Meditations in Jude

Jude’s epistle is one of those writings that can be read in a matter of minutes.  If you happen to have legalistic tendencies that compel you to read the Bible daily so as to feel like you’re right with God, you might have read Jude many times!  

Hopefully, you DON’T read your Bible for some sense of righteousness—rightness before God can only be found in Christ.  Hopefully, you read the Bible out of a desperate desire to hear from and know God and His ways.  

On that note, I’d like to invite you into my pursuit of our God and His ways via my reflections on Jude.  If you read this, you’re more than welcome to read along with me.  While I’ll be doing my reflections in a linear fashion, I would encourage you to read this little letter on your own or with others.  Why?

My experience is that many men and women can “read” the Bible just fine.  Outside of a few mispronunciations and working around some strange sentence structure (in certain translations), most people can digest the text so as to understand the essence of what’s being said.  There ARE a few exceptions where the text is confusing in its content (some of which are actually in Jude), but even those exceptions need not interfere with our reflective reading of the Scripture…as I hope to show you.

Where many people struggle is in training themselves to extract devotional thoughts to ponder and meditate upon.  Many find themselves bogged down in what they DON’T understand and let it interfere with what they CAN understand.  How incredibly sad!  The Enemy takes pleasure in your frustration over a fixable problem.

So give yourself permission to NOT understand everything.  Don’t let the Enemy receive glory and pleasure from your frustration in reading the Bible.  Instead, let’s see what can be learned by prayerfully reading the text.  Perhaps by following how I’m reading through Jude, some of you might be able to train yourself to better see things that are worthy of your reflection so that you can then ultimately act on your meditations.

I hope this is a way I can shepherd you through reading the Scriptures well.  But be warned…this isn’t a text/language study and cultural considerations will rarely be addressed. This is a prayerful/reflective engagement of the text.  More to come...