Jude’s counsel is wonderfully practical: don’t drift, don’t panic, don’t try to manufacture spiritual life—stay positioned where God’s love is enjoyed and let the future shape the present. The way we live today is meant to be tethered to what Jesus will surely do when He completes our salvation.

Keep Yourselves in the Love of God

Jude doesn’t tell you to earn God’s love; he tells you to stay in it. Jesus said, “Remain in My love. If you keep My commandments, you will remain in My love” (John 15:9-10). Remaining is relational—choosing, again and again, to come back to Christ when your heart starts wandering toward comfort, control, or resentment.

This is not fragile love that collapses the moment you struggle. The cross already settled God’s disposition toward you: “He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10). Keeping yourself in God’s love looks like refusing the lie that your worst day cancels His covenant love, and instead letting repentance and obedience bring you back into the warmth of fellowship.

Pray Like You’re Dependent

The verse before Jude 1:21 gives the pathway: “build yourselves up in your most holy faith and pray in the Holy Spirit” (Jude 1:20). Prayer in the Spirit isn’t spiritual performance; it’s dependence. It’s admitting you can’t muscle your way into holiness, clarity, or endurance—you need God to supply what He commands.

And He does. “God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (Romans 5:5). So when your love runs cold, your prayers feel thin, or temptation feels loud, you don’t quit—you ask. God is not stingy with help, and dependence is not weakness; it’s the posture of someone who believes God is actually present and actually powerful.

Wait for Mercy with Active Hope

Jude links staying in God’s love with waiting: “keep yourselves in the love of God as you await the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you eternal life” (Jude 1:21). Waiting here isn’t passive; it’s purposeful. The mercy you’re waiting for is not a vague optimism—it’s Jesus finishing what He started, bringing you all the way home.

This kind of hope changes your day-to-day choices. “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith” (Hebrews 12:2), and “await the blessed hope and glorious appearance of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ” (Titus 2:13). When you’re tempted to settle for lesser loves, remember: you’re not just surviving until the end—you’re being carried toward eternal life by the mercy of Christ.

Father, thank You for Your steadfast love and the mercy of Jesus. Keep me close, teach me to pray in dependence, and help me live today with my eyes fixed on Your coming grace. Amen.

One area of thinking that needs reform is our practical beliefs about God's design for mankind. I emphasize practical beliefs, because there is a difference between nominal beliefs and practical ones. A nominal belief is what you hold in name, and the practical belief is what you hold in reality and what holds you. While probably there are not many faults to be found with the nominal beliefs, there are a great deal to be found with the practical beliefs. These practical beliefs need restoration to their happy and bright state with faults and abuses purged. It has been a long time since Jesus was born in Bethlehem, died on the cross, rose again the third day, ascended to the right hand of God the Father Almighty and sent the Holy Spirit to establish His church. Since those days there have been changes in the world so radical, sweeping, all-pervading and revolutionary as to be entirely incredible to anybody living in Jesus' day. Today's world was entirely unimaginable to the people of those times. Have these changes forced God to modify His plans for His church and for mankind? Here is where we have fallen by the wayside. . . .

A man shall be as a hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land. - Isaiah 32:2

"Under His wings shalt thou flee to a refuge." Is not that a vivid, intense, picturesque, but most illuminative, way of telling us what is the very essence, and what is the urgency, and what is the worth of what we call faith? The Old Testament is full of the teaching - which is masked to ordinary readers; the same teaching as the New Testament is confessedly full of- of the necessity of faith as the one bond that binds men to God. If only our translators had wisely determined upon a uniform rendering in Old and New Testament of words that are synonymous, the reader would have seen what is often now reserved for the student, that all these sayings in the Old Testament Book about "trusting in God" run on all fours with " believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved."

But just mark, the faith which unites with God, and brings a man beneath the shadow of His wings, is nothing more nor less than the flying into the refuge that is provided for us. Does that not speak to us of the urgency of the case? Does that not speak to us eloquently of the perils which environ us? Does it not speak to us of the necessity of flight, swift, with all the powers of our will? Is the faith which is a flying into a refuge fairly described as an intellectual act of believing in a testimony? Surely it is something a great deal more than that! A man out in the plain, with the avenger of blood, hot-breathed and bloody-minded, at his back, might believe, as much as he liked, that there would be safety within the walls of the City of Refuge, but unless he took to his heels without loss of time, the spear would be in his back before he knew where he was. There are plenty of men that know all about the security of the Refuge, and believe it utterly, but never run for it; and so never get into it. Faith is the gathering up of the whole powers of the nature to fling myself into an Asylum, to cast myself into God’s arms, to take shelter beneath the shadow of His wings. And unless a man does that, and swiftly, he is exposed to every bird of prey in the sky, and to every beast of prey lurking in wait for him. A man is not saved because he believes that he is saved, but because by believing he lays hold of the salvation. It is not the flight that is impregnable, and makes those behind its strong bulwarks secure. Not my outstretched hand, but a Hand that my hand grasps, is what holds me up. The power of faith is but that it brings me into contact with God, and sets me behind the seven-fold bastions of the Almighty protection,