Able To Keep You

Now all glory to God, who is able to keep you from falling away and will bring you with great joy into his glorious presence without a single fault. All glory to him who alone is God, our Savior through Jesus Christ our Lord. All glory, majesty, power, and authority are his before all time, and in the present, and beyond all time! Amen. Jude 24-25

JUDE’S LETTER BEGINS by telling us as believers that we are called and loved by our heavenly Father and that we are kept “safe in the care of Jesus Christ”(verse 2). Then he ends his brief letter with the assurance that God is able to keep us from falling away and will bring us into his glorious presence where no accusation of sin against us will stick.

In between these two assurances that believers are kept safe by God is the reminder Jude gives of the Israelites who were rescued from Egypt but were not kept due to their unfaithfulness and were destroyed (verse 5); angels who rebelled and are being kept, not for salvation, but for judgment (verse 6); and people in Jude’s day who claimed to be in Christ but who lived immoral, rebellious lives (verse 10). They would not be kept either, but were bringing about their own destruction.

It will take a work of God to keep your child spiritually alive and following Christ over the course of a lifetime, and to bring your child into the presence of God full of joy and without fear of condemnation. He is the giver of this life, the moment-by-moment sustainer of this life. Yet your child has a part to play also, as made clear by Jude: “But you, dear friends, must build each other up in your most holy faith, pray in the power of the Holy Spirit, and await the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ, who will bring you eternal life. In this way, you will keep yourselves safe in God’s love” (verses 20-21, emphasis added). Even as your child is being kept by God, he must keep himself in the love of God by putting himself among the people of God. As believers, we build one another up in faith by praying in the power of the Holy Spirit and by waiting expectantly for the day when God will bring us into his glorious presence.

Now all glory to you, God, who is able to keep ________ from falling away and will bring ________ with great joy into his glorious presence without a single fault. All glory to you who alone are God, our Savior through Jesus Christ our Lord. All glory, majesty, power, and authority are yours before all time, and in the present, and beyond all time! Amen.