We fight, first, because we love the truth, and second, because we love people and want to save them from certain death. We fight to “save others by snatching them out of the fire” of God’s judgment against unbelief and apostasy. We defend the truth as an act of mercy toward “those who doubt” (Jude 22-23).

Beloved, while I was making every effort to write you about our common salvation, I felt the necessity to write to you appealing that you contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all handed down to the saints. For certain persons have crept in unnoticed . . . ungodly persons who turn the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ. (Jude 3-4 NASV)

A few years ago I read a news story about a British Columbia woman who saved her son from a cougar. She saw a cougar mauling her seven year old son as he played outside, so she ran out and fought off the predator with the kitchen towel she carried in her hand. She courageously risked her own life to protect her boy.

Looking for the news story about this incident, I googled the phrase “mom saves child from cougar,” and on the first page of results I found four other stories of heroic mamas. One mother used a camping cooler, one a water bottle, and another her bare hands to save their children from a cougar attack. The last mother saved her child but died from her injuries.

Faced with a dangerous attack on a beloved child, would any mother simply stand and watch? No, a mother’s love for her child compels her to protect and defend—and fight to the death if necessary.

When Jude wrote his New Testament letter to one of the early Christian churches, he urged the members to fight to protect and defend the faith—or, to use his language, he called them to contend earnestly for it. “Certain persons” who claimed to be believers, had “crept” into the church. They looked like ordinary Christians, and they settled into the body like ordinary Christians did, but they had joined the group for shady reasons. We don’t know the details, but it seems that both their actions, which were immoral, and their teachings, which were false, attacked “the faith which was once for all handed down to the saints.”

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