Immanuel Sermon Audio
Jude (65:66)
All right, find the book of Jude, one chapter, 25 verses, and we're going to read it before we jump in. Book of Jude. Tutorservant of Jesus Christ and brother of James, to those who were called, beloved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ. May mercy, peace, and love be multiplied to you. Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation, I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. For certain people have crept in unnoticed, who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality deny our only Master and Lord Jesus Christ. 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 an eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day, just as Sodom and Gomorrah in the surrounding cities which likewise indulged in sexual immorality and pursued unnatural desire serve as an example by undergoing a punishment of eternal fire. Yet in like manner, these people also relying on their dreams to file the flesh, reject authority, and blaspheme the glorious ones. But when the Archangel Michael, contending with the devil, was disputing about the body of Moses, he did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment but said, "The Lord rebuke you." But these people blaspheme all that they do not understand, and they are destroyed by all that they, like unreasoning animals, understand instinctively, woe to them. They walked in the way of Cain and abandoned themselves for the sake of gain to Balaam's heir and perished in Cora's rebellion. These are hidden reefs at your love feasts as they feast with you without fear, shepherds feeding themselves, waterless clouds swept along by winds, fruitless trees in late autumn, dead, twice dead uprooted, wild waves of the sea casting up the foam of their own shame, wandering stars for whom the gloom of utter darkness has been reserved forever. It was also about these that Enoch, the seventh from Adam prophesied, saying, "Behold, the Lord comes with ten thousands of his holy ones to execute judgment on all and to convict all the ungodly of all their deeds of ungodliness that they have committed in such an ungodly way and of all the harsh things that ungodly sinners have spoken against him." These are grumblers, malcontents following their own sinful desires. They are loud-mouth boasters showing favoritism to gain advantage. But you must remember, beloved, the predictions of the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ. They said to you, "In the last time there will be scoffers following their own ungodly passions. It is these who cause divisions, worldly people, devoid of the Spirit, but you beloved, building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life. Have mercy on those who doubt, save others by snatching them out of the fire to others show mercy with fear, hating even the garment stained by the flesh." Now, to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy to the only God our Savior through Jesus Christ our Lord be glory, majesty, dominion and authority before all time and now and forever, amen. So there you have it. That's the book of Jude. I want to tell you about, to begin, maybe one of my favorite heroes from church history. And it's a guy that we don't know a whole lot about, but we have some bits and pieces from his life. And it's a fascinating story. The guy I want to tell you about is Athanasius, and he was the bishop of the city of Alexandria. Okay? So we're talking about Egypt, North Africa. We've talked about this part of the world over the last couple of weeks, a few times, and I've just mentioned to you that in Athanasius' day, in the first few centuries of church history, North Africa was the hotbed for Christianity. That's where the best and the brightest theological minds were coming from was North Africa. And Athanasius was one of those guys. I'm going to back up, but here's what I want you to know. He was the bishop of Alexandria, Egypt, for 45 years. He was sent into exile five times. And when you add all of the time that he spent in exile, not in Alexandria, it adds up to 17 years. And he fought with four different Roman emperors, four different emperors sent him into exile over and over and over again. So to understand his story, you've got to back up a little bit. You've got to back up to the year 325 to the council of Nicaea. And I showed you this picture a few weeks ago, and I mentioned it. I just want to make sure you know what was going on here, okay? We're backing up before Athanasius, so you can understand why he was in so much trouble with the emperors. In 325 at Nicaea, they had the first ever Ecumenical Church Council. And what this was was the Emperor Constantine invited 1,800 bishops from all around the Roman Empire. And he said, "I want you to come to Nicaea." And the issue that they were really arguing about, there were some small issues like they were trying to figure out what day are we going to celebrate Easter on, and how do we put some things on the church calendar. There were some small things. The big thing that they were talking about at Nicaea was a debate between a guy named Alexander and a guy named Arias, okay? Alexander, this is kind of confusing, was the bishop of Alexandria, okay? Before Athanasius, Alexander was the bishop of Alexandria Egypt. And he was a great guy, pastor there, taught there, everybody liked him. There was another pastor, not as high up as the bishop, but another pastor named Arias. He was called a presbyter, he would preach and speak in churches. And he started preaching in Alexandria, Arias starts telling people that Jesus was not equal with the Father, that he was less, that he wasn't really God, that he was a created being. And Arias's famous line was, "There was a time when the sun was not." There was a time when the sun was not. And so at Nicaea, 1800 bishops invited 318 attend from as far away as Britain. They come from all over the place, 318 of these guys, and they sit down and Constantine's there, and they hash out some of the small stuff. But then they spend a few months on this debate between Alexander and Arias. Alexander gets to stand up because he's a bishop, and he gets to make his case, the Orthodox case, what we believe. And he shares what he thinks and makes his argument and all of that stuff. Arias doesn't get to speak at the council because he's not a bishop. So a guy named Eusebius sort of speaks for him. And Eusebius stands up and he makes his case, and then they have this big debate, and they sort of start hashing it all out. As a side note, this is the council, whereas they're debating, and the position of Arias is being argued, that Nicholas, the bishop from Myra, stands up, walks up to Arias and smacks him in the face in the middle of the council. I mentioned that a few weeks ago. The same Nicholas who later became known as Saint Nicholas. So Santa Claus gets up at the thing and smacks this guy across the face, and they're arguing in their fighting. In the end of the council, after all the arguments have been made, all the debates, all this stuff, they write something called the Nicene Creed, which you've probably heard of. And it's basically a statement that says, Arias is an idiot, Alexander is right. We don't believe what Arias said. We believe that Jesus is equal with the Father. He is truly and really God. That was the outcome of all of this. So you come to the end and you say, okay, they had this big council, the first ecumenical council, and the emperor was there, and they hashed it all out, and they figured it out, and they even wrote this creed, and all these churches have to accept this creed because that's what Constantine tells them to do. You're like, well, they dodged that bullet, all right? The problem is over. It's solved. We dealt with that. The problem is Arias was personal friends with Constantine, and Constantine came down pretty hard on him at the council, and the other bishops came down pretty hard on him. But after everybody went home, Constantine said, maybe I was too hard on my friend. Maybe we were a little bit too extreme. And about ten years later, he ends up letting Arias back in as a presbyter. They had excommunicated him. They kicked him out of the church, and Constantine lets him back in, and he lets him start teaching again. And he begins to spread this false idea. There was a time when the sun was not. And by this time, about ten years later, Alexander, the bishop of Alexandria, is dead. The main guy that saved the day at Nicaea is gone. But the new bishop who was present at the council of Nicaea listening in and watching everything is Athanasius. And Athanasius had a nickname. His nickname was the Black Dwarf, and his enemies called him that. That was like a derogatory term, and it referred to the fact that he was a black guy, and apparently he was a short guy, and they called him the Black Dwarf. And Athanasius, when Arianism and all this false teaching is growing, and growing, and growing, and spreading, Athanasius stands up against it boldly, and loudly, and confrontationally, and he won't back down. And he says, we decided to sit Nicaea, Alexander, explained it to you guys, and he begins to teach, and write, and preach, and all these different things, and it gets him in trouble. And so he ends up spending 17 years of his life. While he's the bishop, 17 years of his life, he has to leave town and live in the wilderness with a bunch of monks in the Egyptian desert, because if he goes back to Alexandria, he's going to be killed. The emperor and the people in charge are going to come after him. And so he was sent into exile later by Constantine, kind of ironic. And the guy who presides over Nicaea eventually sends Athanasius into exile, Contentius, the second, Julian, the Postate, and Valens all send him into exile. And he lives out there for 17 years, five different times he has to go out. And the common phrase that he wrote and that people used to say in this day was, Athanasius Contramundum, that's Latin for Athanasius against the world. Because in his day, they didn't have a big church council where everybody got on the right page. It was just rampant false teaching, and it seemed like he was the one guy standing against the whole world standing for the truth, and he lived a remarkable life. And the reason I mention him, when you look at the Book of Jude is, he lived the Book of Jude. He did what Jude is calling us to do. And the big idea, Jude, is not complicated. It's right here in verse 3 where he says, "I found it necessary to write appealing to you to contend, literally, to fight for the faith that was once for all time delivered to the saints." Jude is saying, "You have received the one true faith is not going to change, and your job is to fight for it, whatever you have to do, fight for it." And Athanasius did that in his life, and he gives us a picture of what that might look like in somebody's life. So we're going to walk through the book, we're going to talk about the author, the purpose, and some of the things that it calls us to do, and we're going to move pretty quick. So here we go. The author of the book, interesting that he identifies himself as the servant of Jesus and the brother of James. That's right there in verse 1. Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ, and a brother of James. It's interesting because very strong church tradition says that this is Jude, the younger brother of Jesus. So there's verses in the gospels that indicate that Jesus had younger brothers and sisters. And this is interesting on a couple of levels. It's interesting for one thing, because there was a time when Jesus' brothers thought he was crazy, out of his mind, nuts. When they went to get him one time, Jesus was teaching and they said, "You need to come home man. You are making a fool of yourself. You're making a fool out of us. You're nuts. You're crazy." And Jesus said, "Forget it." So now you have this guy that once thought Jesus was crazy, and he says, "I am the servant, the slave of Jesus." And it's also interesting because if this is the brother of Jesus like very strong tradition tells us, we know from the gospels that Jesus did have a brother named Jude, don't you think if you were writing a letter you would just sort of name drop a little bit and say, "I'm Jesus a brother." Yeah. Jesus, he's my big brother, kind of cool. We grew up together. He used to play T-Ball out in the front yard where he used to wrestle in the living room. He won every time. I don't know how he did that, but he doesn't do that. It's sort of a mark of humility, and we saw the same thing when we looked at the book of James, which we said was probably written by James, the brother of Jesus, that he identifies himself as a slave of Jesus, and Jude does the same thing here. He identifies himself as the servant of Jesus and the brother of James. The purpose of the book, yeah, you can go to the next one, I'm ready for that. The purpose, he wanted to write about their common salvation, and then he says, "I found it necessary to urge you to contend for the faith." This is a little bit interesting to me because Jude's a really short book in case you didn't notice, and you sort of just want to say, "Well, why didn't you do both?" You wanted to write about your common salvation. You said, "But now I have to write to you to tell you to contend for the faith," but it only took one chapter to do that. You could have written another chapter and talked about your common salvation, or you could have written another 10 chapters and talked about that, but he didn't do it. And so we're left to assume that whatever his circumstances were when he was writing, this was all he could write. Maybe he had one piece of papyrus to send this letter out on, and I can fill it up and then I got to send it out, I don't know. But that's why he wrote, "To urge his readers to contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints." I want you to see a picture of these false teachers. This is on the back side of your outline. Those teachers, just put them all up there for you, they creep in unnoticed. They're morally corrupt and they're doctrinally corrupt. They're arrogant and boastful and they're worthless. So I'll let you jot those down and then we'll look at a few of these verses. Okay, first of all, they creep in unnoticed, verse 4, "Certain people have crept in unnoticed." Then he goes on to talk to their false teachers, and he's giving us a pretty important reminder just saying false teachers don't show up with false teacher T-shirts. They don't wear false teacher name tags. They creep in secretly. They don't think they're false teachers. They think they're real teachers. You've got to be on guard. You've got to watch. You've got to be alert. They creep in unnoticed. They're morally corrupt. He talks about in verse 4 that they're ungodly. They pervert grace into sensuality. So one of the things we've been talking about when we looked at the book of James and when we looked at 1 Peter and when we looked at 2 Peter and we looked at 1 2 3 John, we've seen it in all these books. This idea that if you're a true follower of Jesus Christ, you have genuine faith in Jesus, your life will reflect that. You can't say, "Well, I love Jesus. I trust in Jesus. I believe in Jesus, but I'm not going to obey Jesus." James and Peter and John and now Jude say it just doesn't work that way. Even if you have all your doctrinal ducks in a row. If your life contradicts what you're teaching, you are a false teacher. The things you're saying may not be true, but you are not true. You're not a person of integrity. So they're morally corrupt. They're doctrinally corrupt. He gives one example of that in verse 4. They deny Christ and he doesn't explain that a whole lot. It could be that they deny him verbally. We saw that in the book of 1 John that there were some people who denied that Jesus came in the flesh, so maybe they denied that Jesus was really human or maybe they denied him with their actions. They said all the right things about Jesus, but they refused to obey Jesus and they denied him that way. So they're corrupt, morally and doctrinally. They're arrogant and they're boastful. Verse 8, "They rely on their dreams and they reject authority. They don't care that this is the faith once for all delivered to the saints and handed down, that doesn't matter to them, because in their arrogance they say, 'Why had a dream? Why had a vision? Will God told me fill in the blank?' And here's guys like Jude and John and Peter and James, Athanasius saying, 'Wait a minute, wait a minute. That doesn't line up with the faith once for all delivered to the saints. It can't be true.' And they say, 'Well, look, I don't know what you're talking about, but I know what God told me. I had this experience. They're arrogant and they're boastful, refusing to submit to authority. And they're worthless. I love the descriptive words Jude gives us in verse 12 and 13. He says, 'They're hidden reefs, hidden reefs.' These were, this was in the day where sailors didn't have GPS and sonar to find the reefs. It's like they creep in unnoticed. They don't know it's there and then all of a sudden you're shipwrecked. They're shepherds feeding themselves. That's not the job of a shepherd. Shepherd's supposed to take care of the sheep. These shepherds are taking care of themselves. That's worthless. They're waterless clouds. We live in the desert. We know the angst and the pain of waterless clouds and they build up and you say, 'It's coming. It's coming.' And then it just blows right by. That was worthless. There's trees, wild waves, wandering stars. All these things are of no value. So these false teachers are worthless. And then I'm going to share some stuff, put it up on the screen. You can jot it down on the side if you want. You didn't have room to put this on your outline. He gives a few examples of judgment just to remind his readers, God will deal with people who need to be dealt with. And he talks about the exodus from Egypt and he says, 'The Lord, He saved the people out of Egypt.' But then he destroyed those who didn't believe. There was salvation but there was also judgment. And he talks about the angels who left their positions. We talked about this when we were looking at 2 Peter. And I told you that I think what Peter is talking about and I think what Jude is talking about is the angels of Genesis 6, who left their position of authority and cohabitated, lived with, mated with, whatever you want to call it, human women. And I know that's a strange thing but if you're going to look at this verse about the angels who did not stay within their own position of authority and left their proper dwelling and you want to say, 'No, no, no, that's just talking about the angels who rebelled with Satan.' They left their position of authority and they rebelled against God. Well, Jude says that these angels have been kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness. But you know from the gospels that there are demons wreaking havoc on the earth who are not kept in gloomy chains in darkness. So who are those demons? And it's a difficult problem to figure out. So I think what he's talking about there is Genesis 6. You can go back and read that later. And then he talks about Sodom and Gomorrah. There was salvation for lot and for his children but there was judgment for the rest. And he mentions all these just as an example of judgment. Don't forget that this happened, don't forget that this happened, don't forget that this happened. God can deal with people that he needs to deal with. And then he gives basically three more examples but he puts them under the heading of woes. And somebody says woe, W-O-E in the Bible, it's sort of the equivalent of damn, D-A-M-N, damn nation. When Isaiah says woe is me, what he's saying is I should be damned, I'm a sinner. And when Jesus says this to the Pharisees, that's what he's saying, that's the strength of this word when he says to the Pharisees woe to you Pharisees, woe to you Pharisees. And Jude uses it here down in verse 11 and he talks about Cain, somebody who approached God according to the book of Hebrews without faith did not come in faith. And when he experienced the discipline of God, he didn't repent, he just sort of felt sorry for himself and complained about what God had done to him. There was no repentance in his life. And Jude is saying Cain sort of like these false teachers, they like faith, they like repentance. He talks about Balaam, you can go back and read the story of Balaam in the book of Numbers. Balaam was a diviner and he was hired by the pagan king of Moab, Balaak to go curse Israel. And it's a really weird story. You go back, check it out in the book of Numbers, it's strange. But he basically took money to call down a curse on Israel. That's what he was getting paid to do, to curse God's people. And God wouldn't let him do it. He just kept putting words into Balaam's mouth to bless the people. And it angered Balaam and it definitely angered Balaak who was paying him to curse the people. And it's this bizarre story. But what you learn on the backside, even though he wasn't allowed to curse the people directly, he came in the back door and he tempted them with unclean food and with prostitutes. Sexual immorality. You can read about that in the Old Testament. And what Jude is saying is, sort of like Balaam, these false teachers don't just bust down the front door as a false teacher, they sneak in the backside. It's not necessarily a full frontal attack, but it's sort of a side attack. They're coming in and they're trying to be sneaky and how they do things. And then he mentions Cora. You can go back and read about Cora in the book of Numbers. Cora was the great grandson of Levi. He was cousin of Moses and Aaron and he led a rebellion against Moses, 250 men. And it's a great story, the ground opened up and swallowed some of them and then fire came down and got the rest of them and God took them out. And Cora is sort of like these false teachers. You remember, they reject authority. They won't listen to their pastor. They say, "Well, I had a dream, well, I had this experience. I don't care about the faith ones for all delivered to the saints. I'm not going to submit to that teaching." Cora said, "I realize you're the one that God's dealing with Moses, but we don't like you and we don't like submitting to you, so we're going to do our own thing." Jude says he's sort of like the false teachers in that sense. So he gives these woes. And then he says, before we get to what we should do, he says, "You ought to listen to Enoch. If you won't listen to me, listen to Enoch." You go all the way back to the book of Genesis and read about Enoch. He was the great grandfather of Moses. He was the seventh from Adam. When he was 365 years old, God took him from the earth and he never died. And the only words we know that Enoch ever spoke, we know he spoke back in the Old Testament, we don't have any words. All of his words are here in the book of Jude. And I just think it's fascinating. All the words we have from Enoch, in English it's 50 words. Four of them are the word ungodly. Five percent of what Enoch had to say was the word ungodly. That's what he was talking about. That's what he was rebuking. That's what he was confronting, is ungodliness. So he says, "Listen to Enoch." Then he says, "Listen to the apostles. If you won't listen to me, if you won't listen to Enoch, if you won't take warning from all these examples of woe and judgment and all this stuff I've listed, maybe you'll listen to the apostles." He says, "In the last times they said there will be scoffers following their ungodly passions." And then he describes these false teachers that they predicted. They cause divisions, they're worldly, and they're devoid of the spirit. So there you go. That's all warning. You look at the book of Jude. First two verses are introduction. Verse three sets the tone for the rest of the book. This is why I'm writing. I wanted to write for this reason, but instead I'm going to write for this reason. From verse four all the way down to about verse 19 is warning. Warning warning warning warning warning. Those of judgment, this has happened before. You need to watch out for it. You need to listen to these guys warning. And then in verse 19 he finally tells us to do something. This is what you should do if you're going to fight for the faith once for all delivered to the saints, okay? Six ideas. Number one, build yourself up in the faith. This is the idea that you need to know the faith once for all delivered to the saints. If you like to make notes in your Bible, when you read in verse 20, build yourselves up in the most holy faith, you circle that word faith, and you draw a line back up to verse three where it says contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints. You can't fight for it if you haven't built yourself up in it. You have to know it, you have to understand the truth so that you can spot the lie. Secondly, he says you need to pray in the Holy Spirit. You will never be able to contend for the faith if you're not a person of prayer. You have to be a person of prayer. Third, you have to keep yourself in the love of God. That sounds kind of strange on the surface because it sounds like there's something we have to do so that we don't find ourselves outside of God's love. But that's how he phrases it, verse 21, keep yourselves in the love of God. We'll come back to that in a minute. Fourth, he says, or third, no fourth, wait for the mercy of Jesus. And as he phrases that in these last verses here, the idea is sort of that Jesus is going to come back one of these days. You're waiting for him to come back. It's going to be mercy for his people when he returns. It's going to be judgment for his enemies. So your job is to wait for the mercy of Jesus. Fifth, have mercy on those who doubt. This is an important one. You ought to circle this on your outline and star it or highlight it or whatever. Because when you read through the book of Jude, it's sort of like Peter and John and James. It's very confrontational, right? And he's listing all these examples of Sod and Gomorrah. God just, he whooped those people and people he killed after the exodus. He took care of those folks and Cain and all these people and he's listing all these negative things. These guys are worthless and they reject authority and they're false teachers and it's very confrontational. And you can almost sort of get the idea, I just need to be angry with anyone who deviates from the sinner line here. He doesn't want you to be angry with people, he just wants you to be serious about contending for the faith. And so he says, look, there's some people who doubt. It's not that they've completely wandered off, it's just that they're struggling with things. They're trying to put all the pieces together. They're trying to make sense of it all. You need to be patient with those people. You don't need to brow beat these folks, but you need to have mercy on those folks. He says you need to save others from the fire and the idea seems to be that sometimes you're going to see people that just sort of fall off the wagon, so to speak, and you don't need to be so merciful with them. You just need to grab them by the spiritual shirt collar and yank them back in the line. He says you need to show mercy with fear, which is a strange, strange way of talking about things here that's down in verse 23, show mercy with fear. And I think the idea relates to what Paul says to the church in Galatia where he tells them that they need to rebuke people who are wandering off into sin, but he says you need to be careful that you don't find yourselves tempted with the same things you're rebuking in other people. You need to be careful when you confront them. So you show mercy with fear. And then lastly, you rest in the saving power of God. And this is key to the book of Jude. I told you there was this strange verse, if you look in the text, verse 21 where he says, keep yourselves in the love of God. And the idea there is you can't say you love Jesus and then wander off and do whatever you want to do. You've got to keep yourself in the love of God. If that's all that Jude said, you may walk away saying, "Man, this is all on me. That's a heavy responsibility. I could be in today and I could be out tomorrow and I hope I don't blow it and I hope I don't mess it up." But again, if you like to make notes in your Bible, you should draw a line here. Look at verse 1, Jude 1 down at the end of verse 1, "To those who were called, beloved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ, not people who are keeping themselves for Jesus Christ, active verb, but passive verb, those who are kept for Jesus Christ. So you circle the word kept and you draw a line all the way down to verse 24 where it says to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of His glory with great joy. So the ones who are kept for Jesus are kept because God is able to keep us from stumbling and you connect those two lines. And then you draw a line to verse 21 where he says, "Keep yourself in the love of God." And you say, "You've got to have both of those things." There's some people, there's one variety of false teaching. Some people will say, "Look, God keeps you secure and it doesn't matter what you do. You go do whatever you want. God keeps you secure. They throw around phrases like, "Once saved, always saved." And just it's sort of a cheeky, catchy thing to them. God will keep you. You prayed the prayer? He'll keep you. And then you've got people over on this side, another variety of false teaching that say, "Oh, no, no, no, no, no, I don't believe that one saved, always saved stuff," because it says you've got to keep yourself. You need to do it. And if you don't do it, you're going to fall away and you're going to be lost and you're going to be damned forever. And Jude is holding to the faith once for all delivered to the saints holding on to both of those things. You've got to have both. You've got to have this rock-solid assurance. God is the one who keeps you. He keeps you. And you have to keep yourself and his love. Both of those are true. You do have to follow. You do have to obey. You do have to understand what Christ is calling you to do. It's not optional. It's not sort of periphery. It's central to being a follower of Christ. But you understand, ultimately, I don't keep myself. God is the one who keeps me, and that's what he says in verse 1, and that's how he ends in verse 24. And it reminds me of what we talked about in Psalm 121 on Sunday. God is our keeper. He keeps us secure, and at the same time we're called to keep ourselves and his love. So that's the book of Jude. I think I said I had six things for you, but there's eight there, and that's the charge to us as the church. So we're going to pray and ask God that he would help us to do these things and to fight for the faith. So let's pray together. Lord, we're grateful for the book of Jude, and it's a short book, but it's a challenging book and a convicting book, and it's a startling book, and we pray that we would hear these warnings and take them seriously. Father, help us to contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints, regardless of what that means for our comfort or our safety or our livelihood or our popularity or our reputation, regardless of what everyone else in the empire or the nation is doing. Father, we want to contend for the faith once for all delivered to the saints, and we want to be bold in that. Help us to build ourselves up in the faith, to know what we believe and to be ready to defend it. Father, help us to be people of prayer. Forgive us when we are so arrogant that we think we don't need to be people of prayer. Help us to keep ourselves and your love, and help us to remember that you are the one who keeps us. Father, we want to be patient as we wait for the mercy and the coming of Jesus, and Father, we need wisdom as we deal with those around us who are doubting and who are wandering, and Father, when we need to have mercy, we want to have mercy when we need to be more direct, we want to be more direct and pray that you would use us in those situations where we need to help others and encourage them or rebuke them. Father, we pray not only for ourselves as individuals tonight, but we pray for our church, and we pray that regardless of what the culture around us does, that we would be faithful to the faith once for all delivered to the saints. Father, we pray that even as things change and hymns and praise songs and lyrics and all of it changes over time as buildings come and buildings go, as people come and people go, we want this church to be faithful to the faith once for all delivered to the saints, and we pray that you would help us to do that, and we pray it in Jesus' name, amen.