing this type of faithful living and having a faith that is built on contending for it, is hard, and not meant to do alone!

Find a friend at work or school that can hold you accountable

They help you not give in and compromise, but stand in the truth, and be a good example of Christ in your school or work

We are not meant to do faith alone, and contending is important to do together! Don’t try to do it alone, there’s a reason why God founded the church, and not just individuals that happen to follow Christ

Church

When getting heated in doctrine or what Scripture says about a certain passage give grace and mercy to others. In other ways, seek to understand their view, rather than prove your view right!

Just because you disagree doesn’t mean you have to kick them out of the church! Show grace, mercy and hospitality to them!

Wouldn’t this make any church a much healthier place to be!

Parenting

As a parent, teaching your children about your faith should be important!

Our society is very opposed to several key things we believe like the Sexual ethic, but how do we show that? We do it with kindness

Use what Jude lays out, showing them being rooted in faith is important and the foundation

If Jesus is who he says he is, and if he rose from the dead, everything else stems from that!

It’s ok to tell your kids, and even others that there are things you don’t like about Christianity!

I don’t know a lot of people that really like the idea of hell!

I wish the Bible said different things on sexuality at times, but it is only in a monogamous marriage between a man and woman that God gives approval. It’s difficult for friends of mine that have same sex attraction that they have to be chaste for their lives

You can see how our culture impacts our faith and what we view as important or not or difficult or not

Don’t be afraid to have these discussions, but have them with trying to wrestle and contend with your faith

Perhaps you can do a Bible Q&A with your kids, walking through difficult passages and topics, and trying to understand how they can be aligned with who God is revealed as

And sometimes you get an understanding, and sometimes it might that you misunderstand who God is, and sometimes it just stays as a mmm that’s a hard topic!

So how do we become resilient, or tempered against deception?

Rooted in God’s word

Growing in Discernment

Active in Rescuing Others

Drawing from the power and authority of Jesus