These are sensual persons, who cause divisions, not having the Spirit.

But you, beloved, building yourselves up on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit,

keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life. (Jude 1:19-21)

Soldiers who experience actual combat never come back the same. Today, soldiers are helped with what’s called post-traumatic stress syndrome, which in older times would have been called living with the horror of war. It’s not uncommon for ex-soldiers to face severe marital crisis, to struggle to integrate back into life, to have normal and healthy relationships again.

Christians don’t face the same horrors of war in the spiritual battles they face, but it is nonetheless a battle. Jude says his whole purpose was to write exhorting us to contend earnestly for the faith. But Jude also wants to prevent Christian soldiers from suffering from adverse reactions to the battle. He does not want the battle to harden or ruin us in other areas of our lives. And so he writes verses 20-

In this entire epistle, verses 20 to 22 are the only commands. The whole letter has been one of describing apostates for us: their danger, their speech, their actions, their character, and even their final judgement. Jude told us in verse 3 that he decided to write a letter exhorting his readers to contend earnestly for the faith. And up till now, that has taken the form of helping us to identify false teachers, recognise them, so we can guard the once-for-all-delivered-to-the-saints-faith.

But now in verse 20, we have the clear marker, But you, beloved. In contrast to the false teachers, in contrast to those who do not have the Spirit, who are sensual, who divide up the church, you, beloved are different. And because you are different, there are different words written to you: not words of condemnation and rebuke, but words of exhortation, words of instruction.

False teachers will keep appearing, and apparently multiplying. Paul also said so, and then used the same phraseology:

But evil men and impostors will grow worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived.

But you must continue in the things which you have learned and been assured of, knowing from whom you have learned them, (2 Tim. 3:13-14)

We have seen that God is going to judge apostates in the world. We are supposed to identify, separate and discipline. But then, we need to get on with our Christian lives. We need to not be fixated on false teachers, obsessed with their false doctrine. Someone has said, “Don’t steer your car by avoiding the ditches on the sides.” If all you do when driving is look at the ditch on the side of the road and try to avoid it, you will very likely wander off the road, or perhaps even veer into the ditch on the other side of the road. And if you notice the ditches on both sides, and try to steer by alternatively looking at them, you will wander across the road in a dangerous fashion. You steer best by keeping your focus ahead of you, looking at the road straight ahead.

Some Christians, and some churches, steer themselves almost entirely by answering the latest false teaching, becoming aware of every perversion of the faith that is out there. But sometimes, they end up in ditches they didn’t expect. And these verses in Jude are the Holy Spirit’s commands to us as to how to steer the car, what to keep our eyes on.

This passage has one main command, supported by three sub-commands. We’re going to see the one great priority of those who contend for the faith, and then the three ways we reach that priority. It’s similar to the Great Commission in Matthew 28, where the main command is make disciples, and then there are three participles, going, baptising, and teaching, that tell you how to make disciples.

The same thing happens here, where the main verb is in verse 21: keep yourselves in the love of God. How do you do that? By building yourselves up in your most holy faith, by praying in the Holy Spirit, and by looking for the mercy of the Lord Jesus.

After describing the false teachers in detail so that we can identify them, how does Jude want us to contend earnestly for the faith? Surprisingly, the answer is keep yourselves in the love of God.

The Great Priority for Contenders: Keep Yourself in the Love of God

Now before we explore what that means, we should ask, why would the love of God, whether it means God’s love for us, or whether it means our love for God, be relevant to a book about identifying false teachers? What does love have to do with contending for the faith?

Actually, it has everything to do with it. I have watched for many years churches and ministries, and individuals that give special attention to contending for the faith, to discernment, to answering false teachers, and I have seen a trend. I see many of them starting out well, opposing the compromise and error they see in so many churches, calling for purity in doctrine and life. As they do that they take flak, and because of this, they stand even firmer. But then there seems to come a decisive moment when the church or the group or even the individual has to decide if it is going to make opposing false teaching its bread and butter, its lifeblood, or if it is going to, while retaining its stance for truth, go on to teach all of the Christian life. In other words, will it move on to teach not just what to oppose and what not to believe, but what to love, and what to believe, and what to obey.

I’ve seen too often, that doesn’t happen. Once you have attracted a following who were drawn by the contending for the faith, you now have some among them who are not just contending but contentious. Now you have a crowd which is expecting a fight every Sunday, or every time you post on the Internet, it is hard to move on to more serene topics. People’s pulses are racing for a bit more Christian bloodsport, and now you’re going to talk about love, joy, and peace? So instead, the church becomes lopsided, decidedly hostile, and suspicious of everyone outside itself. If it continues, soon it begins to shrink the circle of who and what is orthodox, and soon it starts shooting its own. Now, the problem is no longer even the cultists, now it becomes orthodox Bible teachers. Now even helpful Bible teachers are compromisers and teachers of error. They become theological Ishmaels, whose hand is against every man. A group that was meant to call for truth in the church, actually becomes anti-church, hostile to churches everywhere.

The problem is ignoring what God’s Word puts right here in Jude regarding contending for the faith. Love and truth exist in an inseparable relationship. When you focus only on love, and you neglect truth, you become lopsided, and fall into sentimentality. You begin to love your love, you start to want unity at all costs, and you surrender one important truth after another, until the only thing you have left is the consolation that you feel so loving.

But the opposite side of the horse to fall off is to defend truth without love, where you defend propositions at the expense of persons, and are willing to call down fire on the Samaritans like James and John. You forget that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, and the point of defending the truth is so that people can believe it, and those people can be saved and discipled, and loved and nourished in a local churches. And in some ways, it’s a lot easier to do battle-royal in the world of ideas and propositions, and simply dismiss and ignore the actual people around you. But then you become like the Pharisees who “pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith (Matt. 23:23)” or who “bind heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.” (Matt. 23:4)

Warren Wiersbe summed it up when he wrote that love without truth is sentimentality, and truth without love is brutality. Ephesians 4:15 tells us to speak the truth in love.

So it’s important to see why this command for love comes in a book focused on defending the truth. Jude knows we will be very good at discerning who the apostates are, but then not as good at moving on from there, and developing a wholesome, healthy Christian life.

So the command comes to keep yourselves in the love of God. What does that mean? The word keep means to guard or protect. It’s not as clear if love of God means God’s love for us or our love for God. Often it can mean both, with a shade in one direction. The best answer is by looking at the immediate context, and then by looking at a related Scripture. The immediate context speaks of things we do in God’s direction – building, praying and looking, which suggests the idea is our love for God. Certainly when you build your faith and pray and wait on God, you are also receiving His love, but the idea here seems to be, guard yourself in a life of loving God.

Conserve, protect, keep your life within the walls of love and worship for God. Ironically, you will defend the truth best, when you simultaneously defend your own love for God.

Now I think we know we’re on the right track because of a parallel Scripture in John, that also speaks of keeping yourself in the love of God.

John 15:1 “I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser.

Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit.

You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you.

Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me.

I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing.

If anyone does not abide in Me, he is cast out as a branch and is withered; and they gather them and throw them into the fire, and they are burned.

If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you will ask what you desire, and it shall be done for you.

By this My Father is glorified, that you bear much fruit; so you will be My disciples.

As the Father loved Me, I also have loved you; abide in My love.

If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love, just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love.

These things I have spoken to you, that My joy may remain in you, and that your joy may be full.” (Jn. 15:1-11)

Here Jesus gives us the secret to life lived without Him physically present, but present in the Holy Spirit. He says it is going to be like branches in a vine. Those branches are in the vine, they are part of the vine, but the vine’s sap and life is in the branches. As long as a branch remains connected to the vine, it has the vine’s life, and it will bear fruit.

In the same way, once we become believers we have a union with Christ. We are in Him, meaning all He is becomes credited to us, and He is in us, in the Holy Spirit. We have this positional union in Christ, but Jesus tells us to work that out into a practical union to become what we are. Abide, stay, keep yourself in Me, Jesus says in verses 4-6. Then He adds, abide in My love. Keep my commandments, and you will be abiding in Christ’s love.

So the meaning of keep yourselves in the love of God seems to be very close to abiding. It means live in a close relationship of taking in the Word, prayer, and obedience, so as to love Christ, and know His love. And that matches very closely the three ways that Jude tells us to keep ourselves in the love of God.

But you, beloved, building yourselves up on your most holy faith,

I. Remain in God’s Love By Learning Progressively

This word building up has the idea of continuing to build on a foundation. What foundation is that? Here Jude calls it your most holy faith, and that recalls the way he used the word faith back in verse 3. The once-for-all-delivered-to-the-saints faith. There the idea means the whole body of doctrine and practice and affections which God inspired in His Word. So to be building yourselves up on that most holy faith is to be growing in God’s Word.

You’re saved, you have embraced the faith, but now, brick by brick, keep adding to your knowledge of the faith by taking in God’s Word.

Colossians 2:7 rooted and built up in Him and established in the faith, as you have been taught, abounding in it with thanksgiving. (Col. 2:7)

This is parallel to what Jesus said in the John 15 passage, when he said, “If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you.” You must be in God’s Word until God’s Word is in you.

There is no growth in Christianity, and consequently, no abiding in God’s love, unless you are making the effort to build up your knowledge of the faith, by taking in God’s Word, or by reading Christian books rooted in God’s Word.

There is a lot to the Christian faith.

Many Christians approach to building their faith amounts to hearing a sermon, every now and then. Then they wonder why their love for God feels so spiritually chilly, why the winds of the world seem so strong and so sharp, why they feel continually wet by the storms of unbelief.

I have always noticed a proportional spike in growth when a Christian gave himself to exploring the faith, to getting as much teaching as possible, to reading Christian books, and increasing his intake.

Someone says, I don’t have time. One theologian write this: “Suppose you read about 250 words a minute and that you resolve to devote just 15 minutes a day to serious theological reading to deepen your grasp of biblical truth. In one year (365 days) you would read for 5,475 minutes. Multiply that times 250 words per minute and you get 1,368,750 words per year. Now most books have between 300 and 400 words per page. So if we take 350 words per page and divide that into 1,368,750 words per year, we get 3,910 pages per year. This means that at 250 words a minute, 15 minutes a day, you could read about 20 average sized books a year!”

Keeping yourself in the love of God, communing with God is not only praying, as we’ll see in a moment. It’s also a lot of mental brick-laying. C.S. Lewis said, “I believe that many who find that “nothing happens” when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology.”

What are you doing to be building yourself up in your most holy faith? Are attending whenever God’s Word is given? Do you have a regular discipline of being in God’s Word? Do you have some kind of reading list you’re trying to get through? The emphasis is building yourselves – not passively waiting for someone else to build you.

Jude’s second way we are to abide in love for God is the next phrase:

praying in the Holy Spirit

II. Remain in God’s Love By Praying Dependently

Praying in the Holy Spirit. What does this mean? Well, Jude doesn’t tell us in the surrounding verses, so we have to find the same phrase in the rest of the New Testament.

The only other place in the New Testament where we come across the phrase praying in the Spirit is in Ephesians 6, as Paul completes a section giving us our spiritual armour:

Eph 6:18 praying always with all prayer and supplication in the Spirit, being watchful to this end with all perseverance and supplication for all the saints –

Again, that verse tells us to pray in the Spirit, but doesn’t tell us what it means. But there are two other verses in the New Testament that shed a bit more light on this.

Romans 8:9 But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. Now if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not His. (Rom. 8:9)

Paul tells us that the position of a truly regenerate Christian is to be in the Spirit. You are in the Spirit, and the Spirit is in you. And immediately you should be thinking of Christ’s words in John 15, Abide in Me and I in you. The branch is in the vine, the vine is in the branches.

The second important text that uses this phrase en pneumati is in Ephesians 5:18

Ephesians 5:18 And do not be drunk with wine, in which is dissipation; but be filled with the Spirit, (Eph. 5:18)

Paul says, don’t come under the influence of a substance like alcohol which changes your whole person, you lose control, but be filled with the Spirit. Instead, come under the influence of the Spirit, so that He transforms you into a different person. Paul doesn’t mean in an ecstatic way, he means in a continual progressive way. The more the Word of Christ dwells richly in you, the more the Spirit of Christ will fully control you. The idea is dependence on the Spirit.

That leads me to believe that praying in the Spirit is what a truly Spirit-indwelt person does, when he prays Word-saturated prayer, dependent on the Spirit.

You see, we all know what it is to try to pray in our own strength. Our prayers last a few moments, before they sink down again, and distracted thoughts take their place. And we try again, and before our prayers take wing, they flop to the ground.

But if you take God’s Word, which is the chariot in which the Holy Spirit rides, and you begin reading it, meditating on what you read, and then praying some clear responses to God based on what you are reading: adoration, thanksgiving, confession, requests.

You remember George Muller’s counsel regarding Bible reading. He said, “The first thing I did, after having asked in a few words the Lord’s blessing upon his precious Word, was, to begin to meditate on the Word of God, searching as it were into every verse, to get blessing out of it; not for the sake of the public ministry of the Word, not for the sake of preaching on what I had meditated upon, but for the sake of obtaining food for my own soul. The result I have found to be almost invariably this, that after a very few minutes my soul has been led to confession, or to thanksgiving, or to intercession, or to supplication; so that, though I did not, as it were, give myself to prayer, but to meditation, yet it turned almost immediately more or less into prayer. When thus I have been for a while making confession or intercession, or supplication, or have given thanks, I go to the next words or verse, turning all, as I go on, into prayer for myself or others.”

This is praying in the Spirit. Why? Because we depending on Him, on His Word, to pray through us.

Praying in the Spirit, is the same thing as praying in Jesus’ name. It is praying from the position of being in Christ, in the Spirit, and then seeking to pray the will of God from the Word of God, with reference to your own life.

And interestingly enough, in our John 15 passage, Jesus says,

“If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, you will ask what you desire, and it shall be done for you.”

You cannot abide in God’s love if you neglect prayer. If your Christian life becomes nothing more than the building of doctrine, you will soon find yourself in a prison of depression and narrow-spiritedness. Those bricks of truth are meant to be baked in the furnace of prayer. You cannot only hear truth; for a lively heart, you must respond to truth. Your prayers do not have to be long. All things considered, I would say you should read more than you pray – let God do most of the talking.

But then you cannot be content to read and not pray. Ten minutes of carefully worded responses to God, growing out of meditation on the Word, will warm the heart, express love for God, grow love for God, and experience love from God.

The contrast is with the false teachers in verse 19. They are sensual. That word means soulish. They live for this life. They do not have the Spirit, so there is no upward orientation in their lives. They might pray when in trouble or in emergencies, but there is no life of prayer.

J.C. Ryle wrote: “Now what is the case of most backslidings? I believe, as a general rule, one of the chief causes is neglected private prayer. Of course the secret history of falls will not be known until the last day. I can only give my opinion as a minister of Christ and a student of the heart. That opinion, I repeat distinctly, that backsliding generally first begins with neglect of private prayer.

Bibles read without prayer; sermons heard without prayer; marriages contracted without prayer; journeys undertaken without prayer; residences chosen without prayer; friendships formed without prayer; the daily act of prayer itself hurried over, or gone through without heart: these are the kind of downward steps by which many a Christian descends to a condition of spiritual palsy, or reaches the point where God allows them to have a tremendous fall.”

The third way we keep ourselves in the love of God is in verse 22

looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life.

III. Remain in God’s Love By Waiting Expectantly

When Jude speaks here of looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ, we could assume that he means we should look for him to save us from our sins, as if our salvation is not yet accomplished. That’s not the idea here. Nevertheless, it is true that our salvation has a past, present and future aspect. We have been saved from sin’s penalty, we are being saved from sin’s power, and one day we shall be saved from sin’s presence. That future event is either at our death, or at the return of the Lord.

The word looking is a word used throughout the New Testament for waiting for the return of the Lord.

looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, (Tit. 2:13)

Luke 12:36 “and you yourselves be like men who wait for their master, when he will return from the wedding, that when he comes and knocks they may open to him immediately. (Lk. 12:36)

See, a Christian who knows the truth of verse 2, that he is preserved in Jesus Christ, can actually long for death. Why? Because to be with Christ is better far. But if you had to choose between dying, and Christ returning within your life, which would you choose? We’d all choose Christ’s return. If Christ came back, and you were caught up to meet Him in the air, and received a new glorified body immediately, and went into the glories of heaven, you’d have it all, without facing the pain of death.

Longing for Christ’s return is longing for the hope of heaven, the hope of resurrection, the hope of eternal rewards, the hope of reunion with loved ones, the hope of an end to sin and injustice and evil.

If you remove this hope from your life, what do you have? You become cynical about the evil in the world. You become morbid about your body aging. You become too protective over your money and goods here. You try to create a pseudo-heaven here, which is the essence of worldliness. You lose the sense of freedom of not being locked into this world and its chaotic confusion.

The story is told of the eagle who was raised with chickens, kept on a chain. Chickens have their heads down, looking for food to peck at. This eagle had learnt only to strut on the ground, pecking at seeds. And when the chain was taken off, the eagle continued to peck at seeds. Until finally the eagle one day heard the cry of another eagle, looked up, and mounted up to fly.

Too many Christians are pecking at seeds, grumbling about the world, complaining, joining in the murmuring of the unsaved, when we can look up, and forward, and consider a glorious future, and know that every moment that ticks by brings you closer to that day.

Conclusion

How do we avoid veering into brutality or sentimentality? How do we avoid becoming theological Ishmaels, like soldiers who cannot stop fighting, even when they’re at home? Keep yourself in the love of God, by building your faith progressively, praying dependently, and waiting expectantly.