But you, dear friends, build yourselves up in your most holy faith and pray in the Holy Spirit. Keep yourselves in God’s love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life ~ Saint Jude.
Jude knows the gospel: it is waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring us into the life of God. The mercy of Jesus is not dependent on who we are, but on who God is. We do not ask are we good enough to be brought into God’s life, but is God good enough to bring us into his life?
Our faith is the trust we place in the goodness of God being sufficient to rescue us even though we deserve nothing. We turn and trust the good news when we orient ourselves in a new way, adopting the life of God that we trust he wills to give us.
While Jude gets the gospel, in this passage he also concisely points us toward our formation in Christ when he instructs us to build ourselves up in the holy faith, pray in the Holy Spirit, and keep ourselves in God’s love. None of this careful attention to our formation merits the mercy of Jesus for which we wait, but it is what we do while we wait.
So much of the Christian voyage has been wrecked on failing to distinguish these two matters. Often, we see the association of what we must do to participate in our own formation, has, in fact, been linked to our reception of God’s mercy. The result is a form of legalism. Rather than a free gift, the grace of God becomes what we receive once we have done what is required.
On the other hand, we can see where Christian faith has neglected the serious work of formation, seeking only to fixate on the free gift of God’s grace. Any emphasis on being transformed and making progress through intentional submission to God’s work is portrayed as diminishing the freeness of God’s gift and an emphasis on works.
In these two verses Saint Jude sets us right: do your work of spiritual discipline while you wait for the mercy of God to bring you to his life.
Blog post of June 25, 2008, Greg Newton
Traveler's Journal 