EVENING SPIRITUAL DIARY FOR 6/15/2025 11:00 PM
My Worship Time Focus: PT-2“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.”
I begin this SD by picking up where I left off in
the last SD, looking at verses 3-4 of Jude.
Warren Wiersbe entitles this section in his commentary on Jude “The
Enemy,” and this evening I will begin by looking at the third sub-section
entitled “They were enemies of God’s grace (v. 4d).
“They
were enemies of God’s grace (v. 4d).” I mentioned that it is difficult for me
to understand where these verse definitions like 4d are located in the
verse. The question that Dr. Wiersbe
asks at the beginning of this section is “Why did they enter the churches?” True born-again believers who attend churches
do not usually want to change the doctrine, but these non-believers do want to
change the doctrine as the want to “turn the grace of our God into
lasciviousness” (Jude 4). Let us take a
look at how Dr. Wiersbe describes the word lasciviousness: “The word lasciviousness
simply means ‘wantonness, absence of moral restraint, indecency.’ A person who is lascivious thinks only of satisfying his lusts, and
whatever he touches is strained by his base appetites. Lasciviousness is one of the works of the
flesh (Gal. 5:19) that proceeds from the evil heart of man (Mark 7:21-22).”
There
are some people who get the wrong idea of grace and the apostates surely have
the wrong idea of it as they would argue, “You have been saved by grace, so you
are free to live as you please.” Now if
a person believes this then there is a very good chance that they are not a
true believer, for if you are a true believer and you do something that is
wrong then your conscience will cause you to feel badly about it, and the
Spirit of God will convict you of it too.
Peter has already warned these people that the apostates would be the
ones arguing that you can live like you want after you become a believer. They promised the people freedom, but it was
the kind of freedom that led to terrible bondage as seen in 2 Peter 2:13-14,
and 19. The readers both Peter and Jude
addressed knew what Paul had written (2 Peter 3:15-16), so they should have
been fortified with Romans 6 and 1 Corinthians 5-6.
Dr.
Wiersbe writes “the apostates, like the cultists today, use the Word of God to
promote and defend their false doctrines.
They seduce young, immature Christians who have not yet been grounded in
the Scriptures. Every soldier of the
Cross needs to go through ‘basis training’ in a local church so that he knows
how to use the weapons of spiritual warfare (2 Cor. 10:4-5).” I will end this SD by quoting those important
verses from 2 Cor. 10:4-5: “4 for the
weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the
destruction of fortresses. 5 We are destroying speculations and every
lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking
every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.”
6/15/2025 11:29 PM
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