I'd like to ask you to turn to the book of Jude this evening, down near the end of the New Testament. Jude. We have been looking at a series entitled The Biblical Christianity and have seen two parts of that. The first week we looked at the concept that biblical Christianity has both a center, the inspiration of the scriptures, and a circumference, an outer edge, which is the gospel. That is, you must believe the gospel that's recorded in the scriptures to rightly claim the name Christian. And in fact, if it's going to be a biblical Christianity, it must be Christianity which finds as its authority the scriptures, the basis upon which we stand. Last week, we looked at the apostasy from biblical Christianity that happened at the end of the 1800s and early 1900s in our country that was called the Modernist Movement. It was an effort, an organized effort, to try to modernize the Christian religion. And the pursuit of it in that way involved a lot of various compromising aspects, but in some senses, the core of it was an elevation of man's reason above God's revelation. That is, the Bible was subjected to the test of man's reasoning ability. What we found or thought was found in science or history or sociology or anthropology, those elements of what we consider to be our knowledge were then brought alongside of the Scriptures, and the Scriptures were read in such a way that they were being shaped or conformed to what we thought, rather than our understanding of the Scriptures controlling our interpretation of those things. When Darwin publishes his evolutionary theory in the middle part of the 1800s and it begins to sweep the scientific community, people then begin to go back to look at the beginning of Genesis and say, well, obviously Genesis must not be recording for us what actually happened since we know it happened this way. And that kind of naturalistic, rationalistic approach to the scripture systematically went through the Bible and started with this assumption. If it does not seem reasonable to us, then it must be something other than what it claims. So that the miracles of the Bible became myths, stories with a spiritual purpose, but not an actual accounting of it. Things like the virgin birth were treated as a work of literature inserted into the scriptures to try and explain how Jesus was unique, not actually that he was indeed born of a virgin. So the elevation of man's reason above revelation and And a part of it, as I tried to show last week, was the separation between faith and reason in such a way that they could emphasize experience at the expense of doctrine or theology. That is, being a Christian now was actually some kind of religious experience not defined by what you believed. The theology was really, in essence, irrelevant. It was how you felt about God or how you lived your life that determined whether or not you were a Christian. It moved it from a theological definition to really more of an experiential definition. And ultimately at the heart of it all was a shift, in my mind, a shift from God being the center, if I can use this word, of religion to man being the center of religion. It was a shift from theism to humanism. And ultimately, defining religion as humanistically, humanly generated, as humanly acceptable, and therefore humanly oriented. And ultimately, setting God aside other than as something that's helpful to us. God is a way in which we deal with life. not that he is our maker and that he is our master and therefore we must give him control. So I said that slide toward apostasy began in this expression of in the middle of the 1800s, but it began to gradually pick up speed until by the end of the 1800s in the early 1900s. It was a full fledged problem that there was really a controversy which came to be called and recognized as the fundamentalist modernist controversy between the opposing sides. Professors in seminaries that were run by the ecclesiastical groups of the day began to teach the theories of modernism Some of those folks were actually brought up on charges and dismissed from their positions because of it, but many more were not. And it began to spread through the educational institutions and then began to show itself in the literature of the churches so that if you have a group of churches that use a standardized Sunday school curriculum, it wasn't long before the curriculums were being infected with modernist thinking. challenging the miracles of the scripture, the inspiration of the scripture, or the reality of a blood atonement by Christ on the cross, or miracles like the virgin birth, those things began to become eroded in the curriculum and the writing of the day. Pastors in major, usually metropolitan pulpits, began to preach the new version of Christianity and use it to influence the folks of their time. And the reality of it, it was growing quite frequently, and obviously in a perspective that reveals my colors in terms of the issue, in a very sinister way, they took over the political machinery of the denominations. Because if we're, as a church, a part of a group, let's say the Northern Baptist Convention, And the Northern Baptist Convention controls the seminaries and publishes all the materials that are there. And pretty soon you have to elect officers. You have to choose people to head up the mission boards and agencies. And the modernists very effectively, very craftily took control of all those political entities so that the mission agencies were full. of apostates and being sent to the field, not carrying the gospel of Jesus Christ, but carrying the social gospel. And it was turning the tide very quickly. The rise of this controversy forced believers to ask a basic question. How do we respond to that? What do you do if the The landscape of Christianity is shifting so that those who deny the faith are actually gaining control of everything. What do you do? And this text here in Jude became one of the texts in which the believers turned to draw instruction from God about. Look at the third verse of this short little letter of Jude. 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. Here in this text, Jude expresses what his point was. He wanted to write them about the common salvation, but because of the circumstances that we're facing. For instance, in verse 4, certain persons have crept in unnoticed. That is, they had under cloak permeated and penetrated the believing community in such a way that Jude wants to sound the alarm. That is, I wanted to write a positive letter to you about our salvation, but there are false teachers who have crept in among you and I need to sound the note of alarm. And that note of alarm, he says in verse 3, is that you would contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all handed down to the saints. There's probably no better text of Scripture to capture the essence of fundamentalism in that text. That is, fundamentalism is biblical orthodoxy. The faith, which was once for all handed down to the saints, it's biblical orthodoxy joined to a kind of militant defense of that faith. He says, contend earnestly for the faith. When we see that phrase there in verse 3, the faith which was once for all handed down, that captures the centrality of a core of doctrine which Jude could call the faith. That is, there's something recognizable, identifiable as the faith. And that faith was something that has been handed down to the saints. Paul would use language like this when he talks to Timothy about guarding the deposit which has been entrusted to you. Or when he says to Timothy, the things which you have received from me, commit to faithful men who will be able to teach others also. That there is a recognizable core to the faith which must be guarded. And it's received from those who've gone before, and it is to be handed down to others. I've said previously, and I'll just remind us of it because one of my goals or responsibilities as a pastor is to remind us of these things so that we don't ever find ourselves drifting away from it, that there is, I believe, a truth, a core to truth in which every believer to genuinely be one. That is the thing that makes the difference between those who say they believe in Christ but can't really be called Christians and those who say they believe in Christ and can be. The difference is in what they believe, not that they believe. All kinds of people believe things. Believing things does not make you a Christian. It's what you believe that makes you a Christian. There's a content to the faith. And the way that I've tried to say it is that there is an orthodoxy, a straight doctrine that affirms all that the Scriptures say we must affirm and cannot deny without disqualifying ourself from being a Christian. That is that we can't reduce it to, you believe that Jesus died on the cross and was buried and rose again, because really you have to ask yourself, who's Jesus, right? In 2 Corinthians 11, Paul says there could be someone comes who preaches the Jesus which is not the Jesus that I preach. So, if somebody tells you they believe that Jesus died, was buried, and rose again, but they don't happen to think that that Jesus is the Son of God, then they're not a Christian. There's some weird kind of offshoot of Christianity. They're not holding to the faith which was once delivered, which is that Christ, who pre-existed, came in the flesh, that you have an eternal Son of God. So when you really look at the Scriptures, it's hard to reduce it to just a set of five or ten or twelve things, because in every era, The devil has been very effective at bringing some other aspect of the truth under attack. Whatever the scriptures say, you must believe to be a Christian is the truth that was delivered to the saints. At our particular, in this particular battle that we're talking about, there were certain key things that became the issue. Things like the virgin birth. Which in terms of the amount of material that's covered in the scriptures, not very much at all. It's mentioned in Isaiah, it's mentioned in Matthew, it's mentioned in Luke, sort of elusively, not clearly. Well, I'm sorry, it is clear in Luke. It's alluded to in Galatians. That's about it. I mean, if you were going to catalog the amount of material on it, you'd say it's a very insignificant doctrine. But that's not the way you decide what a significant doctrine is. I mean, if you deny the virgin birth of Christ, you now have said Matthew and Luke lied. That has significant ramifications. You now say Jesus was fully human in the same way that you and I are in terms of our conception, which means if he was the product of two humans, he also took on himself a sin nature. He would also be denying his eternal existence. I mean, if you want to think of it, the virgin birth may seem small, but it's like a thread on a sweater that once you start to pull it, you start to do serious damage to the whole garment of what the Scriptures teach. And so that's why it became one of the tests. That's why you have, for instance, in the list of the five fundamentals, so-called five fundamentals from the Presbyterians, that was one of them. Because you know what? If you ask somebody that, it opened up your entire window to what you believed about the authority of Scripture. You deny something that's taught that clearly, it was a simple test. It was a litmus test. It was something that was clear in that regard. And the fact is that that was the point of battle, naturalism and denial of the inspiration of the Scriptures. Do you know what wasn't in any of those fundamental lists? The doctrine of justification by faith alone in Christ alone. You know why? They weren't dealing with apostate Roman Catholics. They were dealing with apostate Protestants. Everybody believed in justification by grace alone, through faith alone and Christ alone. That wasn't denied. So it didn't make the list. Did that make it unimportant? Obviously not. If you were going to establish a list of tests today, you would have to throw on there things very important. like that. You'd have to be probably much more clear on issues like the Trinity again because of the tendency for some to try and put their arm around Mormonism or people like T.D. Jakes because they've become popular Christians who haven't denied the Trinity. So you would have to really be clear about what the scriptures teach. But the point is that the Bible identifies that there are some elements of what you and I believe which will not cost someone their soul. I mean, I've said before, and I hope I would have the courage of my convictions, but I think baptism by immersion is an incredibly important doctrine, one that I hope I would have the strength of conviction to die for. But you know, there are non immersed people who will be in heaven. Because baptism isn't at the core of your salvation. So it wouldn't be a part of the element that is something that if a person is wrong about, they're not a Christian. You can't be wrong on the deity of Christ. You can't be wrong on the gospel. You can't be wrong on those kinds of things. That's the faith. which was once delivered to the saints. And Jude says that we're to contend for it. We're to be willing to do battle over it. To fight for the faith. And that's the language that Paul uses in 1 Timothy 1. He talks about fighting the good fight of faith. He says in chapter 6 of that book that you have to fight the good fight of faith. He is willing to say in 2 Timothy 2 That you are willing to take a stand over this that would cleanse yourself from those who deny it. That you're willing to fight it. Paul tells Titus that those who are false teachers must be reproved sharply so that their mouths will be shut. That there's a willingness to do battle over the faith. Because souls are at stake in it. Paul says, he describes it in 2 Corinthians 10 as having the weapons of our warfare. That he is going to bring every thought captive to Christ. Contending for the faith means that we cannot take any kind of soft stance toward it. Doesn't mean that we have to be ignorant and obnoxious. It doesn't mean that we have to be ungodly in our tone or disposition. 2 Timothy 2 also tells us to be patient and gentle in taking that stand. But there's a difference between taking a stand patiently and gently and being so kind to unbelief that we essentially deny that it's unbelief. We must be willing to stand against apostasy in that regard. Go back just two books to 2 John, probably just a page or so, because 3 John is one chapter, 2 John is one chapter. Look at 2 John verses 9 through 11 to see the kind of disposition that is required of those who hold to the faith. Verse 9 of 2 John. Anyone who goes too far and does not abide in the teaching of Christ does not have God. The one who abides in the teaching, he has both the Father and the Son. If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your house and do not give him a greeting. For the one who gives him a greeting participates in his evil deeds. Think about what John's saying here. I think probably the best way for us to understand it would be to think in terms of the fact that the believers assembled in houses. And I think that the best way to take what John's saying here is when the believers assemble, if somebody comes into their house, wants to come in their house, who is not abiding in the teaching of Christ, he says, do not receive them into your house. Don't bring him into the assembly of God's people. Don't even acknowledge him with a greeting. I think illustratively, think about it the way what happened with Paul. For instance, in Acts chapter 13, in Antioch of Pisidia, Paul and Barnabas show up in Antioch. And as they're meeting in the synagogue there, the leaders of the synagogue turn to them and say, do you have anything to say? They extend a greeting to them and give an opportunity for Paul and Barnabas to speak to the people. It was a much more common custom, it seems, than what you and I are used to. And in that kind of a cultural context, John is saying, do not recognize apostates. Don't even give them recognition. Why? Look at verse 11. For the one who gives him a greeting participates in his evil deeds. Think about that. I mean, think about what he's saying here. This is so important that if If an apostate comes into the assembly of believers, the believers should not acknowledge his presence, shouldn't let him in, but should not even acknowledge his presence in any way that would demonstrate a warmth of acceptance to that person. Because if you do that, you become a participant in his evil deeds. Now that's contending for the faith. That's being willing to say, because you have departed from the faith, we can have nothing to do with you. We cannot extend the hand of Christian fellowship to those who cannot legitimately claim to be Christian. You can't do it or else you ultimately compromise the Gospel. You dishonor God. You essentially say that this apostate means more to us than God. And in fact, you show no love for that person's soul. If I extend the hand of Christian fellowship to somebody who cannot be legitimately considered a Christian, I am actually giving him some kind of spiritual anesthetic. I'm numbing him to the reality that he's on his way to hell because I'm acting like he's my brother in Christ. I blind him to the seriousness, and everybody who watches it is blinded to the seriousness of it. They think, oh, hey, they must agree with each other. They're both Christians. They may have some doctrinal disagreements, but they both worship the same God. They both have the same Jesus. And that's not true. If their Jesus was not born of a virgin, is not an eternal Son of God, is not the God of the Scriptures, then we don't worship the same God. And we dishonor God to act as if we do. We're letting someone turn people from the faith. So fundamentalists looked at texts of Scripture like this and said, we must do something. We cannot sit by and watch the inroads of apostasy happen without taking a stand against it. And so they began to contend earnestly for the faith, which was once for all handed down to the saints. And really that contending sort of went through two phases. The first phase was an internal fight. It was an opposition to the spread of the apostasy. It took all kinds of forms. One aspect of it was the emergence of Bible conferences and newsletters and pastors' meetings that began to rally people to the faith. Some of the old great Bible conferences, like the Niagara Bible Conference, formed and met together and drew Christians really from across the denominations to come together. Because in the Presbyterians, there was modernism. In the Methodists, there was modernists. In the Baptists, there were modernists. In the non-denom, sort of quasi-denominational churches, there were modernists. And so fundamentalists in all of those began to come together to take a stand for the truth. They began to publish newspapers form groups, the World Christians Fundamental Fellowship, and those kinds of things to stand against it. The Northern Baptists had alongside of it a group of people called the Conservative Fellowship, which was fundamentalist. Actually, it's the heritage of the Fundamental Baptist Fellowship, but they began to take a stand and argue for the faith. From 1910 to 1915, there were 12 volumes of articles that were written called The Fundamentals, A Testimony to the Truth, that were sponsored by some wealthy believers who were concerned about it. The Union Oil Company, they've invested their money, these believers, into publishing these articles that would defend the faith against these attacks. And so, over that period of time, they were written, and you can get them now as one-volume or five-volume sets, the fundamentals of the faith to try and answer the issues that were being raised in them. Some groups began to set up orthodoxy tests. That's where, for instance, as I already said, the Presbyterians came up with a test of what they called the five fundamentals, that they began to ask that anyone seeking ordination would have to say that they agree with these things, along with all the other stuff that they were supposed to be saying. The Westminster Confession of Faith. But they highlighted five things that would immediately expose a modernist. And so they introduced those at the beginning of the 1900s and began to try and push for those kinds of things. Among the Baptists, the Baptists in the Northern Baptist Convention began to try to fight to get back control of some of the mission boards and some of the political machinery of the agencies. This battle was going on in the early part of the 1900s. There was actually, I mean, technically, the name fundamentalist wasn't coined until 1920. But there clearly were fundamentalists. Obviously, they were writing books called The Fundamentals. So the concept of fundamental, essential doctrines that could not be denied began to emerge as the point of conflict. Then finally, a man named Curtis Lee Laws wrote in an article that those who intend to do battle royal for the fundamentalists should be called fundamentalists. And so that became the title, the label that they all rallied around, whether they were a Baptist or a Presbyterian or a Methodist or one of the non-denom groups, the Bible church kind of movement. They began to be called fundamentalists, and their effort was to drive out the apostates. They were separatists, but separatists in this first phase was, they wanted to separate the modernists from them. They wanted to practice what would be the equivalent of church discipline on a broader scale. That is, let's find the modernists in the seminaries and in the mission agencies and let's remove them from the midst of us. And so that was the battle. And sadly, in terms of the picture from our perspective, they raised the banner, but the battles were being lost. By the end of the teens, in the Presbyterians, they decided to drop the five fundamental tests. In the early 20s, in the Northern Baptist, there was a push to try and make the New Hampshire Confession of Faith the Confession of Faith for the Northern Baptist Convention. And they came to the convention meeting and tried to push that through. And in a very shrewd move, one of the defenders on the liberal side of the equation substituted a motion that said that we should have no creed but the New Testament. And how do you vote against the New Testament? And so they won. But it's really in the interpretation of the New Testament that's the issue. And they turned away from historic, orthodox confessions of faith to a sort of subjective interpretation of the New Testament. And eventually they lost. And so then they moved to a second phase in dealing with the apostasy. Look at it, if you would, to 2 Corinthians chapter 6, because this is really, I think, the kind of text that they had to move toward. They wanted to deal with the apostasy, to not give it a greeting, to not receive it. They wanted to turn it out, but they couldn't do it. They were unable to do it. So then they were forced to wrestle with texts like 2 Corinthians 6, beginning in verse 14. Do not be bound together with unbelievers, for what partnership have righteousness and lawlessness, and what fellowship has light with darkness, or what harmony has Christ with Belial, or what has a believer in common with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God. Just as God said, I will dwell in them and walk among them and I will be their God and they shall be my people. Therefore, come out from their midst and be separate, says the Lord, and do not touch what is unclean. And I will welcome you and I will be a father to you and you shall be sons and daughters to me. says the Lord Almighty." Notice verse 17, "...come out from their midst and be separate." So if you can't clean out the modernism, that is, the Presbyterian Church decides that it's going to be a mixed multitude. It's going to have in its midst modernists and fundamentalists. The Northern Baptist Convention decides it's going to be a mixed multitude, modernists and fundamentalists. than those who believe in the fundamentals of the faith could not accept that. They couldn't say that we can be partners with those who don't know Christ. And so J. Gretchen Machen, a famous conservative Presbyterian, writes a book and he titles that book Christianity and Liberalism. You know what his answer there is? He's saying liberalism was not Christianity. The modernist had some other religion than Christianity, and he was calling for the Presbyterian Church to remove it. But when they wouldn't, eventually, by the middle of the 1930s, Machen and a group of his companions in the defense of the faith, they pulled out of the Presbyterian Church and formed the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Among the Northern Baptists, there was this battle that went back and forth and eventually they began to see that they were not going to win. And so the Northern Baptists in 1932, there was a group that pulled out of them and formed the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches as a separatist group of Baptist churches. There was a later group that pulled out of the Northern Baptist Convention in 1947 called the Conservative Baptist association of churches. They pulled out as well after having realized that they were not going to be able to turn the Northern Baptist Convention around. Among the independent churches in 1923, a group sort of started to pull out. And in 1930, that group formed as the Independent Fundamental Churches of America. so that they pulled out from the apostasy that they were seeing and joined into these. So you had these fundamentalist groups who now became active in the issue of separation. They said, we cannot remain in fellowship with apostasy. We can't have union when there is no union. And so when they could not put them out, began to pull them out in obedience to text like this. Let me show you another Romans chapter 16, Romans chapter 16. Look what Paul says, beginning verse 17. Romans chapter 16 and verse 17. Now, I urge you, brethren, keep your eye on those who cause dissensions and hindrances contrary to the teaching which you learned and turn away from them. For such men are slaves, not of our Lord Christ, but of their own appetites. And by their smooth and flattering speech, they deceive the hearts of the unsuspecting. Paul makes it clear what the response of an obedient believer is. It's not just written to pastors here. He's writing to the church at Rome. He says, brethren, here's what you need to do. You need to have your eye clearly on those who are turning away from the truth that you've received. And when they're turning away from that and dividing God's people on the basis of false teaching, then you are, he says, to turn away from them. to separate yourself, that you have to be willing for the sake of the truth and obedience to God to break fellowship with those who are denying the faith. And actually, practically speaking, this verse makes it clear who causes the division, right? You know who caused the division? Ultimately, it was the modernists. It wasn't the fundamentalists. The fundamentalists stood in the heritage of those who had believed the faith and held to it. The modernists crept in and began to lead people away from the faith. They acted in an incredibly dishonorable and deceptive way. They would say they believed the Bible, but what they meant when they said that was something different than what historic Christianity meant. I mean, one modernist defended himself. He said, someone claims that I don't believe in the deity of Jesus Christ. I've never denied the deity of any man. What he was saying is we're all God. And so he would defend himself. Yes, I believe in the deity of Christ. But what he means by that is something very different than what historic orthodox doctrine was. And once the day was clear that the leaven of unbelief had permeated these groups and the believers could not cut it out, then they had to pull out, out of faithfulness to God, out of a commitment to the truth of God's Word. In a very real way, the fundamentalists in the United States were doing something very similar to what one of the great preachers of all times, Spurgeon had to do in Britain in the 1800s at the end of it. Among the Baptist Union there in Britain, there became a permeation of false doctrine and they wouldn't remove it. They wouldn't accept a confession of faith that would effectively block it. And so Spurgeon came to the conclusion that he must withdraw from it. Listen to how he described it. The divergence is every day becoming more manifest. A chasm is opening between the men who believe their Bibles and the men who are prepared for an advance upon Scripture. Inspiration and speculation cannot long abide in peace. Compromise there can be none. We cannot hold the inspiration of the word and yet reject it. We cannot believe in the atonement and deny it. We cannot hold the doctrine of the fall and yet talk of the evolution of spiritual life from human nature. We cannot recognize the punishment of the impenitent and yet indulge in the larger hope, which means that somehow those who haven't heard or have been lost will somehow be saved. larger hope beyond the gospel preaching. One way or the other, we must go. Decision is the virtue of the hour. Neither when we have chosen our way can we keep company with those who go the other way. When he finally came to his conclusion, he tried to urge others to take a stand. He finally summarized it in one of the most famous quotes on this issue. He said, fellowship with known and vital error is participation in sin. That is, if you know that there are apostates involved in this effort, and you tolerate it, you participate with it, then you're actually engaging in sin yourself. And so Spurgeon separated in our heritage as our church. Our heritage going way back was with the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches that were a part of those churches that clearly marked themselves off as a part of the separatist movement. That we would stand for the fundamentals of the faith and not engage in any kind of compromising alliance that would call into question our commitment to that truth. We would not blur the distinction between light and darkness, between believers and unbelievers, between those who hold to the faith once delivered to the saints, and those who are abandoning that faith to follow after man's thinking. You cannot blur that line without dishonoring God and demonstrating a callous disregard for the souls of people. If you obscure the line, you are sending a signal that will turn people off the path and to a broad way that leads to destruction. We cannot do that. So I don't hesitate. I don't hesitate to say that I'm a fundamentalist because I believe there are fundamentals of the faith that must be held to and held to with such appreciation that we are willing to contend for them. We don't hold them lightly. We think they're the very life and soul of the church of Jesus Christ. So we are willing to stand for those things. Let's bow together in prayer. Father, thank You that You have remained faithful even when the tides of human opinion seem to crash across the church and men turn away from You that you've always preserved a remnant, that you have not abandoned your faithful people, and that from the ashes of apostasy often has emerged a stronger, healthier church. And that's what happened last century. In the face of the losses of the fundamentalist modernist controversy, There rose a giant movement of gospel proclamation throughout our land and to the ends of the earth. And so we're grateful that we have confidence in your word that Jesus said, I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. And nothing will stop the advance of your plan and purpose. and that we can be confident in that. And yet we confess our need for wisdom, our need for courage, our need to be willing to stand, if necessary, like the writer of Hebrews says, outside the camp and bear the reproach of Christ. That if others fall, if others compromise, that we will remain faithful by your grace and for your glory. Lord, please don't ever let the light go out in this place. Help our church never to become a hollow, empty testimony to the danger of apostasy. What a sad and terrible thing it would be. So Lord, shape and mold our hearts so that we stand in our day for the faith once delivered and we pass it along to our children without distortion, without subtraction, without addition. We give them the faith which was handed to us, recorded in the scriptures, believed on by your people through the centuries. Lord, please keep us faithful. in this great battle between truth and error. We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.