Jude 1

Jude 1:12

Hidden Rocks Hidden rocks.—Jude 1:12.What is the greatest treat when you are on holiday at the seaside? Paddling? No; better than that! Building sand castles? No; more exciting than that! Swimming? No; even jollier than that! What then?

Why, going for a row in a boat, of course! That is “top hole,” as you boys say, especially if you are allowed to steer for a bit, or to take an oar occasionally. If you add to these joys the joy of dangling a line over the side of the boat and catching fish to fry for tea, you will agree with me that an outing like that is hard to beat.I have a piece of advice to give you when you go for such a row, and it is this. Take an old sailor man with you. Why? For two very good reasons—the first of which is that if you want to fish he will show you the best fishing ground; the second, that he will keep you clear of our text.

Our text, like strong currents, is one of the dangers of going for a row on a coast you do not know. If you wish to find out what that danger is turn up the Revised Version of the Bible at the second last book, the Epistle of Jude.

In the twelfth verse you will find two words—“hidden rocks”—and in these two words you have both the text and the danger.Any sailor will tell you that hidden rocks are one of the worst dangers of an unknown coast. Sometimes you can tell that they are there from the white line of foam which breaks over them, and at very low tide you may see their black tops showing above water. Sometimes the water is perfectly calm and smiling above them, and there is no sign to tell you that they are beneath. But if the sun is shining and the water clear, lean over the side of the boat and you will catch a glimpse of their dark forms. You will notice that some are sharp and jagged like the teeth of a saw, others are rounded or covered with a thick coat of seaweed; but you feel that though they may look different they are all capable of knocking a very nasty hole in the bottom of your frail boat. Sometimes the channel between their hungry teeth is so narrow that the boat has to be steered very carefully to get you safely through.

You are not so keen on holding the tiller then; you are only too thankful to hand it over to someone who knows the passage.Boys and girls, the sea is not the only place where we find hidden rocks. We find them in everyday life; and the rocks we find there are even more dangerous than those to be found in the ocean.

Strange to say, too, the hidden rocks of life, like the hidden rocks of the sea, are of two kinds. The first show a path of white above them. They hoist a danger signal. But the second are so hidden that we cannot tell they are there till suddenly one day a flash of light reveals them to us.1. Now for the first kind—those that hoist a danger signal. These are, I think, the wrong things that we know quite well we should not do, yet straightway go and do them. We know that they are dangerous, but we deliberately run our little boat on to them. What would you say of a sailor who steered straight for the foam that marked a hidden reef?

You would call him either mad, or foolish, or both. Well, when you know a thing is wrong and yet do it, let me assure you, you are equally crazy and foolish.Of course I know that often it is more difficult to steer away from the rocks than to steer to them. People who want you to do wrong have a peculiarly maddening way of daring you to do it, and hinting that you are a coward if you refuse. When you come across such people, remember this: it is more splendid to be a moral hero than a merely physical hero. It is more splendid to turn a deaf ear to taunts and refuse to do what conscience whispers to be wrong, than it is to yield to mockings. Conscience is the foam on the hidden rock, and if we disregard it we deserve shipwreck.

To run headlong into danger or temptation is no sign of bravery.A gentleman once wished to engage a coachman. He had a number of applications from good men.

How do you think he chose among them? He took them all to a certain road which lay between a hill on the right side and a precipice on the left; and he asked each in turn how close to the edge of the precipice he could drive. One man said he thought he could drive within a foot, another said within nine inches, and a third was certain he could drive within six inches. The last man said, “I should keep as far from the edge as I possibly could,” and the gentleman promptly engaged him.2. What about the second kind of hidden rocks? I think these are like the many things we do every day without realizing that they are wrong.

They lie hidden so deep in our heart and are so well concealed that we never suspect their existence; and just because we don’t know of them, just because they hoist no danger signal, they are all the more dangerous. Lots of us would be tremendously surprised if we saw how selfish we were.

We always thought that was just standing up for our rights. We should be surprised, and shocked, too, to learn that we were mean and greedy. We always imagined we were just taking our share of the good things of life. Then others of us would be astonished to find that we were spiteful and revengeful; we had always thought that was merely paying people back in their own coin. Perhaps a few of us had been thinking ourselves perfect and patting our own backs and despising others, but we called that self-respect and did not think how hideous a fault it was. Boys and girls, look into your hearts today.

Ask God to flash some of His own light into their darkness and discover to you their hidden faults.Then, having discovered them, set about getting rid of them with His help. You know what is done to dangerous rocks in a harbor channel.

They are blasted out with gunpowder. That is what we must do with the hidden rocks in our heart. We must blast them out; and we must ask God to help us to do it, for we shall never get rid of them without His aid.

Jude 1:13

Wandering Stars Wandering stars.—Jude 1:13.If you have been out on a dark night, especially about the month of November, you may have seen what looked rather like a rocket, or a series of rockets, falling from the sky. There was a flash and a long stream of light behind it, and almost before you could say, “Look!” it had vanished into darkness again.People usually call these flashes in the darkness “falling stars,” but they are not really stars at all. That name was given to them at a time when their origin and history were unknown. The earth in its journey through space meets small portions of matter. Now you know that the earth has a tremendous pulling power. That is the reason why, if you jump down off a high wall, you don’t fly up into the air.

And so when our world in its journey round the sun comes into the neighborhood of any of these small portions of matter it pulls them towards itself. Before they meet the earth they are quite cold and invisible, but when they first enter the atmosphere which surrounds the earth they travel at the rate of from ten to forty-five miles in a second, and the speed at which they travel makes them extremely hot and brilliant.By far the greater number of these meteors are turned into gas before they reach the surface of the globe, but a very few are broken up and descend in the form of meteoric stones, or “meteorites,” as they are called.

If you visit a good museum you may see some of these meteorites. They look like a bit of rock with a sort of crust over the top. They are usually black in color and are largely composed of iron. Most of them are covered with little indentations which look rather like thumb-marks. The largest meteorite ever found was discovered in Mexico. It was about thirteen feet long, six feet broad, and five feet thick, and it weighed about fifty tons. Another very large one was brought from Greenland by Peary in 1894. It weighed thirty-six and a half tons, but must have been larger originally, as the Eskimo had chipped away fragments to make weapons.

You must not think, however, that meteorites are all large and heavy. The majority are quite tiny; many do not weigh an ounce, and I daresay there are thousands upon thousands so tiny that they have never been found at all.Now perhaps you will wonder where these meteors come from. How did they happen to get into space and how did they manage to get in our way? Well, you have all heard of comets, and you know that comets are heavenly bodies, very hot and bright, which wander through the heavens. Some of these comets go round the sun just as we do, others go round it once and then seem to disappear for ever. Now when a comet is near the sun it has a tail which looks very much like fiery hair streaming out from it.

This tail is formed by the sun’s pushing off from the comet some of the lighter matter of which it is composed. Sometimes the tail breaks off altogether, and the matter of which it is composed cools down and becomes solid.

These solid bodies get left behind, but they still follow the path where the comet has been. One day the earth crosses that path and comes in contact with these bodies, and so we have a fall of meteors.Now, boys and girls, God sent you into this world to shine, but He meant you to be something better than a meteor. Don’t be one of the people who are too brilliant to do steady work and whose light is certain to go out. Don’t be one of those who are fair and pleasant on the outside, but who can’t be relied upon. Do your duty faithfully and thoroughly. Never mind how slow you are, or how humble. Shine with your own little steady light. Be a fixed star, sure and steadfast.

Someone will be the brighter for your shining.

Jude 1:24

The Great Keeper Him that is able to keep you from falling.—Jude 1:24 (AV).Our text is at the end of one of the gloomiest books in the Bible. We know little about the writer of it, but he must have been well known among the Christians. His Epistle is written to the whole Christian Church— to men and women of different race and outlook on life, but who in religion are at one, for Jude speaks of a common salvation. He was very much in earnest. He saw that many of those who began well in the Christian life were living in a way that showed God was not in their thoughts; and he said very hard things to them.The Epistle of Jude is a mysterious little book, but the stern writer of it has a loving heart. You are sometimes afraid of a teacher who appears very stern, and who, if he says an encouraging thing to you, puts in a little word to keep you humble.

Yet, after a time you may discover something that makes you respect him. Such men are often very downright and good.

After his hard words Jude breaks into a message of hope to the Christians who had been forgetting God. “There is One,” he says, “who both can keep you and will. He will not only keep you from falling but will do it so that He will, at last, present you without faults, before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy·”Jude wanted to alarm those Christians simply because he saw their danger. It is told of one of the great painters of Italy that, being engaged upon a fresco inside the dome of a lofty cathedral, and standing on a platform hung more than a hundred feet from the floor, he paused to look at the effect of his work, and, absorbed in his art, kept walking backward for a better view, till, forgetful of danger, he had almost reached the platform’s edge, unconscious that two more backward steps would hurl him down to death. A brother artist, seeing his danger, but afraid to speak lest a sudden shout should precipitate the fall he was anxious to prevent, seized a brush full of paint and hurled it against the face of the brilliant figure on the dome, completely spoiling the labor of many days. But that saved the painter’s life; for, resenting what he thought an insult, and springing forward with a cry, he only then discovered that it was a friendly act to save him from an awful death.You boys and girls are in danger of falling. You go to school one morning determined to do the right thing.

Things seem to go all right at first; you think so at least. But in the playground you come down.

You fail to “play the game.” You speak behind someone’s back; you misrepresent something in telling it; you even tell a lie. Did you ask God before you left home to help you to do right? He can guard us from stumbling, but we have to keep asking His help day by day. Even if one day we seem to get on well, the very next morning may see us in the mud. God does not give us an unlimited supply of strength, leaving us to spend it as we please. His promises only are unlimited; and He fulfills them as they are presented.Boys and girls can help each other to keep from stumbling. In climbing steep Alpine tracks no man is independent of his neighbor. Sometimes the members of a climbing expedition are roped together.

And it is always the weak one of the party who must be considered. His failure would be the failure of all. The slipping of the feeblest might endanger the lives of all. Remembering the difficulties of life and how easy it is to make false steps, won’t you be a helper of those who are weaker and have had fewer advantages than yourselves?