Love the Church- Part 3

Week 3: Love the Church…

because it’s a community fighting for
authenticity in a world of hypocrisy

Let’s pray:

God we come to you this morning and admit our weakness. We admit that in the battles of life we often fail to fight for truth and love like we ought to. We’ve laid our swords and shields down and we have suffered as a result. We thank you that you sent Jesus who fought on our behalf to deliver us from all our enemies. We pray now that you would truly give strength in this moment for us to hear your word and we might come out of this time encouraged and empowered to live for your glory. We pray for those that need to know Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord to see Him as glorious.

Good morning church family, and welcome to you if you are live streaming our service today too!

We are in the third week of a series called “Love the Church,” that’s kind of an extension to the previous 5-sermon series called “Love the Commandment.” In these series, we are still preaching “expositionally” in that we are seeking not to just take a topic and come up with something to say, but we are exposing parts of God’s word and bringing it to bear on our lives. We will get back to more “exegetical” or verse by verse teaching as we go through Genesis 37-50 and the story of Joseph, starting next week.

But, the big point of our current overall series, like I said the last two weeks, is that the 59 one another commands to Christians in the New Testament could be summed up as “Love one another,” or “Love the church!”

We started in the letter of Paul to Philemon seeing that the church is to be loved because it has the only true message and ministry of reconciliation. Then last week, we looked at John’s little letters in 2 & 3 John about how the church is to be loved because it is a community of family and friends walking together in the truth. This week we tackle a challenging and seemingly ominous letter called Jude, where we’ll see that the church should be loved because it’s a community fighting for authenticity in a world of hypocrisy.

Also, remember our goals for this series are:
Now one thing to say before we introduce the book of Jude, and that will tie into the message today, is that viewing the church as what it is called to be biblically always needs to be seen as aspirational. Otherwise we can get overly discouraged with ourselves or with the church - which would go against the whole point of this series! We need to be patient and realize that the three emphases we’ve put on the church each of these three weeks are like “squad goals.” What do I mean by that? Well, “squad goals” is a term I was taught by my always relevant teens, but didn’t fully understand until I googled it, that means:

So you can see in this series of slides what that means. My generation was fixated on the idea of the sitcom Friends. That picture of a group of friends was our squad goals.

And maybe the previous generation relates a bit more to the Golden girls, much in that same theme of what a group should aspire to be like in that season of life. I’m not saying that these are my current squad goals, just that for many people they were.

It could be sport teams with certain aspirations, or even a youth group….though I think Trent may have something to say about this particular aspiration for the youth group.

So, the picture of the community of the church we want, because it’s biblical, is essentially what I would call our church #SquadGoals:

Be patient, if you are working on reconciliation in relationships in the church, be patient if you are struggling to find a family here or friends here, and be patient in how you view people’s faith here - because we are all a work in progress. So today we are going for that last goal, looking at what it means to be a community of authentic faith. We’ll begin by looking at the introduction to this letter of Jude is verses 1-2:
The first thing we see is that we should:
There are hints of what authentic faith looks like even in the introductory blessing and prayer that Jude offers to the believers he is writing to. Think about it: his name is Jude, he’s the brother of James - the brother of Jesus Himself. That means that Jude also is the brother of Jesus. And he calls himself the servant or the “slave” is the actual Greek term, of Jesus.

There is no other form of faith, or trust, that I know of more authentic than this. If you have a brother in the room or watching online, you know this. Would you ever in a million years think to call your brother what Jude calls Jesus over and over again in this letter: LORD? Would you ever, ever, ever call yourself his slave? All I can say is that my brother would never do this, and I would never do this to my brother. So something real and genuine must have happened for Jude to call himself the slave of Jesus! Slavery is a horrible term, and rightfully so, but here Jude takes it, redeems it, and says that his brother Jesus has been so worthy and amazing in taking him from being a slave to sin, that he is now a slave to Him. That’s what I would call the only good thing about the idea of slavery that God can take it and use it to teach us something about how terrible of a master our sin is, and how gracious of a master the Lord Jesus is. And that’s what Jude continues with as he affirms that he is a willing slave to Jesus because he is one of those that has been “called” or literally “summoned” by God through Jesus.

That’s another hint at authentic faith, not something you are trying to put on and pretend about. Jude is saying that his readers had received a summons from God though the gospel, the Holy Spirit worked in their hearts and they obeyed the gospel and came to know the mercy, peace, and love of God the Father so that they would be kept as Jesus’s beloved forever and ever. Jude is praying God’s blessing over these believers. He will go on to tell us about the crazy, confusing situation in their church, and he prays that they will know that from the beginning their fight is authentic because it is a faith that God started, and God will keep with His mercy, peace, and love pouring out on them. Much like we saw in the letter of 2 John where John says:
So for them and for us, it’s important that we hear Jude’s words this morning. Amidst the craziness and confusion of COVID, our country, and the cataclysmic year of 2020, I pray right now with Jude for you, may mercy, peace, and love be multiplied to you! Later, Jude is going to call them to be merciful to doubters, to have peace despite division, and to keep themselves in God’s love. But they need to know, just like we do, that God’s good news is that an authentic faith is always the mercy of God given to us and the peace of God given to us, birthed out of the love of God for us in Christ despite the fact that we don’t deserve any of it. If we are struggling with that currently, maybe we think we don’t need mercy, have been looking for peace in other things, and doubting the love of God for us in our current climate.

This is so important! You can’t love the church without being in the church because you have an authentic faith that has been started by God.

One other thing. We don’t know much about the believers that Jude is writing to, but we know that God had set His affections on them. And we also know that they were, like I have been saying the past two weeks, a localized congregation as a church. This is easy to miss, but so crucial to an authentic faith. Jude is going to describe inauthenticity in the faith of some in their church and call them to discern. It’s so important to see that the authenticity of our faith is not left to us in isolation.

Jude will call us to contend for the faith shortly and that starts with the community of believers you are in.

As one great preacher said, your profession of faith is only as good as the piece of paper it’s written on. Or as Stephen the Levite put it on the album “The Church,”
And that is for both members of churches and teachers in churches. Authentic faith is confirmed through community. Praise God that He provides all of us the safety of a community to check something so important to our souls as the authenticity of our faith that determines our eternal destiny. We should love this and not fear this. This makes Jude’s next point all the more poignant as he tells them that they are fighting for authenticity in the truth:
Read with me in the next two verses of Jude:
After his introduction, Jude now moves to his motivation in writing this letter. He had, in the same love that he referenced in the beginning, wanted to write a whole letter full of the love and truth about the salvation that is held in common between him and his reads, and all true Christians. But, there was a problem. There was controversy. And there was a bigger problem. The controversy wasn’t being seen or dealt with. It’s crazy to think that there could be teachers in a church doing what he describes here: denying Jesus as master, perverting the grace of God, and there’s more to come. But for now, what is the heart of what he is saying? He is calling the church to “contend for the faith.”

To contend here literally means to wrestle, and the early readers of this would have had in mind the Greek Olympics, or maybe Jacob wrestling with God in the story of Genesis. Some kind of hand to hand combat that is tough, sweaty, and grueling.

So he calls them to fight for authenticity by fighting for truth. Because there can be no authentic faith without a faith that is founded in the truth. The truth that he says was “once for all delivered to the saints.” So, he’s not talking about a feeling of faith or a sentiment of trust, but a body of truth. Jesus Himself said in John 17 that unity in the church would be based on truth, and that truth is God’s word.

A couple things to say here. First of all, maybe you hear this and go “Oh no! We are getting the guns out.” We all have had the unfortunate occasion to interact with those who are “contending for the faith,” when really they are just contending to be right. So let me clear. Jude is not saying to be a jerk for Jesus. Let that be a word for anyone in particular right now, but I promise I’m not thinking of a anyone but myself! Here is one way that has helped me to figure out what to fight for over the years. Maybe it will help you. It’s called the church unity chart:

I love this because it puts things in perspective for us. Is the issue that I am ready to fight for a “gospel issue?” That could be theologically or that could be in practice. The things we should be fighting over are the things consistent with what we sang already this morning, a song based on the Apostles Creed. That creed reads:

The Apostles Creed

I believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth.
I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again;
he ascended into heaven,
he is seated at the right hand of the Father,
and he will come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting.
Amen.

So, we do have to wrestle with the truth and for the truth of the faith. Because to be authentic Christians we have to acknowledge that the truth matters. It is the deposit of the faith that we are to guard and the church is called a, “pillar and ground of truth,” in 1 Tim 3:15. The church is to hold up and put on display the truth of who God is and what He’s done. In 2018, a ministry did a survey that they called the “State of Theology”:

The whole point was to check what people the US, and even people that call themselves Christians, believe and see how that goes with the truth. The results were somewhat shocking. Here’s a couple:

• 53% said the Bible is not true
• 60% of people agreed that truth is subjective
• 69% disagreed that the smallest sin leads to God’s judgment
• 78% agreed that Jesus was the first created being of God.

So, we have a culture that doesn’t believe Jesus is God, that the Bible is true, that there even is truth, or that sin leads to judgment!

If the stats alone don’t hit you, then watch this brief video to see people’s faces themselves as they share their confusion:

(VIDEO)

The reality is that we are surrounded by people everyday that are confused. And that makes it all the more important that Christians are fighting to make sure we have the authentic truth as given once and for all by God. And that we are sharing that truth with others. Here’s one more set of stats to drive this home:
Notice the bottom two stats. More millennials think that it is wrong to contend for people to believe the gospel and come to share the “common faith” that is in Christ. Please know if you are younger than me, I am not sharing this to criticize you, though based on the last stat you might think so anyway! I am sharing this to encourage you from Jude that this is inconsistent with what you believe. Contending for the faith is not for boomers, gen x’ers, or for any age group. It’s not for extroverts, introverts, or specific personality types. It’s not even just for pastors, leaders, or people with certain gifts in the church. Jude writes to say that it is for the whole church to be theologians and to know, believe, and share the authentic truth of God. We have to fight for this.

But, I think if we are honest, the majority of the things that have historically have got us hot under the collar are the things that should be under the category of charitable disagreement, or even worse, things that are preference issues. While people are confused and lost , many times we want to fight over less important things as the people of God.

And Jude would tell us to fight for something that matters. Let this be a word for all of us right now. There are so many things that people are fighting about! Masks, no masks. School, no school. Individual rights, or giving up our rights to love others. This is even dividing the church broadly and being a trial. People find the response of their favorite teacher (once again an online teacher that they in most cases don’t know personally) and argue for their side of how the church should respond. And friends, there truly are arguments on all sides that are valid. Last week I watched three different in-depth interviews with three churches that are responding differently in this climate. After each of them, I said, “They have good points!” Much like Proverbs 18:17 says, “The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.”

My question is for us as a local church: is the disruption of COVID and the way we navigate it really an apostles’ creed gospel issue? Is it worth dis-unifying with your church family? Is it worth losing friends over?

Now I fully acknowledge that I’m sure we as leaders in the church have made mistakes as we have gone through this unprecedented time in church history. However, I know the leaders at FCBC have been trying to make wise, loving decisions, informed by God’s word, in counsel with one another, listening to members of our church family, and taking in as much of the wider context as we possibly can. So, let me ask something this morning, can we fight about the things that matter?

But is Jude even calling us as believers to merely contend for the truth of the gospel? Is he is actually doing more than saying to fight for propositions or truth claims? I believe he is. Jude is telling them and us that we should love the church by fighting for authenticity in both truth and life:
You see, Jude spends only a little time in this letter challenging the believers in the church to contend for truth, though he does. But what he wants to get to the heart of, in a loving but very confrontational way, is the need to contend for an authentic life along with an authentic truth. The majority of this letter is Jude describing the characteristics and condemnation of the false teachers and those that would be like them. That started in verse 4, but continues from verses 5-13. Let’s read the bigger portion of this letter now:

Wow, those are some harsh words! It’s tough for us to hear these kinds of things in today’s world. It truly sounds like an annoying iPhone alarm that is going off over and over again and we can’t shut it off. And it seems so unloving and so insensitive, regardless of who it is talking about to say things so directly about a group of people or anyone! Jude is pulling no punches! He is using the false teachers that are in the midst of the church to help the believers see what an authentic life that corresponds with the truth really looks like, because they aren’t seeing it. So what does he say?

He uses Old Testament stories that the readers would have been familiar with to help them to catch his point. Notice the characteristics that he draws out about these teachers who do not have authentic faith:

• They live for their own passions and pervert grace
• They have unbelieving hearts like Israel
• They are rebellious like fallen angels
• They are immoral like the cities of Sodom & Gomorrah
• The reject authority and place their own dreams over God’s word
• They are ignorant and arrogant, blaspheming power spiritual realities they dot understand.
• They have murderous hatred in their hearts like Cain
• They are motivated by greed and personal gain
• They have no shame in their sin
• They are selfish and produce nothing good for God’s people

Last week, I said (prematurely I think) that I wasn’t worried about deception from the truth, and that I was more worried about people being deceived into a loose affiliation with their family and friends of the local church. But I take that back! Because Jude tells me to in his letter! Let me apply it to us.

I know that many of us have been separated due to health concerns, and the pandemic. And that has led to many listening to various podcasts, live streams, and teachers. But I want to encourage you to also be wise. The Lord never intended for us to listen to “our favorite” preacher on podcasts as an example of authentic faith. If, there were teachers going unnoticed in the congregation that Jude writes to and they were known by those folks, how much less can you really know the people you podcast. Their theology, their motives, and whether their life is an authentic faith or not. This week I listened to several livestreams of the most popular pastors on their YouTube accounts. Man, it can be so subtle. Please, can I implore you to do two things? First, ask questions in our community. Honestly, I would love it if my inbox was filled up with questions about truth. If every time you watched a livestream or podcast and had questions you sent it to one of us as pastors. It gives us the privilege and opportunity to talk to you, hear what you’re hearing and talk about whether it is good, healthy truth in line with the gospel or not. Maybe some folks think we don’t want to be bothered, but that is one thing I personally love! So email away!

Second, ask this one simple question if you are listening outside of the context of your church community with leaders you know and that know you. Does this teaching, at the core of it, glorify God’s grace and point to me giving him more glory? Or does it subtly, even with biblical language promote a gospel of self, a “gospel” that promotes my personal ability to boast in my success, health, wisdom, relationships, experience or any other gain I get from that teaching? I watched one this week that seemed so good, it was an ‘out with the old and in with the new’ kind of message, based on Romans 12. Let you mind be transformed from the inside out and not be conformed to this world from the outside in. It all sounded good. But as I continued to listen the problem was that the core of the message was do whatever it takes to get what you want or need for your personal mental health. It even said to not “catch” like a “virus” the negativity off other people to make this happen. There may be some truth to that, but the problem is that it ultimately appeals to self. If you are bad for me in my opinion, I cut you out of my life so I don’t conform to you. But what about God’s word that says for His glory we are to bear with one another when we are even having a tough effect on each other’s lives. You see, this is how people end up leaving friendships, marriages, and other relationships in a way that doesn’t glorify God or walk in obedience to His expressed will, and can think they are obeying Him! Jude says false teaching and false teachers have destructive results!

But it’s not just the false teachers. This letter is a warning to the believers and to us to not follow their example.

Jude would say to the believer listening to these teachers that sometimes we can’t spot the inauthenticity because we are steeped in inauthenticity ourselves.

And we need to be careful in terms of doing this even as we talk about having an authentic faith. Even our search for authenticity can lead us to a biblically inauthentic faith.

You see there are very popular counselors and teachers saying things like this:

“Authenticity is the daily practice of letting go of who we think we’re supposed to be and embracing who we are.”

On one level I really like that, but it falls short of Biblical authenticity. If the purpose of my life is to just “be real,” what purpose does that really serve?

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the word "authentic" means "true to one's personality, spirit, or character." It also means "made to be or look just like an original." By these definitions, we can safely say that being authentic means being "true to the original.” We need to understand that being authentic doesn't mean acting in line with how you feel. It means making your feelings follow your true identity. But if like the false teachers in Jude, my “being authentic" leads to selfish behavior, sinful desires and passions, or doing what I want instead of what God wants, then I’m being authentic to the wrong “me.” Because scripture says there are actually two versions of myself as a believer.

One passage that sums it up well is Ephesians 4:22-24, in which believers are called, “to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.”

So there is a type of being authentic that can result in a never ending search for yourself or what you want, or what you can do to be better. And let’s be honest, that’s simply called American culture. But I’ve noticed that leads to people believing a gospel of self-expression and a gospel of self-authentication that has no morality, no righteousness, etc. Being authentic to yourself in Christ is walking in holiness and righteousness and dying to the old desires and living in the new desires.

If we want to really “know ourselves,” we have to come to a place where we don’t like the old self and want to live in the new self. John Calvin said this hundreds of years ago when he said:

“Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other...indeed, we cannot aspire to Him in earnest until we have begun to be displeased with ourselves.”

Otherwise we fall into a form of spiritual pride that the false teachers that Jude writes about were expressing and that he is warning the church not to take on. A version of ourselves and our lives where we are able to live for ourselves and find our purpose in that.

In his book The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness, Tim Keller writes, “Spiritual pride is the illusion that we are competent to run our own lives, achieve our own sense of self-worth, and find a purpose big enough to give us meaning in life without God.”

This is so easy to do, it’s all around us, because we live in a world full of man trying to claim his own way, and his own goodness but always desperately falling short. That’s where Jude heads next as we see that we should love the church as we fight for authenticity in a world full of hypocrisy:
Let’s see that in verses 14-19:
Look at the main word in this passage and you will see where I am going.

UNGODLY - the main point. Jude moves from false teachers to all. He shows us that not only the teachers and not only the church, but the whole world is full of hypocritical lives going against the truth and life that God calls for in scripture. A life lived without reference to God. Because that is the question in all of this of Jude to his hearers. Why are you following them? What about God - like my friend Ryan likes to say. In our worship, in our teaching, and in our living, what about God? What does He want? That’s not often a question that people seem to be asking or paying attention to. And that is being seen in this church here.

This hits at the heart of one of the main criticisms that people have and why they say they don’t love the church: hypocrisy.

This is why people are burning bibles in Portland. Because, whether right or wrong, they view Christianity as hypocrisy, and hypocrisy, whether real or perceived, always breeds rebellion.

So I want to talk about that for a minute and show why I think that we can actually say that we should love the church rather than hate it for its struggles with hypocrisy.

As Christians, I believe we can embrace our hypocrisy in the sense that we can admit it. We’ve already looked in this series how the church has failed historically with slavery, abuse, and so many other ways. We need to accept that we also fail to live out an authentic faith on an individual and local church level. We are not perfect. We can admit that to you if you are not yet a follower of Jesus. We have one source of the truth - the faith once delivered to the saints, but we don’t always live up to it:

You see we have one truth that can result in hypocrisies.
All we need to do is take the major thrusts in this letter, where Jude says to be have mercy, be at peace, and have love abounding in the believers lives. If we just take those three things we will all be able to admit that we have been hypocrites in some form this week. I’m sure you and I have failed to be merciful this week, I’m sure we have not lived in the peace given by God, and I’m sure that love has not always been abounding. So there we have it; we are hypocrites.

But, here is the thing. I actually think we, and the world, can still love the church despite this. Why? Because our hypocrisy is clear. We have one truth and we can be called out on it. We have definable ways that we as believers ought to live lives of faith. So we should invite and welcome others to point that out, so that we can live more authentically. And many times the world does just that! And that’s okay, welcome it.

But as that is pointed out, let me point out that the world doesn’t have anything better to offer. If you are searching and looking for authenticity, the world around us with all its ungodliness just makes it harder. Because when you take away the one source of truth and multiply it to many, chaos ensues:
As people say that they need to speak “their truth” and live out their “true selves,” it devolves into a situation where there is no standard, but then we see people break the standards of their own truth and what they claim is authentic as well. A well-known TV hostess, who was seen as the most loving and kind and tolerant person - that was her authentic truth - was recently called out because of abuse to her staff. There is hypocrisy even when people take away the standard of the authentic truth of the gospel. And just multiply that in society right now and that is why we have the chaos we see. Like the book of Judges in the Old Testament, everyone does what “is right in their own eyes,” and the results are not pretty.

So, if you criticize Christianity for our hypocrisy, we understand. We say hands down, you are right. We hold up the white flag and say, thank you for pointing that out, we can live more authentically. But, is that what you really see in the world? Look at how people hide, get defensive, apologize but don’t really apologize. Listen, leave all that chaos and come join the church as a band of hypocrites being brought further into authenticity.

And I have good news for you. One day all hypocrisy will be judged. Christians who are admitting their failures and others who don’t admit theirs. Jude says here, it’s not about your judgment, or my judgment, but one day the Lord Jesus will judge all of our “faiths” to see which was real and genuine. Christians will be held accountable. And again, the world can’t offer that kind of true justice. There is no one in many worldviews that will hold anyone accountable for “their truths” or how they lived, and so there can never be true justice that so many today want.

We should love the church because in a world full of hypocrisy there is actually hope for real justice through the truth it holds and justice that will come despite hypocrisy.

Now, you might be a bit weary of this letter now. That’s a lot and that is intense. Let me apply it briefly and give us some hope and good news. Because Jude moves to an encouragement and a praise as were end talking about how we can fight for this authentic faith:

He tells us one command with three parts. Keep yourselves in the love of God is the command, worked out through building yourselves up in your most holy faith, praying in the Spirit and waiting for the mercy of Jesus. I don’t have time to say a lot on this, but I just want to apply it by saying, we as a church have tried to cultivate a way for us to do this in the next season of church life. As we enter the study of the life of Joseph, who had a real fight for authentic faith in his life. We want to help us do this. So if you get the discipleship guide that we handed out early out I will walk you through that quickly.

The admin staff, Jason and others have done a great job preparing this and you can see the contents of it at the beginning.

To build yourselves up in the truth of the fight, we have a reading guide and resources on pages 5-6 that you can start right away in. This week we’ve suggested reading the whole back story in Genesis 12-37 as we prepare to go through this section of scripture:

In addition there are guides for each week, each sermon where you can reflect, journal, talk about things in community both in families and Life Groups. There are also prayers written that you can pray in the Spirit as Jude tells us to.

There is more we could say, and so many ways we could apply fighting to keep yourselves in the love of God, but we’ll leave it at that today. Next Jude tells us to fight to keep others in the love of God:

Again, there are so many ways we could apply this. But I want to encourage you to do it in one way. I wonder if anyone can guess what I’ll say here:
Yes I know there is COVID, but as we plan for the fall (and there will be a brochure about that next week), plan to get yourself in a group where you can have the relational context to show mercy, encourage each other in the peace of the Lord, and love each other with all the 59 one-anothers of the New Testament. I really wish every member or attender at FCBC was in a Life Group before COVID because I think it would have made it so much easier to navigate and just go into “house church” mode until we could gather on Sundays again. So let’s learn from that and do that starting this fall, while still gathering on Sundays.

Finally, Jude tells us to remember that Jesus fought for our faith, to keep us in the love of God:

This is a beautiful and powerful way to end this letter. Jude began with a prayer of blessing and ends with a praise to the God who can bless. He says, look at God who has all dominion, power, and authority. If you are sitting there thinking, I don’t know if I can do this fight anymore, Jude calls us to look at Jesus Christ. He has not only all the power, but the ability to keep you. He will present you, despite your lack of authentic faith at times in your journey, before the throne of God as faultless, spotless, and blameless. All because He fought for you through the cross!

Remember that in our struggle and fight in this world today. And to close I want to point to an example of Jesus’ faithfulness to encourage us that this will be the case.

Many of you know that during our Ecclesiastes series Jason shared an interview with one of our older members, Clair Jones, who was 99 at the time. Sadly on a human loss level, he passed away just the the other day. To honor him and also show that his being kept by the Lord, and what he tells us to do is an echo of Jude, I want to play a brief portion of that interview again today. Here are the words of someone kept by the Lord to the end:

(VIDEO)

May God give us all grace to be kept like Clair, to love Jesus in return for His great love to us in keeping us, and to have an authentic life in Jesus Christ to the end, or until He returns. Let’s pray.