24 Now to Him who is able to protect you from stumbling and to make you stand in the presence of His glory,blameless and with great joy, 25 to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, power, and authority before all time, now and forever. Amen.
So much to soak in this morning as Jude gets to what he originally intended to communicate.
Unlike us, God is able to hold that which He has grasped. Everything inevitably slips through our fingers and faster and more frequently the more we grip it. Like sand sifting through your fingers, the harder you squeeze to keep it, the more you ensure you have less to squeeze.
John MacArthur once said, “If I could lose my salvation, I would.” That is to say if it depended upon us to keep what we could not get, we would lose it because we couldn’t find it in the first place.
Moving on…
The Holy Spirit is our personal helper in reminding us of the Gospel of God so that we are assured daily of His sufficiency on our behalf. He also urges, encourages, commands, and equips us to walk in light of this love by having love stirred up within us. We delight in the Law and desire to organize our lives around fulfilling God’s desires rather than our own. If we keep the first commandment, we keep them all. If we break the first commandment, we break them all.
The Holy Spirit secures and seals us to finish the race by faith alone when the world around us tempts to abandon it for self-indulgence, self-interest, self-esteem, or self-righteousness.
“24blameless and with great joy”
We are counted as blameless because in Christ we are seen as clean; not because we are actually blameless, but because Christ was and is and intercedes on our behalf - imputing to us what is rightfully His.
We have great joy because facing God as a friend in Christ is an occasion that erupts with melody, dancing, singing, and joyous shouts of praise. We have no natural business in being anything other than destroyed by the presence of God.
We deserve to be found as blameworthy and afraid. We have done wrong. We have failed to do right. We have known that for these things we deserve to die. We know that He is better than us. We all admit, “no one’s perfect,” but know that God is. That is a problem. His perfection is not our salvation, it is our condemnation.
By grace, God has provided a means to alleviate this situation in Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. By our faith in God’s provision, we are saturated daily in eternal life and prepared to survive God’s holy presence. We will “stand” in that we will survive.
Our hearts attached to Him.
Him holding our hearts secure.
God will never fail in what He has prepared, planned, performed, produced, and published.
It’s His Gospel until the end.
It’s His Gospel for you today.
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