Contending for the Faith
We have been retreating in a solitary old farm house set deep in the woods of southwest Arkansas. There is actually an old covered well in the utility room of the house. We are so far away from cities that there is no telephone or television, and in order to send or receive a cell phone message, I have to walk out into the pasture and climb to the top of a small hill.
We are waiting on Father to hear his voice. Fresh (no... actually, depleted) from six months in Africa and now back in America for a while. We know his general will, but the specific strategy is in need of clarification. There are so many invitations and such wonderful opportunities before us. There are so many weaknesses and wounds that are in us. The next step must be in the Spirit.
In my devotions with my wife this morning, the Lord gave me Jude 1-3. I read it aloud out of my old King James version, a thin leather-bound New Testament and Psalms which I carried along with my high school textbooks from 1965 until graduation in 1967. That's the year I started Bible College and met my lovely bride to be, Lana. Starting before High School, I had memorized passages and verses from the old King James Bible. Now, I often have devotions from the New International Version but I usually study and preach from my New American Standard Bible. (The new 1995 updated version is fantastic!)
Today I took these scriptures from Jude and personalized them, inserting our names as though the writer was speaking directly to us in the present tense. (The Holy Spirit can speak through any Bible verse, can‚t He? But to hear God at any time, we have to be in the present, and not tense!)
Using that technique, a technique I also employed as a father to read the Bible to my kids and as a pastor to read the Bible to sick or discouraged people-- Jude had some good words to say to us.
He said we are sanctified by God the Father, we are preserved in Jesus Christ, and we are called.
I noticed that all these three things-- sanctified, preserved and called-- are all at God's initiative and they were all accomplished in the past. That means it has already been done for us.
This lets me appreciate the fact that God is sovereign. He started providing for us in eternity, even before we were born. His kind intentions toward us began before time, originated from heaven, and are only discovered by us in time as though God had just now done it that moment!
Then Jude spoke three precious wishes: "Mercy, peace and love be multiplied to you." Wow! Even though we are already sanctified (by God's truth), already preserved (or saved in Jesus), and already called (everyone has a specific calling), we are still in regular need of experiencing something more in our lives.
What is that something more? We need to encounter mercy. We need to be enveloped by peace. We need an environment of love.
By love, I don't just mean some kind of casual, "when it's convenient" cheap love, but God's kind of unending, unselfish agape-type love that keeps on giving. And, we need to feel God's love, not just read about it or hear about it. I'm convinced that the reason most sinners are not yet saved is that they have never felt God's kind of love, love with hands and feet, love made real.
Peace is not only a sense of well-being. It is an expectation of security based on God's goodness. His hand can hold us steady in the midst of shaky circumstances or even active opposition. Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the presence of Christ. Peace, shalom, is one of the greatest side-benefits of being in Jesus Christ and of doing his will. I have learned that peace is not based on our momentary circumstances, but on our unbroken connection with his heart. God's peace is not something the world can take away from us. Many, many people struggle with depression and anxiety and insomnia. They are in desperate need of genuine peace, not a make-believe band-aid of "Let's pretend the problem isn't there," but peace that surpasses comprehension. That's the kind of peace my Jesus offers to all of his faithful followers.
Mercy is more than superficial forgiveness, more than salve for our guilt. We take mercy for granted as though it were a cheap erasure from an accountant's ledger book. We need to count the cost of God's mercy: the blood of His beloved Son, shed on the cross as a sacrifice for our sins.
But the precious gift of mercy is even greater than merely forgiveness. Even Old Testament saints had forgiveness. New Testament mercy goes further than forgiveness. It bestows through grace the rights of sonship, adoption into the promises of God, the benefits of an inheritance that includes everything Jesus paid for on the cross and earned by his obedience!
And Jude said God wanted this experience of mercy, peace and love to be multiplied to me and my wife. Wow again! I'll take a present like that any day, won't you?
But the next verse includes one area which was not granted before time, which was not provided as a gift through an apostolic blessing, but is an area meant to be worked on diligently, an area where we have a responsibility to take action in order to lay hold of something. What is that area? It is the area of faith.
Jude admonished us to "earnestly contend" for the faith originally bestowed on the saints. To be earnest means to be sincere and single-minded, to pursue whole-heartedly. To contend means to fight or struggle for something. It implies effort and labor, like a wrestling match. Here is a promise made to all modern followers of Jesus. It is this: the same kind of faith which Jesus originally modeled, imparted, and gave as a gift to the apostles of the early church is still available to us today.... if we contend for it.
How do we contend for this kind of faith? Are we willing to pay the price? I suspect part of the answer lies in keeping ourselves biblically informed. The Bible was written under the Holy Spirit's inspiration. It is THE source of authentic faith. Another part of the answer involves listening to the voice of the Spirit. After all, "faith comes by hearing...." (Rom. 10:17). That requires quiet time, being alone in God's presence, seeking his face, worshiping the Lord, waiting on God, listening to his leading. This is a learned skill.
In all of this, the Holy Spirit is our Helper. Jude goes on to say, "But ye, beloved, (Don't you love the tender terms of endearment that are sprinkled in this first century leader's pastoral letter?) building up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Ghost, keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life." (Jude verses 20-21)
Ah! Jude has given away a great secret of ever-increasing faith, of knowing more of God's love. What is it? It is this simple practice: Praying in the Holy Spirit.
When I was but a child of eight, I had an overwhelming experience while of being filled with the Holy Spirit. It was way beyond my childish comprehension. I was washed, bathed, filled, inundated, saturated with buckets of liquid love. It left me intoxicated with delight and left me giddy with joy. It was like God's great big fatherly arms had picked me up and swirled me around until I was dizzy with laughter and flushed with love. I was speechless and beyond words.
Later, as a young teenager, the experience of Holy Spirit baptism took on new definition for me as I learned to yield myself daily in prayer and release a flow of unknown tongues, words which were prompted by the Spirit and seemed to express exactly what my spirit yearned to say but had no vocabulary to adequately express.
I learned how to pray from my heart instead of just my head. I even learned how to sing with my spirit! (See Ephesians 5:18-19 and First Corinthians 14:15).
Now when I wait on God and cross over from the material realm into the realm of the Spirit by worship, I receive divine help in my prayer life. Spending time enveloped in the Spirit of Jesus leaves me with a residual anointing. That anointing produces a lingering faith which is greater than my own. My faith grows, with no conscious effort, when I am lost in adoration of God. God loans me his faith. And that is a gift that keeps on giving!
Worship, prayer, lingering in God's presence, amounts to "getting in his face." A face to face encounter implies no boundaries, no inhibitions. My face, beholding his face, gives me his faith as a gift. There, by the gracious gift of hearing God's voice, I can see myself in the mirror of his word, and I can begin to believe what he has said and is still saying. It is like our Heavenly Father takes hold of our face in His hands and stares right into our eyes and calls us by name and tells us the truth as he sees it, the only perspective that counts for eternity, the only antidote to the lies of the devil and the echoes of sin in our souls.
Only in that holy moment of intimacy with God are we able to know his love and by that knowledge, enabled to believe him and his truth, and also to better know ourselves and be healed.
I am aiming for an appointment with the Risen One, a regular visit to His throne, a chance to sit on the lap of my Eternal Father. Jesus bought this privilege for me, and I intend to take full advantage of it.
The work will be still waiting on me when I get back to the field. Right now, I want some time at my Daddy's table, to sit at a place reserved just for me, to enjoy a realm where there is laughter and joy in communion with my Lord.
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