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Jude 1:22-23 – How To Build Spiritual Muscle
There is a segment of people who love lists; who need lists. Preachers search to make lists to form “everyone’s” favorite type of sermon: A How To. Some search so hard they fail to see the list right in front of them. So if you like lists, Jude shows us how to build spiritual muscle (vv.20-21): 1) Build Yourself Up – take responsibility for your faith (although it is easier to blame others); 2) In Your Most Holy Faith – take the facts of the faith of the gospel and internalize them by living them (although it is easier to just know things); 3) Pray in the Holy Spirit – contextually this means to pray the knowledge revealed through the Spirit (although it is easier to practice trite phrases than to study truth to know God’s will); 4) Keep Yourself in the Love of God – do not lose focus of what God’s love means through Jesus and for you (although it is easier to claim God doesn’t love us which permits us to not believe); 5) Expecting the Mercy of Jesus Christ for Eternal Life – keep looking forward to the Second Coming in hope and humility of needed mercy (although it is easier to focus on this world). This is Jude’s list on how to become spiritually stronger. And we didn’t have to skip all over the Bible to find or make it. God made it for us.
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