Have you read the book of Jude lately? Probably not. It’s more often overlooked than read. After all, it’s only twenty-five verses long and it’s positioned in the Bible right before the very last book of the Bible, the book of Revelation. So it lies somewhat in obscurity. But it’s a powerful book and one that encourages us to grow in our faith and in our prayer life.
I encourage you to read the book of Jude, and as you do, I want you to focus on verse twenty, which says, “But you, dear friends, continue to build yourself up in your faith, and pray in the Holy Spirit.” Well, some of that may seem confusing, so I’m going to try to make it easy for you to understand. Ricky, on the “I Love Lucy Show” would always button-hole Lucy when she did something dumb, which was quite often, and say to her with an accusing voice, “Lucy! You’d better ‘splainin’ yourself!” So I’m going to see if I can do some “splainin” to make this verse easy for you to understand.
First of all, he says to “grow in your faith”, that is, make it stronger, strengthen it from what it is to something greater. How do you do that? Peter gives us an idea in 2 Peter 1:5-7. In this passage Peter says there are some Christian traits that we need to add to our lives, and each one is “stair-stepped” upon the other. Peter says we are to supplement our faith with things like goodness, knowledge, self-control, endurance, godliness, brotherly love, and a god-like kind of love. In other words, we are not to sit idle in our faith. We are to grow our faith, to exercise it and make it stronger than it already is.
