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. And 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.—Jude 1:17–25

 

Introduction

 

For decades now, Bethlehem’s people have heard two messages at the start of every new year, one on Prayer and another on the Bible. Spanning them is Prayer Week. Once again, this year the devotional booklet is ready. I do hope you’ll use this Prayer Week Guide:  “Pray & Obey.” Take the few minutes required to read and follow its instructions each day. Use it personally, as a family, and in as many corporate gatherings as possible.

 

On the schedule (pp. 4–5), corporate prayer gatherings are listed for most days, (as well as the all-congregation Night of Prayer this Friday, January 6, Downtown), and fitting the theme of Prayer Week, the bookstore has a supply of Pray for the World, of which Michael Oh, executive director of the Lausanne Movement, says …

This new tool will mobilize immeasurably more prayer, bringing the latest research from the Operation World team to a broader audience. What a service they’ve performed for the global church and for the least-reached peoples. Take up, and read ... and pray!

To illustrate why we stick to this tradition of preaching on Prayer and Scripture, let me begin by drawing in space a diagram simple, and I think valuable, enough for virtually all of you to memorize. It is a house with a floor, two walls and two roof rafters. The rafters point upward to the word GLORY! Here are the other labels for each part of this house:

 

1. The floor (or foundation): GRACE (not just God’s leniency and unmerited favor to sinners, but grace as God’s power to do his will:

 

By the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of [the other apostles], though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me.—1 Corinthians 15:10

 

2. 1st wall: THE BIBLE’S PROMISES

[God’s] divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who has called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, and escaped the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire.—2 Peter 1:3–4

 

3. 2nd wall: PRAYING IN THE HOLY SPIRIT

 

... praying at all times in the Spirit, with all prayer and supplication. To that end, keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints.—Ephesians 6:18

 

4. 1st roof rafter: FAITH, the “Master Virtue that glorifies God”

And without faith it is impossible to please [God], for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.—Hebrews 11:6

 

No distrust made [Abraham] waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.—Romans 4:20–21

 

5. 2nd roof rafter: LOVE, the fruit of saving faith that glorified God

 

“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor to people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works [OF LOVE], and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.”—Matthew 5:14-16

 

Construction complete: I said it was a house, founded on GRACE with walls of the WORD and PRAYER, and pointing its rafters of FAITH and LOVE to the GLORY OF GOD in heaven. But it’s also the schematic of an engine too, to be installed by habit into your mind and heart. It’s guaranteed to work for a lifetime, but it’s a motor designed by God that you must start not just once, but again and again, every day—the sooner the better.

 

So, here we are on New Year’s Eve/Day, and at the stroke of midnight the last of 2016’s 365 individualized days of providentially mingled “weal and woe” will be over. And simultaneously, at that very same stroke of the clock, the waiting new year of 2017 will have begun. My goal tonight/today in this message is that God, by the power of his own Holy Spirit, will start your engine (or if you prefer ... will build his house in your heart) so that in the new year of 2017 and for a lifetime you will ...

 

… offer up … your desires unto God

for the things agreeable to his will

in the name of Christ

with confession of your sins

and in thankful acknowledgment for all of his mercies

—Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q. 98

 

PRAYER for the Holy Spirit’s Help to Pray in 2017

 

God, send us the help we need tonight/today, help at the turn of the years to make and keep “resolves for good and for doing every work of faith” that your power enables us to live up to in the days, weeks and year ahead. That Help and that Power is the Person of your Holy Spirit. So, send him now into my mouth to speak your message and your peoples’ hearts to hear and obey your living Word. In His Name, Amen.

 

There are four places in the Bible where the Holy Spirit is explicitly described as our Prayer Helper. One is the Ephesians 6:18 text that Pastor Jason preached on last October 8/9, and that is extensively revisited in the Prayer Week Guide.

 

Two other super-encouraging passages tell us that the Holy Spirit actually is himself the Pray-er:

And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father’!—Galatians 4:6

(And how pleasing and necessary for us in the weakness of our spiritual ignorance and infirmity to read ... )

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with [i.e., accompanied by our] groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.—Romans 8:26–27

The fourth and final such reference is before us, nestled among the exhortations near the end of the powerful little letter of Jude. But, let’s find it in that immediate context of vv. 17–25. Those nine verses can be summarized with three words:

1. RECOLLECTION (vv. 17–19)
2. REACTION (vv. 20–23)
3. BENEDICTION (vv. 24–25)

1. First, Jude Calls for Urgent Recollection (vv.17–19) 

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.”

Jude was a faithful pastor who loved his flock, repeatedly calling them not only his beloved, but also God’s. He began and ended his short letter beautifully:

To those who are called, beloved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ: May mercy, peace, and love be multiplied to you” (vv. 1b–2) ... 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 ... (v. 24).

But in the middle, as one commentator put it, this pastor had to “snatched up his pen” to write—like a watchman on the wall of a city about to be attacked—his letter of urgent warning! Beginning at v. 4, Jude described not just a group of dangerous sinners (we were all once capable of that) but began a compressed “diagnostic of wickedness,” focused on a far more insidious group, and all the more perilous to the church because their presence was unrecognized. He began, “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 and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.” That description runs non-stop all the way to its close in. v. 19, occupying a full 60% of the letter, where along the way the fate of those described is linked with the most villainous sinners of biblical history: fallen angels, a whole grumbling generation of sinners who perished in the wilderness, the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, murderous Cain, scheming Balaam, and rebellious Korah. All of them “following their own sinful desires … ungodly passions” (vv. 16,18).

 

Two deadly sins dominate this sweeping landscape of lostness: 1) the rejection of God’s authority (and human authority as well, except their own), and 2) a giving-way to and the justification of all kinds of immoral sexual self-indulgence—the first of them leading to the second.

 

Jude was just as clear in the bulk of his letter about two things as well:

 

1) None of this should have surprised his readers because it was something Jesus’ apostles had clearly predicted in advance. Still, there was his need of reminder. How often? How frequently do we need to read what has been written on that wall of the Scriptures, or listen to it preached, or study it together in small groups of accountability? The writer of Hebrews gave this answer:

Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another daily, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.—Hebrews 3:12–13

2) That God remains utterly in control even of the most ungodly. Their destiny is that “long ago they were designated for condemnation” (4) in “a punishment of eternal fire” (7) and that they are those whom “the gloom of utter darkness has been reserved forever” (13). Few things are more important to take into serious account than God’s everlasting judgment of “the ungodly” in hell.

 

Yes, “the ungodly.” That is Jude’s pastoral default-name for these implacable heretics and apostates. He wants us taking special warning about them; that’s the name he found used four times in his quotation of the apocryphal book of Enoch in his own vv. 14-15: “Behold, the Lord came with ten thousand 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.”

 

Do we take God and sin and hell that seriously? Listen to how up-to-date Charles Spurgeon’s words are today—though spoken more than 150 years ago in the midst of what he called “the Downgrade Controversy” in England in the 1860’s:

The assurance that God is just, even in the midst of his hot displeasure, must ever be cherished. The Judge of all the earth cannot but do right. Though he is terrible and dreadful in his anger, as a consuming fire, yet he is still our God for ever and ever, full of goodness and full of truth. There is a deep-seated unbelief among Christians just now, about the eternity of future punishment ... I fear that at the bottom of all this there is a rebellion against the dread sovereignty of God. There is a suspicion that sin is not, after all, so bad a thing as we have dreamed. There is an apology, or a lurking wish to apologize for sinners, who are looked upon rather as objects of pity than as objects of indignation, and really deserving the [suitable] punishment which they have willfully brought upon themselves. I am afraid it is the old nature in us putting on the [seemingly good garment] of charity, which thus leads us to discredit a fact which is as certain as the happiness of believers. Shake the foundations upon which the eternity of hell rests, and you have shaken heaven’s eternity too. ‘These shall go away into everlasting punishment; but the righteous into eternal life’ [Matthew 25:46]. There is precisely the same word in the original ... if the one be not eternal, the other is not. Brethren, this is a fearful thing. Who can meditate upon the place appointed for the wicked without a shudder? (From 365 Days with Spurgeon, Volume 2, entry for Nov. 20)

Before turning from this “recollection” to the second portion of our text, look at the last phrase of v. 19. These scoffing, divisive, sensual, worldly people are, he says “devoid of the Spirit,” i.e., completely without and empty of the Spirit with no help, no Helper, no assistance to cry, “Abba, Father!” No Spirit of sonship and relying instead inwardly on their empty dreams (v. 8a).

 

Join me in praying right now specifically from the breaking of these a these demonic strongholds in any of the “tares” that may be growing in the midst of our congregation ...

 

PRAYER

Father, how shall we be helped in killing sin, lest it kill us? Do the heart-work, Holy Spirit. Turn our gaze to the worst of the sins we have ever taken part in; let us see the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world just now in this moment of urgent recollection ...

 

Stricken, smitten, and afflicted,

See Him dying on the tree!

‘Tis the Christ by man rejected;

Yes, my soul, ‘tis He, ‘tis he ...

 

Tell me, you who hear him groaning,

Was there ever grief like his?

Friends thro’ fear his cause disowning,

Foes insulting his distress;

Many hands were raised to wound him,

None would interpose to save;

But the deepest stroke that pierced him

Was the stroke that Justice gave.

 

You who think of sin but lightly,

Nor suppose the evil great

Here may view its nature rightly,

Here its guilt may estimate.

Mark the sacrifice appointed,

See who bears the awful load;

‘Tis the Word, the Lord’s Anointed,

Son of Man and Son of God.

 

Here we have a firm foundation,

Here the refuge of the lost;

Christ’s the Rock of our salvation,

His the name of which we boast.

Lamb of God, for sinners wounded,

Sacrifice to cancel guilt!

None shall ever be confounded

Who on him their hope have built. [Amen]

(Thomas Kelly) 

2. ‘But You, Beloved ...’ by Way of Reaction (vv. 20–23)

There follows two sets of imperatives, pastorally, perhaps with something of the same urgency as the “recollection,” these imperatives remind me of the emergency circumstances of being on a airplane when something goes wrong enough that the oxygen masks actually do drop from the panels. I’ve been on one such flight—a wild, bucking ride through a Caribbean lightning storm. We were struck more than once! I took the Haitian man’s shaking hand seated next to me and prayed for help in the name of Jesus. That was like getting that mask on and taking some breaths of the Spirit.

 

In the storms of false teaching and immoral living, we’re instructed in advance to “secure your own mask and breathe normally”:

But you, beloved, build yourselves up in your most holy faith; pray 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.—Jude 20–21

Obedience to the duties outlined here was indeed the “normal breathing” those endangered Christians needed in the first century, just as they are what we need today, especially in our efforts to “Fill These Cities” in the decade ahead. The priorities of building a permanent south facility, planting 25 new churches, and engaging 25 presently unengaged people groups around the world requires and starts with the theme of Prayer Week: Pray & Obey!

 

“Pray and Obey” to be strengthened in 1) past faith, 2) present love and 3) future hope.

 

1) Past Faith: Jude started off with “building yourselves up in your most holy faith” (20a). There is a sequencing element in these verses, beginning with past faith. I take this from looking back at v. 3 as the kind of faith Jude was talking about here in v. 20, i.e., “the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints.” So, the building up comes not on a shaky foundation of looking inwardly to the strength of our experience of faith, but outwardly and back to the perfect, verbally inspired expression of faith in the apostles’ teaching—the Scriptures the word of God’s grace—which Paul commended to the Ephesian elders as “able to build you up and give you an inheritance among all those who are sanctified/holy” (Acts 20:32). Start with studying the message of the faith, unique from all other messages and able to radically rewire your whole way of thinking and ability to interpret life God’s way.

 

This first command does makes sense as the central one, with the following three designed as a Trinitarian “how to” of building ourselves up in that past faith, i.e., by 1) praying in the Holy Spirit, 2) keeping ourselves in the love of the Father, and 3) waiting for the mercy of Jesus Christ. Harkening to our opening diagram, that sounds like great pastoral advice for continuous growth and strengthening in the faith, especially since it is also so gospel and Godward as to “the faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3).

 

But, the central command, grammatically of the four is, the third one that starts v. 21a: “Keep yourselves in the love of God.” Center-stage here are 1) the greatest virtue—love, 2) the first Person of the Trinity, God the Father, and 3) the right moment in time for the Father’s love to sustain we hearers—now! The other three commands are built around this love-command, calling on us to continuously watch, to observe, to pay careful attention, to keep ourselves in the Father-God’s love. How? By the “-ings” of “building ourselves up in our most holy faith” (20a), “praying in the Holy Spirit” (20b), and “waiting anxiously for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ” (21b).

 

Having said that, let’s look together at Command #2: “praying in the Holy Spirit.” First, in relation to reading, studying, and memorizing the Bible. As I’ve already hinted, and can testify to by my own personal experience, all too commonly doing those good things becomes either an end in itself or boring or results in mere head-knowledge, filling me, us and our children with a sterile, academic litany of “right answers.” Instead, we need supernatural help to transform the received, written, and spoken form of the faith into our own vital, vibrant personal faith in Jesus. To the first command of being built up in the Bible, we need to obey the second command, not just by praying (which again all too often turns boring, stilted, and empty), but instead to be “praying in the Holy Spirit.”

 

So, to “pray in the Holy Spirit”—what does that mean? To begin with, it means ...

a) giving up the false notion of being all by myself when trying to commune with God. We are never alone. Christ assures us that he is with us always (Matthew 28:20), and the apostle Paul reassures us as sons and daughters of God that the Spirit of Christ is in our hearts. (Galatians 4:6). But praying in the Holy Spirit surely further means ...

 

b) taking conscious, fresh possession of the Holy Spirit as the real Person he is, relating to him, not as an “It,” an idea or impersonal “Star Wars Force,” but with the deeply respectful and intimate personal pronouns (He, His, Him) Who can be “grieved” and called upon, who can guide our minds and footsteps, and who is amazingly compared to the wind, a blazing fire, a gentle dove, a flowing river, a down-payment, our Helper, a teacher, the Guarantor of our eternal redemption in Christ.

 Wesley Duewel in, Touch the World Through Prayer, has a chapter titled, “Your Indwelling Prayer Partner.” Listen to this extended quote (pp. 45–46):

The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of prayer. He prays directly, speaking with the Father and the Son. He also prayers indirectly, praying through you, the believer. It is the nature of God the Son and God the Spirit to pray. They ever live to pray. Just as God has ordained that you join Christ in intercession for His will to be done on earth, so He has ordained that the Holy Spirit should enable, guide and empower your intercession.

 

To say it in another startling way: God the Son is your enthroned Prayer Partner [seated as it where in heaven at his Father’s right hand and therefore having his ear] and God the Spirit is your indwelling Prayer Partner ... just as surely as you can know the Fatherhood of God and the Saviourhood of Christ, even so you can know when the Holy Spirit is working within you. To be filled with the Spirit is to be filled [among other things] with the Spirit of intercession.

 

When the Holy Spirit fills, prayer becomes your very spiritual breath. The Holy Spirit loves to do within you that for which He indwells you—to accomplish God’s will on earth. God has ordained that the prayer of the believer is one of the major ways He accomplishes His will, so the Holy Spirit desires to make intercession a major expression of your spiritual life.

So, with the aid of the Holy Spirit, consciously aware of his immediate presence, his promptings and invitations, and calling on God for his fresh filling, here is an example of praying from one old Puritan, taken from an instructive book of prayers titled, The Valley of Vision, asking for the Holy Spirit to ...

 

Come as power—to expel every rebel lust, to reign and keep me thine;

Come as teacher—leading me into all truth, filling me with understanding;

Come as love, that I may adore the Father, and love him as my all;

Come as joy—to dwell in me, move me, animate me;

Come as light—illuminating the Scripture, molding me in its laws;

Come as sanctifier—body, soul and spirit wholly thine;

Come as helper—with strength to bless and keep, directing my every step;

Come as beautifier—bringing order out of confusion, loveliness out of chaos.

 (“Spiritus Sanctus,” p.28)

 

“Built up when bent in prayer” ... that’s v. 20, and it’s also this week’s and next week’s sermons in a nutshell.

 

But again, those are supportive of the main thing to study and pray for; i.e., to ...

 

Command # 3: “Keep yourselves in the love of God” (21a).

Once again, just as we need God’s help in “building ourselves up the faith,” so we need divine assistance to keep from naturally falling out of love with God. Here, after all, is the chief indictment of all unsaved sinners, and especially the apostate lost—that they do not love God. But even for us saved sinners, keeping our side of the covenant of love with God would be impossible if this was an “empty imperative.” But that’s never true elsewhere in God’s word, nor here in this text. “In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John. 4:10), is the assurance of John, the beloved disciple. And Jude also knew that the Father’s special love for his chosen ones, whom he effectually calls is a “divinely keeping love”: “To those who are called, beloved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ” (v. 1).

 

‘Keeping ourselves in the love of God’ never depends on self-effort, ginning up by willpower enough right affections toward God. Wonderfully, it is an overflow back to him of God’s love poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, in another of his multiple ministries (Romans 5:5). God’s love is the shoreless, bottomless ocean of love the hymn writers knew and prayed and teach us to sing back to our Father. It’s George Matheson’s hymn of prayer:

 

“O Love that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul in Thee;

 I give Thee back the life I owe, That in Thine ocean depths its flow

 May richer, fuller be.

(“O Love That Will Not Let Me Go,” Worship & Service Hymnal, p. 323).

 

And it’s the words of the anonymous classic ...

 

The love of God is greater far

Than tongue or pen can ever tell.

It goes beyond the highest star

And reaches to the lowest hell.

The guilty pair, bowed down with care,

God gave His Son to win;

His erring child He reconciled

And pardoned from his sin.
O love of God, how rich and pure!

How measureless and strong!

It shall forevermore endure—

The saints’ and angels’ song.

 

When hoary time shall pass away,

And earthly thrones and kingdoms fall;

When men who here refuse to pray,

On rocks and hills and mountains call;

God’s love, so sure, shall still endure,

All measureless and strong;

Redeeming grace to Adam’s race—

The saints’ and angels’ song.

 

Could we with ink the ocean fill,

And were the skies of parchment made;

Were every stalk on earth a quill,

And every man a scribe by trade;

To write the love of God above

Would drain the ocean dry;

Nor could the scroll contain the whole,

Though stretched from sky to sky.

 

(“The Love of God,” words & music ©1923, Ren. 1951 by Hope Publishing Co., Carol Stream, IL)

 

Or those of Samuel Trevor Francis ...

 

O, the deep, deep love of Jesus, vast unmeasured, boundless, free.

Rolling as a mighty ocean in its fullness over me.

Underneath me, all around me, is the current of Thy love,

Leading onward, leading homeward to Thy glorious rest above.

 

O, the deep, deep love of Jesus—love of every love the best!

Tis an ocean vast of blessing, ‘tis a haven sweet of rest.

O the deep, deep love of Jesus—‘tis a heav’n of heav’ns to me,

And it lifts up up to glory, for it lifts me up to Thee.

 

Command #4 is the exercise of hope: “Waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life.” (22b). Here is the future, unrealized part of our salvation, explained once again, I think, in the great Romans 8: “We ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (vv. 23–25).

 

Predictably, the grace-as-power for us not to give up waiting, through the sufferings of this present evil age for the final mercy of getting our redeemed bodies, resides in the work of God—this time God the Son’s mercies which were foundationally won completely for us in his broken body on the cross—and now applied daily by God the Spirit as we groan our way to glory!

 

1) Built up in faith, 2) kept in love, 3) waiting in hope: all our require work, all to be pursued by 4) “praying in the Holy Spirit,” God the Spirit’s multiple ministries applying the past, present and future workings of God the Father and God the Son. Everything guaranteed in the Father’s sovereign plan for us in Christ—all his ultimate ends, reached by our own Spirit-enabled daily, finite exercise of faith, love, and hope!

 

And, now about that last set of imperatives ... About that terrified Haitian man flying beside me who for all I know may himself be “devoid of the Spirit.”

 

Attempting to help others ...

And have mercy on those who doubt; save others by snatching them from the fire; to others show mercy with fear, hating even the garment stained by the flesh.—Jude 22–23

Can you hear how Jude’s last command shifts our attention away to saving the lost, lost at varying levels of lostness. He pastorally saw three kinds of evangelistic need, each more desperately needy than the previous: first, “have mercy on those who doubt,” second, “save others by snatching them out of the fire,” and third, “to others, show mercy with fear, hating even the garment stained by the flesh.”

 

I dare say, the Holy Spirit could put on all our hearts at least one person who fits in each of those conditions—a person to begin (or renew) praying for, ranging in severity from...

• the simple doubters (easily encouraged and answered and won)
• to the discouragingly persistent backsliders (my own dad in his cups for 40 years, then sober the last 25 years and wonderfully saved the last 7 of those 25)
• to the outright, toxically frightening, infectious and dangerous (that we tremble to approach lest we be overwhelmed with temptation ourselves).

May God’s Spirit help us into the new year—birthing and reviving evangelistic courage—and break our hard hearts for those in any of these conditions and preserve us from the very real threats any of them might pose if we would dare, in the love of God, to get involved in saving them.

 

This little letter of Jude, if it does anything, again, according the Charles Spurgeon,

 ... Should teach [us] to be in earnest about the salvation of others. If the punishment of sin were some slight pain we need not exercise ourselves diligently to deliver men from it; but if ‘eternity’ be a solemn word, and if the wrath to come be terrible to bear, how should we be instant in season and out of season, striving to win others from the flames! What have you done this year, some of you? I fear, brother Christians, some of you have done very little. Blessed by God, there are many earnest hearts among you; you are not asleep; there are some of you who strive with both your hands to do your Master’s work, but even you are not as earnest as you should be ... [and] are there not men and women here, members of this church, doing nothing for Christ? No soul saved this year by you, Christ unhonored by you, no gems in his crown? What have you been living for ...? God make you—you that do little for him—to humble yourselves before him, and to begin the next year with determination, that knowing the terrors of the Lord, you will persuade men, and labor, and strive to bring sinners to the cross of Christ. (From 365 Days With Spurgeon, entry for Dec. 28)

3. Finally: the Concluding Benediction (vv. 24–25)

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.

In all the struggles we have been unequal to in the old year and against all that tempts us to play it safe in 2017, we get to conclude with the assurance that God is able to preserve us in this present life and present us perfectly to himself in the everlasting future. Kept from falling now—stood up blameless in Christ in heaven!

 

Again, my goal tonight/today in this message has been that God, by the power of his own Holy Spirit, will start your engine (or if you prefer, will build his house of the word and prayer, faith and love, into your heart) so that in the new year of 2017 and for as long as your earthly life you will ...

 

offer up … your desires unto God

for the things agreeable to his will

in the name of Christ

with confession of your sins

and in thankful acknowledgment for all of his mercies

—Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q. 98

 

May the Holy Spirit help us to pray and to obey in the new year! So that to us is the exceedingly great joy—and to God alone is all the glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time, and now, and forever! Amen!

 

Sermon Discussion Questions

Outline

1. Recollection (vv. 17–19) 
2. Reaction (vv. 20–23) 
3. Benediction (vv. 24–25) 

Discussion & Application Questions

• Draw and summarize the parts and passages of the illustration in the introduction. Which is better—to call it a “house” or an “engine”?
• Another way to look at verses 20–21 is to see the first command (20a), “Building yourselves up in your most holy faith” as the main point, and the next three as a trinitarian “how to” under that heading. Do you think that works? Why or why not?
• Two especially prominent sins of the apostate stand out in this passage: Rejecting God's authority and sexual self-indulgence. Pray for one another against these strongholds in yourselves and in the wider church body at Bethlehem.
• Whom do you know who fits any of the three degrees of danger in verses 22-23? Will you begin to pray for and make a plan for show them mercy this year?

Prayer Focus
Memorize the benediction of verses 24–25 and turn it into a prayer to say every day of Prayer Week 2017: 

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.—Jude 24–25