Kept in God’s Love | Jude 17-25 | Strength to Contend and Confidence to Endure
In the closing verses of Jude (17–25), believers are called to take the warnings of the apostles seriously, to remain steadfast in the love of God, and to rely on His power to keep us from stumbling. In this sermon, Kept in God’s Love, Pastor Mark reminds us that the Christian life is not lived by grand gestures but in daily faithfulness—holding fast to God’s Word, building ourselves up in prayer, showing mercy to others, and trusting that the God who has saved us will also keep us to the very end.
The Christian life is not about grand gestures but about daily faithfulness: remembering God’s Word, remaining in His love, and relying on His power to keep us.
❓ Click to Open the Sermon FAQ
Q: What does Jude mean by “the last time” (Jude 17–18)?
A: It’s the era inaugurated by Christ’s finished work—the church age—not merely the final moments of history. In this time, scoffers will arise following ungodly passions.
Q: Why warn about scoffers?
A: Scoffers mock God’s truth and entice division. Their presence is not new; every generation faces them, so believers must stand firm in the apostolic Word.
Q: How do we “keep ourselves in the love of God” (Jude 20–21)?
A: By building ourselves up in the faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, and waiting in hope for Christ’s mercy that leads to eternal life.
Q: What does it mean to “show mercy with fear” (Jude 22–23)?
A: We move toward the doubting and the endangered with compassion, yet with wisdom and caution, avoiding compromise with sin or false teaching.
Q: Who ultimately keeps us from stumbling (Jude 24–25)?
A: God Himself. He is able to preserve His people and present us blameless before His glory with great joy—so our confidence rests in His keeping power.
📖 Click to Show the Transcript of this Sermon
Thank you for joining us for this week's sermon from First Reformed Church in Edgerton, Minnesota. Each week, we dig into God's word, trusting that the Holy spirit will continue the good work of sanctification in us. With summer having started and the weather cooling off quite a bit, we really don't need Labor Day tomorrow to let us know that summer's over. We can feel And as usual, the consensus is that summer has gone by way too fast. And it's been one of the wettest summers that I can remember in quite a while. And by that, I don't mean that we've had a lot of rain, but that we've had consistent nights with plenty of flashes and booms and rain that follows. Many times, those noises and those flashes might cause us to be aroused during our slumber and cause us to lose sleep. And well, one thing that I've taken notice of with this summer being the way it is, is the number of notifications that we get now in regards to the weather. Your phone buzzes in your pocket or Alexa beep's at you and you check what it's all about and you have a thunderstorm watch or a thunderstorm warning in effect until a particular time.
The notification doesn't mean much to us most of the time, Because most of the time when we get the notification, we can look at the sky and it's clear. It's a ways off. You wonder, will this even show up? Is this just another notification of bad weather that isn't going to come to pass? Well, in the last few years, we've also even started getting notifications about air quality, right? Have you gotten these? And there are so many of these, and what can I even do about them? It's basically the same notification as a thunderstorm or a tornado watch, but it's about the air quality. What am I going to do? There's nothing I can What do we do with this. And my point is, there's so many notifications about all these different things that can happen that I have become very apathetic about these warnings, even more so than I normally have been. Like me or like you or like many of you, you might see a warning and it tells you to find shelter and you're standing at the window watching or you go outside in the middle of the storm. I I've always been apathetic about storm warnings, but it has become worse.
I started thinking about this. When I was younger, the warnings were rare. If Dave Dedrick or Phil Strack came on my TV while I was watching the Duke's a Hazard after school, I was going to the basement. It meant something. I would have taken that notification seriously. I would have assessed the safety of the situation. And like I said, I most likely would have gone to the basement immediately. Well, now, what do I do? I swipe away the notification with roughly the same flippancy I wipe away notifications about spam emails. That's how seriously I take these things. Now, if I look around and notice it, maybe I'll take it seriously. But chances are I just don't care. So as we finish off the Book of Jude this morning, we get a notification from Jude to remember the predictions of the Apostles. He reminds us that they offered the early church warnings, and Jude tells them that they're to prepare themselves for what is coming by keeping themselves in the love of God. And that warning is not only for the believers who received this letter in the first century, it's also for us who are receiving it 20 centuries later.
So this morning, as we work through the text, we're going to use three R's to help us remember the important message of this passage today. The first thing that we are going to see is that we need to remember the word of God. Then we will see that we need to remain in the love of God. And finally, Jude reminds us we rely on the power of God. Our first R is to remember the word of God, and it's specifically related to this idea of warnings. Jude calls his audience back to not just what he is writing or to the Old Testament, but also to the word of God delivered through the Apostles. Jude points them to Specifically, predictions that in the last times, there will be scoffers who follow after ungodly passions. In the New Testament, the idea of the last time is not the very final moments of history. When the New Testament says the last time, it's like you're right up to the end. That's not what it's saying. It's speaking of what has been ushered in by the work of Jesus. So the people were familiar with the old covenant and the way that God was mediated to them in the past through that covenant.
And now there is this new covenant where they have access to God through Jesus. And so this is more than just a new way of doing things. It is the final way in which God comes to his covenant people. It is the last days. This is the final way that God is going to reveal himself to his people. So this idea of there being scoffers is not some sign that the end of history is nigh or something like that. It's a truth that there will always be those who scoff at the people of God. Mockers come with their mocking at the people of God because they are in rebellion against God. And we can understand why this is the case. When we see what Jude has to say, they are following their passions, ungodly passions. Their rebellion has them going after the passions of the flesh, and they don't want anything to do with a God who tells them that what they are doing is wrong. Some things never change, do they? We pick up this Book of Jude and we read it. But you could change some of the language. Without it being in your Bible, without you knowing what it is, you could think that if you change some of the way things are worded, that this charge to the people of God was written last week, not in the middle of the first century.
Here we see another one of those statements about the way the world is in the Bible, and we could take out our phones, and we could pull them out, and we could look for an example of where mockers have come with their marking, where scoffers are mocking the word of God. I bet you could find a video example of it in less than a minute without any problem. In our era, the scoffing of God is broadcast loudly via technological means. But these scoffers that Jude is referring to, they would have been loud and they would have been proud in the first century as well. They just couldn't share it on social media. They couldn't make a YouTube video about it. The reason I bring that up, we feel that we live in particularly immoral times. We do, but we do not live in a unique time. This has always been the case. Scoffers following after their ungodly passions. It's not just a 21st century problem. It is an every century problem. This is precisely why we need to remember the word of God. Because this is how the people of God have stood through the storm throughout the generations.
It's how you and I will be prepared to stand strong ourselves. Standing firm through this is not easy because there is more than just scoffing that takes place. Jude tells us that they cause divisions, that they are worldly people, that they are devoid of the spirit. First, here we see that they cause divisions. This is, of course, going to be the case because you can't attack core beliefs of the Christian faith without it dividing people. Because when you attack those core beliefs, it changes how you understand God. It changes how we understand salvation and the mercy of God. If I were to change the smile on the face of the Mona Lisa, it's not the Mona Lisa anymore, and it doesn't have any value. You swap the amount of salt and the amount of sugar in a cookie recipe. They look the same, right? You swap the salt and the sugar, you go from having a delicious treat to having a disgusting mistake you have to throw in the trash. If someone thought an engineer was wasting their time in the design of a bridge and gave it three supports instead of five that the engineer said was necessary, you end up with a disaster instead of a safe way to cross a river.
If we believe that God has revealed himself in his word and he has shown us, Christ, to bring us this faith, then it is essential that we protect that message and that we stand firm on it. When we do that, division visions will inevitably come. And what is interesting is that, generally speaking, the ones who are standing firm on what has been once and for all delivered to the saints, they are the ones. We are the ones who are labeled as being divisive. We are the ones who are causing division. I have a good friend who's a Lutheran pastor. He's now retired. But when he decided to stand firm on the faith once for all delivered to the saints, the denomination labeled him as a schismatic. He was believing what the church had believed for 2,000 years. We have to be sure that we don't fall for that tactic of flipping things around. Stand firm and know that true unity comes from holding to the word of God. The second thing that we see here is that Jude calls them worldly people. They are pursuing the things of the world instead of pursuing Christ. We can't understand the temptation of this.
None of us wants to be poor and ostracized by those around us. But we also know that the things of this world are fleeting. And while there is great temptation in these things of the world, we know that they don't last. And we also know that they don't bring us the happiness and fulfillment that those who pursue them think they will. That happiness that we think the world will bring us is not achieved by the things that we are going after. This is a temptation for each and every last one of us. But it is particularly apparent in those who are scoffing the people of God and opposing the things of God, as Jude tells us here. And finally, Jude says they are devoid of the spirit. In other words, he saying they are not true believers. They may tell you that they are, but by their denial of the word of God and by their actions, it will be evident that the Holy spirit is not at work in them. And so in all of these things, we must remember the word of God and the warnings that we find there. The warnings tell us to stand firm, and they're not only found here in the Book of Jude, they are found throughout the scriptures.
And we need to make sure that when we hear those warnings, we don't come to them and just swipe them away. We have to make sure that we don't disregard them as unlikely. We need to make sure that we don't see these warnings as irrelevant. When we come to them, we need to take them seriously and prepare ourselves to hold fast because we will experience what Jude warns us of here. Like I said last week, it will not likely come in the form of someone standing up here in front of you and deliberately preaching against scripture openly. That could happen, I guess, but it's unlikely. It's going to come in small things. It's going to be in places where you might not expect to see it and where you might not look for it. Like I said last week, it can be in your podcast feed or in a best-selling book that everyone you know is reading. We need to be on guard. We need to protect our hearts. We need to protect our minds by remembering the word of God. To do this, we find our second R for today in the next few verses, where it reminds us to remain in the love of God.
We build ourselves up and we protect ourselves in the faith by praying in the Holy spirit and keeping ourselves in the love of God as we wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life. Let's unpack that quick. First, Jude says to build ourselves up in the most holy faith. The idea expressed in the Greek verb that is used here is the idea of building upon something that has already been built. We're not starting something new when we do what Jude says here, but we're taking what we have learned, and we're learning more, and we're applying it. There's a contrast here with the false teachers who divide. They take what has been established and they break it up. They split it apart. But by standing in the faith, we are building on something instead of destroying it. The second instruction here is contrast of the false teachers and the fact that they do not have the spirit. Remember, the spirit was absent from them. But here, those who are firm in the faith are to pray in the Holy spirit. This is not alluding to praying in tongues or something like that.
It means that we put our trust in the spirit to do that good work that he has promised to do in us. As believers, we have the ind dwelling Holy spirit who guides us, who builds us up in faith and conforms us to the image of Christ. Then finally, Jude says, We wait on the mercy of Jesus. By saying, We are waiting for mercy, he isn't saying that we haven't received forgiveness and mercy from God yet. What he's pointing to is our great hope that we have joy because we have received mercy now, but we also live in great anticipation of the final day when we receive the final fullness and richness of the mercy of God in the salvation we have in eternal life. When we remain in the love of God and live into this, we don't just keep it to ourselves. We love others because God has first loved us in the Lord Jesus Christ. If we find those who are doubting because of the attacks on the faith, we best love them by declaring the truth of God's word to them. When we do this and they hear and believe, they are snatched from the fire of the destructive teaching of the false teachers.
Jude here makes the necessity of this clear to us with an image that he paints for us. He says that they are to hate even the garments stained by the flesh. Well, the idea here isn't that the garments that these false teachers are wearing are house stained by their false teaching. If the people that they know happen to end up getting their clothes at a second-hand store or something, then they're going to be polluted by the false teaching by touching their clothes. That's not what Jude is saying here. The idea here is that the influence of false teaching is so great and so pervasive that they should avoid it completely. Stay away even from their clothes. Get away. Get clear. Have nothing to do with them. Keep your distance. And so we remember the word of God. We remain in the love of God. And finally, in the benediction of this book, we see that we rely on the power of God. So in these challenges that we face, we don't rely on ourselves because we can't do it our own. We look to the one who is able to keep us from stumbling. It's his spirit and his power that protects and sustains people.
We will not be presented blameless before the presence of his glory because we were strong by our own power or because of our works. Instead, it is the one who has made us his people who will also keep us as his people. This benediction here is a beautiful expression of praise to that good work that he does for us. It says, To him be glory authority, Majesty, dominion, and authority before all time and now and forever. When we look at these words of praise expressing who God is, why would you ever try to rely on in himself instead of in him. We are reminded each and every day just how finite we are. Whether it's the aches and pains that signal to us that we aren't as young as we used to be, or whether we have some specific ailment in us or a loved one that reminds us of our mortality, we live in a world that persistently makes us aware of our weakness. We can try to ignore it, but that doesn't change the reality. These words of Jude here remind us that we serve an infinite God. And so we need to hold fast and remember that he is able to keep us, and we need to look to him.
Why in the world would we trust in ourselves when we have a glorious, majestic God who has all dominion and authority, and he's on our side. But as we remember to rely on the power of God, we have seen through this Book of Jude that this does not mean that we are to be passive. God preserves his people. But this truth doesn't minimize our responsibility to stand firm. And that's the challenge that I want us to come away from the Book of Jude with, because we know that he has saved us to the uttermost. And now we want to understand how we can live faithfully in light of that good news. It's a great truth. But let's be brutally honest. This truth that we know that God has saved us to the uttermost can be a bit of a danger because we can quickly find ourselves being complacent. God wins. And so we don't need to actively contend for the faith. God is going to win. My salvation is secure. I I didn't do anything to achieve it, so I can be passive. I'm guessing you're likely familiar with the cliché that they won the battle, but they lost the war.
I realized as I was thinking about this passage this week, that the biggest temptation for us as believers is we are so confident that God has won the war that we don't bother to fight any battles. Each and every day, we will find ourselves with challenges. Each day, compromising is a very real temptation. That's the battle that we're called to win. That one. That's the most important way that we contend for the faith. We are drawn to the big cultural issues and the social issues, and those battles seem so huge that we don't think that we are the ones who are even in the fight. I'm not downplaying those issues at all. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is that those battles are truly won when each individual believer contends for the faith in their life. When they resist temptation, when we hold fast to the authority and sufficiency of God's word, and when we faithfully pass the faith on from generation to generation. That is where the battle is won. That is how we contend for the faith. We are only able to win those daily battles by relying on the power of God.
It is his word and his spirit at work in us that gives us the strength to do it. And so as we depart from here, may we be reminded each day that he is the one who is able to win our greatest victory over sin, death, and hell. But he is also able to give us the victory in the daily battles that we face. So as we close, remember remember that the call of Jude is not just to notice the warnings, but to take them seriously. We contend for the faith not by grand gestures, but by holding fast to God's word, by remaining in his love and relying on his power in the daily battles of our life. And when we do, we can walk in confidence knowing that God who has saved us keeps us to the end. Amen. Let us pray. Great and merciful God, we thank you for the message that we have read in this Book of Jude, that you are powerful and that you are able to keep your people. And we thank you that we know this truth, but we pray that we would not become complacent in it, that we would remember that call from the beginning of the Book of Jude to contend for the faith And then in our daily lives, we would do that in the daily battles that we face.
We know that you have won the war. And we pray that we would desire to continue the battles against sin, that we might glorify Christ for who he is and what he has done to rescue us. It's in the name of Jesus we pray. Thank you for joining us for this week's sermon. For more information about First Reformed Church, head to our Facebook page or website, edgertonfrc.org.
You can find five days of devotions that correspond with this sermon here.
