“To those whom God has called, who live in the

love of God the Father and in the safe keeping of Jesus Christ”

(Jude 1)

The brief, two-page letter of Jude that comes so late in the Bible that it is seldom noticed is addressed to people whom the author describes as “those whom God has called, who live in the love of God the Father and in the safe keeping of Jesus Christ.”

Though unknown and unnamed, these Christians to whom Jude wrote his little letter so long ago share with us Christians of every age these three great experiences: (1) we are all called of God, (2) we are all privileged to live in the love of God the Father, and (3) we all may abide forever in the safekeeping of Jesus Christ.

All Christians are called; that is, all of us have been summoned from what we are to what we should become. Calls of many kinds come to everyone: friendly calls, anonymous calls, obscene calls, calls of sad tidings, calls for financial assistance, calls for church or community service.

But the call of God is unique, decisive, prophetic. It is the call of the Creator to his creature. It is the call to every person that is not so much audible and from without as it is compulsive and from within, calling that person to rise up and live in the heights of the soul, to be about the work and witness for which the Creator has made his creature.

God has called you. He is calling you now. How are you responding? The second great experience we have in common with those unnamed and unknown Christians to whom Jude wrote is that we are privileged to live in the love of God the Father.

The Christian is the one who has learned through Jesus Christ of the amazing reality of a Heavenly Father who loves every human being he has created as his own child, as if each child were his only child and the whole fervent torrent of omnipotent love were poured out on that favored child alone.

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life…. God is love; he who dwells in love is dwelling in God, and God in him…. We love because he loved us first.”

But so many Christians who are called of God do not live in the consciousness of the love of God. I recall a woman who was indeed in a sad plight. She was out of work. Her debts were piling up. She did not know what to do. As she talked of her many difficulties, she poured out the hostility, resentment, and bitterness she felt toward her children, who were ungrateful and uncooperative, toward her relatives, who refused to help her on her terms, and toward her former employers, who one after another had employed her for only a few days and then let her go.

What was wrong in this woman’s life? As she saw it, everybody was against her, including God himself — getting in her way, obstructing her fortunes, withholding from her rights — and she was angry and resentful.

What was really wrong was her attitude. What she needed most was not a new and better job, not someone to pay her debts, not someone to make her children gratefully obedient and the family generous. What she needed most was the love of God in her heart — a changed attitude characterized by an unwavering conviction that she lived and moved and had her being in the love of God the Father. When she began to live in the consciousness of the love of God for her and let that love flow through her heart, her life was changed. First, came the change within, and then mysteriously, but oh, so practically, her outward circumstances were also changed. She found out the truth of what Frederick W. Faber wrote in his hymn “There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy”:

For the love of God is broader

Than the measures of man’s mind,

And the heart of the Eternal

Is most wonderfully kind.

The third great experience we share with those unnamed and unknown Christians to whom Jude wrote is that we all abide in the safekeeping of Jesus Christ. The safekeeping of Jesus Christ — what is this? It is not immunity from disease. Christians get sick and need doctors and medicine just like pagans. It’s not protection from catastrophe. Christians crash in airplanes; they have wrecks on highways. Well, what is the safekeeping of Jesus Christ? Is there some reality here, or are these just so many words, the safekeeping of Jesus Christ?

I had occasion to think about this question recently as I drove to the funeral of a boyhood friend who had been killed suddenly in a highway accident. I remember the first time I had ever seen him — a bright, agile little boy of four or five playing with the neighborhood children. Certainly he was the handsomest and best coordinated of all the children who played on the lawn that summer afternoon. Within the week he was stricken with polio.

Where then for this child was the safekeeping of Jesus Christ? Why, in the love and prayers and fierce fight of his parents for their child’s life, in the dedication and skill of nurses, physicians, and surgeons who worked with him and for him across all the years of childhood.

Where was the safekeeping of Jesus Christ? Why, in the cheerful, courageous spirit of his mother and father, whose minds and hearts were kept from bitterness and remorse when this dark, crippling thing grasped their son’s body and made a lunge for his soul. The safekeeping of Jesus Christ held their spirits from the damaging poison and through them structured their son into a debonair, blithe young man who faced life with courage, con­fidence, and love, even though his back was bent and his leg crippled.

But when grown to maturity with his own happy family about him this loyal churchman, responsible citizen, and faithful father met instant death on the highway last week, where was the safekeeping of Jesus Christ? Why, in his broken-hearted family’s confidence that in the same moment he was taken from their arms, he was securely held in the arms of an eternal savior.

Yes, the safekeeping of Jesus Christ is real. First of all it is a reality of moral safekeeping. Temptations succumbed to can wreck life. It is the moral safekeeping that Jesus Christ gives that is paramount in Jude’s mind as he writes. Some of the Christian community to whom he wrote had been called of God and lived for a while in the love of God and then strayed. Jude knew men needed more than good intentions and strong resolves to remain pure, so he ends his letter with that beautiful prayer and benediction: “Now to the One who can keep you from falling and set you in the presence of his glory, jubilant and above reproach, to the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, might and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all time, now, and for evermore. Amen.”

Left to himself man is prone to stumble. Jesus Christ is able to safeguard him at this point and to keep him morally sure-footed.

What better example of both the reality and nature of the moral safekeep­ing of Jesus Christ could anyone ask than the life and death of Pope John XXIII? Here was a man not particularly gifted as a scholar or an intellectual or a political organizer, but whose distinction lay rather in the completeness of his subservience to the spirit of Jesus Christ, and the whole world bowed low to the otherworldly grandeur of this personality who was in the safekeeping of Jesus Christ.

But the safekeeping of Jesus Christ is not only moral reinforcement; it is mental redemption. People nowadays are troubled terrifically from within. The chaos that threatens is not the wild beast or the hostile man, but the tormented conscience, the uncontrollable thoughts, anxieties, worries of a man’s mind. Peace, we crave, peace of mind.

And this is precisely what Jesus Christ brings us for our safekeeping. “Peace I leave with you,” he said to those troubled disciples mourning his imminent departure. “My peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid.” And when he had gone, all the way home to the Father, they found they had it just as he had promised — his strong, untroubled peace.

When people would wonder at the remarkable strength and inex­haustible resources of Christian wisdom and work that came from a devout but very frail man, his wife would always explain, “Oh, it’s because he works without tension. He doesn’t ever need `to blow his top’ or `get things out of his system’ or `off his chest.’ He harbors no resentments, holds no hostilities. He works relaxed because his mind is so completely in the safekeeping of Jesus Christ.”

But at a deeper lever still, the safekeeping of Jesus Christ is the safekeeping of our motives. Arthur Gordon, in one of his essays, “A Day at the Beach,” tells of how when once life had grown flat and sour for him, he went to a trusted advisor who counseled him to reexamine his motives. And on reexamination he discovered that his work was no longer an end in itself. It had degenerated into simply a way to make money.

Gordon came to realize that “the sense of giving something, of helping people, of making a contribution, had been lost in the frantic clutch at security. Then I saw in a flash of certainty that if one’s motives are wrong, nothing can be right.”

And Jesus Christ makes such stern demands of his disciples: “But he that is greatest among you, shall be your servant” (Matt. 23:11), and “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me,” and “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.” He makes these demands at the deep level of man’s motives that he may be Lord of the heartland of the soul, to the end that his disciples may be enfolded in the safekeeping of Jesus Christ.

Are these ancient and universal experiences of all Christians your present possessions in the fullness of their glory? Do you know yourself to be called of God and responding obediently to that call? Are you living in the love of God our Father? Are you abiding in the safekeeping of Jesus Christ?