The Devotional – Fight the good fight of Faith (Part 6)

The Devotional – Fight the good fight of Faith (Part 6)

Comment: Preventive Maintenance, the discipline of keeping things that are not broken; working! As simple as it is, the regular oil changes on your vehicle is preventive maintenance. And even for some a facelift can be a form of preventive maintenance. So most of us are aware of the need to keep the working things working even if it is a VANITY. For the children of God there is another area of this preventive maintenance that is almost always ignored or better yet, misunderstood. Jude’s epistle covers it thoroughly. He begins with an earnest plea to contend for the common salvation and the need for every saint to protect his or her faith in the grace of God. His epistle ends with the challenge that we all face; building up ourselves in a “most holy” faith and “praying in the Holy Spirit”. Now do not miss this; these are the two areas of our common salvation that we neglect daily; faith and prayer in the Holy Spirit.

Devotional: Jude 1:20-21 – It is in my thoughts that when the children of God fall to apostasy or neglect, it is primarily because we fail to maintain our personal life with God. Faith is our response to God’s grace and when we fall from grace because we have returned to a system of works (Galatians 5:4) which is no longer faith and becomes a condition of false spirituality. Or we fail the grace of God because we neglect spiritual growth as we see in Hebrews 5:12 through Hebrews 6:1-8. 

Earnestly contend for your faith in God, it was once unholy but now it is HOLY, it became holy the day you received God’s gift of grace and believed in Jesus. Ephesians 2:1-10 makes this CLEAR to everyone who seeks to love God biblically. Our faith was once DEAD in trespass and sin, our faith once walked in accordance with the direction of the world’s faith. Our faith was trusting in the lusts of flesh, the eyes and the pride of life. We were children of wrath, just as the rest of the world.

OH! but God, who is rich in MERCY and because of His great love, even when we were lost and dead in trespass and sin made us alive in Christ, BY GRACE YOU HAVE BEEN SAVED. Saved; not for the purpose of returning to our old way of life and neglecting God and His Son Jesus, this is not a proper understanding of God’s grace GIFT! A proper understanding is Ephesian 2:10. This transformation of faith in God is a response by us PERSONALLY when we received God’s gift of grace. We became God’s workmanship in Christ and the works we now do are not of this world system; these are of God who has prepared all for us a supernatural way of living. The proper result is for you and me to walk in these works; that is to keep, maintain or contend for our personal and most holy faith as prescribed by Jude.