Mosaic Church | Winter Garden Audio

Since the beginning of time, God has planned every life with purpose. And yet, humanity struggles to maintain faith in the present and hope for the future while surrounded by the effects of sin. Christ’s genealogy affords us an opportunity to look back all the way to the beginning and be encouraged. Included are stories of all kinds – the rich, the poor, obedient, disobedient, famous, and obscure. As participants in God’s story, they all mattered, and so do we. Not because they were sometimes faithful but because He is always faithful and true.

The genealogy of Jesus tells many true stories to ultimately tell one story. Our Faithful and True King uses the worst of humanity to tell the best of His faithfulness, whether in the rebellion of people like Adam, Eve, and Jacob or the weakness of people like Abraham, Sarah, and Rachel. God continues to show Himself faithful to preserve the line through which the Lion of Judah, the root of David, our conquering King Jesus, would come.

As Jude calls us to contend for the faith while extending mercy to false teachers, we must do so with our gaze fixed upon the One who is able! Our God is able to preserve us until the end and present us blameless before His glory with all joy. He is worthy of our contending, our everything because to Him belongs all glory, majesty, power, dominion, and authority forever!

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?

What is God’s plan for His church in the world? According to His word, the Church is to be a force that shoves back the gates of hell, a sermon that declares the wisdom of God to the cosmos, a family that relates to one another as brothers and sisters, a temple that represents God’s tangible presence, and a bride that loves and is loved deeply by God. We live out these various facets in our gathering and scattering as we seek to demonstrate and declare the gospel together.

As Paul concludes his letter to Titus, we are reminded that the same God who caused unity and flourishing in the creation of the world is the same God who provides unity and flourishing in the Church today. In avoiding what sows disunity, we kneel together at the cross, embracing things that cultivate a kind unity that is from Jesus and for Jesus.

The world should experience us as we experience Jesus! Jesus extends goodness to all, even His enemies. He saves those that don’t deserve saving. As recipients of his loving kindness, we are to be gentle, courteous and devoted to good works as we live out our heavenly citizenship.

Grace has appeared in Jesus! Through Him alone are we saved and being trained in God’s life-giving ways. As those who belong to His Kingdom of life, we are called to exhort one another away from death toward the comfort of life with God.

As those who know and are delighted in by the God who does not lie, we can live lives that are a fitting adornment to the gospel. Even within our contextual limitations, whether older men or women, or younger men or women, we are provided the opportunity to point to God right where we are.

Paul reminds us that God has always intended Jesus’ church to be led—not by one leader—but by a plurality of them. Not only are the leaders to be plural, but godly and worth following. They must have character that stands both the test of time and the watchful eye of the entire church body. Ultimately, God’s desire is for godly leadership within the local church to be influenced by God’s character rather than the world’s culture.

Paul writes to his long-time disciple Titus in order to preserve the church in the strategic but rebellious island of Crete. Our trustworthy God, unlike the lying, false gods of Crete, will be made known when the church grows in the faith and knowledge of the truth that leads to godliness and hope. All of this is only possible as we are filled with the grace and peace of the gospel that overflows into a lost and broken world.