Be Careful

Pastor Burcham's Sermon

Sunday, August 21, 2005

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Any chocolate lovers among us this morning? Yeah, I figured that. Hershey's Pot of Gold chocolate. That's what I have here. I wondered if any of you would like a piece of chocolate this morning but I need to tell you beforehand, though, that you need to be careful. Because, honestly, this morning, as I was leaving the house, I picked up the box of chocolate from the lid and the lid came off and the box went crashing down. I don't know if I woke up the whole family or not. It went crashing down. Chocolates went everywhere in the kitchen. Even the dog started whimpering. So I picked them all back up, and I put some of them back in here. The floor was pretty clean. That's not really what I'm concerned about. What I'm concerned about is there are three different kinds of chocolate I have in this box for you to choose from, so you need to be careful.

Now for certain, there is some pure milk chocolate, some of Hershey's best from their Pot of Gold. But I also added in here two other kinds of chocolate. The one is baking chocolate. Have you ever tried baking chocolate? See, I snitch everything from the kitchen. Ooh. After it's baked, it's good but before, no. You'd be disappointed. There's a third kind of chocolate in here that, if you ate it, you'd probably say, “It's not bad. It's not the best chocolate I've ever had in the world but it's pretty good.” But a little while later, you probably wouldn't be too happy with me because it's chocolate-flavored Ex-Lax. So the word for today is, if you want a piece of chocolate after service, come and see me but be very careful. Be very careful in what you choose. Because, although they all look good, unless you inspect them carefully, you may end up with some results you don't like too well.

In a much harsher way, that's the message of Jude's letter to his audience. It's a letter where he says, “Be careful.” They have teachers among them who are preaching the good news about Jesus. They are preaching the gospel message, but they need to be careful about exactly what they are teaching. What are they saying about the gospel? Because it isn't the pure gospel that's contained in God's Word. It's something that looks good, something that sounds good, even reasonable to them but it has unfortunate consequences.

This week, we're going to do the same thing as we did last week and that is we're going to sort of step through the Book of Jude. As I said in the beginning, there are some parts of it we're just simply going to have to skip over. But, for two weeks in a row, it's okay for you to read your Weekly Word in worship but only Page 6 if you don't mind. On Page 6, we have the Book of Jude. We're going to walk through the book and have a little bit of an understanding of this letter that was written.

You notice from the first verse that he addresses his letter in a similar way of all letters in the first century A.D. That is simply there's a salutation where he addresses who is the author of the letter and then who are the recipients, usually telling a little bit about the author and a little bit about the recipient. So Verse 1: “I, Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and a brother of James. To those who have been called, who are loved by God the Father and kept by Jesus Christ.” Okay, so Jude is the writer of the letter. Who's Jude? Is there a Jude in the New Testament? Where do we get that from? Well, we need to understand about the name Jude. The name Jude actually has three derivatives. There is, first of all, the Hebrew derivative that it comes from and that's Judah . So we know that from the Old Testament. That's shortened down to Jude. Or there's the Greek version of Jude, which is Judas. Now we know some Judases from the New Testament. There are actually a couple. There is not only just Judas of Iscariot because obviously it's not him because, at this point, he's already passed on after his betrayal of Jesus and all that, but there are a couple of other Judases in the New Testament, so which one is this? We had hoped he'd give us a little bit of a hint of who he is. So he says a servant of Jesus Christ. Alright, that doesn't tell us too much. But then he says something really unusual. He says “the brother of James.” Why would he say the brother of someone? It's typical fashion of the bible when a person identifies himself, they identify themselves by their father. So he'd say, “Judah, the son of,” but no he doesn't. He says, “the brother of James.” Well, that must tell us that James then must be very well known in the church. It must be a name that doesn't even need an introduction, a name they could relate to immediately and so there is a James in the New Testament church that most Christians would know about and that was the James who was in charge of the Church at Jerusalem . Now it's true Peter was in Jerusalem , but the actual head of the Church at Jerusalem was actually James, James the brother of Jesus. So does that mean Jude is the brother of Jesus? Well, why doesn't he just say so? Why doesn't he say, “Jude, the brother of Jesus and James?” I'm going to infer a little bit here. My inference is this. He may be the brother of Jesus, that is, half brother, a son Joseph and Mary had, but he doesn't count that as somehow he has a special relationship with God and somehow he's special or different. No, he's a servant of Jesus Christ just like all the rest of us are servants of Jesus Christ. But he identifies himself as the brother of James.

The New Testament even sort of supports this idea that Jude is the brother of Jesus. If we look at Matthew 13, the people are talking about Jesus after he gets done teaching and they're just looking around saying, “Now what a minute here. Isn't this the carpenter's son? And isn't His mother's name Mary? And aren't His brothers, James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas?” So we can't definitively but more than likely, most scholars agree, Jude is the brother of Jesus, also the brother of James.

Okay, who is he writing to? He doesn't give us a whole lot of hints, does he? He says, “To those who have been called, who are loved by God the Father and kept by Jesus Christ.” That's pretty generic, isn't it? You know, a lot of times in the letters, Paul addresses the Church at Colossi or he addresses the Church at Philippi or even last week he addressed Philemon directly in his letter. Now we have sort of a general introduction here. There are a couple of things we can learn from that. One is maybe this letter wasn't intended for just one set of people. It was popular at that time to have what was called circular letters and, that is, you'd send the letter to one group of people and, when they were done reading it, they'd pass it on to the next group and the next group and the next group. So maybe there was sort of an area of congregations that Jude is sending his letter to.

The one thing we can infer again about the audience is this. They must have had a pretty good knowledge of the Old Testament. Because as we read through that, did you see all the references to the Old Testament? Sodom and Gomorrhah, Balaam, Korah's revolt, Moses. And even the tradition surrounding the Old Testament is mentioned there. So if they weren't Jewish Christians, they had to be very well educated Gentile Christians in the Old Testament. And Jude now is addressing them. Why is he sending his letter?

Well, that's the situation we get into. He says to them starting in Verse 3 that things have changed for him. He says, “Dear friends, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt I had to write and urge you to contend for the faith.” So Jude's original intention was he was eager to write to these churches and sort of share the gospel with them, to celebrate with them the freedom they have in Christ, the forgiveness that's been won for them, the new life that's been given to them. But he obviously knows enough about what's happening in the congregations there that he has to change subject matter. He changes subject matter, he says, because I want “you to contend for the faith.” And then he talks about the actual situation there. In Verse 4, he says, “For certain men whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you. They are godless men who change the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord.” The key words there are, “who change the grace of God into a license for immorality.” There are false teachers among the people there, and the false teaching he's talking about there has a close correlation to another book of the bible, 2 Peter 2. In fact, if you read 2 Peter 2, it almost looks at point as a direct quotation from Jude or is it the other way around? Is Jude quoting Peter? Either way, I don't know that it really matters. The point is there is a problem in the churches of the first century A.D. and the problem, evidently, is pretty wide spread. And the problem is this. They have changed the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ into a license for immorality.

In other words, what they're saying is since we are forgiven people, since we enjoy God's grace, since every time we sin we are forgiven, well, in that case, why not sin all the more? Now they wouldn't put it as bluntly as Jude does in his letter. They'd probably state it more like this. “Our God is a God of love and a God of grace and a God of compassion. And when Jesus Christ died upon the cross, He died for all and He died for all the sins that ever have been committed, all the sins that ever will be committed. Therefore, Brothers and Sisters, don't worry about what you do. Don't worry about your life. Don't worry about walking down the straight and narrow because you're forgiven anyways.”

Or maybe they took another bent and that was the bent Paul addressed in the Book of Romans 5 and 6. There he says, “Well, if grace is there where sin is evident, well then let's sin all the more so grace can abound.” The more you sin, the more grace you're going to have. So every time I sin, I enjoy God's grace anew so I might as well sin as much as I can and enjoy all the forgiveness and all the grace of God. It's a perversion of the gospel, but it's put in an eloquent way and it's put in a persuasive way so people are starting to believe it.

And evidently, the specific bent these folks had were for the sexual sins. Because they traded the grace of God as a license for immorality. Now here's a word the next time you're playing Scrabble . Gnosticism. Gnosticism was a teaching that was happening in the early church. This was maybe the precursor of Gnosticism. I'll give you an idea how difficult this word is. It starts with a “g,” not an “n.” Ask about it later. Great for Scrabble . Who's going to question you whether you spelled it right. Gnosticism. But Gnosticism's important for our understanding of Jude because Gnosticism taught this. It taught the mind was more important than anything else, your intellect and your connectedness with your spiritual being. So they thought of themselves as being intellectual. They thought of themselves as being rather smart and looked down at other people. They also had a disconnect, a disconnect between their mind and spirit and their body. What was important was mind and spirit, not the body. The result was do anything you want with your body. In other words, they led down the road of immorality and sexual perversion and that seems to be what Jude is trying to address with the people there. He addresses it first when he says this is why you have “to contend for the faith.” Then he talks about Sodom and Gomorrah and how, in a similar way, they were given over to sexual perversions. And also, if you want to go back to St. Peter in his second letter when he wrote it, he alludes to the same thing. So 2 Peter 2 says about these same teachers, “They will be paid back with harm for the harm they have done..Their idea of pleasure is to carouse around in broad daylight.” Then he says about them, “They are blots and blemishes, reveling in their pleasures while they feast with you with their eyes full of adultery, they never stop sinning.”

What Jude is concerned about here is you have a group of people who have infiltrated the church and, through their persuasive words and their teaching, they have perverted the gospel, they've changed the gospel as if to say it doesn't matter how you live, it doesn't matter what you do, and what's happening is they are becoming an immoral and perverted society.

Maybe we do know who Jude was writing to because I think Jude is writing to America . Jude is writing to our society, our culture. Look around you. Think of all the things we simply blindly accept that 50 years ago, 20 years ago we wouldn't have. Have we not become an immoral and perverse generation? Have we not given ourselves over to all the sexual sins that are mentioned in scripture and made light of it. We don't even pay attention to it anymore.

Look no further than Friday's paper. Friday's paper, I'll tell you right now I'm a movie buff. I love to go to the movies, so I always go to Iowa Life on Friday to see what new movies are released and what are their reviews. Two movies came out this weekend. Ready for the first one? The 40 Year Old Virgin . It's a story about a guy who's remained single for his whole life. He's now 40 years old. Okay, no big deal about that. But here's where the yucks begin. He's still a virgin. Can you believe that? Unbelievable. Well, look at the guy. He's a doofus, he's a dork. Because only someone like that would find himself in this situation, so here the laughs begin as we trace through how he has to take care of the problem, the fact that he's 40 years old and still a virgin. Who would think of such a thing?

Second movie came out. Turn the page. Broken Flowers . Stars Bill Murray. Similar kind of story, that is, it's centered around a man who's never been married. He's probably in his 50's but, in direct opposite to the first movie, this man has been with so many women, he can't keep track of them. The story line is this. Some 19 years ago, he fathered a son and this son is looking for him. Well, now the laughs are nonstop as Bill Murray goes back to all his previous lovers to try to find out where is this 19-year-old son. Well, that's a real knee slapper.

You know what the problem is. All of us, when we went to the theaters, we saw the clips for both of these in the trailers. Did you give it a second thought? Did you think about the implications of the message these movies are saying to us and saying about us?

Some of you right now, if you were honest with me, you'd say, “Ron, you're making way too much of this.” I don't think I am. Movies reflect society. They also influence society. We don't give it a second thought.

July 22, USA Today , one of the lead articles, couples have replaced dating with living together. Living together has replaced dating. So no longer does a couple, for their courtship, go to the movies, go out to dinner, hold hands in the park, go ice skating. No, let's replace that because, after a short time into the relationship, they move in with one another. The implication of that is this. It says that 60% of all people who get married today lived together before that happens. You know what that says? That says that sex before marriage is not only accepted by us, it is expected by us. Did you catch the change? It's not only accepted by us anymore. It's expected that's what's going to happen. That's another litmus test for the relationship to make sure everything is going to be okay. That's where we've come as a society and that's why I say we're an immoral and we're a perverse society and it's infiltrated into the church. It's not just out there.

Let's look at the things the church is accepting and going along with. Read the newspapers. Go the web. I did this week. I just did a quick search. It took me no more than 10 minutes. I just wanted to search some of the major denominations, and this is what I found on one. I'm not going to identify which one it is. It said this, “This church embraces a theological heritage that affirms the bible as the authoritative witness to the Word of God, the creeds of the ecumenical council, and the confessions of the reformation. That sounds great, wonderful. It says “their doctrine is Christ alone is the head of the church.” It sounds wonderful, a good church. You go a little bit deeper into the web site, a little section called the box. And in the box, it says this, “God can blow the lid off any box, unfold it, and turn it into a dance floor.” Well, that sounds like fun. I'd like to be part of that church. What a neat church. Blow the top off any box and turn it into a dance floor. We tend to be out-of-the-box kind of people. And what are some of the accomplishments they brag about? It says, “We were the first to ordain openly gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons.” In one moment, they say the bible is the authority for us and the next moment they contradict blatantly what scripture says. And they don't have a problem with it. But they do have a problem with me saying that's wrong. Because they'll put in words and it will be so persuasive, talk about a God of love and acceptance and a God of mercy and a God of passion. God would never be a God to tell us what's right or wrong.

What are the buzz words of today? Diversity. Well, diversity is fine except when it falls short to definitely say there are some things that are right and there are some things that are wrong. There are many things in our world that are gray and scripture talks plainly, boldly about what is right and about what is wrong. And anytime we start mixing that, we do an injustice to God's Word. It is a perversion of the gospel. Is God about love? You know He's about love. Is He a compassionate God? Yes, He's a compassionate God. But He's not a God we should slap in the face. To say God has forgiven me all of my sins; therefore, I can go out and sin all the more, that's like slapping God in the face for all He's done for us. It's an insult to Him.

Jude in his letter comes down pretty hard, did you notice? This isn't the kind of talk we're used to. Jude talks about them. He says, “Though you already know this, I want to remind you.” What is he going to remind them of? “I'm going to remind you about the people who came out of Egypt .” Remember they came out of Egypt . God had rescued them out of there. They turned their back on God. They started worshiping other things. They wouldn't believe in God. Not one of them stepped foot in the promise land except Joshua. All the rest perished in the desert. Do you remember Sodom and Gomorrah ? Do you remember Abraham was pleading for them? What if I just found one or two righteous people there? One or two people who looked to the Lord, would you turn away? He couldn't find one or two. He got Lot and his wife out and, because of those perverse and sexually immoral sins, they were destroyed by fire. What about the angels, the angels that joined along with Satan in the rebellion? He says they're locked up, they're chained up in hell and they'll be there for an eternity. Jude doesn't mince words about this. He doesn't mince words when he talks about the teachers of this. He says, “They're empty. They're leading you astray.” And how many times can he call them godless in just one verse?

Why is he so upset? Why is he coming down so strong? Is it because God is up there as a righteous judge just waiting to put His thumb down on someone? No, it's because God is up there as a loving God. And He doesn't want to see anyone lost. If Jesus Christ came into our world and lived among us, if He willingly went on the cross and He endured the shame and the pain of all of our sins, are we then going to just keep on sinning and pile on as many as we can? That's not the gospel. The power of the gospel is that it changes us. It makes us new people. Romans 6 says, “If we've been freed from sin, why in the world would we return to it?” If God has freed us from our conscience, if He's freed us from the shame, if He's freed us from the bondage of sin, why would jump back into it? Why would we return to it? God has given us a new life. That's the God of love and compassion and mercy, that He loved us so much that He rescued us from that life and He doesn't want to see us go back into things that ultimately destroy us. So Jude comes down very strong about that. Don't give into these teachings.

And even though he comes down so strong about that, what does he offer as a solution? He says, “Remember the words of the apostles. Remember they warned these teachers were coming. Remember the gospel message they spoke to you. Remember the mercy of Jesus Christ.” Because if you think about the mercy of Jesus and what He has done for you, you realize the great gift He's given to you. It makes it awfully hard to turn your back on Him, awfully hard to return to that former way of life. He says, “Pray in the spirit. Pray God will give you the strength. Pray God will be there to help you make a wise decision.” And then after those strong words, look at the very end of the book. He says in Verse 22, “Be merciful to those who doubt; snatch others from the fire and save them.”

Jude's letter is not a letter of condemning people. Jude's letter is an appeal, to save them from false teaching, false idea the grace of God releases you from an immoral and perverted life to save them so they could hear the true gospel, the life changing gospel. And then he says “to him who has the power.” In other words, God gives you the power. He gives you the power to stand up for what's right.

My friends, that's what time it is for us to do. It's time for us to take a bold stand in our world and in our society and to stand up for what is right, no matter what they call us, no matter what we are accused of, no matter what names they may throw at us, we stand up for the truth of the gospel so we can show mercy to those who need it and we can snatch some out of the fires of hell itself. So we can proclaim to them the one true gospel message, the gospel message that will change their lives. It's time we rely upon God's power so when we're sitting around having coffee at work and the subject matter comes up and everybody's accepting it, you're willing to stand up and say, “No, that's not right.” To give us the power and the courage to resist the temptation of society, to give us the wisdom and the discernment so when we see things and we hear things and, although they're very persuasive in their words, we look deeper to find out what is the true meaning behind what they're saying. Is that the gospel of God?

It's not going to be easy. It's not easy to discern. You have to be careful. Because out there, there's some milk chocolate, your gospel Jesus. There's some baking chocolate, which is kind of bitter. Frankly, there's some that's nothing more than Ex-Lax. Amen.

Copyright 2005 Gloria Dei Lutheran Church