“For certain men whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you. They are godless men, who change the grace of God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord.”
– Jude 4
Hi James and Ellen,
Would you be okay with your math teacher if he or she told you that whatever answer that you come up with for the mathematical problem that you are trying to solve will be the right answer? Would you be okay with your English teacher if he or she told you that whatever you decide to write for a short story will not need to have any punctuation marks? Would you be okay with your history teacher if he or she told you that whatever you do not like in your history book that you can rewrite what took place so that it will be more meaningful to you? How long do you think a teacher will keep his or her teaching position if he or she accepts any answer on a math test as being the correct answer, accepts a short story in whatever way that it is written as being perfectly written and accepts any version of any historical event as being a reliable account? Your grandpaa hopes that every teacher has an innate acceptance and trust in his or her teaching material. Your grandpaa thinks that if a teacher is unwilling to accept the voracity of the teaching material that he or she is using, that he or she will be begin to vomit on his or her students what his or her thinking is on what he or she believes that his or her teaching material should be. Your grandpaa believes that when a teacher begins to question what guys and gals have spent years in getting a good handle on and then putting into books to be taught, that the teacher is taking advantage of the fertile minds of his or her young learners in order to get them to discount absolute truth in a disrespectful way and then to get them to open up their minds to using disobedience to disrupt life and home norms.
Your grandpaa believes that most school teachers today do not have nefarious objectives in what and in how they teach. Your grandpaa strongly believe that there are today a very large number of evangelical church leaders who have personal reprehensible goals. Your grandpaa believes that there are today a lot of guys and gals – who espouse being Christ-followers, who are using their hired, appointed, elected or ascribed church or parachurch leadership position to garner personal prosperity, to pursue ardent admiration and to claim superior status. Your grandpaa has become maxed out with pastors who are using their pulpits to obligate their congregants to change something in their lives, to give more money and to become members of his church. Your grandpaa has become maxed out with church worship leaders who use being upfront to be performers, who use loud instruments and flashing strobe lights to augment the refrains or the songs that they only sing and who use the worship time to tap into the emotions of spiritually immature guys and gals. Your grandpaa has become maxed out with mission pastors who use funds designated for missions to travel wherever they want to go, who mandate missionary units what to do and/or report when he or she never spends time with the missionary unit in his or her or their host country and who never takes time to personally sit down to interact with a missionary unit who his or her church supports. If you are wondering why your grandpaa does not do something about it – if your grandpaa really does feel so much angst about what is taking place among the guys and gals who are Christ-followers in the United States as your grandpaa has communicated that he is feeling, your grandpaa has begun to put his internalized feelings into written narratives or storylines that . . .
Jude was struggling over 1,900 years ago with similar kinds of inter-Christ-follower church issues that your grandpaa is struggling with today. Jude starts out his circular letter by saying that he really wants to tell his readers about what a great thing it is for the especially elected or called guys, gals and kids to be unconditionally loved by God – as God the Father, and to be kept by Jesus Christ – as God the Son, that it is all about the salvation that they have in common but . . . Jude feels it more important though to tell his readers that they are going to have to be a lot more diligent in contending for the faith that they have been entrusted with because per verse 4, “For certain men whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you. They are godless men, who change the grace of God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord.” Jude identifies these church usurpers as guys and gals who instead of feeding the sheep – or the Christ-follower guys, gals and kids, do everything to only feed themselves, who show up claiming to be like rainclouds ready to water parched souls – the Christ-follower guys, gals and kids, but in reality do not have any water to drop, who claim to be fruit carries – to feed the Christ-follower guys, gals and kids, but whose branches are totally bare, who argue that they are the ones who are in the know in who Christ-follower guys, gals, and kids need to believe in when they are actually like storm tossed seas that are churning up rubbish and stirring up moral filth and . . . just as Jude did not want his fellow Christ-follower guys, gals and kids to have ungodly, boasting, flattering, faultfinding and perverse guys and gals in their circles, Jude does not want you to be around these kinds of guys and gals either. Jude knew that it is only God’s glorious presence that can fill a Christ-follower guy, gal or kid with joy. Jude’s final invocation is for all Christ-follower guys, gals and kids to always claim glory, majesty, power and authority in the name of Jesus Christ.
Jude (1117)