Jude calls believers to posture themselves to continually experience the love of God through building themselves up in the faith, praying in the Spirit, and waiting for Jesus to return and make all things new. As we experience His love and mercy, we get to extend His mercy to all people, even those most opposed to the gospel.

Jude shifts from engaging with the false teachers who have crept into the church to now engage with the Lord’s beloved people. Believers are called to contend first and foremost by vigilantly guarding their hearts in the remembering of God’s word. We guard ourselves knowing that we battle in a spiritual war that has already been decisively won in the victory of the risen Christ!

Jude uses another culturally respected, extra-biblical source, 1 Enoch, to further remind his readers of the coming justice of the Lord toward the false teachers who have crept in. One of the main fruits of the false teacher’s lives is discontentment. As believers, if we’re not careful with who we allow to influence our lives, we can likewise be tempted toward discontentment that breeds destruction. We can grow in contentment as we allow the Word of God to be our primary influence through biblical meditation.

False teaching has been around since the beginning of time as Jude brilliantly shows with multiple Old Testament references. With them, we are reminded that when God and His Word are not the ultimate authority the inevitable end is utter destruction and gloom. No false gospel has a chance when believers have clarity of the true gospel. Abiding with the Holy Spirit regularly as we study Scripture in the context of community enables us to bring and release the real lion who needs no defense.

The church is a people called by God to be a force in the world for redemption. We are invited to take all that God has given us and invest it in the realities around us that are full of vulnerability and injustice. Following Jesus into these spaces requires denying ourselves and taking up our cross daily as we save our life by losing it for His sake.

As Jude uses Old Testament realities to remind the church of the inevitable end of false teaching, whether bondage or wrath, he exposes how these teachers crept in. Forgetfulness of the gospel provides a way for false teaching to creep into our midst. In the end, it is better to pay the price of remembering than to pay the price of forgetting.

Jude calls us to contend for the faith delivered to believers because false teaching so easily creeps into the church unnoticed. This teaching spreads ungodliness and a denial of the authority of King Jesus. And yet, while Jude’s audience has failed in guarding the gospel, he contends for their faith by reminding them of their true identity. We need to know who we are in the gospel as we contend for it.

Jude greets his audience as mutual recipients of the grace of God. Jude, Jesus’ own half brother, formerly rejected Jesus. But now, by God’s grace, acknowledges Jesus as his Lord and King! Likewise, his audience having failed in contending for the gospel, are addressed by their identity in the gospel: called, beloved, and kept. Jude desires that everything he writes, though corrective, would work to multiply mercy, peace, and love among them.

Not only do we get to be recipients and participants in the gospel, but we also we get to be partakers of the fruit and joy of the gospel! This participating and partaking is showing up amidst the local gathering of the church, serving with our gifts, sharing our resources, living on mission as we scatter, and praying for one another. When we participate in such ways, we make up the local expression of Jesus’ church, which then makes up the cosmic expression of Jesus’ church.

All of us who are recipients of the gospel are called to participate in the gospel with our presence, time, gifting, and resources. When we participate in the local expression of Jesus’ church, we get to be a part of something extraordinary. What will be your part in God’s unfolding story through his church in the world?