Build, Pray and Keep

DEVOTION

JUDE

BUILD, PRAY AND KEEP

Jude 20-21

20 But you, dear friends, build yourselves up in your most holy faith and pray in the Holy Spirit. 21 Keep yourselves in God's love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life.

NIV

Done with the warning about the bad guys and now for the encouragement to the good guys, that would be us. So we are to build ourselves up in our most holy faith for one thing. That requires some action on our part, that is an active verb certainly not a passion one. We cannot just come to church on Sunday and hear some sermon and hope we have done enough to build ourselves up. This kind of construction needs daily work. We need to be in the Word of God each and every day of our lives. This would also mean that just reading it might not do the trick, but that we need to study and seek the help of the Holy Spirit in understanding how we apply the truth to our daily lives. It is just like we tell our children that they have to each good foods so they can grow up strong and healthy. If when children if we did not eat good foods we would grow up sick and weakly, so it is with the Word of God, we need to eat and digest it daily so we can build ourselves up, to be strong and healthy in our most holy faith. We should also pray in the Spirit, which is not pray in the flesh. Often times we can think that what we or someone we love needs, but that may not be the right thing, if we are thinking in human terms. We know that we have not because we ask not or we ask with wrong motives. Those wrong motives are usually generated by human thought. If on the other hand we pray in the Spirit, allowing him to direct our prayer to God, then we will be asking for exactly the right thing, and within the will of God the Father and we can then be assured that what we ask we will receive. Now we can get into a sticky part here as we see we are to keep ourselves in God’s love. Often we hear people say that God will keep us in his love. In the letter to the Romans we see the phrase or question, Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Then Paul goes on to list, trouble, hardship, persecution, famine, nakedness or a sword as things not able to separate us from his love. He goes on to state that nether death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present not the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, not anything else in all creation, will able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord. What he doesn’t say is we cannot separate us from the Love of God. Yes, God will also love us, but that does not mean we would always love God. If we do not keep ourselves in his love, we would be refusing that love, walking away, keeping ourselves from his love. So we must never allow anything including ourselves to make a wedge between us and God while we wait for the return of our Lord Jesus Christ who will take us to that place he has been preparing for us, that place of perfection, a paradise where we will spent all eternity with him. So we build, pray and keep.