Let the Shepherd Lead

Originally Proclaimed: 05/17/20

Intro:

• From Disney’s Be Our Chef to Food Network’s Chopped to Fox’s most explosive one of all,  Hell’s Kitchen, cooking shows represent much of the competition on television today.
• Now as we consider that trend, think for just a moment of the way that most of us learned to cook.
  • Under the watchful eye of my Mama, I learned how to scramble eggs, chop vegetables correctly, and sear meat the right way.
  • I learned some basic recipes, and some crock pot recipes, and some very complicated recipes.
  • But I remember one of the things I was not allowed to make for a long time was gravy.
  • Mama told me that I could not make gravy because it was too easy to burn the rue as it went from uncooked to done in seconds.
  • For a long time I simply watched and as she said, got the feel for it.
  • But one day I was allowed to try to make gravy for the first time, and for the first time I understood the pressure of trying to brown the rue, at just the right second add the milk, and stirring furiously to keep it from getting lumps.
  • But what joy there was the first time I sat down to eat country style steak, rice and gravy that I prepared.
• The cooking, eating and fellowship around a table represent some of the most enjoyable experiences of life. 
• So for me, I cannot imagine adding pressure to make the experience into a cutthroat, high stakes contest seeking to eliminate anyone who underperforms.
• But that is exactly what these cooking contests do episode by episode.

Hook:

• These shows put on display a dangerous trend in our lives.
• Take for example our graduates today, the normal pressures of college and career that follow high school have now been complicated with the pressures of stay at home orders and social distancing.
• Life comes with a certain amount of natural pressure.
  • Ordinary circumstances also add pressure. We have to pack for trips, including mission trips, but we rarely complain once the journey has begun.
  • Some relationships add pressure, like marriage, friendships, or church membership, but the pressure added is outweighed by the benefits.
  • John Piper relates in the book Don’t Waste Your Life, which I commend to you graduates, that Christ promises empower us to obey His Word and to help us glorify and enjoy Him forever.
    • Then he says “Faith in these promises frees us to risk and to find in our own experience that it is better to lose our life than to waste it.”
    • So risk and pressure for the sake of Christ are right for us to accept.
  • But there are some relationships and situations that add pressure to the extreme, transforming  life’s enjoyable activities into our own personal version of Hell’s Kitchen.
• In today’s passage Jude warns the church to watch out for  three types of pressure increases that can make life into Hell’s Kitchen.

Message Points:

• Jude’s tone in this epistle may seem harsh as he spends much more time warning us of danger than anything else.
  • But Jude does this because he wants believers to enjoy and grow in their common salvation (3).
  • The false converts now inside the church threaten the common salvation we have in Christ (4).
  • So Jude warns identify the false converts by watching out for their diminishing of meaningful membership, abandoning all accountability, and defiling of spiritual health (5-8).
  • Last week he warned us that the church could ruin its witness if it began to please self more than Christ, criticize rather than call to Christ, and use gut reactions more than grace reactions.
• As we begin today’s passage, Jude begins and ends with warnings in verse 11 and 13.
  • His first word is WOE, which alerts us to a bad situation, a heart rending exclamation of fact something like “Their situation is tragic”.
    • This interjection is like an animal expressing terror or pain with a outward cry.
    • It is a statement of the miserable future, but it is more prophetically a statement of God’s judgment (Green, 88)
  • Then he concludes his thoughts with the recognition that some will endure eternal darkness and all that Scripture expects will accompany that darkness.
  • Jude wants us to know that the pressures he will describe lead us to Hell’s Kitchen eternally.
    • The details of our common salvation are the details that will save us from this eternity.
    • By turning to Christ when faced with these pressures, we can repent and go in a new and better direction.
    • Even if we would lose our lives, we would gain eternity in Christ.
  • So friends, and especially graduates, let’s heed Jude’s warning.
• Jude makes his points in these verses with a plethora of examples.
  • In fact he uses three sets of examples. So I will describe his examples for us and then draw three applications.
  • In verse 11 he describes three Old Testament bad examples. He speaks of Cain, Balaam, and Korah.
    • Cain is found in Genesis 4, but we see from Jude’s reference that the warning is against going the way of Cain.
      • You may have heard the phrase “there are a lot of ways to the beach, but all of them go through Columbia”
      • Going the way of Cain is setting a destination,  with the pressure of knowing the route will take us to places we do not want to go.
      • Cain offered a unacceptable sacrifice, and became very upset.
      • God spoke to him and warned him to rule over his downcast angry heart that tempted him to further sin.
      • Gen. 4:7 “If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it.”
      • Cain stubbornly set his destination and the pressure built towards inevitable murder of his brother Able stubbornly ignoring God.
    • Balaam was a Gentile prophet in the  region of Moab.
      • He was hired to curse Israel by the king of Moab as they mourned towards the Promised Land.
      • Balaam claimed to only be able to speak what God commanded, and three times his curse came out as a blessing of Israel.
      • Yet Balaam was enticed by a  desire for the wealth and respect of the king of Moab.
      • The pressure of his enticed desire led him to forfeit his role as a prophet working against his own prophecies.
      • He offered ruinous advice that would derail Israel’s progress towards the Promised Land.
        • Number 25 tells us that Moabite women were sent into prostitute themselves to the Israelites and thereby distract and derail them.
        • Numbers 31:16 (NIV84) ¹⁶“They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and were the means of turning the Israelites away from the Lord in what happened at Peor, so that a plague struck the Lord’s people.
      • One commentator said that Baalam’s heresy was “the failure to recognize that nothing can be economically good if it is morally bad” (Hiebert, 254).
    • Korah was one of the Israelites who left Egypt under Moses’ leadership.
      • He most certainly was a key grumbled and complainer.
      • No matter what was happening, Korah was not satisfied until he contradicted what Moses relayed that God had said.
      • He eventually demanded that God show that the priesthood should reside with Aaron since “all the congregation was holy”.
      • The pressure of his dissatisfaction led him to rejected the authority of Moses and of God’s Word.
      • God allowed the test and made Aaron’s staff to bud, but he also sent a tremendous judgement, swallowing up in the earth Korah and all his followers.
    • Each of these examples are ones who let the pressures get to them.
    • Scripture and tradition, frames each of these men not only as contestants but as the trainers in Hell’s Kitchen.
    • Their example still teaches us bad habits today.
  • In verse 12 he describes three bad examples in the church. 
    • Jude actually begins in this verse describing six examples from his culture.
    • Three of them relate directly to the church of his day.
    • He refers to the false converts as “hidden reefs” or spots/blemishes at their love feast .
      • The love feast was a combination pot lunch and communion.
      • Meals in the ancient world were mean to connect people and bond them together.
      • Jude’s point is that these false coverts add pressure
        • Like a hidden reef they cause us to exercise caution in connecting.
        • Like a spot on a shirt they cause us to second guess people’s impression.
    • He also refers to  shepherds feeding themselves rather than caring for others.
      • This harkens back to the Old Testament in Ezekiel 34 and similar passages where the prophets condemn the actions of Israel’s shepherds.
      • Evidently some of the false converts had even become leaders in the church.
      • Because they were not shepherding as God called them, they added pressure to the flock for each to fend for him or her self.
    • Finally He mentions waterless clouds which sounds out of place in this triad.
      • But we must remember Proverbs 25:14 “Like clouds and wind without rain is a man who boasts of gifts he does not give.”
      • Jude is referring to people who boast or promise but do not make good.
      • A cloud in the west in the arid Middle east was a welcome sign of relief, but if it did not produce it disappointed everyone.
      • Paul warns against this in Ephesians 4:14, “Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of men in their deceitful scheming.”
  • In verse 12-13 he describes three bad examples from nature.
    • Jude then refers to three bad examples from nature.
    • To alert us to his new set of three he changes the tense of the participles in verse 12 as it refers to barren, uprooted autumnal trees.
      • Trees in the fall should have produced at least one crop of fruit, but these trees were fruitless.
      • In the Middle East some fruit trees in the fall would actually loose their leaves.
      • They are twice dead, dead to produce anything and now dead without any signs of life.
      • They have been uprooted, like the myriad of trees in our area after the tornado.
      • Right after the event they looked like they were alive, but in reality being uprooted meant they would die.
      • The pressure of caring for a dead tree is unnecessary.
    • Then he refers to wild waves foaming up shame.
      • This refers to waves that have been stirred up by a storm.
      • The word wild could be used of any wild animal, scary and untamable.
      • This fall, on a field trip with Robbie to Chicago, we were able to see Lake Michigan each day.
      • The first day, the lake was placid and calm. Gentle waves beat against the shore.
        • On the next day with just a small threat of storms, the lake churned, beating the shore relentlessly, flinging water and foam into the air.
        • I could hardly believe it was the same lake because of the way it changed.
      • Jude compares the foam of the sea to the shamelessness of these false converts.
      • Ordinary moral conventions and standards do not seem to apply to them.
      • There is an added pressure to being around them because no one knows how they will react.
    • Finally he points to wandering stars.
      • Today we call these planets, derived from the word translated here as wandering.
      • Unlike the actual stars, the planets wander out of the expected position in the sky, into darkness.
      • Anyone who sought to use them for navigation would quickly be in trouble.
• These sets of examples offer three specific pressure warnings for those who believe.
  • First, Avoid the pressure of stubbornness which journeys towards broken relationships.
    • Think once again of the first example in each of Jude’s triad.
      • Cain’s stubbornness set a course towards murder and exile.
      • A hidden reef stubbornly persists under the water keeping sailors away.
      • A stubborn blemish or stain can cause a shirt not to be worn.
      • A tree that is stubbornly barren will be removed and no longer enjoyed.
    • Friends we must be very careful not to think of stubbornness as a virtue, but rather as a barrier to relationships. This reminds me of a story: https://www.ba-bamail.com/jokes/jokes-about-men/?jokeid=748
      • Three men and one spiritual woman were in an argument.
      • The woman was clearly correct, but the men stubbornly refused to admit it.
      • The woman decided to pray asking God for a sign.
      • A big storm came up and a clap of thunder came just as she finished her prayer.
      • The men all said thunder was a natural phenomenon.
      • So the woman prayed for a bigger sign, that the lightning would strike a nearby tree.
      • Again just as she finished praying, the lightning slammed into a nearby tree.
      • The men still insisted that the lightning could have been a coincidence.
      • So the woman prayed again, simply asking the Lord to prove that she was right.
      • As she finished the prayer a voice from heaven said, “She’s Right”.
      • To which the men finally said, “okay, okay. But its still three against two.”
    • Believers, let us never be like those men, so stubbornly against God’s will that we would forfeit our relationship with God and others just to be right.
      • But this is so easy to do, especially if we harbor anger and resentment towards others.
        • We will refuse to believe that person even if they are right.
        • We will avoid engagements with them and refrain from using our gifts and talents around them.
      • And church, how often is it the refusal to call out people’s stubbornness about what God is clearly leading us to do that leads to hurt feelings, broken relationships and church splits.
  • Second, avoid the pressure of enticement that leaves us without any profits.
    • Let’s think of Jude’s second example in each triad.
      • Balaam was enticed to abandon being true prophet of God for temporary profits.
      • The shepherds who feed themselves were enticed away from their divine mission for their own temporary satisfaction.
      • The wild waves were enticed to froth up shameful activities in the temporary storm of life.
    • Enticements come in many shapes and forms, but they are most dangerous when we have not committed ourselves fully to God’s plan for our lives.
    • In his book on burnout called Reset David Murray encourages readers to say no to more things in order to say yes to the right, God-honoring things of life.
    • He offers the example of a well-planned life vs. a summoned life.
      • The well planned life is one where a strategic course is plotted for life and one must stick to it step by step.
      • The summoned life is one where the daily circumstances must be examined so that we do what they summon us to do.
      • Rigid adherence to either of these systems adds pressure to our lives so that we either cannot live in the moment or plan for the future.
      • The enticements of either system cause us to miss out on what truly profits us.
    • Instead, heed what Murray calls the Prayerful Life.
      • We plan to do what will please the Lord.
        • God tells us in His Word what will please Him.
        • He gives us principles for marriage, parenting, friendships, stewardship, and leadership.
        • As 2 Tim. 3:16 says, all Scripture is profitable.
      • But we regularly take into account His sovereign providence.
        • God interrupts our normal and our plans.
        • Sometimes it is with opportunities we did  not expect at times we would not have considered them.
        • Sometimes it is with circumstances we would never have chosen, but that He wants to work to good in our lives.
        • And as Jeremiah 29:11 says, God knows the plans he has for us; plans to prosper us and give us hope.
    • Friends, we do not need to chase worldly enticements when we have all the profit available in the universe for all eternity with Christ.
  • Finally, Avoid the pressure of Dissatisfaction which wanders towards eternal disaster.
    • Jude’s final example in each triad are difficult because in each case they represent someone who could not turn back from their ways.
      • Korah was dissatisfied with God’s plan and it led to his destruction.
      • The waterless cloud left everyone dissatisfied, and eventually dissipated.
      • The wandering star, not satisfied with its position wandered into eternal darkness.
    • Friends dissatisfaction will cause us to wander and chase all sorts pleasures, but we will never realize what we seek.
      • Dissatisfaction, greed and lust all fall into a pattern defined well by the biblical counselor and pastor Heath Lambert.
      • He says, “Lust by definition wants what it does not have.”
      • That eternal want of something better will be met by those in hell with the deepest kind of regret.
      • In Hell the dissatisfied will discover the truth of God’s Word in Jeremiah 29:13 where God tells us “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.”

Conclusion:

• So friends, and especially graduates, do not give into the pressures of Hell’s Kitchen.
• Avoid stubbornness, enticements, and dissatisfaction by repenting and turning to Christ and trusting Him.
• Only there will we find what we seek, a relationship with a God who we can glorify and enjoy forever.