Sermon Tone Analysis

I hate being sick.

I’m sure Meghann hates my being sick worse than I do; I’m the worst kind of patient—really, I am.

I can’t imagine what it might be like if and when I have to deal with actual sickness or chronic disease.

I feel really bad for Meghann when that day comes.

Over the years I’ve been as a pastor, I’ve had a front-row seat to sickness and disease.

There have been weeks when the majority of my time was spent in a hospital, sitting with patients who were members of whatever church I was pastoring at the time.

I believe I’ve been in every major hospital in Kansas and western Missouri, including every single hospital in the Kansas City metropolitan area.

In my first couple of years as a full-time associate pastor, for instance, I spent a two-week stint at Stormont-Vail Hospital in Topeka, KS sitting bedside with my good friend, Mildred McCreight, an 80-year-old cancer patient.

This was one of many in a long line of hospital stays and visits over the last 15 years.

The last time my dad was in the hospital, I went to visit him.

I had a few things I needed to give him, so I just took them to the hospital with me.

As I approached his room, I was stopped by a nurse who told me, “You can’t go in there and you can’t leave any of that stuff for him either.”

I chuckled to myself.

This nurse obviously didn’t know who I was.

“I’m Barrett Case.

I’ll go in that room if I want to.

That’s my father; I’m here to see him.”

As you can probably guess, my posturing did not work.

I had to take all the stuff I was going to leave with Dad back out to my car.

I had to gown up, put on gloves and a mask, and was allowed in the room only after I assured the nurse that I was, in fact, not sick and that I hadn’t been around anyone who was; only after I gave her two forms of identification, slipped her a couple hundred dollars, and promised that if she ever needed a kidney, I was her guy.

When I finally got into the hospital room, I saw Dad whose immune system was not doing what immune systems ought to do.

He was, at that moment, very susceptible to illness.

>So it is with the local church.

The local church can get very sick, very fast.

The local church can go from being healthy one minute to gravely ill the next.

Listen to Eugene Petersen:

“Our spiritual communities are as susceptible to disease as our physical bodies.

But it is easier to detect whatever is wrong in our stomachs and lungs than in our worship and witness.

When our physical bodies are sick or damaged, the pain calls our attention to it, and we do something quick.

But a dangerous, even deadly, virus in our spiritual communities can go undetected for a long, long time.

As much as we need physicians for our bodies, we have even greater need for diagnosticians and healers of the spirit.

Jude’s letter to an early community of Christians is just such a diagnosis.

It is all the more necessary in that those believers apparently didn’t know anything was wrong, or at least not as desperately wrong as Jude points out…energetic watchfulness is required.

Jude’s whistle-blowing has prevented many a disaster.”

This morning, we look at Jude’s reason for writing.

We know why Jude writes this letter (he tells us why).

But, on a deeper level, we know that the Holy Spirit inspired this writing; we know that Jude was carried along by the Holy Spirit.

We know that Jude is speaking on behalf of God.

And we trust that what Jude writes is meant for us today.

Our text for this morning is Jude 3-4, the next two verses in this great letter.

If you have your Bible (and I hope you do), please turn with me to the short letter of Jude.

If you are able and willing, please stand for the reading of God’s Word, out of reverence for God’s Holy Word.

Jude, verses 1-4:

May God add His blessing to the reading of His Holy Word!

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Jude loves the people he’s writing to.

He calls them “dear friends” which sounds nice, but it’s even more than that.

It’s the word beloved.

He is writing to people he deeply loves, people for whom he has deep affection and concern.

Jude loves them.

He has been wanting to write to them for some time—no doubt he was excited to write to them about his half-brother and Master, Jesus; about the salvation they all share by faith in Him.

I don’t know about you, but I would love to read that letter: to hear from Jude, the brother of Jesus, about the grace and mercy and love and redemption offered by Jesus.

I would love to read that letter.

But this letter from Jude is not that letter, not exactly.

Jude wanted to write about the salvation they share, but his subject has had to switch to the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints.

It doesn’t sound all together different (a letter about salvation and a letter about faith).

It doesn’t sound all that different, that is until we realize what Jude is actually doing: he’s asking his audience to contend for the faith because there are many people threatening the faith.

Instead of writing a letter about something, Jude writes a letter calling for action.

Jude is asking his readers to take action.

Jude doesn’t just want them to have faith; Jude wants them to contend for the faith.

Verse 3 sums up the urgency with which Jude writes.

Jude is serious.

He writes:

I felt compelled to write and urge you...

I find it necessary to write and appeal to you...

I have to write, insisting—begging!—that you...

It was needful for me to write unto you...

Jude is writing because there is a group of people who are having a deadly influence on the lives of his dearly loved brothers and sisters in the faith.

The church, Jude knows, can go from being very healthy one minute to being very, very sick the next.

Therefore, the church needs to beware, lest it be duped by false teachers.

The threat to the church is very, very real.

And so, Jude writes to warn the church about the impending, imminent, ever-increasing danger facing the church.

Jude writes to his beloved brothers and sisters in Christ about the faith, about the opposition they will face.

And then Jude gives them their marching orders: contend.

Jude writes to them about the faith.

By faith Jude means those things which we believe, rather than the fact that we believe them.

Faith is objective rather than subjective.

It means something because it means something, not simply because it means something to us.

It is what it is (and I mean that literally, not the silly/overused expression “It is what it is.”

The faith Jude speaks of here is what it is all on its own).

Christopher Green: “By faith Jude means the simple Christian truths which, from the earliest Christian writings, have been seen as the gospel that saves us.”

Jude’s writing to them about the faith, because it’s being attacked (in their day, and in ours).

There are many disputes over the content of the faith—the content of the gospel, the good news; many of the letters in the New Testament show that this has always been the case.

Sometimes people subtract from the gospel, and sometimes people add to the gospel.

The clearest New Testament examples of subtracting from the faith, from the gospel are:

a denial of the resurrection (Paul wrote 1 Corinthians, in part, to deal with this issue).

a denial of the return of Christ (2 Peter deals with this).

The other deadly danger is the temptation to add to the message:

Galatians was written to urge the believers to resist new teaching.

Colossians, to avoid a new spirituality.

Jude commissions his readers, both then and now, to be rock-solid in our adherence to the faith, the whole faith, and nothing but the faith, because it’s every bit as common today to remove those parts of the faith that are culturally “embarrassing.”

There are many who prefer to prune the gospel.

“Let’s get rid of this part and that part, oh, and definitely that part.

That’s a dated, archaic, old-fashioned truth.

We need to downplay that part, because people aren’t going to like it if we take a firm stance on what marriage is or a firm stance on human sexuality or a firm stance on divorce.

We can’t be too direct about sin or the exclusivity of salvation through Christ.”

It’s easy to spot those who wish to subtract from the gospel, those who wish to give the gospel a little haircut in order to make it more appealing, more welcoming, more palatable.

Jude commissions his readers, both then and now, to be rock-solid in our adherence to the faith, the whole faith, and nothing but the faith, because it’s every bit as common today to add to and supplement the faith.

This is summed up in the word and.

The great 20th-century theologian, Karl Barth, wrote in 1965 that the greatest obstacle in witnessing to those who belong to the Roman Catholic Church is “the very small word ‘and’.”

Barth wrote: “When we say Jesus, the Catholics say Jesus and Mary.