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Jude 1:1-3   Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and a brother of James,  To those who have been called, who are loved in God the Father and kept for Jesus Christ:  Mercy, peace and love be yours in abundance.  Dear friends, although I was very eager to write to you about the salvation we share, I felt compelled to write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people.

Eugene Petersen, in ‘The Message’, tries to capture for us in a more dynamic way the ‘feeling’ of what God is conveying to us in the inspired Word, even if he has to be a bit more ‘free’, and less ‘mechanical/literal’ with the Greek original.  I often find this approach very helpful (and we do have ready access to more ‘accurate’ translations in English if we want to check him out!).  This is often the case with passages that tend to lose their impact with familiarity.  This is how he expresses today’s verses:

“I, Jude, am a slave of Jesus Christ and brother to James, writing to those loved by God the Father, called and kept safe by Jesus Christ.  Relax, everything’s going to be all right; rest, everything’s coming together; open your hearts, love is on the way.  Dear friends, I’ve dropped everything to write you about this life of salvation we have in common.  I have to write insisting – begging! – that you fight with everything you have in you for this faith entrusted to us as a gift to guard and cherish.”

How comforting is this timely reminder of what the apostle Paul is conveying in all his letters:

When our Father God, by his sovereign grace alone, through faith, calls us to himself and saves us, we become his slaves [more accurate in modern terminology than ‘servants’] who are loved unconditionally and eternally by him because of what Jesus Christ, his Son, has done for us.  We are eternally safe under his Fatherly care, and no matter what ‘strange’ difficulties and discouragements he might send us along the way, we can “know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”  We can, and must, truly relax in him; as well as take serriously his earnest urging to always stand firm for what we believe in the face of a hostile world (eg Romans 1 & 8; Ephesians 1, 2 & 6; Philippians 2 & 4; 1 Thessalonians 5; 1 Timothy 1 & 4;  etc, etc, to name just a few).  Let us resolve to be diligent readers, and obeyers, of God’s Word as we are encouraged daily by seeing the Holy Spirit using it (the ‘sword’ of the Spirit) to do its powerful work in us and through us.

– Bruce Christian