Sermon Tone Analysis

Jude’s Concern

How many of you all get excited about vacations?

Breaks from school?

Camping trips?

Stay-cations?

Man..

As I get older and older, the more I like a good stay-cation.

If you would’ve met me like 4 years ago, I was the guy who loved to go out and do stuff.

Hanging out until like two in the moring, going home, getting like 30 minutes of sleep, waking up and doing it again like it was no big deal.

But now?

I LOVE a good stay-cation where I get to stay and home and do nothing.

Those are the best.

So if you didn’t know, Angela and I missed last week because we we’re in Florida.

We weren’t going to Disney or just hanging out on the beach, we we’re there for a funeral and a couple of the leaders were out last week too, for different funerals and while I was trying to decide what I wanted us to talk about tonight I thought we would look at Heaven and what we get to look forward to.

How many of you get excited when you think of vacations?

Disney world, camping, cruises, stay-cations?

Where you stay at home and just relax?

We all have those things that we look forwards to and we get excited when those things get closer and closer, like Christmas, right?

That’s how I get when I think about Heaven and what we have to look forward to!

A place where there is no more heartache, no more pain, no tears, no sin, no worry, no anxiety, no illnesses, no COVID, no cancer, and even better than all of that- A place where we are with Jesus again.

A place where we are home.

It sounds so good and that’s what I thought I wanted to talk about tonight, but last Tuesday I sat down to read my Bible.

And I’ve been reading through 1 Samuel again, but for some reason I decided to go read the book of Jude.

If we’re being honest I was just thinking about the name “Jude” and I like that name so I flipped over and started reading.

It’s one of the shortest books of the Bible, you could actually read through it a few times before I even get done talking.

But the book of Jude is written by one of Jesus’ four brothers and it was written to a Church.

To beleivers.

And he starts his letter by saying “I was eager to write to you about salvation....I felt compelled to write you and urge you to contend for the faith.”

Jude starts talking about these false teachers that are in the Church and it isn’t their teachings that he points out, it’s their lifestyles.

Their moral compromise, he says that there are people who are using the grace of God and a “license for immorality”

They were saying “we are free in Christ so everything is allowable”

“God gives forgivness and abounds in grace so we are free to live as we please!

It doesn’t matter if I sin.”

This directly betrays Jesus’ authoirty and teachings… this goes against the words we say when we say “Christ is Lord.”

But we aren’t like that are we?

We don’t sing songs to God about how He is all we need and then turn around and live lifes full of everything but Him.

We don’t sing about His goodness and then keep it to ourselves, do we?

We don’t say that Christ is Lord and then live like the world… do we?

But Jude goes on and he starts to give examples of people in the past who knew the Lord at one time and then fell into darkness.

He talks about how the Israelites were lead out of slavary and then rebelled against God and died in the wilderness.

He talks about how some of the angels were once in Heaven actually rebelled against God and were judged because of it.

Then he talks about the entire cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and how the entire city was living in sin and how God destroyed them because of it.

And I was sitting up in bed reading the book of Jude and it just hits me how destructive sin is.

How evil it is and how there is not a single sin that doesn’t have an effect on our lives.

Every single sin that is committed seperarates us from the Lord.

It is our sin that makes us unworthy of God and His kingdom.

And there is not a single sin that does not bring death and consequence.

Here and in Heaven.

So what I want us to do tonight is look at a couple of stories and see just how destructive sin can be.

Open your Bibles to Genesis 19 with me.

So in Genesis 19 there’s a story about this guy named Lot.

Lot is Abrahams nephew and a couple of Angles come to vist him in the town of Sodom.

Once these Angles see how evil the town is, they tell Lot to take his family and flee, because they’re going to destory the entire place.

So of course Lot starts to gather his family up and one of the Angels gives them instructions on how what to do.

The angel tells lot to “Genesis 19:17”

Genesis 19:17 (KJV 1900)

Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed.

“Run to the mountains, don’t stop and don’t look back.”

and what we see next should show us just how seriously we should take disobidence to God.

God said flee and do not look back.

Do not stop anywhere, just keep going, but we get down to verse 26 and as they were fleeing, Lot’s wife looks back.

She becomes a pillar of salt.

She was gone in an instant.

Now we read this story and I don’t know about you, but that seems like really severe punishment for a glance.

Like all she did was look back and she dies on the spot.

There’s a lot to point out in that story but tonight what I want us to focus on is the seriousness of one sin before God.

Like one sin that we might even think is kind of small, right?

Like not that big of a deal, there are worse things that Lots wife could have done right?

But sin is sin and sin is what destoryed the evil city of Sodom and sin is what killed Lot’s wife.

One sin and boom.

Death.

Just the turn of her head and that was it.

Comparision- I wonder what Lot was thinking when that happened.

I wonder if he tried to compare the sins of Sodom to the sin his wife commited.

Sodom was an evil place, if you’ve ever read this story they were doing HORRIBLE things.

Raping and killing and beating and living in disgustingly, evil ways.

We look at them and say “Yup.

They deserve punishment.” and then Lot’s wife comes along and just turns around.

She looks back towards the city and is punished just like Sodom is.

She recieves death, because she directly disobeyed the commands of God.

How often do we look at another person’s sin and think to ourselfs “well I’m doing alright because I’m not nearly as bad as that person?”

“I might be a liar, but at least I’m not a killer.”

There are even times when we say things like “I’m keeping the commands.

I’m not doing the things that God told me to stay away from, so I must be doing alright.”

But one sin.

In front of the infenitly holy God of the universe.

Death.

There are two types of sin

Commision

Doing what God said not to do.

Omission

Not doing what God said to do

Sins of commision would be things like what is descrived in Matthew 15:18-19

Sins of omission are described in James 4:17 Another one of Jesus’ brothers says

How many times are we in a position to do something good for some and we don’t take that opportuniy?

How many times do we have time to read our Bibles or pray and spend time with God and we fill it with something else?

Both of these are sin and both are deserving of punishment.

Both of these things seperate us from God and both of these things impact our lives and if we don’t think that sin impacts our life than we are flat out lying to ourself.

There are some sins that we sin the immedate repercussions from

Murder brings death