#DailyDevotion What Are You Doing While Waiting On The LORD?

Jude 20–25

²⁰But you, dear friends, building yourselves up on your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, ²¹keep yourselves in God’s love, as you look for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to give you everlasting life. ²²Some people are in doubt — pity them, ²³snatch them from the fire, and save them. Pity others with fear as you hate even their clothes stained by their flesh. ²⁴To Him who is able to keep you from falling and have you stand without a fault and with great joy before His glory, ²⁵to the only God, Who saves us through Jesus Christ our Lord — to Him be glory, majesty, power, and authority — as it was from everlasting, so be it now and forever. Amen.

So what should we be doing as we wait for Christ’s second advent? For one, we are to building ourselves up on our most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit. What does this mean? Our faith is founded on hearing the word of Christ. If we are going to be building ourselves up on it then we need to continue to make use of the means of grace. So we remember our baptism daily. We regularly gather with the saints to hear the word of God preached and meditate on it daily. We receive the Lord’s Supper regularity when it is offered to have our faith strengthened. When our sins accuse us we receive absolution from the pastor. And we converse about the word of God with our fellow Christians absolving them of their sins against us.

Praying in the Holy Spirit is praying the word of God which is Spirit. We ask God for those things which he has promised us and believe he will answer in the affirmative. Keeping ourselves in God’s love is trusting and believing in the love he shows us in the means of grace and giving away that love to others, even our enemies.

We spend our time looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to give us everlasting life. That is, the problems of this world do not overcome us or our faith. If we lack something now we do not fear and fret. We believe everything will be provided us when Christ returns in glory.

To our fellow Christians who doubt the mercies of God we are are pity them and snatch them from the everlasting fire to save them. We do this put by putting forth the promises of God in Christ Jesus before their eyes and in their ears. Those we pity with fear as we hate the clothes stained by their flesh are not all unbelievers but those who used to be fellow believers but fell away. We pity them because they used to know the truth. We fear them because they can be a temptation to us to fall away.

Nevertheless we rest upon this promise which Paul and Peter reminds us of also, Jesus is able to keep us from falling and stand before him blameless with great joy. He uses the means of grace to accomplish this. You know, the ones I mentioned up above. It is through these means he works to keep us faithful and blameless. To God the Father and our LORD Jesus Christ let us then join with Jude and all the saints and give them all the glory and majesty which is rightly theirs.

Ever faithful Father, continually make the means of grace available for us and give us your Spirit that we make use of them to preserved in the faith so we may appear before you in glory, holy and blameless with great joy. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.