Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / February 26, 2017 | Route 66 - Jude

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February 26, 2017 | Route 66 - Jude · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Good morning, Topeka Bible Church.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: How are you?
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna ask uh Bill Gobel to come up.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: Would you come on up, Bill?
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_01: I want to talk to Bill about something.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_01: So what is that?
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my goodness.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: This is Ellie, my uh pink elephant.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: Pink elephant.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Oh it's so cute.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: But uh ignore her.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Oh okay.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Don't look at her.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: Don't look at her.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: She's not really there.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: Which reminds me, by the way, of something else.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, another subject, a hot subject that uh that's really awkward and embarrassing to talk about.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know that we shouldn't probably talk about the subject in church.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's way too provocative and controversial, you know.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think we need to because uh I mean it's a huge problem in our culture, society.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there's no country or culture or even church that is not affected by pornography.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: It's like the pink elephant in a room.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: We don't want to talk about it, and yet there are we have three choices.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Basically, you know, we can't ignore it and hope it will uh go away or uh at least die down.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Or we can acknowledge but acknowledge it but offer no practical help or tools, or we can meet it head-on and address the issue and um get in the battle with some people.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: Some people call it the greatest um even secular people call it call it the greatest addiction or the greatest problem facing us today, am I right?
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Chuck Swindah has recently said that uh pornography is the greatest cancer in the church today.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: Well you can see how it affects marriages, affects individuals, affects businesses, affects church.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: So um so anyway, so that's why you know the church is gonna do something.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's a little scary, it's a little awkward, but we're gonna bring this series and we're gonna try to address it and help people with it.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: This conquer series uh can be life-changing, and it's uh well done.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um top uh biblical leaders uh give um uh talk about the scope of the problem, they lay out biblical tools, uh, they talk about the neurochemistry and uh and the uh battle of the brain, um talk about strongholds of the enemy uh and it's gonna be shown uh thankfully here at TBC beginning a week from today, uh uh 6 p.m.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: on uh the 5th of March.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: Right here?
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's correct.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: In this room building.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, in the Milvain building.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: So we can go to date night on Saturday night, and then the men and young men can come here.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: Dance the night away and then.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, got it.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that works.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: On Sunday evening.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, no.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm telling my friends, I'm telling the guys I know to come because because the issue is broader than just me.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: The issue is, you know, is well I was reading a stat about about young people today.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: Guys used to hit pornography at about age 11 or 12, about the age that I that I saw it, but it's dropped.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's dropping now, isn't it?
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: Right, right.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Studies have shown that the exposure, first-time exposure, is uh now uh nine, eight.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Uh and uh so it's not if children will be exposed, uh it's when.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so we yeah, we need to have something where we can help other people and we can help our children, we can help our grandchildren.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_01: So that's that that's why I'm I think all guys, and this is just for guys, right?
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: 16, 17, 18 older.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's correct.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: Uh 16 to 18 uh with your parents.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um and uh yes, again, I would like to emphasize that that uh you may not be struggling, um, and maybe never have, and I uh thank God for that.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: But uh I promise you that someone that you know, someone that you work with, umone that you love um probably is struggling uh at some extent with that.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so this series will give you some practical tools.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: It'll gain give you the knowledge, the awareness that we need to get in the battle and to help other people, because as believers, I think that's part of our job too, is to help others.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: Bill, thanks for taking the initiative on this.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: We really appreciate that.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: So that really ties in.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's an absolutely perfect stop along Route 66 for what we've just talked about.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: The book is called Jude.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's Hey Jew, or it's not really Hey Jude, it's like Jude yelling out, hey! And and so I want you to turn, it's the next to last book in the Bible.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: So turn open to Revelation and then just go left.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's just 25 verses, pretty short.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: One of the most mysterious, enigmatic, exciting, crazy books in the New Testament.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: And um it's um it it let me explain when when I realized this morning we're gonna be talking about the Conquer series, pornography, and so forth.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: I thought, you know, I need to flip this sermon around.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_01: I need to start with the end, because there are two verses at the end of Jude that are really famous that your priest or your preacher, when you were young, probably quoted these a lot.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_01: And they're very famous, uh, and so uh and they really have to do with what we're talking about.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: So uh it starts with now unto him, and in fact, say these with me if you know them, now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy to the only wise God, our Savior, be glory and majesty, dominion and power both now and ever.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: Amen.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_01: Isn't that great?
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the reason this is an amazing promise, the kind of a promise only God can give, is it has two parts to it.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_01: One sort of negative, one sort of positive.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: The negative side is he can keep us, he's able to keep you from falling.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: I love the picture of, you know, the uh of the eight or twenty-month-old little boy who's already doing climbing walls, but I can guarantee his daddy's always behind him so that his boy won't fall and get hurt.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: And and this is an amazing promise that's hard to believe.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: You go, you're kidding me.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, all of us fall.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: So really, God, you can keep me from falling.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: Not only that, he says, I got the positive side, not only an absence of negative, but the positive is can present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: Are you kidding me?
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh really?
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: Blameless or faultless with joy?
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: I'd love that.
• 7:05
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I know that it'll be joyful.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: You go to heaven, Psalm 16, and his presence fullness of joy, but to be faultless, that would mean even more joy to be presented that way.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: How is that even possible?
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's even worse than this.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: This promise is even bigger than this because if you look in your more modern translations, you find that the word falling actually, biblically, actually, in Greek it's the word stumbling, which comes before falling, right?
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: Stumbling is when you just stumble.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: And you oftentimes catch yourself, you know, and so God's able to keep you even from stumbling.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: And then he says, but and then he says, blameless before the presence of his glory of the greatest, how in the world can he ever present you blameless?
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the answer is, of course, he can present you blameless only because if you've trusted Christ as your Savior, you stand there dressed in his righteousness.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: God looks at you through the lens of Jesus when he shall come with trumpet sound.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, may I then in him be found dressed in his righteousness alone, faultless, blameless to stand before the throne.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: So praise God, that's what's going to happen on this amazing promise.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: But in the meantime, we need help to keep from falling, falling to pornography, falling to all kinds of difficulties, right?
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm reminded of the story here that illustrates this verse of the little girl who's holding hands with her daddy.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: You know how they grabbed the fingers, she grabbed your daddy's fingers, they were hiking over the rocks, and she kept stumbling.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: And then occasionally she'd fall and let loose of his finger.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: And after this happened a couple of times, uh she said, Daddy, um, how about you hold on to my hand instead of me holding on to your hand?
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: And it made all the difference in the world.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_01: As soon as he grabbed her hand, she didn't fall anymore.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what that verse says.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: It's unto him who is able to keep you from falling.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: And so maybe this week, one of your prayers and my prayers ought to be, whether it's pornography or anything else, make it your prayer, my prayer.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: Precious Lord, take my hand.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: Lead me on, let me stand.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: I am tired, I am weak, I am worn.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: Through the storm, through the night, lead me on to the light.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: Take my hand, precious Lord.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: Finish it with me.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: Lead me home.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: So make that your prayer, my prayer, even this week before we see this series.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: Now, that's the end of Jude.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: Now we find that the rest of Jude before that uh is a call to military action, basically, as I've titled it, it's fighting time.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's fighting time.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: And um, Jude is a very interesting book.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um there's a half a dozen times in this book where he says stuff you don't find anywhere else in the Bible.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's really wild, crazy, alien kind of stuff.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: You can spend a lot of time talking about these parts of it.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: But but it's oftentimes uh that this book ranks in the top two, three books maybe in the New Testament where it just applies so clearly to today.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: Today, someone has said that the Acts of the Apostles, the fifth book of the New Testament, the Acts of the Apostles was for the beginning of the church.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: Jude, the act is the Acts of the Apostates, and it's for the church at the end of history.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: And and one of one of the things you realize you read this book is that is that if you thought as you read the rest of the New Testament, that the problems and the issues of life were all back, you know, in New Testament times, you read Jude and you go, no, no, no, no, they're right here at home.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's sort of like the story that Blackie Sherid, the sports writer, um uh once told, made up, I'm sure, of, of the scout, the uh football scout for the NFL's Detroit Lions, who who called back to the team in the offseason said, Yeah, I'm traveling in the Mideast, I'm here in Syria, found the guy with an amazing arm.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: He's been practicing for years, throwing rocks at the government soldiers, and so forth.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so, and we needed to give him a tryout.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: So they flew him back, you know, to Detroit.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, and sure enough, I mean, the guy was brilliant, he picked up, you know, the picked up the wherewithals of the of the pro game so well that he led Detroit, Detroit Lions, total miracle here.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_01: This is how you know the story's not true, because he led them to an undefeated season and a victory in the Super Bowl.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: And after the victory in the Super Bowl, he got he finally was able to raise his mother on the phone and he calls and said, Mama, mama just won the Super Bowl, happiest day of my life.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: And she lashed out him, she lashed out him.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_01: She's telling me how happy you are when your poor papa, who gave you everything you have, was shot like a dog in the streets.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: Tell me how happy you you are when when your sister was assaulted by young thugs.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_01: And even now, listen carefully, you're telling me you're happy when your little brother has been beaten up by a gang right outside the door.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: Can you hear him?
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, Mama, mama, what can I do?
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: And she said, What can you do?
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: She says, You already did enough when you talked us all into moving from Syria to Detroit.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: So terrible story.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: Point of that story, you know, is that all the evil in the world and the issues are not overseas or in the Mideast.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: They're right here at home here in River City.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what Jude's gonna tell you that there are real issues right here and right now, and you need to get involved.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: The first two verses are just an introduction, rather simple.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: Jude, a slave of Jesus Christ.
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_01: Now that's an interesting phrase, because Jude's actually a brother of Jesus Christ.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: He's one of those younger brothers who didn't believe in Jesus when Jesus was alive after the resurrection.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: He realized who Jesus was, and so now he calls himself a slave of Jesus Christ and a brother of James.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_01: To those who are the called, loved by God the Father, and kept.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: There's that word again, like at the end of Jude, kept by Jesus Christ.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_01: May peace, mercy, and love be multiplied to you.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_01: Now, however, he gets into the fighting words.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: Verse 3, when he says, Dear friends, although I was eager to write you about the salvation we share, I found it necessary to write and exhort you to contend, contend, fight for the faith that was delivered to the saints once for all.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, it's fighting time.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's time to contend.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's time Paul's been saying this, uh, Jude writes just after Paul, probably, and Paul's been saying things like fight the good fight of faith for years.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: When my student ministry pastor, Derek Rowe, found out we're doing Jude, and it's fighting time and so forth, he had to immediately let me know that the college he'd graduated from a few years ago, Wabash College, has this at its as its theme: Wabash always fights.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's everywhere he's at, football stadium, inside the field house, t-shirts, we're always.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, he gave me an article that'd come back, you know, the Wabash team had been down by a lot, and they came back and won the headline, Wabash really does always fight.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so I just want you to know I'm I'm with you this Sunday.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I giving the shout-out to Derek, Wabash always fights.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: Well, this book saying we all need to always fight.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: Now, it is interesting before I move on to why we should fight, how we should fight, to note that he says, interestingly, contend or fight for the faith that was delivered to the saints once for all.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: Why does he make such an emphasis on the fact that the faith was delivered to the saints back then for all time?
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think the answer, well, I think you can express it with a with a story.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: Let me express with a story of the church was building, they were building a new church.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_01: And the pastor wanted to get involved.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: He had no construction experience, but he kept going to the contractors, wandering around every single day.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: He said, I'd like to get involved, like to help.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: Well, contractor realized, you know, this guy's paying me my money.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: What can you do?
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: He said, Well, I can I can saw, I can hammer nails and so forth.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: Finally, contract gives me, he said, okay, we got, he said, I need a hundred um eight-foot tube fours.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: And we just got, we got donated all those tube fours over there, 12 feet.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_01: You need to cut, cut me a hundred of those down to eight feet.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: Pastor was so, so excited.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_01: So I got his tape measure and he carefully measured eight feet, exactly, eight feet.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: And he drew a line right there and checked his, checked it again.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly right, eight feet.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: And he went over and he took that thing in, he ran it exactly eight feet, and stuck that thing down.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, you didn't want to measure with a tape measure every time.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: So went to the next 12-foot board and he laid the eight-foot board down on it, drew a line.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: Took that board, he brought it over and he and he cut it.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: Then took that board, not the first board, took that board, second board, and he took it over and he laid it down on a third board, drew a line, and he cut it, and took the third board and took it back and so forth.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: And it went all the way down the line out.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: You know what I'm gonna say?
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: When you draw a line at the end, you're adding a sixteenth or maybe an eighth of an inch each time, so that by the time he got to the hundredth board, he had some nine-foot boards there close to the end.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_01: Listen very carefully.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: Here's the application.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: In the hundred or so generations, since the faith was originally delivered to the saints 2,000 years ago, in those hundred or so generations, what we notice is that Christianity and Christian people often make their comparisons with the immediately prior generation rather than with the faith originally delivered to the saints.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: Do you understand what I mean?
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: And when you compare my culture with the culture of 10 years ago or 20 years ago, you can think I'm doing pretty well, or my theology with the theology of the last 20 years, you can be doing pretty well.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_01: But when you go back to the faith once delivered to the saints originally, you realize that over the years you have strayed quite a way.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that's why he says we need to contend or fight for the faith once or originally delivered to the saints.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: Now he's gonna answer two questions.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: Why then is it fighting time and how?
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: And it's fighting time, he's gonna say in verses four through 16, because the fight is being brought to us.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's it's it's it people are being influenced right now.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_01: And he says, God's really serious about this.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so I want to tell you, he says, I want to tell you how serious God is about these people that are coming in with falsehood.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: He says, for some men who were designated for judgment long ago have come in by stealth.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: They didn't advertise ahead of time, we're gonna change things here in the church, we're gonna change morality, we're gonna change stealth.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: They come in by stealth.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: They are ungodly in two ways.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: Number one, they turn the grace of our God into promiscuity, and they deny Jesus Christ, our only master and Lord.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: First thing that they do when they come along is they are, we can call them anti-morality.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: They they buck, they have bad morality because they buck the morality of the faith once delivered to the saints.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: Promiscuity is a broad word, it could include all kinds of things, sexual, and so back then primarily it would be uh adultery that sleeping around is just fine.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_01: And as you know, down through the years, it's embraced homosexuality, and in more recent days, I mean, it's going really fast, isn't it?
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: Somehow now there's a redefin, total redefinition of marriage, there's there's even flexible gender.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_01: Somehow the gender, the sexual gender God gave you at birth is flexible.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_01: And I just read an article that there are from San Francisco Paper, whatever, that there are every single person in a way has a different gender and can move between genders.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: So there's there's a sort of a there's a move in towards morality that says the original morality or biblical morality is wrong.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: And the second thing is there's bad theology.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_01: There's an attack on the theology of the New Testament.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: Now, is this relevant today?
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: Question is, does this apply to us?
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: Does this speak to us today?
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_01: Is there something we need?
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_01: Well, if you just go up to let's about 1900, 100 years ago, as we were entering the 20th century, one of my favorite writers, the thinker and humorist G.K.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: Chesterton in England predicted the next great heresy is going to be simply an attack on morality and especially on sexual morality.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: I think 20th century and early 21st show that this prediction came true.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: And at the same time, William Booth, the revolutionary founder of Salvation Army, predicted this.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: I consider.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: I consider the chief dangers which confront the coming century will be religion without the Holy Ghost, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God, and heaven without hell.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_01: Does that sound relevant today?
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: Of course it does.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: You can go to many churches today that would completely fulfill everything that William Booth predicts there.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, that this has been happening slowly, stealthily, easily.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: The road to hell is not hard rocks, it's paved.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: People have often said that, paved with good intentions, paved with whatever, but it is paved, it's smooth, it's easy to travel, you can hardly tell.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: And you come, kids come away from watching late night television or listening to maybe their favorite college professor, and it just happens so easily, and you find, wow, they're really a fur piece from what grandma used to say.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why the author said, Listen, it's time to fight.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's time to fight.
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_01: I want to tell you how serious he says that God is about this stuff.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_01: God has got his boxing gloves on.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: And he says, now I want to remind you, though you know all these things, first illustration the Lord first saved a people out of Egypt and later destroyed those who did not believe.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: His point is God knows how to sift the chaff from the wheat and burn up the wheat.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_01: God knows how to sift his people from the Egyptians and the Canaanites and how to drown the enemy.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: And then the second illustration is about fallen angels.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: And God has kept with eternal chains in darkness for the judgment of the great day.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: The angels who didn't keep their own position but deserted their proper dwelling, you go, what is that about?
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: By the way, there's a half a dozen of these places in Jude, which, you know, make you go, whoa, what is that about?
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_01: And it'd be fun sometime to have a class or whatever and go through these wacky, alien, strange, mysterious, enigmatic things.
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: This one happens to do with the fact that, yes, there are fallen angels, there are demons that whisper in your ear and help you, you know, with your addictions, moving you along, saying it really doesn't matter.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_01: But there are also a group of angels who did something especially bad.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's a group of angels in Genesis chapter 6, who back then it was okay for angels to roam around and they cohabited with human women and caused a lot of problems.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so God took them and he said, I'm locking you up until the end of time.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm told you it's a little weird, but that's what Jude's talking about here.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_01: And then the third illustration, in the same way, Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them committed sexual immorality and practiced perversions, just as angels did, and serve as an example by undergoing the punishment of eternal fire.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: And God saved Lot out of that.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: God knows how to sift the wheat from the chaff, his people, from those who persecute his people, and who are who are against God and he knows how to punish them.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: In the same way, he continues, these people who claim authority from their dreams live immoral lives, defy authority, and scoff at supernatural beings.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: Like unthinking animals, they do whatever their instincts tell them, and so they bring about their own destruction.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: What sorrow awaits them.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_01: And he keeps on going.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: He actually quotes what we call Apocrypha, that would be a book of Enoch, which isn't in the Bible, but he basically says there's a couple verses in Enoch that are exactly true that predict that the Lord's are going to come back to execute judgment on these false teachers.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_01: This is how serious God is about them.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: But my main point he's going is that these people affect you and your children.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: And when sometimes, sometimes they're even in church, and when they eat with you in your fellowship meals, commemorating the Lord's love, meaning all of their Lord's tables used to be meals in the context of a meal, they are like dangerous reefs that can shipwreck you.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: So that's why he says it's time to fight, because of how God feels about them and because of how they can affect you.
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: And then he answers the very practical question, well, then how do I fight?
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_01: How do I get involved in the last nine verses when he says, first of all, most fundamentally, most basically, you need to fight mentally.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: You need to get smart.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_01: Jude 17 through 19, but you, dear friends, remember what was predicted.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: You have to be mentally aware of something.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_01: Remember what was predicted by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ, who told you, in the end times there will be scoffers walking according to their own ungodly desires, bad morals.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_01: These people create divisions and are unbelievers not having the spirit, bad theology.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: So you need to be mentally aware.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: Now, this is this is the first stage.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: This is the stage in which you just keep calm and you fight back by being mentally aware, mentally alert, and mentally tough.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_01: One of my favorite writers, I quote him here almost as often as C.S.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: Lewis, and they too have a lot in common.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_01: He's a professor, Peter Craft, at uh we once brought him a few years back to Care Paravel Latin School for a seminar.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: He's a professor of philosophy at Boston College, brilliant guy, written many books.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_01: And he was delivering a talk recently called How to Win the Culture War.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: And the first thing he said had to do with fighting mentally.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_01: He said, first thing you have to do is know the existence of a war.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: Quote.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_01: If you don't mind, I'm going to read two of the paragraphs I really liked out of here.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_01: Many minds do seem moonstruck, puttering happily around the Titanic, blandly arranging the deck chairs, especially the intellectuals who are supposed to have their eyes open, are more open, not less.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_01: But in fact, they are often the bland leading the bland.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: I have verified over and over again the principle that there is only one thing needed for you to believe any of the 100 most absurd ideas possible for any human being to conceive.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: You must have a PhD.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_01: Now, he has several PhDs himself, but he's he's making a point about intellectuals, and then he continues, just about everybody except the deep, quote-unquote, deep thinkers knows that we are in deep doo-doo.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: The students know it, but not the teachers, the mind molders, especially in the media.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: Everybody in the hospital except the doctors knows that we are dying.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: Night is falling.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_01: Mother Teresa said simply, when a mother can kill her baby, what is left of civilization to save?
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: What Chuck Colson has labeled a new dark age is looming, a darkness that christened itself the enlightenment at its birth three centuries ago.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_01: I would add something that I've observed in the last year, especially in recent months, sort of, I think I would call it a Jedi mind game, where um where you look at it on talk shows where they have somebody who holds uh, shall we say, biblical morality, biblical theology, and so forth.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: And uh in these discussions, you oftentimes, in this sort of a con game that happens, you find you find uh the leader or the speaker saying, listen, first, in the spirit of open-minded cooperation, in the spirit of fair-minded discussion, we must give up our moral prejudices and principles and priorities.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_01: We must just start letting to give those things up so that we're all fair-minded and we're open-minded.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, is everybody there?
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_01: He goes, Yeah, okay, we're all there.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_01: Well, give those up and we can have a fair-minded discussion.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_01: And then as it continues, you realize that the second point is now we must accept my moral principles and prejudices and priorities as the only reasonable and loving way.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why you need to be mentally sharp.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_01: You need to fight mentally, you need to get smart, you need to be mentally alert and mentally tough.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's not just in basketball that the most valuable attribute a player can have is mental toughness.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_01: And the second stage is not only should you fight by being mentally aware, mentally alert, mentally tough, getting smart, you should fight spiritually, you should get strong.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_01: Jude 20, 21.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: But you, dear friends, as you build yourselves up in your most holy faith and pray in the Holy Spirit.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: Keep yourselves in the love of God, expect the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ for eternal life.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_01: These are spiritual disciplines, and there's four of them, four ways to get strong.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_01: And the first is the word of God.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_01: Build yourselves up in your most holy faith, the faith once delivered to the saints.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's sort of like what the Apostle Paul said in Ephesians 4, that they are babies who just drink milk, but we need to grow up and be strong, attain to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, chapter 4, verse 13, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine by human cunning.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: You find that the people that are suckers for these progressive ideas and morality and theology are invariably people who do not study the Bible and do not know the Bible well.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_01: So the first way you get strong is the word of God.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_01: The second way is prayer.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_01: Prayer.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_01: Every great saint down through the years has said that prayer is absolutely essential in spiritual warfare.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_01: And this is prayer and the Holy Spirit, notice, and quoting Paul basically with all prayer and petition, pray at all times in the Spirit.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, what does that mean?
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_01: Well, one thing it means is we're not talking here about praying prayers you've memorized, or praying wrote prayers, or praying reading prayers.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking about, we're talking about in the sphere of the spirit coming to God and pouring yourself out, and when you can't think of the words, the spirit, Romans 8 says, takes what you can't express and then relays it to the Father with groanings that can't be uttered.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_01: This is a special kind of an intimate and fervent prayer, praying in the Spirit.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: Word of God, prayer, and third, keep yourself in the love of God.
• 31:57
  SPEAKER_01: What does that mean?
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it has to do with abiding or keeping, it's perseverance, stick to it, obedience.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_01: Jesus said to the disciples on that last night, abide in my love, you abide in my love if you obey my commands.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_01: So this is a daily perseverance and in telling God you'll do whatever he wants you to do because you love him.
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_01: Like in the Princess Bride, remember how Wesley and Buttercup, and no matter what Buttercup said to Wesley, no matter how crazy the demand, he would always say, as you wish.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_01: Remember that?
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_01: How beautiful that was?
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_01: And then came the day when she said she.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_01: I was amazed to discover that when he was saying as you wish, what Wesley meant was, I love you.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what it means to God.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's how you keep yourself in the love of God by constantly telling him, as you wish.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_01: So the word of God and prayer and obedience or perseverance are the first three ways to get strong.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: The fourth has to do with anticipating the second coming, looking for that, expecting the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ for eternal life, because in the parallel passage in 2 Peter, and 2 Peter and Jude, by the way, overlap, Peter took about two-thirds of Jude and just quoted it directly in his book.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: But uh 2 Peter adds, scoffers will come in the last days with scoffing.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: This happens even today.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_01: Following their own sinful desires and saying, Where's the promise of his coming?
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: Ha ha.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: Ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things are just as they always were.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: Can you believe those Christians are still looking for the coming of Christ?
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: And Jude says, Well, yeah, you need to.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's one of the four ways you get strong.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_01: The word of God, prayer, obedience, the second coming.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_01: Fight mentally, fight spiritually, finally, fight fiercely, fight fiercely, get moving.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_01: Jude 22 and 23.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_01: Have mercy on those who doubt.
• 34:06
  SPEAKER_01: Save others by snatching them from the fire.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_01: Have mercy on others, but with fear hating even the garment defiled by the flesh, because as you're saving, as you're getting involved in the fight, and one way you do it is going to those children of yours or those friends of yours, those people you know who slipping, slip-sliding away into bad morality or bad theology.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_01: And you get involved, you decide you're gonna move into that situation and try to help those people who are stuck in that addiction to alcohol or pornography or whatever.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_01: You find as you get involved in that, that your hands can get defiled and you have mercy on them, you try to pluck them out, you try to get involved.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_01: But watch out, hate even the garment defiled by the flesh, lest it rub off on you.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_01: And there's an implication here in this fight of something you know already.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_01: If you're a parent or if you're a friend of someone who's sliding away, you know that just getting involved at this level of trying to save somebody is getting in the fight and risking being wounded.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_01: You say something to someone and you have the best motives because she or he is going in a direction which is so destructive, and then they turn and they bite you.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_01: Your friendship is at risk, and you discover that uh that you are in the fight and it hurts, and you've gotten wounded simply by trying to help some.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's like what happened last month down in Houston, Texas.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_01: A call came in at about 2 a.m.
• 35:41
  SPEAKER_01: on a Friday morning, the first week of January.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_01: Firefighters rushed to the call.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_01: It was at the quick car lube and oil change or something.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_01: Brick building and and smoke just pouring out as they as they got there.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so they they got out and stood, but that looked as though the fire was dying down.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_01: And then one of the firefighters he shouted to the captain, Kenneth Wilmington, he shouted, uh, I just think I just heard a noise inside.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_01: And so instead of waiting until it was all done, they got out of sledgehammer and they broke a hole through the brick wall.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_01: And Captain Wilmington put his head in Shernob, right there.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_01: It was a man, 34 years old, happened to be, and he was lying unconscious.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_01: He'd inhaled way too much smoke.
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_01: He yells at him, Are you alert?
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_01: And the guy didn't respond.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_01: Captain Wilmington reached out to save him, to pull him through the hole.
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_01: And that roused the man, and he he just grabbed a pocket knife out of his, out of his pants, and he stabbed the captain right in the left eye with a knife.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_01: Captain falls backwards, they rush him to the hospital.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_01: It takes the other, takes the other officers, the other, the other firefighters a while to talk this man down.
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_01: We're just trying to help you.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_01: And he has to go to the hospital for smoke inhalation.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, he's fine.
• 36:57
  SPEAKER_01: Captain's had to have surgery, he's stable, thankfully, right now.
• 37:01
  SPEAKER_01: But but sometimes you find out.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes people with the best motives find out.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_01: You try to rescue someone, and you get wounded because you you're in a fight.
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_01: You're in a fight that started way back on the Garden of Eden with the serpent and will continue until the devil is cast into the fires of hell.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's the fight between good and evil, the fight between dark and light, the fight between God and Satan.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_01: And Jude said, I don't care if you get wounded, you may get wounded, but you've got to get in the fight.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's all important.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_01: You're on my side.
• 37:32
  SPEAKER_01: Will you do it?
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_01: And this is a charge for you and for me, and I think that's a charge for today.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_01: You have to say, Yeah, I'm gonna get involved.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna realize there's a war going on.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_01: I'll get involved mentally, I'll get involved spiritually, and I'll get involved fiercely, I'll go right in there and try to save some people.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: Will you do it?
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_01: Let's pray.
• 37:56
  SPEAKER_01: Our Heavenly Father, I pray that uh this church will arise and and and go to battle that though we like to go along to get along, every one of us does.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_01: We don't like getting into fights.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_01: We understand that there's a battle going on and we should be there to make a difference.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_01: Give us strength and courage and grace, Heavenly Father, to step into the battle.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_01: For your sake and for the sake of those that need to be saved, we pray.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: Amen.