“Contend For The Faith”
Text: Jude 1-4
5-21-2023
In the name of our risen Lord Jesus, dear friends in Christ. When I was a boy, I used to love watching wrestling on TV with my Dad and my brothers. My sisters didn’t really care for it. I wonder why? I was in seventh heaven when we occasionally went to Cobo Hall in Detroit to watch it live. Wow! All these modern wrestlers on TV today with all their make-up and glitz are a bunch of sissies compared to my wrestling heroes! There were kids I knew at school who wrestled, but their kind of wrestling was silly to me. I mean, shoot, in their matches nobody ever got smacked with a folding chair or took a flying leap off the top ropes of the ring. In my book, their kind of wrestling wasn’t real. So imagine my horror when my Dad had to finally break the news that my beloved “Big Time Wrestling” was all fake. I was devastated! It was like being told your dog had died. But I had to face reality. My heroes were pretenders, not contenders.
I honestly didn’t like or understand the strange sport of real wrestling until my son got involved with it in about 5th grade. Slowly but surely, I began to appreciate the complexity and the strategy of the different holds and moves. It takes strength, strong will, and lots of practice to win that struggle called wrestling.
That is the picture that St. Jude is using in verse 3 of our text when he says, “contend for the faith.” The Greek word for “contend” was used to describe the struggle that takes place during a wrestling match. The root word is where we get our English words agony and agonize from. What do you do when you “agonize” over something? You struggle or “wrestle” with it in your mind. So, when Jude says to contend for the faith, he’s telling Christians to struggle for it, to wrestle for it.
Now why in the world would you have to wrestle for your faith? Because someone or something is trying to wrestle it away from you. The unholy trinity of the devil, the world and our sinful nature are in a wrestling match for our faith. They want to strip it away from our grip so that we’ll lose it and thus lose our salvation. Sadly, some Christians don’t realize this. They think that once you have been Baptized you don’t have to struggle to hang onto your faith. Because of that, all too many have been pinned to the mat by false teachings and they’ve given up.
You see, Jude was writing to Christians who were being challenged by a bunch of “contenders” who were actually “pretenders.” He says in verse 4 that these people, who claimed to be Christians, had slipped in secretly and were filling the minds of believers with all kinds of false doctrine. And it was threatening to loosen their grip on the pure Gospel. There was a spiritual wrestling match going on between true and false doctrine. So, like a coach on the sidelines, Jude was urging them to contend for the faith, to wrestle for the truth. It was crucial because if they gave up and lost this match, they would also lose their salvation.
Every generation of Christians has to contend for the faith against false doctrines. They did in Jude’s day. Martin Luther and the Reformers also had to wrestle against all kinds of false doctrine that had crept into the Church’s teachings. My question for us is: Do we Christians today have the guts to contend for the faith? Some of the comments that I hear from Lutherans leads me to believe that the answer is No. If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a hundred times that we focus too much on doctrine in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. Why don’t we just focus on the Gospel instead of wrestling over doctrine? But friends, our doctrine IS the Gospel! Doctrine is just a fancy word for the summary of teachings from the Bible that we believe and confess. That doctrine is so precious that it’s worth fighting for.
Like Jude, St. Paul also had to address this issue. In 1 Timothy 4:16 he writes, “Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers.” He clearly makes a connection between pure doctrine and salvation. Then in 6:12, he says, “Fight the good fight of the faith.” Guess what Greek word Paul uses there for “fight.” Yep. The same root word that Jude used when he said to “contend” for the faith. My point is that we regularly have to wrestle against false teachings for the pure doctrine. That’s a good thing. Let me make it clear that I’m not talking about getting into wrestling matches over insignificant, non-doctrinal issues. There’s a Latin word for that: “adiaphora.” Translated it means, “things indifferent.” In other words, it’s the stuff that hasn’t got anything to do with pure doctrine. For instance, God never gave us a command about what color to paint the church, or what time we should have services, or whether we use the piano, the organ, or a guitar. But listen closely. Even these adiaphora must be examined through the filter of pure doctrine. We have to ask, “Does it honor God and show proper reverence to Him? Will this action help me contend for the faith or will it hinder me and others?”
Having said that, though, we have to be careful and not label serious doctrinal issues as insignificant “adiaphora.” That’s what’s so insidious about false teachings. So often, they start out as small battles. And the tendency is to not address them. It’s similar to raising children. If you let the little things slip eventually, they’ll grow into big discipline problems. It’s much easier to wrestle with the little problems when they pop up rather than letting them intensify. That’s true of the false doctrine that we must wrestle against as we contend for the faith even within the LCMS. I could give you plenty of examples, but I guarantee they all started off as seemingly small challenges to wrestle with. Over the years I’ve talked with my fellow Pastors about disturbing doctrinal issues that have arisen. And some of those Pastors have encouraged me to not wrestle over these problems. To them, they’re just little bits of “adiaphora.” My response is simple: Look at what has happened in other church bodies where LGBTQ ideology has taken over. Do you think they suddenly woke up one day and said, “Hey, let’s allow homosexuals to be Pastors and have drag queens do the children’s messages? Let’s call it normal, rather than sinful.” No. It crept in and they skipped the small battles over pure doctrine which grew into all-out war. Folks, if we refuse to wrestle with serious doctrinal issues like these in our own church body, we may wake up some day and find that we’ve also lost our grip on the pure doctrine of the Gospel.
There’s a great line in the movie Heartbreak Ridge. The old Gunny-Sergeant has his platoon of young marines repeat the motto: “Surrender is not in our creed.” Maybe we ought to make that part of our daily routine as we contend for the faith? In other words, when we’re wrestling to keep a firm grip on pure doctrine, we cannot accept defeat. We cannot allow false teachings to pin us down and steal away the truth from us because our very salvation is at stake.
Why then do so many of us surrender and cry “uncle” so easily? The answer is simple. We’re weak and giving in is much easier than struggling to hold onto the purity of God’s Word. But there is a way to prevent that. In order for a wrestler to win his matches, he has to train. He has to get strong and stay tough. He has to learn the tricks of his opponent. He has to have confidence and a strong will to win. Ah, this is the area where we often fail isn’t it? We skip our training by the Holy Spirit. I harp on this a lot, but if you want your faith to be strong you need to regularly be in God’s Word. That includes your time here in worship and in Sunday School and Bible Class and privately on your own. Why is it that sleep, leisure time, hobbies, work, and a million other things can so easily wrestle us away from worship and Bible Study? The words of St. Jude are a call for us to fight back. “Contend for the faith,” he says. Don’t give in and don’t give up.
The more you train and practice with pure doctrine, the more confident and proficient you’ll be when your beliefs are challenged. It’s not a matter of winning an argument. No, we’re wrestling for the very truth on which our salvation lies. We believe and teach that Jesus Christ died for our sins. And that we’re justified before God by His grace without any merit of our own. And that God’s grace is delivered to us through His through His Word and Sacraments. And that God’s Word is totally without error and shouldn’t be tampered with. That is the essence of the pure doctrine that we have been blessed to receive. We dare not let down our guard and give even an inch of ground to any false teachings that threaten this truth.
Christian friends, we need each other’s support as we contend for the faith. We need fellow Christians, who confess the same doctrine, to encourage us when we’re feeling weak. Likewise, we need to be encouraging others when we see them weakening. We can use those words of Jude to urge one another to “Contend for the faith! Wrestle for that pure doctrine because it’s certainly worth it.” And we can pray. In my daily prayers, I ask God to keep my children and grandchildren in a church where His Word is taught in truth and purity and the Sacraments are administered as Christ instituted them. I pray the same for us as a church.
I just know that some of you are thinking, “But, Pastor, how can we be so sure that we have the pure doctrine and the other guy doesn’t?” Good question. And I’ll answer it the way Martin Luther did. “Show me in God’s Word where I’m wrong, and I will release my grip on our doctrine.” Personally, I have wrestled with the doctrine that we teach and I have found it to be true to God’s Word in every area. Every Christian in every Church ought to be doing this. By the power of the Holy Spirit, I encourage you to do the same. Convinced of God’s unerring truth, then, hold onto that pure doctrine and don’t allow anyone or anything to wrestle it away from you because your salvation depends upon it. May God grant us His divine power to stay strong, as together we daily contend for the faith. Amen.
Soli Deo Gloria!