In the sermon 'Jude's Portrait of a Christian,' Robert Bosley explores the often overlooked book of Jude, emphasizing its significance in addressing internal and external battles facing the church. Jude is part of the general epistles, also known as Catholic epistles, which are often neglected due to their size and polemic nature. The core theme of Jude is the reality and danger of heresy, which must be actively opposed by Christians. Bosley identifies seven key aspects of a Christian's identity according to Jude: being called by God, set apart by the Father, preserved by Jesus, recipients of God's mercy, at peace with God, loved by God, and fighting for the purity of the gospel. He highlights Jude's call for Christians to contend earnestly for their faith against false teachings. The sermon also delves into Jude's identity as the brother of James and half-brother of Jesus, emphasizing the transformative power of the gospel. Bosley encourages Christians to rejoice in God's grace and to be vigilant in safeguarding the gospel's truth.

Thank you, Josh. That was excellent. I think that was a good song choice. As Josh said, the church is entering into a time in our country where We are facing greater opposition, but this book helps us to focus not only on the battle outside, but also the battle within the battle within the walls of the church. So if you have your Bible open up to the book of Jude if you see the book of Revelation or a bunch of maps You've gone too far to the right Back up a little bit.

So one or two pages right before the book of Revelation The epistle of Jude is really one of the most neglected books in the New Testament. The smaller books, particularly smaller non-Pauline books, generally get less attention than some of the big ones that we think of. When we think of books that are foundational for our doctrine, our minds jump to Romans or the Gospels. We don't generally think of Jude or 2nd or 3rd John. But these small books, this one especially, these small books have much to offer us and we can learn much of what God wants for his church in these smaller books.

These books like Jude, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, John, these are books that are considered the general epistles. Now a general epistle, it has that name because these books are grouped together because their audiences are either mentioned cryptically, such as the diaspora in James or the elect lady of 2 John. Or there's no clear indication given of the audience at all, such as with Jude. So these books of James, 1st, 2nd, Peter, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, John, and Jude, They're grouped together and they're given their names in our New Testament by the name of the author, not the name of who the book was intended for like the rest of the epistles in the New Testament. And these books in this category of the general epistles are often neglected.

As one commentator put it, they have a kind of shadowy existence. Most of us have a vague knowledge that they exist, but aside from a handful of verses, a lot of people don't know their content. When we think of Jude, Generally people immediately think of verse 3, contend earnestly for the faith, and the doxology, sorry not the doxology, but the benediction of the last two verses, and that's about it. But there's so much to this marvelous little book. 25 verses, the same as Philemon, the last book that I looked at with us, although a good indication that whenever they did the versification, they weren't very consistent.

Same number of verses as Philemon, but about 25% longer by word count. I don't know how that works. Don't blame me. So these books are very helpful despite their size and despite the fact that they're often neglected. Jude especially is a very powerful book that punches above its weight, so to speak, considering its brevity.

This book touches on several issues, but all of it centers on one fundamental point. Heresy is real, and it is dangerous, and it must be opposed. That is the central point of the book of Jude. And this this core theme I think is another reason why Jude is badly neglected especially today. In a world of I'm just asking questions Christianity, where the only sin is calling out sin, a book that repeatedly calls false teachers ungodly, that calls them brute beasts and twice dead uprooted fruitless trees, That says God has predestined these false teachers for damnation.

That says that Jesus not only saves, but also destroys unbelievers. That says that homosexuality is a sin worthy of eternal fire and worst of all that says Christians must fight a Book like this does not get a very wide acceptance Or much attention in a culture where the chief commandment is thou shalt be nice But scripture is much more concerned with what does it mean to obey God and exalt Him and serve Him rather than conforming to modern standards of niceness. And so not only are there issues with the polemic nature of the book where he's refuting and exposing error, but there are other issues with this book that cause people to not focus on it, not spend a whole lot of time with it as they ought to. I think part of these issues, as we will see when we go through it, Jude is, I would say, pretty much a raging Calvinist. I think that's the technical term.

And so that can be difficult for some people to work with. There are also issues of translation and textual variants which are always fascinating. And Jude will even cause us to deal with issues of canonicity. What book should we consider Scripture? Because the book of Jude is the only writing in the New Testament that quotes from the Apocrypha.

If you're unfamiliar with the Apocrypha, these were books written between the Old Testament and the New Testament that were never considered scripture by the Christian church but by some various sects were considered possibly scripture. Jude quotes from them. So what does that mean for us? What do we do with that? So this little book has a lot in it.

It's a fascinating letter and it really deserves much more attention. I hope that I can bring some of that forward as we go through this study. So all that being said, let's read through and I do want to read the whole thing. It's short enough. I think we can justify reading the whole thing.

So follow along and after we are we read it we'll focus on the first couple of verses. The Epistle of Jude. Jude, a bondservant of Jesus Christ and brother of James, to those who are called, sanctified by God the Father, and preserved in Jesus Christ, mercy, peace, and love be multiplied to you. Beloved, while I was very diligent to write to you concerning our common salvation, I found it necessary to write to you exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints. For certain men have crept in unnoticed, who long ago were marked out for this condemnation, ungodly men, who turned the grace of our God into lewdness and deny the only Lord God and our Lord Jesus Christ.

But I want to remind you, though you once knew this, that the Lord, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt afterward, destroyed those who did not believe. And the angels who did not keep their proper domain but left their own abode, he has reserved in everlasting chains under darkness for the judgment of the great day. As Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them in similar manner to these, having given themselves over to sexual immorality and gone after strange flesh, are set forth as an example, suffering the vengeance of eternal fire. Likewise, also, these dreamers defile the flesh, reject authority, and speak evil of dignitaries. Yet Michael, the archangel, in contending with the devil when he disputed about the body of Moses, dared not bring against him a reviling accusation, but said, The Lord rebuke you.

But these speak evil of whatever they do not know, and whatever they know, naturally, like brute beasts, in these things they corrupt themselves. Woe to them, for they have gone in the way of Cain, have run greedily in the error of Balaam for profit, and perished in the rebellion of Korah. These are spots in your love feasts, while they feast with you without fear, serving only themselves. They are clouds without water, carried about by the winds, late autumn trees without fruit, twice dead, pulled up by the roots, raging waves of the sea, foaming up their own shame, wandering stars for whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever. Now Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied about these men also saying, Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of his saints to execute judgment on all to convict all who are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have committed in an ungodly way and of all the harsh things which ungodly sinners have spoken against him.

These are grumblers, complainers, walking according to their own lusts, and they mouth great swelling words, flattering people to gain advantage. But you, beloved, remember the words which were spoken before by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ, how they told you that there would be mockers in the last time who would walk according to their own ungodly lusts. 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. And on some have compassion, making a distinction, but others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire, hating even the garment defiled by the flesh.

Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy, to God our Savior, who alone is wise, be glory and majesty, dominion and power both now and forever. Amen. Let's pray. Oh Father, as we look at your word again, I pray that you would help us to understand it. God, would you open up hearts and minds this afternoon?

May we see these words and understand and believe. May they not be merely words, but may we see them as what they are. The very words of God spoken and given to us, your people. Oh, Lord, bless this time and may you be glorified in Christ's name. Amen.

Okay so the book of Jude, what do we know about Jude? Well in verse one he tells us that he is the brother of James. Now the most logical conclusion for who this James is, is this is the James who wrote the book of James, and who was the half-brother of the Lord Jesus. Because any other James, at this time, would have probably required a more full description for you to pinpoint who you were talking about. When in the earliest decades of the church, if you simply said James, everyone's mind would have run to James the Just, half-brother of Jesus, pillar of the Church of Jerusalem with Peter and John.

Therefore Jude himself is the half-brother of Jesus. Now earlier commentators assumed that these men, James and Jude, were the apostles identified by those names, James and Jude. And now you may be thinking, wait, there was an apostle named Jude? Yes, but most versions render it as Judas. And we all know there's that one apostle named Judas, Judas Iscariot, but there was another which we often forget about.

John 14 22, Judas, not Iscariot, said to him, him being Jesus, Lord how is it that you will manifest yourself to us and not to the world? There were two apostles named Judas. This seems to be the apostle named Thaddeus in the other Gospels. And that is the same name we have here for Jude. It's the same word in Greek, eudas, which is translated Judas everywhere else in the New Testament except this one verse.

I'm not sure how the tradition came about that we would decide this one is Jude and the others are Judas. Names do funny things across languages and throughout time. For instance, the book of James. The Greek there is Jacobos, Jacob, but we know it as the book of James. But despite this history of connecting James and Jude to the Apostles James and Jude, I think the modern consensus is different and I think it's right that these men were not the Apostles James and Jude or Judas but these were the half-brothers of the Lord who were converted after the Lord's resurrection.

We were told that Jesus's brothers did not believe him They even mocked him in the Gospels. And so it seems unlikely to me that there were two exceptions to that and that they were Apostles. Now some may disagree and that's fine, but it's my perspective that this Judas is the brother of Jesus, the brother of James that's mentioned in Matthew 13 55 where the crowd says is this not the carpenter's son, is not his mother called Mary and his brothers James, Joses, which is also better translated Joseph, Simon and Judas. I think that's who we're dealing with, this Judas, this brother of Jesus here. And so it seems that they weren't terribly original with names in the first century.

In the New Testament we have three or four James's, three or four Judas's, there are even five men with the name Jesus or Joshua, and something like 37 Marys, I don't know. So if you get confused about who exactly is who, it's totally understandable. It's just suffice to say that who we're dealing with here is the Judas who was the brother of Jesus. So Jude is writing, as we saw when we read through it, for the purpose of confronting false teachers and to encourage the saints. He doesn't give an explicit destination, but that's his purpose.

He wants these men that he's writing to, these men and women he's writing to, to be encouraged to stand against false teachers who have come into the faith. And so to my mind the name of the writer itself is very compelling. It creates a very intriguing contrast. One Judas first followed Jesus and then betrayed him to death. And now we have another Judas who at first rejected and mocked the Lord, his own brother, but then later repented and believed and wrote inspired scripture, calling himself a slave of Jesus and urging Christians to fight against apostasy.

To my mind, that is a very beautiful picture of the power of the gospel, of true conversion. And this appeal that Jude makes for Christians to recognize, call out, and strive against apostasy and heresy, This is the call of Jude to his audience and it's really the call to all Christians throughout all time. Hold firm to the faith and fight for the purity of the gospel. That is Jude's exhortation to his original hearers and to us today. The ambiguity of the audience that I mentioned earlier that is consistent with all the general epistles that that has given rise to another name for these books, a name that I actually prefer to general epistles, they're also called the Catholic epistles.

Now don't stone me for saying I prefer the word Catholic epistle. Let me explain. Catholic comes from two Greek words, kata halas, which means literally according to the whole, or usually defined as universal. So Catholic is actually a beautiful word. It's a wonderful word that we shouldn't be too quick to reject.

It was used to describe Christians long before there was a man with a funny hat in Rome claiming to lead Christ's church. So these epistles, and Jude is a Catholic epistle, and these epistles are Catholic epistles in that they are more easily and more directly applying to the universal church, to all Christians everywhere. And with that universal audience and that universal application in mind, I want to look at verses one through three this afternoon and consider what Jude says it means to be a Christian. I want us to see Jude's portrait of a follower of Christ and I want us to be encouraged by it. The reason I'm laser focused on these points, there are so many things that we could talk about especially when we get into verse 3 and we will talk about them in the next session, but the reason I'm laser focused on on Jude's portrait of what a believer is, is because Jude begins and ends with encouragement.

And that's why I want this series to reflect. I want to begin with encouragement because later on this book it gets heavy. It gets hard. There's a lot of serious and often discouraging things that he talks about, things that can be kind of gloomy, but he begins with great encouragement and so I want to begin there as well and so I want us to look at this and see this great encouragement that Jude offers us as we consider what it means to be a Christian. So Jude's picture of what it means to be a Christian.

So I want us to look at seven different points. The seven facets of Jude's portrait of a Christian. First, a Christian is called by God. A Christian is called by God. Second, A Christian is set apart by the Father.

Third, a Christian is preserved by Jesus. Fourth, a Christian has received mercy from God. Fifth, a Christian is at peace with God. Sixth, a Christian is loved by God. And seventh, a Christian fights for the purity of the gospel.

So first a Christian is called by God. Look again at verse 1. Jude a bond-servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James to those who are called Called this word called is being used here essentially as a synonym for Christian to Christians to Believers those who are disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ. And this is the first part of what it means to be a Christian. If you are a Christian here today, it is because you have been called by God.

God called you. You did not first choose God. He called you, both generally, these are theological categories that are used, there's the general call and the effectual call. So all people are to be given the general call. We go and we preach the gospel telling all people everywhere to repent and believe That's the general call.

So all of us have received that call God takes that call and makes it effective or effectual And that's the second call and I believe that's what Jude is getting at here because he's right into Christians You have been called you have been effectually called by God you heard the gospel but then God did a work in your heart and brought you to new life. He called you in a way that no one else could call you. And he brought you to himself. He made you alive. He gave you a new heart and enabled you to believe.

This is the calling of Romans 8.28 that we are called according to his purpose. This is the calling of 1st Peter that we have been called out of darkness into his marvelous light. This is the call, the powerful call that raised Lazarus from the dead. You are called by God. You were dead in your sins, in rebellion against your maker, and God called you to himself.

God set his sights on you and said no that one is mine. That's what it means that you're called. If you're a Christian here today you have been called by God God set his sights on you and said that one's mine I'm bringing him to myself and this is not to be misunderstood as making much of you or me. There was nothing in us that would provoke God's calling. As Paul said, in my flesh there dwells no good thing.

And that is the truth for all of us. There is nothing in you, nothing in me that would lend us to or encourage or require God to say, yeah, that's a good one. God didn't look at you and say, that's a good one, as we heard this morning. He didn't call you because he looked at you and saw how good you are. He looked at you, saw you in your sin, in your deadness, and called you anyway to the praise of his glorious grace.

And now it's not quite as clear in the English, you have called, sanctified, and preserved, and basically in a line here, but in the original this called is the emphasis, and the other two are actually subordinate to it. So called is then further clarified and expanded as being sanctified by God the Father and preserved by or in Jesus Christ. So these aren't three parallel ideas. This is the fountainhead. This is the main thing and then that's given fuller description in the next two that we will look at.

So first, Christians are called by God. Secondly, a Christian is set apart by the Father. He says, sanctified by God the Father. Now there is an interesting textual variant here. A good case can be made that the original reading should be beloved.

You probably have a footnote that says that but either either of these is a glorious truth and Ultimately the end result is the same and so I will simply follow the TR reading that the New King James follows here God chooses and sets apart his people. Now I'm saying set apart. The New King James renders it as sanctified. The word here has the idea of not only growing in holiness, which is generally what we think of when we hear sanctified. We think of growth in our own personal holiness, but the idea here is you've been set apart.

You've been cut off and moved to the side. You're in a new group. And so that's why I'm saying you're set apart by God the Father. And the tense of the verb is this is something that was done in the past and ongoing. So I think there's an element of both.

There's God separating us and putting us to the side as well as our ongoing separation from sin, from worldliness and growth and practical holiness now. It's all together. So since sanctification generally is identified with that second part, I'm using the words we are set apart. Now other versions may render this differently, this and the next clause with different prepositions by or in here it's we're sanctified by God some say we're sanctified in God I'm gonna stick with by and I think by is the better understanding for both sanctified by and preserved by we'll get to the preserved in a minute But what does it mean that we've been set apart by the Father? What does that mean?

We're called, well why are we called? We're called because God first set us apart. In eternity past, he had a special people that by his own choice, he set them apart. Before you were ever born, if you're a Christian, God put you in a different class. He looked at the mass of fallen humanity and plucked you out and put you in this group that is going to be the new Adam.

He put you in this group that is the bride of Christ. He picked us out. He said, no this one's mine. I will bring his rebellion to an end. I will open her blinded eyes, and I will cause him to see the beauty of my son.

God set you apart. He made a distinction between you and the lost, those who will forever refuse to believe. And so when you consider why you believe and your pagan neighbor does not, yes, you made a choice, your choice was real, but your choice was first grounded in God's choice of you. God set you apart. And I love the words of Spurgeon here.

Spurgeon says, quote, "'Before the earth was, or sun or moon or stars began to shine the prescient eye of God was fixed on his beloved and he sanctified them unto himself for the Lord's portion is his people Out of his love and this separation there came a sanctification of another kind, namely that of cleansing, for we were heirs of wrath even as others, polluted like others. But the Spirit of God fulfills the divine purpose of separation, brings us out from the world, even has he brought Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees, and put us in a separate path that we may be sojourners with God." That is what is meant by sanctified by God the Father. If you Take the other translation, loved in God the Father, it comes to the same point. For love has a separating influence upon its object. If the love of a man is fixed upon a woman, he calls her his bride and looks upon her as different from all other women on the face of the earth.

She is ever in his thought and in his heart, and her praise is often on his lips. He lives for her. Even so, God has taken unto himself a people who are his alone." That is what it means. Sanctified by God the Father. Set apart.

He chose you and he intended to bring you to himself. And not only are we set apart but we are preserved by Jesus. So the third point, a Christian is preserved by Jesus. Now again I prefer rendering this with the preposition by as all these these ideas seem to have as their point the work of God in salvation. And so you, Christian, you are held onto by your Savior.

The word that is translated here as preserved is rendered in other places as guard or keep, metaphorically as in obeying the commandments, keep the commandments. The idea is you have something that's been entrusted to the subject's care and he shields it. He guards it from mistreatment and neglect. And Christian, that's you. That's you.

The Father has placed you in the hands of his Son, and no one can remove you from his hands. You are in a place of absolute safety if you are in Jesus Christ today. It is not your own strength, it is not your own intellect, your own moral fiber that keeps you in Christ. Jesus himself holds on to the people his father has set apart and given him. And those people that belong to this triune God will never be let go.

I love the words of the song that we sing often, when I fear my faith will fail, Christ will hold me fast. When the tempter would prevail, He would hold me fast. I could never keep my hold through life's fearful path, for my love is often cold. He must hold me fast. And that's true.

And that's what we have here. We are preserved, we are kept, we are held onto by Jesus, the one who died and rose again and rules as king over all the universe. He is the one ensuring that you don't apostatize right now. He is the one holding on to you. He is the one who sustains your faith.

So Christians are called. We are sanctified by the Father, set apart by the Father, and preserved by Jesus. Fourth, a Christian has received mercy from God. Verse 2, it says, mercy, peace, and love be multiplied to you. First, mercy.

We all know what mercy means. It's not getting what you deserve. You and I, What did we deserve? We heard about it today. We deserved that death that Jesus died.

We deserved that wrath, that cup of wrath that he drank on behalf of his people. You and I deserve the unmitigated, unwatered down wrath of God. Your sins, my sins, they screamed out to God for justice, But justice was satisfied on your behalf and on my behalf by another. And so you don't receive that cup of wrath. You and I get the cup of blessing.

We receive God's mercy, his covenantal mercy, his covenant faithfulness. He is relented from the disaster he was going to bring on you. And he's given you mercy. And so now instead of his frown, you have his smile. We receive mercy.

Fifth, a Christian is at peace with God. A Christian is at peace with God. The unbeliever, the unbelieving world, they're at war. They're at war with God. They're in rebellion against the one who made them.

But if you're a Christian, that war is over. Not because you negotiated some settlement with God. If you're a Christian, you surrendered. God conquered you. Your heart was in rebellion and he conquered you.

Jesus wasn't knocking on the door of your heart. He kicked it in and made himself at home. He brought the war to an end by conquering you. And so now we are at peace with our Maker. You're no longer hostile in your heart and in your mind.

This gospel of peace has brought peace and you are at peace with your God. Sixth, a Christian is loved by God. Mercy, peace, and love be multiplied to you. So often this becomes trite in our culture and in evangelicalism. People will run around and tell unbelievers God loves you.

If you look in the New Testament you will never find an evangelistic encounter where the one sharing the gospel, Jesus, the Apostles, none of them, they never say to the unbeliever God loves you. Those words are reserved for the Christian. And so hear this. We've heard it so much it seems almost meaningless, but listen. Christian, God loves you.

He loves you. He loves you. The one who made you, who made all the world, He has set his affection on you. Even when you deserved wrath, you were in rebellion, you were an enemy. He loves you, believer.

He's called you, set you apart, given you all the benefits of Christ because He loves you. And you did nothing to earn it. He doesn't love you because you repented and believed. Don't get the order wrong. He doesn't love you because you repented and believed.

Don't get the order wrong. He doesn't love you because you repented and believed. You repented and believed because he loved you first. Here in his love, not that we love God, but he loved us and sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins. He loved us first.

Jesus didn't come into this world and live a perfect life and die in the place of sinners so he could make the Father love you. Jesus came into this world, lived a perfect life, and died in the place of sinners because the Father already chose to love you. He had chosen to set his affection on you and chose to bring you to himself so that you could enjoy his love forever long before you were born. He made that choice. He made that decision in himself to set his love on you.

And so Christian, God loves you. God loves you. Seventh, a Christian fights for the purity of the gospel. Look at verse 3. It says, Beloved, while I was very diligent to write to you concerning our common salvation, I found it necessary to write to you exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the Saints." There's so much that we could look at here and we will in the future, But right now I want us to look at that, contend earnestly for the faith.

Christians fight. We fight for the purity of the gospel. We fight for the faith that has been handed down to us This faith this body of teaching this gospel message That was given to the apostles and then given to the church, that has been given to us, we fight. We contend. And the idea of contending here, that's not a word that we use very much.

The idea here is a hard struggle. This would be a word used to describe wrestling competitions or battle. This is two men fighting and duking it out, wrestling one another to the ground to see who would win. You contend, you fight hard for the faith because God has done all of this, all of verse one and two, God has done all of this. We fight for the purity and the simplicity of this gospel.

Because God has called us and loved us and made us his own, we fight so that his message, his good news, does not become corrupted Because any other gospel any addition to the gospel any corruption of the gospel is no gospel You are brought in to know and love Christ by the true, simple gospel that if you repent and you believe in this one who died for sinners, you will be saved. Any addition to that or any subtraction from it is a corruption and perversion of the gospel And we fight it Often this this verse is is used as a call to apologetics not the apologetics that we often think of as as making a case for the faith outside of the church. This is a call to apologetics within the church. Those who name the name of Christ but abuse the gospel. Those who name Jesus as their Lord but teach heresy.

We contend against them. We fight against them, not with physical weapons. The weapons of our warfare are not carnal. They are not worldly weapons. We do not use guns and swords and knives to get our point across.

We use scripture. We use what God has given us. And we teach the purity of the true gospel. That Christ came into this world to save sinners. And especially in the context of Jude, he saved sinners and he brings them to himself.

And that grace that has appeared teaches us to deny ungodliness. As we go through we'll see that is the problem that Jude is fighting against those who would take the grace of God and use it as an excuse to indulge in all sorts of sin and say Jesus forgives me. Ever heard that? People who don't really care what God's law says, they want to go their own way, do their own thing. And you say, well, no, God tells you, you shall not do this or that or the other thing.

Well, Jesus, Jesus will forgive me. If that's your attitude you need to really question if you know this real Jesus who actually saves. Because this gospel that sets us apart, this gospel that forgives us our sin, it also makes us new creatures. And so we fight for the simplicity and the purity of the gospel against false teachers, against heretics in the church. They must be confronted, they must be exposed, and if necessary marked and excommunicated.

The gospel is at stake. This gospel that we rejoice in, it's at stake and it's worth fighting for. So that's Jude's portrait of a Christian. We are called by God. We are sanctified, set apart by the Father.

We are preserved by Jesus. We receive God's mercy, his peace, and his love. And I skipped over this earlier, but it's multiplied to you. It is increasing. You get a taste of it at the beginning but it's ever growing until it reaches that fullness in eternity future And because God has been so good to us and equipped us and empowered us and brought us into this family of faith, we fight for the purity of the gospel.

We fight for the truth of scripture. We expose error, even if it's uncomfortable and it's not what we would really want to do. Look at what Jude says, I was diligent to write to you considering our common salvation, But I found it necessary to do this instead he wanted to write a letter just talking about how good Jesus is and Said he spent a letter talking about heresy Sometimes that's necessary. We don't always want to do it, but we must because Christ is worth it. And if you love people, if you really love them, you will care enough to confront them when they are teaching falsehood.

So that's the portrait of the Christian in the first couple verses of Jude. And so my, in conclusion, my encouragement to you is just rejoice in what God has done for you Christian. Rejoice in what God has done. You did not earn it. You did nothing to deserve it.

But God has been marvelously good to you. And if you're here today and you are not a believer, Repent. Put your faith in Christ. Put your faith in that Savior that we heard so much about this morning. Turn to him and enjoy all his benefits and live.

Let's pray. Our Father, Lord, we just stand amazed at what you've done for us. God, you have given us so much. You have done so much for us. We are unworthy.

God, who are we that you would take notice of us? That you would set your love on us. But God, you did. And we thank you that we can stand here today and say that we that we are called and loved that we enjoy all these things, not because of us, but because of you and your grace. So, Lord, we magnify your grace today.

We thank you for extending your mercy to us. We praise you, God, for making peace. Oh, Lord, you have been so good to us. Thank you. Thank you for your blessings.

Thank you for the gospel. May we not only rejoice in it and rest in it, God, may you give us the strength to fight for it if necessary, when necessary. And God, may you be with us and may you be glorified in it all. In the wonderful name of Jesus our Savior, Amen. Thanks for watching!