November 23, 2025 Keep in God's Love | Jude

Today, we will reflect on Jude’s letter to a church where there are members who have embraced some of their culture’s values on sexual values and practices. Our God is a holy and pure God and calls us as his children to purity and holiness. God has given us a way of relating to each other, of living with each other that leads to us becoming more Christ-like and to help us flourish as his children, growing more and more into who he has created us to be. The temptation is to make God into our image rather than living into the image of God.

Transcript

Keep in God’s Love

Jude

The world has changed a lot in the past 30 years. It used to be when we talked about a virus, we were talking about our physical health, now a lot of times when we talk about a virus, it’s because our computers, phones, cars, or anything electronic has become infected with a virus that can shut things down and make our devices useless. In a similar way, false teaching can infect our spiritual lives, leading us into unhealthy ways of living, of relating with each other, and with God. This is what Jude is warning the people about in his letter, that false teachers had crept into the church and were giving the people wrong and unhealthy ways of understanding who God is and what Jesus has done for us. It’s not just Jude who writes the churches about this, Peter warns against false teachers in his second letter, and Paul warns about the same thing in a number of his letters. Jesus also warned about false teachers and shepherds showing up for their own benefit.

Jude calls us to fight for what we believe, for what we’ve been taught in Scripture and Jesus; listening to God’s voice over the clamor of voices in our world trying to lead our hearts away from God. Jude talks about these voices, “They are ungodly people who pervert the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord.” God’s grace is seen as permission to do whatever they want, depending on God’s grace to forgive them. The word Jude uses, “pervert,” means “to change or transfer.” In Jude’s situation the immorality he’s warning against is sexual immorality and perversion, these false teachers are changing what God’s grace and Jesus’ sacrifice are really about. They’re teaching they can embrace the sexual morals and practices of the people around them and God will forgive them, that there’ll be no judgment for their sin because of God’s grace instead of calling for obedience. 

Paul gets angry in Romans 6 over the same attitude, verses1–2, “What shall we say, then? Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?” Paul, and Jude, are countering the false teaching that God owes us forgiveness and that obedience to God’s laws and Jesus’ teachings and way are not important. These false teachers ignore that God is a just God and will punish deliberate disobedience. They fail to acknowledge that deliberate disobedience means that you’ve failed to truly accept Jesus as your Lord, that you still see yourself as lord rather than confessing that you belong, body and soul, in life and in death of Jesus and follow his ways fully out of gratitude and thankfulness for all he’s done for your salvation.

Jude uses the Greek word “ekporneuw” for sexual immorality. This is where our word pornography comes from. Pornography is rooted in lust and self-centered desire. It’s often about exerting power over others, treating them as objects to be controlled or manipulated sexually, believing that you’re in control when in actuality, your desires are what’s in control. In the 60s, the idea that free love would bring joy and freedom hasn’t worked out that way. Instead, it’s brought more brokenness, more shallowness, more regrets, and hurt than joy or freedom into relationships. Today, young adults and teens are looking for a stronger deeper foundation to relationships than the free love mantra of the boomer generation because they’ve seen the brokenness in their grandparents’ and parents’ relationships because of the lack of relational commitment, and the increase in pornography and causal sex. 

Immorality and sexual sin have many roots: many think that lust is the root cause of immorality, but often lust is rooted in anger; anger at others for perceived or actual actions, or self-anger from a lack of self-respect and self-condemnation for not being enough, for not measuring up to your own or other’s expectations, or from rejection. The hook-up culture and affairs are often rooted in the belief that sex will build connections and relationships which will provide fulfillment in who you are, it’s often rooted in wanting to be accepted or to belong. The reality is that these brief relationships create emptiness instead of fulfillment, broken relationships rather than stronger relationships, regret instead of joy and rejection instead of acceptance. 

Paul warns us in 1 Corinthians 6:18–20, “Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body. Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.” We are the body of Christ in the world and sexual immortality impacts others, not just yourself. It impacts the person you sin with because if you’re honest with yourself, it’s because you’re focused on your own pleasure over the other person’s. It creates brokenness within the church body as we’re the body together and unfaithfulness hurts us all. It hurts God and creates brokenness with God because it’s about you rather than about God, creating spiritual sickness.

Our culture confuses lust and sex with love. Love is rooted in how we treat each other, showing respect for the other person, putting their needs above your own, about patience, protecting, trusting, about depth, kindness, truth, perseverance, and hope. Marriage and commitment look different in our culture, marriage has many different forms in our culture, often shaped more as a contract rather than a permanent covenant filled with deep commitment. If it takes too much work, leave and pay the penalty, and then make a new contract with someone else who will fill your empty spot, who will make you whole. The problem is we place so much responsibility on someone else to make us whole, something that only God can do. John Calvin talks about a God-sized hole in each of us, but false teachers tell us that the right person can fill this hole instead of God. 

What’s the cure to this spiritual virus? There’s a failure to recognize that marriage is a gift from God, and mirrors God’s relationship within himself where the Father pours into the Son and Spirit, the Son pours into the Father and Spirit, and the Spirit pours into the Father and Son; that sexual purity reflects our relationship with God. Jude shows us the cure in the beginning and end of his letter, “To those who have been called, who are loved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ,”  ending with “To him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy—to the only God our Savior be glory, majesty, power and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forevermore.” Being kept for Jesus, the one who’s able to protect us from virus thinking, who’s able to keep us safe because we’re in him, kept safe by the love of God through faith in Jesus.

God pours his love and gifts into us; marriage is about imitating God by pouring into the other, building the other up, helping the other to grow into the person God’s created them to be, to develop the gifts God’s placed in them. Marriage and sex are about giving to the other rather than taking for yourself. In Genesis 2:23-25, God creates Adam and Eve and Adam marvels at Eve, “The man said, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.” That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh. Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.” Sex is a beautiful gift, it joins us together in marriage, becoming one flesh; a life-long relationship that is other-focused on building each other up to become the person God has called them to be. It’s intimate and God-given. We see an echo of God’s commitment to us in marriage, a life-long commitment to build each other up to be who God’s created us to be. Sex and sexuality are a gift of beauty and wonder, designed to create intimate safe relationships, it’s about purity and holiness reflecting who God is to our world

Old Testament laws around sex focused on purity, on being an example to the nations around Israel of what healthy relationships look like and that our relationships with each other are a reflection of our relationship with Jesus. Lev 18:1-5 is a chapter that lays out unhealthy ways of relating to each other sexually. These laws are given to build healthy relationships that are respectful of each other and the image of God we’re created in. 

We’re created by God to build intimate relationships within committed relationships. He created marriage as a life-long commitment between a man and a woman; our very bodies are designed this way. Jesus’ teaching always points us to trust in God’s ways. It takes trust and faith that God desires the best for us, that in following his will, walking in his way, even though the culture teaches differently, and we may not always understand the why of God’s ways and rules, that he gives us a way of life to shape us more and more into the image of Jesus.