EVENING SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 6/14/2025 6:50 PM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-1“The Enemy”
Bible Reading & Meditation Reference:
Jude 3-4
Message of the verses: “3 Beloved, while I
was making every effort to write you about our common salvation, I felt the
necessity to write to you appealing that you contend earnestly for the faith
which was once for all handed down to the saints. 4 For certain persons have
crept in unnoticed, those who were long beforehand marked out for this
condemnation, ungodly persons who turn the grace of our God into licentiousness
and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.”
In
earlier SD’s I have already noted that Jude set out to write an encouraging
letter which would be about “the common salvation.” I believe that I also wrote about what the
name “Jude” means as it is actually (Judah) which means “praise,” and he was
anxious to praise God and rejoice in the salvation God gives in Jesus Christ
for after all that would go alone with the meaning of his name. However we know that the author of the
Scriptures is the Holy Spirit and so it was the Holy Spirit who changed his
mind and led Jude to write about the battle against the forces of evil in the
world. I wonder why this was. Dr. Wiersbe states “Because it was needful
for the church.”
He
goes on to write “I must confess that I sympathize with Jude. In my own ministry, I would much rather
encourage the saints than declare war on the apostates. But when the enemy is in the field, the
watchmen dare not go to sleep. The Christian life is a battleground, not a
playground.” I really appreciate the way
that Dr. Wiersbe has with explaining things as I have mentioned before “he puts
the cookies on the shelf where we can reach them.”
Now
what we have been looking at here is the introduction to a number of
sub-sections that Dr. Wiersbe wants us to look at as he writes “Jude wasted no
time in identifying the enemy.”
“They
were ungodly” (v-4b):” I have to tell you that I have had a difficult time in
trying to figure out how Dr. Wiersbe breaks down the verses as he writes about
different parts of the verse. I tell you
what I am going to do and that is because Dr. Wiersbe always uses the KJV of
the Bible and I always use the NASB95 version of the Bible I will now quote
verse four from the KJV “4 For there are certain men crept in unawares, who
were before of old ordained to this condemnation, ungodly men, turning the
grace of our God into lasciviousness, and denying the only Lord God, and our
Lord Jesus Christ.”
Perhaps for this first sub-section I think it best to
quote what Dr. Wiersbe has written here on verse 4b. “This is one of Jude’s favorite words. While these men claimed to belong to God, they were, in fact, ungodly in their
thinking and their living. They might
have ‘a form of godliness,’ but they lacked the force of godliness that lives in the true Christian (2 Tim. 3:5).”
They
were deceitful (v. 4c): These men “crept
in unawares.” Now the Greek word means “to
slip in secretly, to steal in undercover.”
Now it is true that there are times when Satan’s undercover agents are
actually “brought in secretly” by
those already on the inside (Gal. 2:4) “But it was because of the false
brethren secretly brought in, who had sneaked in to spy out our liberty which
we have in Christ Jesus, in order to bring us into bondage.” However those men came in on their own. We can look at 2 Peter 2:1 to see that he
warned that these men were coming, and now they had arrived on the scene. “But false prophets also arose among the
people, just as there will also be false teachers among you, who will secretly
introduce destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them,
bringing swift destruction upon themselves.”
Dr. Wiersbe asks “How could false brethren get into
true assemblies of the saints? The soldiers had gone to sleep at the
post! The spiritual leaders in the
churches had grown complacent and careless.
This explains why Jude had to ‘blow
the trumpet’ to wake them up. Our Lord
and His Apostles all warned that false teachers would arise, yet the churches
did not heed the warnings. Sad to say,
some churches are not heeding the warnings today.”
Allow
me to make a comment as I end this first section on Jude 3-4. I think those who read these Spiritual
Diaries can see how much respect that I have for Dr. Warren Wiersbe. I mentioned that I wrote to him a few years
ago telling him that I was quoting a lot of his work to put on my Spiritual
Diaries. He was retired by then and when
he wrote back to me he did not say a word about me quoting from his books. He apologized for taking so long to get back
to me. He has since been promoted to
heaven, and I am happy that I have all of his “Be Books” in my library so I can
still reference them as I continue to write Spiritual Diaries.
6/14/2025 7:27 PM
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