Earnestly Contend for The Faith

This phrase keeps running through my head lately. Well, for the last couple of days. I read something someone wrote on a blog about “earnestly contending for the faith” as being a matter of opposing false doctrine. For years I have accepted that indeed this is all there is to contending for the faith, i.e. apologetically accurate arguments against false teaching. But I was listening to Art Katz give a blistering critique of the Toronto Blessing the other night in a sermon called “Holiness or Blessing” and he said something that hit me right in the gut and went into my kidneys. He said, “It’s not the doctrines we have to contend for, it’s the faith.”
I started thinking about that phrase. He’s right, Jude didn’t say to earnestly contend for the doctrines, he said contend for the faith. There are a plethora of verses that teach us about right doctrines and to contend for those, but I’m not 100% convinced that this is one of them. Art went on to say that he wasn’t opposed to defending doctrine, but that something even greater was at stake than mere doctrine. I re-upped my study on the word faith today because of these thoughts and found what I already suspected I would.

Before I go any further, let me say I am absolutely sold out to sound, biblical doctrine and that is a major reason why I have parted from the goof-ball movements in charismatica. But the biggest reason isn’t even over doctrine. It’s over the issue of faith. What do I mean by that? Hold on, we’ll get there in a minute, but first I’d like to give the greek word that is translated ‘faith’ and it’s verb tense that is translated ‘believe’, or ‘believed’. For ‘faith’ it’s the word pistis and for ‘believed’ it’s the word pist-yoo-o. It’ll matter later…

I’d like to start with the bible’s clearest statement on what faith is. Hebrews 11:1. “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” We quote this all the time and never get it into our heads what it really means. The word faith speaks of an inner knowing of something to be absolutely true even though we don’t see it. The Strongs says, “persuasion” and “a moral conviction of a religeous truth”. It’s almost identical to the greek word for ‘believe’. Actually it is the same word…I think that ‘believe’ is just the same word only in verb form. Believing is faith in action, putting the rubber to the road.
The word ’substance’ speaks of an under girding support, like a cement foundation for a house. The word ‘hope’ here means “confident expectation of a sure thing”. So what do these things mean when we plug the definitions back in and read it in a sort of amplified way? “Inner knowledge and persuasion of a religious truth is what supports and is the foundation of our confident expectation of what we don’t see with our eyes.” Faith is an “inside job”. It’s being persuaded by God the He is. Faith is the very life blood of the christian walk. Without faith, we’re dead and without hope.

Once again, this isn’t designed to be a treatise on doctrine. I’ll take that up later…actually, I’m already doing it on other subjects and that will continue to be the main thrust of what I do here. Doctrine is not, I repeat, not unimportant. It’s the framework and structure of how to live. So don’t respond to me by telling me that I’m downplaying doctrine. Our doctrines are the fences that our Shepherd has put up to keep us safe from the Wolf and his wolves. I just want to address what Jude was really talking about in this statement of his.

In Hebrews 11 it goes on to say that a bunch of folks did things by faith, not by doctrine or apologetical persuasion but by being persuaded by the Spirit of God to do something. Just as a quick note, in the bible when men disobeyed the Spirit of God’s instructions the judgment of God was often quicker to come than just disobeying the Law…though that often had quick and severe consequences. In other words, there no real dichotomy between word and Spirit, as if one is more important to follow than the other. It is BOTH, and they are inseparable. But I digress…
It says in Romans 4:3 that “Abraham pist-yoo-0′d God…”. We are later in this chapter told that we are sons of Abraham not by phsical decent, but by this same active belief in God, a belief that actually does something in our lives, or rather causes us to do something. It says righteousness was credited to him by this faith.
Without faith it is hard to please God….no wait, that’s the emerging church’s version. It is IMPOSSIBLE to please Him without faith. We have to have residing in us an absolute, rock solid and unshakeable inner knowledge in our spirit that He is real and is who He says He is. Otherwise He is insulted. This, my friends, is what Jude was telling us to contend for, that intangible, deep inner conviction which is our very life in Christ, given to us by His awesome Grace. Saints, I’m talking about the Life of God in you. I’m talking about what makes you live, move and have your BE-ing.
Now I don’t believe that Jude did not have doctrine in mind at all. But I believe he was more upset about the life of the church being killed as a result of certain doctrines from certain men. What Jude was saying was to conted for the Life of God in us by killing anything that comes to steal, kill or destroy it. False doctrines can and will do that. He also spoke of pulling people out of sin so as to rescue them from backsliding into hell. But do you see my point? His protective nature had to do with keeping Life alive, as wierd as that may sound. Now, whatever it is that gets in the way of it, that is what has to go down to the mat. It’s not just a matter of correct doctrine, but the very life of God being altered off course in a Body that is supposed to represent Him in the earth. That can’t happen when bad teachings come and alter that Life, or when immorality abounds. But is wasn’t a fight against bad doctrine and sin just to fight bad doctrine and sin; it was that those things were choking out the Life. It’s like having a brain that has a messed up spinal cord. The brain can’t communicate to the rest of the body to perform even elementary functions when the nerve relay systems are blocked. False doctrine can put a Body out of joint and make it bedridden, for sure, and sin ends in death!

What about us? We may have our doctrines down, but does that guarantee that His Life is unobstructed in us? Does doctrinal “orthodoxy” mean anything when you’re life doesn’t look or sound like His Life? Is it more important to have “correct, historical orthodoxy” and a dead church that serves no eternal purpose, or a church that doesn’t have it all straight but is on fire for God, feeds the poor and preaches the gospel to “those in chains”? I’m not saying that either one is an ideal situation and that neither of them should change, but I’d rather go to a church with a few fruits and nuts than to some dead, so-called orthodox church that goes verse by verse at a snails pace and puts you to sleep phsically and spiritually because, as Karl Barth said, they have no inner relation to the content of what is preached. It’s just mechanical, robotic and dead, though true. It’s easier to tone down a fire than to warm a corpse. It’s easier to teach on fire people the right way to go about things than to get the “chosen frozen” out of their tomb (church) and out making a difference, living the life with fire. I’m talking about faith that is alive, not doctrine that is true and affecting nothing!!!

Besides, who gets to corner the market on what is considered “orthodoxy” anyway? But I digress…

I’m contending for the Life. Zeal. Fire. Heat, sweat, tears, burning hearts. The Holy Spirit came into the upper room before there was ever a Westminster Confession. In fact, the apostles didn’t even have perfectly sound doctrine while preaching and driving out demons, healing sick/lepros people and rasing the dead (matt. 10:7-9) under Jesus’ covering. He was constantly having to reprove them and correct them. Imagine that. They still had a wrong view of the kingdom of Israel’s restoration (acts 1). They still wanted to be shown the Father even after all Jesus had shown them (jhn 14:8). They still battled the fear of man and falling back into Judaism (gal. 2:11>), even as being the very chosen apostle of Christ!! And yet, God was able to use them and straighten them out along the way because they had hearts set on God. That is what keeps a man in fellowship with God, i.e. faith that abides in Him, and He in us. When this is so, faults will come, but they won’t take root long. That which abides will fix it. Don’t forget Jesus’ sobering words to the church in Ephesus. Correct doctrines have never helped me resist sin. They’ve never brought me to tears in groanings which cannot be uttered. Doctrines have never spoken to my heart those convicting words that change the course of my life and bring me to repentance. These things were the work of a Living God, by His Spirit and they all happened before I even knew a lick about right doctrine. I was saved without a knowledge of the Trinity. I was saved before hearing what “justifacation by faith” even meant. It was all just christian-ese to me. I was born again independant of correct, credal doctrines of the nature of man and God. I was saved, born again that is, because A LIVING GOD STEPPED DOWN FROM HEAVEN AND SHOWED ME I WAS A SINNER DESERVING HELL AND THAT HE WOULD SAVE ME IF I WOULD GIVE MY WHOLE LIFE TO HIM IN ABSOLUTE REPENTANT ABANDON!!!

I’m saved because God gave me His Life, His grace to live by. All the correct doctrines have been established since then and have given me, in some cases, a renewed sense of awe of my God but this happens in even human relationships. The longer I know my wife and the more I find out about her, the more I love her. The more I find out just how much she loves me, the greater my love for her grows. So it is with God. Theology has deepened my love of God. Knowing His word (as much as He let’s me understand, that is) has been the anchor of my soul and has put something in me which God can draw from and as Jesus said, the Holy Spirit reminds me of those things which He has taught me. “Even at night, my heart instructs me” is what the psalmist said. I love the doctrines…but first things first saints. Jesus’ gripe with Ephesus was that they had all their doctrine straight as an arrow and were experts in spotting false prophets, teachers and apostles. Jesus gave them props for that, but His main issue with them was that their first love was somewhere, missing as it were. They left it somehow. Have you maintained all the things that the Ephesians had while doing the same thing they did?

LIFE!! Are you flourishing in this Life of His, or are you so carnal and cold that you have no idea what I’m even talking about? Do you have correct doctrine, yet watch and listen to filth on TV? Is your musical diet an abomination to God and an offense to His Spirit, which Paul told us not to grieve? Have you so grieved the Life of God that He no longer makes Himself known to you in that personal way that He used to? Maybe it ain’t sin, just busyness….the cares of this life are choking out the word. Get those thorn bushes out of your soil and re-cultivate holiness and closeness with your God. Are you listening to or watching things which make it impossible to keep a pure thought life? Get rid of it! EARNESTLY CONTEND FOR THE FAITH!!

See what I’m after here?

I love you all, whoever you are that’s reading this, and I’m only trying to make sure that every part of the Body that I’m connected to is thriving in the Life of God.
May God richly bless and bestow a huge downpour of His love and powerful grace upon you today…

mark jr.