Sermon Transcript Tone Analysis

Grace, mercy and peace be unto you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

Amen.

The text for this evening's message is the epistle lesson from Jude that was read earlier in the service.

Remembering and remembered.

How many of you have a great memory?

Okay.

I think I have a greater memory than you do.

I can remember all the way back to when I was two.

And I'm much older than you, even though you probably can remember when you were two.

But I've got a lot more years that I could've forgotten since those years when I was two.

But for as much as I can remember things that happened in my life when I was two years old, I can walk into the grocery store or the hardware store or the sporting good store and get everything but what I was supposed to go into the store to get in the first place.

Part of that is, I trust my memory to remember what I'm going in the store for.

But there's all kinds of other distractions.

You know, in the grocery store, there's all kinds of other food items that sometimes look a little more appealing than what I'm actually going to the store to pick up.

So those always find their way in my cart.

And then, it isn't until I get home that then it's like, oh yeah, that's what I was going to the store for.

And sometimes, I even go to the store three or four different times to get that same thing, and it takes me the fifth time before I actually bring it home with me.

In some ways, I suppose that may be how we sometimes remember God.

Our Lord, Jesus.

We may remember back how He worked in years olf old, but we may not, we may not be focused on how He is working in the here and now.

I had a great-grandmother who I never knew.

I know her name was Clara.

I knew what she look like from photographs.

And I can almost picture her life through what my grandmother and her sisters and brother shared about great-grandma.

Even though I never met her, I have a pretty good idea of what kind of person she was like.

None of us have ever seen Jesus.

Oh, we may have seen pictures of him like we have one over there on the side of the sanctuary.

Or we may have a picture of Jesus at home.

Or maybe there's pictures in our Bible.

But those are only people's thoughts about what Jesus might have looked like.

Their interpretation of what He might have looked like.

But even using those images and what we have in scripture that speaks about Jesus, we get to know an awful lot about Jesus, don't we?

And we should remember a lot of those things that Jesus did and taught, and what God had been doing in the past to prepare for Jesus coming the first time.

And if we remember those things, then we should be even better able to think about and remember that He's promised to come again.

We have a nice little letter in the scriptures.

The next to the last book in the New Testament.

And it's the letter of Jude.

Now, I must confess, up until probably upper Sunday School, upper-grade Sunday School when we really had to memorize the books of the Bible, to be honest, I thought Jude was just the fellow that the Beatles were singing about in the song "Hey Jude."

Who's Jude?

And why does he have a letter in the Bible?

And why is it in the back of the New Testament?

Why is it tucked away in the back?

Jude is a brother of Jesus.

And it's interesting that his letter appears in the scripture, because most of the other writings in the New Testament are written by either an evangelist and apostle or somebody connected to an evangelist or an apostle.

For instance, Luke is tied with Paul.

Mark is tied with Peter.

But then there's Jude, and he's neither an evangelist nor an apostle, nor necessarily tied to an evangelist or apostle, and yet his words, his letter makes it into the scripture.

It's one of those letters that we call a general letter.

It's written to the church in general, not specific like St. Paul writes to Ephesus or Galatia.

But like Peter, it's written to the church in general.

And Jude is writing about 68 AD.

So, about 35 years after Jesus had been crucified, died and risen and ascended to heaven.

Now, 35 years, that doesn't seem like a very long time, does it?

How many of you can remember, something from 35 years ago?

Right at the moment?

Even I can't.

I'd have to think about, well, when was 35 years ago?

And then you realize that oh, that is a long time.

In fact, it's approximately when I graduated from high school.

A lot has changed in 35 years.

But there's still some things about high school and the students I went to school with that I do remember.

Some good, some bad, some in between.

But the thing is, when you show up at the class reunion, everybody looks different.

Everybody looks different.

One fellow, gentleman going to his 65th year class reunion looked in the gathering room, reception room, and he said to his wife, "This must be the wrong place."

And his wife said, "No, it's the room, it's the room name that is on the invitation."

"Well, it's full of old people," he sayd to his wife.

And then there's little pictures on badges that identify what they looked like 65 years before.

But Jude is writing 68 years, 68 AD, 35 years after the events of Jesus' suffering, death, crucifixion, burial, resurrection, ascension.

And he's writing because the church has begun to forget who Jesus is and what Jesus has done.

He opens with a greeting: Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James, to those who are called beloved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ: may mercy, peace and love be multiplied to you.

Beloved in God the Father, kept for Jesus Christ.

He goes on, then, in verse five: Now, I want to remind you, although you once fully knew it, that Jesus, who saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe.

And the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority, but left their proper dwelling, He has kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day.

You'd say, well, what's he mean, Jesus saved people coming out of Egypt?

Jesus is there, leading the people out of Egypt.

They had forgotten that.

And they were also beginning to forget that Jesus had delivered people out of the hand of slavery to sin, death and the devil, himself.

The apostles were passing away.

The message was being forgotten.

I don't know how it is in your family, but my brother always ask me "Now, do you remember this?"

You know, something about the family, the story.

Well, yeah, I sort of do.

Don't you?

Well no, I was never around, paying attention to those stories.

It's like, well, you probably should have, because then, between the two of us, we'd remember everything.

But the people were beginning to forget.

And so for Jude, it's critical to remind the people, remind the church to remember what Jesus has done.

And to remember that Jesus is the Savior of those who believe and that He is the destroyer of the ones who don't believe.

Now, it's probably easy to remember that Jesus is the Savior of those who believe.

We hear it again and again, and it gets reinforced for us.

But this notion that Jesus is also the destroyer of the ones who don't believe, well, maybe we've forgotten that.

Maybe we've forgotten that it wasn't just God saving the people from Israel, but God also destroyed those who, in their unbelief and the hardness of their heart, grumbled against God and Moses, sending those fiery serpents.

But He was also the same One that saved them through the promise of: look to the serpent and live.

He's the same God that Jesus speaking to Nicodemus says, God loved the world so much that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him might not perish but have eternal life.

He did not come into the world to condemn the world because the world was already condemned by sin.

And later on, He goes on and says the one who's condemned is the one who doesn't believe.

And they're going to be destroyed.

And it's the same Jesus, Son of God who is both Savior and Destroyer.

And if we fail to remember that, then we fail to remember what He's done.