Sermon Tone Analysis

Big Idea

Tension: Why should Jude’s audience contend for the faith?

Resolution: Because worldly people will always want to pervert God’s grace for their own means.

Exegetical Idea: Jude’s audience should contend for the faith because worldly people are always trying to pervert God’s grace for their own means.

Theological Idea: Believers should contend for the faith because faithless men will always try to pervert it for their own ends.

Homiletical idea: We must contend for the faith because it protects us from faithlessness.

Introduction

There are a lot of people today who think that what we are doing right now is very strange.

That we have opened up a very strange, very old book, that we read it because we believe it is true, that we listen to it and try to understand truth by it, and that we try to live in the way that we believe it tells us to live.

There are a lot of people today who are fine with Christian morals, but who shun Christian theology.

They say, “What’s really important isn’t what we believe, but what we do.”

Among these would be Steve Robertson, an activist for world peace.

In an article on Huffington Post, Robertson wrote this:

“The salvation of our world is truly possible when each of us have the courage to drop the hot rock of dogmatic religious beliefs and identification...” In other words, salvation, peace, hope, is only possible if we stop believing what we believe.

If we dare to say, “There is a truth, and the Bible has that truth, and that truth is Jesus Christ, and only by him can we be saved,” we are branded as bigots, intolerant, and hateful.

How do we respond to this?

After all, this seems to be clearly opposed to what we read in our passage today.

Jude here says to “contend for the faith.”

Why does Jude want us to do this?

Contend for the Faith

Well, before we can describe why Jude wants us to contend for the faith, we need to describe what it means to contend for the faith.

Common Salvation: So to understand this, we have to understnad Jude’s original intention.

Jude originally sat down to write to them a letter concerning the common salvation.

Now, what exactly he is talking about we have a general idea.

Apparently, he wanted to write a letter about how probably the Jews and Gentiles are reconciled together by the gospel of Jesus Christ.

He wanted to reflect on the saving news of Jesus Christ, and how that has welcomed all different kinds of people to put their faith in Jesus Christ. he wanted to write a letter like Paul did to the Ephesians or Romans, about how GOd’s good news of salvation had brought together many different kinds of CHristians.

He thought that was super important.

He wanted to give them a clear explanation of what it means to be saved: that because Christ went to the cross and died in our place and rose again from the dead, that we are justified before God by faith alone and that we have life in Christ by faith alone.

That there is nothing that we can do to save ourselves, that God’s work on our behalf has made us right with him by grace alone.

Contend: Yet, he says, he found it necessary to tell the Christians to contend for the faith.

Now, this verb for contend is an athletic word, we might say, “to strive, to compete, to labor and toil and put our backs to the plow.”

He wanted Christians to “contend for the faith.”

He wanted us to work for the faith like a football team works to bring home the trophy, like a runner works hard to bring home a medal, like a nascar driver keeps his eyes on the prize to try to bring home the glory.

Jude says, with all the labor, effort, toil, sweat, and tears that you use to win the prize, to bring honor to your team, you should work hard for the faith.

The Faith: Now, here the “faith” probably means that body of Christian teaching which constitutes basic Christian doctrine.

Jude says, “you hsould work hard to strive for the benefit of the faith.”

In other words, he wants us to spread Christian teaching farther out, and deeper down.

He wants us to share it with others, and he wants us to push it deeper into our souls.

Now, what exactly is that body of essential Christian teachings?

Well, even in the New Testament, we have a number of short little creed like statements.

So we think of , , , etc.. Well, approximately 1-200 AD, the early Christians compiled all these little statements, and they put together what we call today the “apostle’s creed.”

And most Chrisitans throughotu the world have said that the apostle’s creed more or less describes what we mean when we say the “faith.”

And This is a modern rendering of the apostle’s creed:

I believe in God the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth;

And in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord,

Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born from the Virgin Mary,

suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried, descended into hell,

on the third day, he rose again from the dead,

ascended to heaven, sits at the right hand of God the Father almighty,

thence He will come to judge the living and the dead;

I believe in the Holy Spirit,

the holy, universal Church,

the communion of saints,

the forgiveness of sins,

the resurrection of the flesh,

and eternal life.

Amen.

So when Jude says, ‘contend for the faith’ this is what he is talking about.

The essential teachings of the Christian faith.

And it is interesting, in the early church, they would actually ask someone if they believed these things in order to be baptized.

They believed that if they were going to baptize them, that this would be very important for them to do.

Now, what is important about the apostle’s creed, is not the words themselves, but the God who it describes.

Creeds are helpful if a. they help us understand Scriptures better ,and b. if they help us understand God better.

Once for all delivered to the saints: These teachings have been handed down “once for all.”

God gave them to his people and will nto change them.

Unlike the Mormons or the Catholics, we do not believe that God has changed his revelation.

No, God gave these truths to the churhc, “once for all.”

Now, when we say that, what we don’t mean is that there isn’t room to grow in our understanding.

In fact, we might say that the controversies in teh Church known as the Reformation were in large part, trying to understand the meaning of the “forgiveness of sins.”

In fact, if you will look at our own Church’s statement of faith, you will find that it is very similar to this, very ancient, very early Christian creed.

This truth was given to us to proclaim and to contend for.

Sacrifice: Now, if we are going to contend for this, what is implied, is that like an athlete, we will sacrifice for it.

It is the idea of self-denial, of picking up our cross and following Christ.

We are willing to say “no” to other things in our lives in order to say yes to Jesus.

So what does it mean to sacrifice or contend for the faith handed down once for all?

Well, i think it can mean a handful of things.

So for example,

Sacrifice our own desires: Another way that we will have to contend for the faith, is to sacrifice our own desires.

That might be hard.

THere are tiems that we will really want to do this, but we know we shouldn’t.

Where we know that nothing would feel better than telling off our coworker, or clicking on that computer screen, or running away from our problems, but we know that it would be out of step with following Jesus.

It means that we are willing to say “no” to ourselves, in other to say “yes” to him.

That we take the attitude of John teh Baptist, “He must increase, but I must decrease.”

It means that we have to be willing, when we read teh Scriptures and we see something that conflicts with how we think it should be, to change our hearts, our minds, and our own beliefs to match ourselves up with Scripture.

Sacrificing our time: So the simple reality is that contending for the faith means sacrificing our time.

Will this mean that sometimes we have to come to church when we don’t feel like it?

Yes.