Proclaimer Blog
Don’t try to be relevant!
I recently preached at a friend’s church on a text he assigned me: Jude 17-25, at the end of a short series in the church on Jude.
The big thing that struck is how remarkably similar our situation in the UK right now is to the situation Jude was addressing, right down to specific details:
• Some ungodly people have got into the church and are teaching believers that they can go lax on morality, especially sexual immorality (vs.4 & 7).
• Some believers seem to be shaken by this, and are beginning to wonder whether the apostles were really the ones led by the Spirit, or whether this new teaching is actually Spirit-inspired (v.17).
That would not have seemed as obviously relevant to the times in the UK fifty years ago as it does today.
Jude’s pastoral response is just as specific. Although the verses in question aren’t the easiest to interpret, most likely he tells believers how to relate to three kinds of people in this situation:
• v.22: believers who are beginning to wonder if the apostles had it right after all (“My daughter is so happy with her same-sex married partner; can it be so wrong after all?)
• v.23a: church-members who have gone a step further and are taking serious steps into immorality (“I’ve decided that God won’t mind if I have an affair; I’m really lonely, and my marriage is dying anyway”)
• v.23b: the very teachers of the immorality themselves, and their followers.
This reminds us of a crucial truth about the relevance of Scripture, that all of us need to stay convinced of:
Relevance in preaching is like happiness. The people who most keenly seek after it for its own sake never really find it.
The preacher who is desperate to be relevant is usually embarrassingly outmoded before he even stands up to speak.
But the preacher who gives himself to the task set before him – to listen to this text in its own right, to ask first of all what God was doing in it back there and then – will discover extraordinary relevance to the details of our lives. Be brave enough to dig down deep enough into Scripture, and then suddenly a really powerful spark will jump across the gap between then and now.