Contend For The Faith | Jude 3-4

Brody Holloway Iron on Iron | Session 2

Youth pastors, it is our sober joy and responsibility to contend for the faith. This is not just a higher calling for pastors, but is true for every believer. As shepherds, our students are watching our lives to find an example of someone faithfully obedient to the Gospel.

Let’s preach the Word of God boldly, live with conviction, and bring others along with us.

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View Transcript – Contend for the Faith

(Please excuse typos)

Let’s read Jude, verses 3 and 4:

There is a scene in the now famous documentary called The Last Dance featuring Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls pursuit of a sixth World Title. Any of you guys… Have you watched… Anybody watch that? Several of you. Even if you’re not a basketball fan. If you’re a fan of drama or any kind of sports, it’s really well done. It was a scene that literally left me with chills. As the documentary had progressed, Michael Jordan had been painted in somewhat of a divided light. He had been seen as obsessed with winning and someone who takes everything on the court very personally.

He is compulsive but measured, strategic but lives in the moment, obsessed yet thoughtful. He cares about his teammates and he cares about the city of Chicago but he will let nothing stand in his way of winning the next Championship. As a competitor, I can’t help but watch and appreciate who he is as a man but at the same time you get the sense that nothing else really matters to him. You’re drawn to it yet somehow repulsed a little bit by it. There’s this moment, though, where he looks into the camera and says this, “You ask all my teammates, one thing about Michael Jordan was he never asked you to do something he didn’t do. When people see this, they’re gonna say, ‘Well, he wasn’t really a nice guy. He was a tyrant.’ No, no, no, no. Well, that’s you because you’ve never won anything. I wanted to win but I wanted them to win. And I wanted them to be a part of that as well. Once you joined the team, you lived at a certain standard at which I played the game and I wasn’t gonna take anything less. Now, if that means I had to go in there and get in your face a little bit, then I did that. Look, I don’t have to do this. I’m only doing it because it’s who I am. It’s how I played the game. That was my mentality.”

At this moment in the interview, Jordan tears up and his lip begins to quiver and he chokes out the final sentence of the interview, “If you don’t wanna play that way, don’t play that way.” Then there’s a long pause and he says, “We need to take a break.” I read that in eight hours of interview, over a year and a half of planning, that portion of the interview actually happened in the first 45 minutes of filming. He’s so passionate about winning. Fascinating. A year and a half of interviews, hours and hours and hours in putting this documentary together, and in the first 45 minutes we see the heart of this man who is obsessed with winning. Obsessed with it. Also consider the speech or letter that was read to the United States Marines before their assault on Baghdad to take down Saddam Hussein in March of 2003. This was written by General Mattis:

For decades, Saddam Hussein has tortured, imprisoned, raped and murdered the Iraqi people, invading neighboring countries without provocation, and he has threatened the world with weapons of mass destruction. The time has come to end his reign of terror. On your young shoulders rests the hopes of mankind. When I give you the word, together we will cross the line of departure, close with those forces that choose to fight, and destroy them. Our fight is not with the Iraqi people nor is it with members of the Iraqi army who choose to surrender. While we will move swiftly and aggressively against those who resist, we will treat all others with decency, demonstrating chivalry and soldierly compassion for people who have endured a lifetime of oppression under Saddam’s oppression. Chemical attack, treachery and the use of the innocent as human shields can be expected, as can other unethical tactics. Take it all in stride. Be the hunter, not the hunted. Never allow your unit to be caught with its guard down. Use good judgment and act in the best interests of our nation. You are a part of the world’s most feared and trusted force. Engage your brain before you engage your weapon. Share your courage with each other as we enter the uncertain terrain north of the line of departure. Keep faith in your comrades on your left and right and Marine Air overhead. Fight with a happy heart and a strong spirit.

General James N. Mattis

For the mission’s sake, our country’s sake and the sake of the men who carried the Division’s colors in past battles, who fought for life and never lost their nerve, carry out your mission and keep your honor clean. Demonstrate to the world there’s no better friend, no worse enemy than a United States Marine.” That makes you wanna enlist. That makes you wanna go sign up. Something about that type of speech or that type of motivation from a leader, whether it’s Michael Jordan talking about a basketball season that happened 20 something years ago or the speech of a war general or a president, I love to read historic speeches that motivate people in like the dark hours of history. You read Churchill, you read FDR, you listen to the fuzzy speeches that are recorded from the World War II years, and so much of that is motivational. I mean, just like ignites something in you, fires you up. But when it comes to the Church and when it comes to our call to arms as Christians in the 21st century, I feel like the average church on a Sunday is either going overboard in the area of patriotism and politics or they’re ignoring the fact that Christian doctrine is under assault.

Preach the Word with Conviction

The way God has defined things like sexuality and marriage and the exclusivity of Christ, and the centrality of the preaching of the Gospel to everything that we do, it’s under assault and what we need is we need motivation. We need to be motivated to do the job and to do the task that God’s called us to. Jude is a motivator. He’s an encourager. He incites something in us when we read him. When this man who we saw yesterday rejects his own brother in John 7:5, not even his brothers believed in him, and then goes on after the resurrection to refer to himself as a slave of Jesus. Not the half brother of Jesus, a slave of Jesus. When this man steps up and puts pen to paper and calls us to contend for the faith, it motivates something in us, it challenges and it encourages us. The passion that comes from Jude and James and Peter and those who saw the shredded and torn body of Jesus ripped to pieces. They saw him snatched away and carried off to be wrongly convicted and falsely accused. They saw the aftermath of his crucifixion when the sky turned dark and the earth literally began to quake.

They felt the emotion and the drama and the intensity of that moment in history like no other moment but then they felt an even greater intensity three days later when the earth shook again, this time yielding forth our victorious Lord and Savior who had gone to a place that none of us will ever go and experienced something that none of us will ever experience. He lay down his life under the full weight of sin and felt the full measure of death and came through that victorious. Our conquest rests on his conquest, and Jude understood this. And he looks at us and he challenges us to contend for this faith that has been made possible by this savior and the work that he has done. Jude, our author, has been referred to as “Jude the Obscure”. The letter he’s written is tiny and, apart from it, he may have been left completely unheralded and unknown in history. And even with this letter, many have overlooked the significant investment in and gift that he made to the church. But to study the Scripture seriously will have to bring us to a place where we look deeply into the words of Jude in his letter.

And by this letter he is known and through the words of this letter and the challenge and encouragement given he is willing to abandon everything for the sake of holding forth the Gospel and calling others to contend for the faith and to contend for this Gospel.

There are those who have crept into the church and who are making a mockery of Jesus and his bride and her mission, and Jude cannot and will not sit silently by or be idle. And in these verses, we will consider the letter’s theme and the letter’s occasion. So let’s look at verse 3. He starts by saying “Beloved” so he’s writing to those he loves. He addresses those he sees as the enemy as a threat. So when you love somebody, you then naturally are going to want to defend that person’s security and safety. So I think it’s a critical pastoral component. Pastoral component being, I care about the sheep, like I care about those students that I minister to. So if you’re at Snowbird and you’re working in the context of a share group, you need to have a love in your heart for those kids that you’re ministering to. You need to care about them.

It’s not just a job. It’s not just, “Man, it’s just like I get to go down the river. I get to do these really cool activities and I get to live in community within the institute and then… Oh yeah, and then I’m gonna do student ministry when I have to.” No, everyone here is here because you’ve been compelled to learn how to do ministry effectively and that being compelled to that, it always is accompanied by a love for people. People don’t sign up for what you’ve signed up for without a love for the people that we’re called to minister to. Those that are watching online, those people that are in student ministry, the people that come here and partner with us in ministry and you bring your students here, you don’t do what you do out of convenience or inconvenience. There may be times and situations where there’s nobody to step up and fill the gap. I think about a close friend and brother and supporter of this ministry named Stan Crews. Stan runs an effective and successful business with a team of employees, he works crazy hours, but in a time where there was no one to lead the ministry, the student ministry at his church, he said, “I’ll do it,” and that’s now gone on for several years.

There are times where, out of necessity, we’re gonna step up and do things but you’re not gonna do that if you don’t love people. We’re called to love those that we minister to and sometimes that is difficult. Sometimes it’s hard. To me, one of the funniest stories that I’ve ever known personally is the fact that God called me to student ministry. I remember when I was a teenager, I just didn’t wanna be a teenager. I wanted to be older. I didn’t like teenagers. And then in my early adult years, I didn’t like teenagers. I wanted to be grown and with grown folks and spending time with adults. But God puts in you with the calling, if it’s a real calling. And we looked at that yesterday. If it’s a true calling, and we examined Jude’s calling yesterday and our calling, he puts with us a compassion and love for those he calls us to minister to. And so there’s a lot that Jude has for these people but it’s a strong love. We looked yesterday at that… Remember we looked at, or in the last session, at the strength of humility and the boldness of humility. We’re not bold in a reckless and aggressive way. We’re bold because of the humility that we have before Jesus.

And Jude exhibits that.

I started watching a series, a five-season series on Netflix. I started watching it and I bailed on like the fourth episode. I was like, “I ain’t got time for this.” And it was set in the 1800s and it was just kind of dark. I found myself, at the end of an episode, not in a happy place. I was like, “Ah, I think I’m gonna quit watching this. There’s enough happening in the world that I don’t need to be entertained with unhappy things.” But the thing that just made me angry is that the show took place in like a logging or railroad camp out West in the 1800s and the pastor or the preacher of the community, he was weak and spineless and sort of sissified and he had no backbone and he was real compromising and he was sort of peddling and pushing this sort of like just be nice to everyone. It just kinda was like… But then as soon as there was a moment where there was an opportunity for the Gospel, the dude didn’t even understand the Gospel. He was teaching like a social sort of approach to “let’s all be nice and get along” and I thought, “Man, this is repulsive but this is pretty accurate probably with how the average movie-goer views people in Christian ministry.” Like we have this, we’ve sort of earned this reputation in some…

And maybe we haven’t always earned it but when it comes to leading in ministry, there needs to be a strength and a compassion that go together. You cannot have compassion without strength and strength without compassion tends to bully. It tends to run over people. You have to care about people y’all. We gotta love people. So he says, “Beloved, although I was very eager to write to you about our common salvation.” So he’s writing about salvation which means he’s writing to strengthen their faith as believers. He had planned to write a letter that focused on their shared salvation. So he says, “I was gonna write this one letter,” and we never get that letter. We know that Paul wrote at least three letters to the Corinthians because he references a third letter but we’ve never seen it. So we don’t know what that said. Apparently, it wasn’t inspired by the Holy Spirit or, in other words, it was just written from the pen of a man who cared but it wasn’t inspiration of the Spirit of God that was putting those words to paper, or it just wasn’t something that God intended for us to hear in a modern context.

But Jude planned to write one letter, we don’t know what that letter was gonna be. Now he’s moving in the direction of using the bond they have through a common salvation in Christ to stand together and withstand and push back against the false teachers in their community who do not possess salvation, teachers and instructors within the church who are actually unregenerate, who don’t know the Lord. They’re not Christians. That is a reality that we’re gonna face often. There are times where the people that we have to contend with in the church are actually not true believers. And we don’t get to make that call to determine that person’s saved, that person’s not, but there are certain things that will give evidence that people are in positions of leadership, and maybe they’re not even Christians. Can you imagine? Someone in leadership in a church, maybe a pastor, maybe a chairman of a committee or a board, maybe someone who’s in charge of the youth council, and they’re not even truly saved. That’s a reality in the Church. It always has been from the beginning.

And so Jude feels this tension and says, “You know what? I need to address this, not the other thing. I need to not just write a nice encouraging happy letter. I was gonna say things like, ‘I love you guys. You’re really nice. We all love Jesus. Here’s some lyrics to a song I recently read. Here’s a poem. This is wonderful. I can’t wait to come see you. We’ll eat fried chicken and have a dinner on the grounds. It’s gonna be wonder… ” He goes from, “I was gonna write to you about this common thing that we’ve got going on. We all love Jesus, we’ve got a common salvation. But, man, I realized in the process there are some other things that need to be addressed within the church that are more important than the things that make us feel nice, make us feel good.” There are times and ministry where we have to say things, do things, address things that are uncomfortable even though it’d be easier to just do the thing that’s comfortable. “Let’s just get together. Let’s go down to the casino and go bowling, that’d be fun. Let’s just hang out.” There are times for that but there are other times when we have to get serious about the responsibility we’ve been given as ministry leaders.

In verses 3 and 4, there’s a clear distinction between the salvation of believers and the condemnation of the ungodly and those who pervert the grace of God and who practice sensuality and deny the Lordship of Jesus. This denial probably simply looks like arrogance and a lack of submission and humility. I’m not gonna unpack a lot of verse 4 in this session because it’s gonna get addressed over the next few verses in the next session. Observation and note. I have heard pastors and preachers before… This is kind of an aside and this is especially critical for those of us who preach and teach. This is very important. I’ve heard pastors and preachers before walk into the pulpit or on to the stage and make the comment that the Lord had prepared a message for them but now he’s changed it and giving them a different word. You gotta be careful. That’s dangerous. I’ve done this myself, I have to admit it. But to be honest, the clear task of a pastor and a teacher is to labor over the text in preparation, in prayer, and to do the hard work of exegesis with a faithful and biblical hermeneutic to mine out the truth faithfully and to work to bring the illustration and application to bear for the hearer, to prepare the sermon, to grieve and sweat and work and labor in the study, in the early hours of the morning or the late hours of the night.

This is why we have to spend time in that study and take seriously the responsibility we’ve been given to preach and teach the Word of God and not just to walk up on stage and say, “Oh, I have a different idea right now. God gave me a different Word.” Then what were you doing for the last 8, 10, 12 hours in your study? We gotta take it serious. Prepare the sermon, we preach the Word of God. Jude is not doing that. He’s not saying, “I had a Word from the Lord, now I’ve got a different one.” He’s writing a letter to specific Christians. But for Jude, he had prepared to write a letter for them and then for some reason decided to change the content of the letter. It would seem as if he intensifies the call to arms and a challenge to contend for the faith.

Concerning the task of the pastor, listen to this quote from Kistenmacher:

“The task of the pastor is first and foremost to feed the people the living Word of God on the Lord’s day and on other occasions he must faithfully preach and teach the Scriptures, 2nd Timothy 4:2. He must proclaim the Gospel to strengthen the believer in his faith and lead the sinner to conversion. He must call the people to repentance and plead on their behalf for remission of sins and urge them to be reconciled to God, 2 Corinthians 5:20. His task is to administer the sacrament of baptism and The Lord’s Supper and to be a leader in prayer, Acts 6:4. He must give leadership in the work of evangelism and mission and to extend the church of Jesus Christ, Matthew 28:19. The pastor’s role is to counsel, exhort, encourage the people to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints. The pastor seeks to maintain order and discipline in the church. He opposes any person who through doctrine in life wants to lead the believers astray. With appointed leaders, the pastor is a watchman on the walls of Zion. Psalm 122:7-8, he is to promote the well-being of God’s people. So the role of the pastor is exhaustive in the life of the church, evangelism of the lost and the shepherding of the saints.”

Kistenmacher

We got a big job to do. We’re gonna shepherd. We’re gonna lead. We’re gonna pastor. It’s a big job. And a student pastor is a pastor. It’s not like, “Hello, such and such Baptist church. Can I speak to a pastor?” “Yeah, I’m so and so. I’m the student pastor.” “Can I speak to a real pastor?” I had a pastor tell me that one time, that that happened. Church secretary was out or whatever. He answered the phone. “I need to speak to a pastor.” “Well, I’m Pastor so and so.” “What’s your role?” “I’m student pastor.” “Can I speak to an actual pastor?” You reject that. Don’t lighten the responsibility that’s been put on your shoulders when it comes to shepherding, and that goes for you guys who are small group leaders and chaperones that come to camp and people that are investing relationally. We have a responsibility in how we shepherd. The theme of the letter is an appeal to contend and the Word contend is from the Greek Word that sounds like agonizing. The idea is one of struggle and intense battle. The very use of this word is very intentional on your part and is a call to action, but it’s an action of discipline. It’s not just action, it’s action of discipline.

It’s a word that was used in the athletic arena in the Olympics. When I was a kid growing up, there was a TV show that came on Saturdays. It was called ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Most of you guys would be too young to remember. Maybe some people watching would remember it. Some of our older guys remember. But Wide World of Sports would come on Saturdays and it would be things like gymnastics, downhill skiing, it’d be Olympic-type sports that would come on. ‘Cause most of us watch Olympic type sports during the Olympics but that stuff goes on year-round. So there’s a world championships, things like that. And I remember it would say “the thrill of victory” and it showed someone’s hand being raised, I don’t remember what he did, and then it said “the agony of defeat” and it showed this downhill skier, or maybe it was one of those ski jump guys, and he crashes and you watched this dude’s rag doll body tumble down the side of the mountain and you’re like, “That dude died no doubt,” but he actually survived and it like ended his career. And it’s like, “The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat.” They probably wouldn’t even show that on TV nowadays. YouTube it. Check it out, ABC Wide World of Sports Intro. It’s crazy.

But that idea that there’s agony that not only comes with winning and losing, there’s agony in the preparation process. It’s agonizing. And when he uses the word “contending” and in the Greek context of that, the definition would be an effort expended in a noble cause. An effort expended in a noble cause. It’s not just effort expended but it’s effort expended in a noble cause. This definition is used in a book by Walter Bauer that is a modern Greek and English lexicon of New Testament words, and this seems to be the meaning that Jude is after. Defending the purity of the church and the sanctity of the Word of God in the lives of believers everyday is a noble cause. Every day your feet hit the floor, every day you open the Word of God, every day you kneel in prayer is a noble cause and there should be effort expended in that noble cause. Application and challenge. For every Christian, we have a responsibility in contending for the faith. This is not just the job of the local pastor or professional. I love to read books about espionage and special operations and stories of bravery and exceptionalism in combat.

I’m currently reading a book about the founding of the CIA and the early missions to go into communist countries undetected to either spy on or assassinate those leaders that were trying to overthrow the free world. The men that did these jobs had extraordinary bravery. They were trained at the highest level. They were multi-lingual and they had an incredible skillset. Remember in that movie Taken… Did y’all see that movie Taken with Liam Neeson? There’s a moment where he’s on the phone talking to the guy that has abducted his daughter and he says, “I have a very unique set of skills.” Remember that? Like, “Oh, that’s a cool moment right there.” You’re like, “Oh, I know he’s gonna go dish some of that out on these guys.” These guys that have this unique set of skills.

There’s actually a man in the book that I’m reading right now, and I read his book last year, the guy’s name is Billy Waugh.

Billy Waugh was 12 years old when World War II started, when we were bombed at Pearl Harbor. All he ever wanted to do is be in the military. So he goes into the military in the late ’40s. In the 1950s, he’s in Korea. He does seven tours in Vietnam. He gets shot. In one combat engagement he gets shot. An RPG goes through his knee and disintegrates his knee and there’s a gaping hole with just skin and muscle holding the top of his leg to the bottom of his leg. He begins to crawl and in the process of crawling from the battle field… What had happened is him and a small ODA team had gone in thinking that they were gonna deal with a small group of people and it ended up being 3500 fighters there. And they get in the middle of this firefight. This is in early 1960s. In the process, he gets shot through the head and it removes a portion of his skull but doesn’t touch his brain and then he gets shot again up through the bottom of the foot and it blows out the other leg. And so he’s laying there, he goes unconscious. And when he wakes up, he comes to the middle of the hottest part of the day the next day and realizes he’s been stripped naked because they left him for… They thought he was dead. And so they just took all of his stuff and left him laying. It looked like he had a bullet hole in his head. And he survives. He goes on and does combat tours. And in every major campaign, he moves from Special forces into the CIA. And in 2001, he goes with Army Special Forces into Afghanistan. He spends his 72nd birthday in the mountains of Afghanistan where he loses 35 pounds in four months, tracking down the Taliban. Read this guy and you’re like, “What in the world?” And he talked about how when he had to leave the battlefield in Vietnam, after he got shot up, they sent him to Walter Reed Memorial Hospital to have his leg amputated.

And he snuck out and hitchhiked a ride back to Vietnam. And I’m like, “How in the world did he do that?” And so they explained what he does is he thumbs his way back to an air base where he knew some guys in the Special Forces community who snuck him onto a transport cargo plane. And he flew back to Vietnam and basically works his way back into another tour. And somehow miraculously his leg is saved. Read a story like that and you’re like, “Jude is that kind of Christian.” He’s like the Special Forces Christian that contend for the faith, man. We’re gonna go into… And this is where you see guys like… If you ever get a chance to watch Douglas Wilson go and debate Christopher Hitchens in a series of debates that took place back about 2010, I think, and it’s called Collision. It’s hard to find it online now. We looked for it recently because I watched it with Tuck. But there’s three different debates. Christopher Hitchens was a leading atheist who died back five, six years ago. And Doug Wilson and he go and they debate the validity of Christianity in these big venues. Doug Wilson’s crazy.

There’s another video where he speaks on the defense of biblical marriage and sexuality on the campus of the University of Indiana or Indiana University, IU or U of I, I don’t know how they say it, but the crowd’s so hostile. It’s crazy. And we think of contending for the faith. For me, I think of the Ravi Zacharias and the Douglas Wilsons and those people that go into those difficult venues. What Jude would say is, “Beloved, the church, Christians—contend for the faith.”

Contending for the faith is the job of every Christian.

And those of us that are in leadership, our task is to equip and prepare and make aware those people we lead, their responsibility to contend for the faith in our society and in the church, in society, in the secular world and in the church to preserve the purity of the church. I think there’s a mindset when people read Jude 3, that this contending for the faith is some sort of special forces operations Christian, like the Delta Force Christian or the Seal team six Christian. But for the average everyday Christian, there’s gotta be some other level of commitment in Christianity. It’s not true.

That’s a cultural mindset within the church. It’s really hard task of contending for the faith that needs to be left to the professionals, the pastors, the leaders. But Jude is writing this letter to the church at large. He refers to them as “Beloved,” not just to pastors. Paul wrote pastoral epistles. We’ve covered those in the Iron on Iron conferences in the past. He wrote to Timothy, he wrote to Titus, this is to beloved Christians. Remember he said that in his introduction of verse three. This is a reference to Christians in general, not pastors and missionaries in particular. So what does that mean for us in ministry? Two goals in our ministry, if we’re gonna teach this well and do this well. Number one, we are to be contending for the faith in our teaching, our exhorting, our discipling, and our engagement outside of ministry circles. So, we’re to be contending for the faith in every aspect of our ministries and in our day-to-day life outside of ministry, getting a cup of coffee or talking to somebody at the grocery store. And number two, the second goal of our ministry has to be to equip the saints for the work and mission. We need to train up and raise up young disciples who are ready to advance the Gospel and to defend the fight. We’re here, at Snowbird Wilderness Outfitters, we’re here to equip the church in this generation.

So let’s break down that second point. Two goals of our ministries is to contend for the faith, both in and out of the church.

Equip the Saints for Work of Ministry

Number two, to equip the saints for the same mission. Let’s break that down into a few talking points.

Teach Clear Bible Doctrine

First, we need to teach clear biblical doctrine. The best way to defend against false teaching is to teach the Word of God effectively and faithfully. We don’t have to focus on every wind of false doctrine that blows, but we do need to teach the true Gospel. We need to train and equip students so that they’ll be… So they will not be carried away by this world. They face an academic assault on their faith from high schools and universities. This assault began… Has begun at the youngest age in elementary school over the last 20 years. Think for example, of how normalized homosexuality has become or how normalized the transgender lifestyle has been promoted to be.

It’s interesting that many young people who professed faith in Jesus have embraced the idea that you can be both Christian and live in a lifestyle that is contrary to what the Scripture teaches. So do you see the danger here? We’re not talking about a full assault from a religion who emphasizes a different God or idol or cause its people to jihad or war in the physical sense. We’re talking about a creeping in ideology that seeks to undermine and attack the Word of God and the Christian belief system at its very root. The root system of Christianity is the authority and sufficiency and inerrancy of Scripture. If we tamper with that and change the meanings and reroute the message to filter it through a social or worldly lens, then what we receive is a false Gospel. And what we teach is a false revelation.

So what is at stake in teaching the Scripture effectively is teaching the whole council of God. This generation more than ever is facing a thread-by-thread undermining, and deconstruction of the fabric of the Christian faith. We gotta guard against it and grow and develop young people in our ministries who have faithfully and intentionally been taught the Word of God in our weekly ministries. So we gotta teach the Word of God. Additionally, in preparing the saints and equipping the saints, we need to teach basic apologetics. Now, here’s the thing about apologetics. You don’t have to understand everything that Norman Geisler wrote. Everything that Ravi Zacharias wrote, everything that William Lane Craig wrote, and all of Til’s presuppositional apologetics works, like your head will spin if you try to do that. If you, here’s what Zach and I had, have had long conversations about this. It’s very interesting.

And he might touch on this at some point in the semester, but you don’t have to know a lot apologetically to defend the faith. Basic apologetics will stand back every argument that the world throws at you, because the strength and power and a little bit of truth will overwhelm falsehood when confronted face-to-face. I’ve had so many conversations where I go into, this happened. I remember sitting at the bar at the ski place where we do our Winter SWO retreats. So when you guys learn the process, we go over there, we ski, and there’s a bar there. I remember going up, there’s nowhere to sit, and I’d come in from working in the ski retreat, and I went up there and get me a cheeseburger or something. I don’t remember. I just remember sitting down, oh, I know what it was; football game was on.

It was playoffs, we’re on. And I go up and I sit down at the bar and I’m just sitting there watching the ballgame. These two guys are sitting beside me. They’ve come off ski slopes. We get into a conversation and these guys are really intelligent and really articulate, and they start to try to undermine the Christian faith and Gospel. And I remember walking away from that conversation blown away at how little they knew of how to present their own argument. These guys both had master’s degrees and from reputable institutions, you don’t have to know a lot to defend the faith. So we need to teach that. Apologetics comes from the Greek word apologia, which means to apologize, which doesn’t mean to apologize in the sense of saying, I’m sorry. It means to give a reasonable defense. Think of 1 Peter 3:15. “Always be ready to give an account or an answer for the hope that is in you.”

In other words, not just arguing loudly, but arguing internally, intentionally, and then wrestling within my own mind and heart over difficult things, and then being able to present and defend those things. There’s never been a time or season in student ministry where this was more critical, the idea of being able to reasonably defend our beliefs have to focus on being able to do two things. Number one, I need to be able to defend these things in my own mind. I have to believe what I’m teaching apologetically when it comes to the resurrection, when it comes to the authority and accuracy and critical structure of the Scripture. When you take the Word of God and you put it under textual criticism and you see that it stands up like nothing else in all of literary history. Like I need to believe these things in my own mind and be able to defend them in my own mind, because let’s be honest, the more dangerous attack on your faith will be the doubt that comes from within, not the assault that comes from the university classroom.

When you begin to doubt, when you begin to struggle, when you begin to… This Os Guinness wrote a book called Shadow of a Doubt, where he talks about like this… The whole book is about this idea that doubt is going to be ever present in a believer’s mind. And so I gotta defend these things in my own mind. The apologetic is first and foremost for personal defense. This means I’m wrestling through hard issues and difficult questions so that I can have confidence in what I believe. If I don’t do this, if I don’t teach my students to do this, then the first real pressure that is applied from the outside will have a far more effective result on my belief system. If I’m not resolved, convicted, convinced, then I might be easily swayed to let the world redefine what Scripture has already defined and what nature and science supports. Number two, I need to defend them in the public square or the classroom.

Students are being bombarded from every side with social justice issues that are more often than not, contrary to or opposed to Scripture. Antifa, Black Lives Matter, the sexual revolution are just the latest assault on the biblical Christian teachings concerning the deity of Jesus and the sanctity of life. These are led by so-called social justice warriors. These movements seek to undermine the very discipleship we are teaching and investing in our students when it comes to the centrality of the Gospel. These people use intimidation and volume through rage to try and control the conversation and the narrative. Nowadays, people think that the louder you yell about a political or social position, the more effective you are. We are raising and discipling a generation of teenagers in what has been called the outrage culture. I would say that the thing that students in this generation are gonna face more than an apologetic assault philosophically on the Judeo-Christian faith.

In other words, what we’re seeing is not an attack on the philosophical side of Christianity. What we’re seeing is an attack on the social, cultural, functional side of Christianity. These social justice warriors in the Black Lives Matter movement and Antifa, they’re not attacking, they’re not saying, “Well, how do you feel about the ontological view of the universe?” Like they’re not doing that. They’re undermining what the Bible teaches about sex, gender, race, equality, the church, the world. Those are the things that they’re attacking. And those things tend to be more visceral than cerebral. In other words, they tend to motivate us emotionally more than academically. A basic apologetic defending the faith philosophically tends to be academic first and foremost.

It’s in the classroom, it’s in that arena. But what we’re talking about, the assault that we’re seeing in the outrage culture, the woke culture is an attack that hits us in the most emotional and visceral way. It triggers things in us where we feel like we need to answer or we need to defend or we need to speak out and if we’re not careful, we get swept away. And next thing we’re carrying a sign and we’re marching with a bunch of radical, left leaning, crazy liberals who reject the Deity of Jesus and we’ve joined right into their course. Yeah, we have a course. It’s to advance the Gospel of Jesus Christ in a dark world. Doesn’t mean there aren’t times where we shouldn’t use the platforms we’ve been given to speak verbally against injustice. Sure, we ought to do that. Absolutely. But that doesn’t become our Gospel.

Dan Crenshaw addresses this in the introduction to his book, Fortitude. He says, “It’s important to stay outraged.” Implored the title of a 2019 op-ed in the hope that their readers would not fall back into the complacency of their cheerful daily routines. “Get outraged and stay outraged,” exclaimed another headline, equally desperate for sustained irritation. “Never lose your sense of outrage,” tweeted Senator Bernie Sanders, knowing the most effective political manipulation is achieved by raw emotion. One recent op-ed acknowledged the psychological tax of outrage, giving more in-depth advice how to hashtag stay outraged without losing your mind, “self care lessons for the resistance.”

Outrage is in vogue, they proclaim. And more than that, it’s a necessity but this story of unrelenting ire goes beyond the abstract sloganeering of politicians and media. Stay outraged is sprawled on countless t-shirts and stickers and buttons for sale across the Internet, as these young activists have clearly discovered. It’s a particular, it’s a peculiar thought, this notion that if only you were sufficiently informed, aware and woke that you would have a duty to exhibit an intense state of fury. The apocalyptic nature of our unjust reality must surely enrage you. It must. Not only that, but once you’ve achieved an enlightened state of madness, then you must stay that way, perhaps forever. Being a normal person with normal concerns, you may read those headlines with healthy skepticism, if not outright confusion.

Don’t we live in the most preposterous nation on earth with a quality of life and freedoms that are the envy of the world but respond the outrage? This is proof that you just aren’t paying attention. If you only knew the true depths of disaster, despair and justice in our midst, you’d rush to join the mob in righteous cultural warfare, scream slogans and solidarity, march arm in arm to cancel those who disobey, destroy the careers of those who misspeak and pile on those who dare to defend anything other than outrage orthodoxy. A peculiar thought indeed but let me suggest an alternative. Outrage is weakness. It is the muting of rational thinking and the triumph of emotion. Despite what you’ve been hearing and seeing as of late, it is not a virtue. It is not something to be celebrated or praised or aspired to. It is deeply human emotion, even understandable at times, but rarely is it productive, virtuous or useful. It is emotion to overcome, not accept, and overcoming it requires mental strength. Why I read that? Why would I read that? Because, what’s happening to the students that we’re leading is they’re being swept into this outrage culture. But a lot of them don’t even know what they’re standing for. They don’t even know what they’re outraged about. They don’t even know what they’re railing against. And so we have to do is bring an apologetic understanding of the Gospel, so that students understand the Gospel is salt and light.

We are the carriers and the messengers of the one message and hope that the world needs and we don’t have to scream it in outrage. We live it accurately and we speak it articulately. The culture we’re doing youth ministry in nowadays is one in which confusion is normal when it comes to contending for the faith apologetically. It is our task to take it. As ours to take the task, to equip a generation to defend the faith in the public square in the classroom. These teenagers face the outrage culture every day, and we need to make them strong so that they can stand on their own two feet emotionally, spiritually and socially. At the end of Jude verse three, tie that into verse four and give some practical application. So we’ve seen that we’ve addressed the sort of the basic need for apologetics and the fact that in this culture, this generation, apologetics looks a little different. We’re dealing with much on the social front or the cultural front. We’re dealing with a lot that we need to prepare students for. And it’s our task as shepherds to do that. And so I wanna move from that into the next thing that we need to do as we break this down.

And if you go back there when we started through verse three. We were looking at two goals of our ministry, which was to be contending for the faith in the way we teach and exhort and work both in and out of Christian circles. But then the second one was to equip the saints for the work and the mission. And we’re working through these talking points of what it looks like to be responsible for the equipping of the saints. The next thing that we need to think about is that we need to take it personal before we teach it. We need to take it personal before we teach it.

Your Calling is to Pursue Holiness

There’s a danger that all preachers, teachers, pastors, that I’ve found in my life where there’s this tendency to think I’m teaching this, but somehow I sort of separate myself from the personal application of it. And maybe not in like inadvertently, arrogant way like, I don’t have to learn this. I already know this, but it’s more like, as I prepare to teach I have a feeling of I need to make sure that I’m saying this authoritatively and that I’m doing this responsibly. But what I need to do is first be shaped by and changed by the truth that I’m teaching. So whether that’s biblical exposition, I need to be shaped by the study of God’s word in preparing the message. If it’s apologetics, I need my faith to be strengthened through the process of studying and preparing the apologetics.

I don’t think a single opportunity to speak around here, gets by without thinking of the Robert Murray M’Cheyne quote that I’ve used a thousand times through the years.

“The greatest need my people have for me is my personal holiness.”

Robert Murray M’Cheyne

We have to guard and watch our own lives, this has been addressed at other Iron on Iron conferences and messages that we need to, but they’re messages that we need to be reminded of continually. There’s a book in the library here at camp. It’s printed. It’s a 2017 copyrighted book. It’s by Paul David Tripp. The book is called Dangerous Calling. Anybody read that? Nobody here? Okay. Alright. So I would encourage you guys to grab a copy of that. We have copies of that. We gave that out in 2017 or ’18. It was the give out book at SWO that we gave to student pastors. So we gave several hundred of these books to student pastors.

It’s called Dangerous Calling and it’s this idea that I have to maintain personal engagement in my relationship with the Lord as a highest priority. So personal pursuit of holiness, prayer life, worship life, study life, being shaped, walking and living in conviction under sin, or of sin under the power of the Word of God. How critical that is and how so many guys in ministry, so many guys and girls will tend to begin to work in ministry as more like, I just know how to go through the motions, but it’s not personal to me. And so the Dangerous Calling book looks at the pressures of ministry, the stress of ministry, the dangers that lurk to drag us away from faithfulness to the Lord.

But anyway, what I wanted to point out was on the back cover of the 2017 edition, the first edition, there are five endorsements given. Five endorsements given by ministry leaders. Since 2017, three of those endorsements are from men who are no longer walking with Jesus. So Paul David Tripp, who I think is an incredible dude to read and listen to, and love his preaching, love his reading. Love his mustache, best mustache in evangelical Christianity, big Sam Elliot Mustache. He writes a book about staying faithful in the calling God’s given us and recognizing the pitfalls that trip people up. And the five men that are chosen to endorse this, the majority of them in a two and a half year window, walk away from the faith.

Is that coincidence? No, that doesn’t happen. That doesn’t accidentally happen. It doesn’t accidentally happen. It happens when we as ministry leaders fail to recognize that first and foremost, our highest calling is to be conformed to the image of Jesus. Your calling is not first and foremost to be an effective river guide or skit person, or to come up with a good program that involves a really good crowd breaker game at the beginning. Like am I creative enough? So it’s not first and foremost creativity. It’s not first and foremost, is there enough humor in my sermon or my lesson or whatever. It’s not first and foremost am I deeply academic enough that I can sound smart at the big person table?

Pursue holiness. Love Jesus, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and love other people.

And what’s interesting is that those five names, the three that have walked away, two of them have experienced what’s called a deconstruction of faith. One experienced more a fall from grace. Two of them experienced a fall from grace. One, a straight deconstruction of faith where he divorced his wife, walked away from the church. Josh Harris, he was kind of an evangelical darling in the late 1990s, early two 2000s. And now as he’s entered the middle years of life, he’s walked away from the faith, deconstruction. So this is what happened with Rhett and Link, who we’ve used a bunch of their skits and videos through the years. They started, as MCs for Campus Crusade at NC State. Were very effective and those guys walked away from the faith. They said, we don’t believe. And what’s interesting is this deconstruction that we see happen with ministry leaders tends to be, they walk away, but they don’t know where to walk to. Zach talked about this in a video recently, that we put out on a blog.

That it’s not just that they’re walking away from the faith, they’re walking aimlessly into nothingness. Well, we don’t know what we believe, but we know we don’t believe this anymore. Where did that start? Did that start with they didn’t have a good apologetic? Once you know, once you can… Here’s the thing about apologetics, once you learn the basic defense of the faith, you got it. It’s like learning to ride a bike or learning another language. You might need to stay tuned up with it, but you’ve got it. Holiness constantly changes you. You’re not holy today in one sense, in 10 years from now, you’re not pursuing holiness anymore. It’s not it, it will change you continually. And so let’s go back to the language illustration. You learn to ride a bike, you never forget how to ride a bike, right? People say it’s like riding a bike, once you know, you know.

My mom used to be fluent in Spanish. She was a Spanish teacher, that was her major in college. She lived in a couple of country, she would spend time in other countries. I remember when I was a kid growing up, she’s very fluent. She would communicate with the Hispanic community in our town. She had an incredible and vibrant ministry there. And then eventually she got into a line of work where she didn’t need to speak Spanish anymore, and now she struggles just to function in conversation. Why? Because it’s perishable. You forget it. And so holiness is less like riding a bike and more like a learning a language. It’s something that has to be constantly pursued and sharpened and like, you’re never gonna master it. And so it’s a constant pursuit. And so we have to remember that our personal approach to teaching and ministering is critical. Peter writes that we are always to be ready to give an answer for the hope that is in us. The idea is that we are able to give an apologetic or a reasonable defense, but that it is driven by the holiness of Jesus inside of us.

Next, we’re to stand ready and recognize that there are no days off in ministry. You don’t get to take days off in ministry. Ministry is exhausting and we will need to take physical days off, spiritual retreats and reading vacations. I love to go somewhere for a couple days and Greg and I were talking yesterday, he’s like, man, I had, I wanted to read a whole book today and accomplished it. A really cool book by Kent Hughes. There’s days where I’m like, I’m gonna go somewhere where my, I’ve got several spots where I can go and my phone doesn’t work. And I go sit down, take my little chair, sit down, and today I’m gonna work through four hours of straight reading. It’s like a reading break, right? Well, some days I go to a break. You take a vacation, you take a day off where you just play. It’s just recreation. You go to the Blue Hole, you go to the cliffs in Graham or Fontana, you just go play, you have a good time.

So we take vocational days off, okay? So we take, you’re gonna have days off where you’re not doing ministry, but we take no days off when it comes to our pursuit of holiness in our relationship with Jesus. We get no time off when it comes to then contending for the faith. Even in a season where I’m not with students or in the public square, I have to be defending my own heart and my own mind, including our thoughts. On verse three, listen to what David Helm says in his commentary. The word from Jude to the church is; “On your feet the time for leisure is past contend, agonize, exert maximum effort. The Christian faith and all of its fullness and completeness is worthy of your struggle.” It’s a good word. It’s a challenging word. And so with that, we move into verse four and contrast that with what he calls certain people in verse four. “For certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation.”

So first off, it’s funny that he says certain people, it’s like saying, old so and so old Quay, oh, what’s his face? What’s his name? There’s some disdain in his, I think, I wonder if he knows who they are by name, I don’t know. Certain people, it’s a phrase that reveals the disdain that Jude has. He calls them certain people. As the chapter progresses, he’ll just take to calling them people. These people, these people. And so he tells us two things about these people, about who they are. Number one, long ago they were designated for this condemnation. And number two, they’re ungodly people. Those two things are gonna get unpacked in the next session because he starts to break down what this looks like. But specifically as we get into the following verses and understand that, I wanna lay down some things that these people were doing that was perverting the grace of God, and the sensuality and denying of our only master and Lord Jesus Christ, which is what he says they were doing.

In other words, they were gutting the faith. Listen, they were gutting the faith of its moral imperatives. Now that’s big terminology. That’s big language. What do we mean by that? They were gutting the faith of its moral imperatives. They were moving from a call and a command to holiness, a call to the purity of the church. They’re moving from that to a social Gospel. A feel good Christianity. Be nice to your neighbors, love people. How can I not love everyone? Just love those that are unlovable. How can I not approve of someone’s lifestyle? It was this sort of socializing, softening of the hard teaching of the Gospel.

It’s like asking this question in the circles of Christian faith and family, so within the Church saying things like, “Do you wanna sleep with that person? Go for it. You guys love each other. You love each other. You’re not married, but it’s not practical to get married right now. You got school and she’s got grad school and you gotta finish this thing. And you got this internship and y’all, you’ll be married soon enough, but you love each other and you committed each other so go for it. Sleep with each other.” Do you wanna redefine what marriage is? Have at it. Create your own version and enjoy that sexuality, gender, doesn’t matter what the Bible says. In fact, we can take the Word of God and we can twist it and reshape it and make it mean what we want it to mean really. You can find something in the Scripture that will support anything from genocide to the Holocaust, to the murder of unborn children, to a change in gender, to a sexual revolution. And we can attach the Bible to it and distort it and pervert it and make it mean what we want it to mean. That’s why it’s critical that we understand the whole council of Scripture.

We’re contending for the purity of Scripture. This is critical to understand. The attacks that Jude is describing in verse four come from within the church, not from the world. We’re not guarding against a political party, we’re not guarding against a social revolution. We’re guarding against an internal undermining and deconstructing of the purity of the Gospel, and the centrality of the preaching of Jesus and him crucified in the church. We’re undermining the value and the definition and the depth of grace. We’re undermining grace.

One of the things that we run into here, often, a lot of you guys have had to deal with this. I know that Sarah Trego had an incredibly difficult conversation with a student this past summer. And many student pastors have found that one of the hardest things to deal with in ministry is counseling and ministering through the repercussions of sexual abuse. So you’ve got a kid that’s been abused, and you’re working through that, it’s very difficult. And here’s typically, what makes it so complicated. There’s times where it’s one extreme, and there’s times where it’s very intricately complicated. What makes it complicated is that the abusers tend to be close friends and family members.

Was a girl that worked here years ago and she was raped at a public beach when she was going to a public bathroom. She was dragged into a hotel room or an apartment I don’t remember, and was held down and raped, okay? Well, it was very frustrating ’cause there was, it was no way to, it was like spring break college week or something at one of these really busy beaches. There’s no way to really track it down. Another story that we know of a similar situation on vacation at a beach, on a cruise type thing, and someone gets assaulted in another country. Well, you feel the weight of that and it’s overwhelming, but it’s more like you’re just mad, but there’s nothing you can do about it. So you’re kinda well, how do we minister to this person? What’s so damaging and distorted and perverted is when the assault comes from an uncle, a father, a brother, someone that I should have trusted, it comes from within. And typically there’s a grooming process and then a level of comfortability that leads to the assault.

What Jude’s talking about here, is not a big collared preacher flying around in a private jet with a goofy fake toothed smile. Signing books, his latest million dollar seller where he is making millions and leading weak-minded little old ladies astray. We do need to pay attention to those guys, speak against them, guard against it. But this is to be taken as a warning against the brother or sister who is sitting next to me on Sunday morning saying the same things I’m saying. But softening to the worldly ideologies that are being influenced from the outside. This is the coworker who says they’re a Christ follower, and seems to have a form of Godliness. This is the very language Jude uses to describe someone creeping in. It’s subtle, it’s initially covert and by the time you realize what has happened, the damage is done. It’s like a Trojan horse in the church that has unleashed its armies of Heresy and those who are undermining the true Gospel.

Churches have been divided and entire denominations have disintegrated. An example would be that of the Presbyterian church who fragmented in the 1960s and ’70s into two major denominations. The PCA, Presbyterian Church of America, and the PCUSA, Presbyterian Church United States of America. It’s confusing, isn’t it? Same thing happened in North Carolina, in the Southern Baptist circles where you have the General Baptist Conference, I think it’s called, and the State Southern Baptist where liberalism crept in and then there was a division. In Virginia, you have the Old Baptist Conference and the Conservative Baptist of Virginia. You’ll see denomination split, where what happens is worldly ideology creeps in and begins to pervert the Gospel. But in the Presbyterian Church for hundreds of years, that denomination was a bulwark of Christian doctrine and faithfulness going back to the time of the reformation.

But in the 1960s and ’70s, under social and cultural revolution, the church was undermined. There rose up from within the church, those who began to undermine true biblical doctrine and teaching and Ecclesiastical integrity. As a result, there was a major split that came outta the Presbyterian Church, called the Presbyterian Church United States of America. Within this denomination, there is first and foremost a rejection of biblical requirements of pastors and overseers. In other words, what this denomination has done has created a new office of pastor and overseer, that has no requirements and no standards. Reject the biblicalty.

Why is that so critical? Because if we do that, if we replace the biblical requirements for pastors and leaders and overseers, then it doesn’t matter what everybody else is doing. We’re under demonic and unfaithful and unbiblical leadership, right? So the attack came from within. And what happened was you had the Cultural Revolution of the ’60s, the Rise of Feminism, the Rise of Sexual Revolution of the ’60s that crept into the church where now it’s not that a pastor is standing in his robe at the pulpit and speaking false doctrine. It’s that in the after church lunch meetings and the small groups in our homes, we had college professors, high school teachers, social justice warriors of that era who now begin to influence their peers, who are weak-minded in their understanding of the Gospel and biblical truth and rigidity.

And so from within, there was a movement that destabilized the church and eventually split it completely in half. And now there’s a whole denomination that is on the loose for the last 40 years teaching a false doctrine that makes a mockery of grace. Where did all that start? Inside the church with the guy to your right, the guy to your left, the parent who was teaching contrary to what you’re teaching in the home, the pastor who wouldn’t take a stand on the authority of Scripture. We must realize that the attack on Christian doctrine that Jude is referencing. And the attack on the Gospel, that is most dangerous is the attack that comes from inside of our four walls, not from out there. That’s not the big enemy. But what happens is, this enemy destabilizes and makes us susceptible to that enemy. Academia and within the church, are where the lines must be drawn.

And that is what Jude is preparing us for when we study Rome. England in the Middle Ages and at the time of the Protestant Reformation, the Soviet Union in Germany, the Nazi Germany in the last century. We must be warned that ideology and biblical doctrine are critical not just to surviving as a society, but maintaining maximum opportunity for the church of Jesus Christ within a culture, because the church of Jesus Christ provides salt and light to places where darkness has crept in. And typically that darkness creeps in through the walls of academia and through, interestingly enough, on the other side of that same token, the entertainment industry. And all you got to do is watch the news right now. You’ve got professors and so called scholars and academics linking up with people like Cardi B and NBA athletes telling us what we’re supposed to believe about social issues. A girl who was a stripper and who writes pure filth for profit, and now she’s telling us [chuckle] things like what referendums we should have on our ballots.

There’s something wrong, something broken? Yeah, but what’s so dangerous is she is given credibility by academics and scholars and by left wing liberal religious organizations and establishments that fly under the flagship of Christianity and the Bible. It’s all convoluted and perverted. That’s what Jude is telling us we have to contend to maintain purity from.

Teach a High View of Grace

So in conclusion, the conclusion and answer to all of this. Lastly, if we’re going to contend for and equip those we lead to contend for, we have to teach a high view of grace, a high view of grace. We gotta value grace, man. The grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men, teaching them to say no to ungodliness. But the specific grace of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, whereby God has provided a way out from under the chains and bonds of sin. The dominion of this world that we’re set free from presuming on the grace of God will lead to perversion, distortion, and destruction.

The Scripture repeatedly warns us against this. To guard against what Jude is warning us to guard against, we must build ministries on the centrality of the Gospel with the high view of the grace of God. As we saw in the introduction, this will bring both humility and boldness in us and in our peers and in our students. We have to take this seriously because the world sure does.

Grace is what distinguishes the Christian worldview and the Gospel from anything else the world has ever known. But grace is what is most often perverted when it comes to false teaching, perversion of the truth, a distortion of the biblical Gospel. It’s typically an attack on grace. And what it looks like is one of two extremes, either we remove grace and create a works heavy system which tends to lead to religion and fundamentalism, or we pervert it and create a sensual approach to the Christian faith which is, eh God wants everybody to be happy. God just wants us all to love each other. He just wants us all to get along. And we pervert grace and we make excuses for a lifestyle that doesn’t honor the Lord, is sinful and ultimately has to be fought against. That’s what we’re contending for with the students that we lead and minister to.