We often assume that departure from the Christian faith will announce itself clearly.
Someone denies Christ. Someone rejects the Bible. Someone walks away from the church and says plainly, “I no longer believe.”
At least then we know what we are dealing with.
But what happens when the language of Christianity remains while the meaning of that language begins to change?
“I believe in Jesus.”
“God is love.”
“We are saved by grace.”
Each statement sounds thoroughly Christian because each statement is thoroughly Christian. But biblical words do not remain biblical merely because we continue using them. Words such as Jesus, love, grace, and truth receive their Christian meaning from the faith in which they were given.
Jude understood the danger.
He begins his short letter intending to write about “the common salvation.” Instead, circumstances compel him to write something considerably more urgent:
“Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.”
— Jude 3
Jude’s concern is not that Christianity has disappeared.
His concern is that something claiming a place among Christians is changing what Christianity means.
When Grace Is Made to Mean Something Else
Jude immediately explains why contending has become necessary:
“For there are certain men crept in unawares… ungodly men, turning the grace of our God into lasciviousness…”
— Jude 4
Notice what is being distorted.
Grace.
There may be no word more central to the Christian gospel. We are saved by grace. We stand by grace. We depend upon grace. Remove the grace of God from Christianity and there is no gospel left.
Yet Jude describes people who have taken that true Christian category and made it serve something contrary to the God who gives it. Jude does not tell us precisely how these teachers explained their behavior. He tells us what they had done theologically: they had turned the grace of God into a license for what grace was never given to excuse.
A biblical concept can therefore be retained while being made to serve an unbiblical conclusion. A biblical word does not automatically make a biblical argument.
The Same Problem Can Happen With Love
Consider one of the most familiar statements in our culture: “Love is love.”
For many people, including some who profess Christianity, the statement seems almost self-evident. After all, doesn’t Scripture say that God is love?
It certainly does.
“God is love.”
— 1 John 4:8
But Scripture does not leave love undefined. The same apostle who tells us that God is love also writes:
“For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments: and his commandments are not grievous.”
— 1 John 5:3
And again:
“And this is love, that we walk after his commandments.”
— 2 John 6
For John, love is not a feeling or an instinct that Scripture is then recruited to support. Love is defined by obedience to what God has actually commanded. Two people can both affirm “God is love” while meaning something entirely different by it — one treating it as license to override a specific command, the other treating it as inseparable from keeping that command.
The disagreement, then, is not ultimately about a word. Both sides can use it. The disagreement is about which authority gets to fill it with content: God’s revealed commandments, or an intuition that revelation is then made to ratify.
Jude saw something similar happen with grace. Grace remained in the vocabulary while its meaning was changed. The same thing can happen with love. The word remains Christian. The definition does not.
John is particularly useful here because he does not treat a Christian profession as self-authenticating. Again and again he introduces a claim — “if we say that we have fellowship with him” (1 John 1:6), “he that saith, I know him” (2:4), “he that saith he is in the light” (2:9) — and then tests that claim against truth, obedience, and love. The claim to know God matters. But the claim does not determine, by itself, whether what follows from it is true. Christian profession remains answerable to the apostolic witness concerning the Christ being professed.
Contending Does Not Mean Becoming Contentious
Jude’s response is equally important. He tells believers to “earnestly contend for the faith.” That language can sound combative, particularly in an age when theological disagreements become arguments almost instantly.
But contending for the faith does not give Christians permission to become contentious people. Jude is defending something that does not belong to us to rewrite. It is “the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.”
Christianity is received before it is defended. We do not create its central truths. We receive them. We do not determine who Jesus must be according to our preferences. We receive the apostolic testimony concerning Him. We do not define grace according to what we wish it would permit. And we cannot begin with our preferred definition of love and then require God to conform to it.
To contend for the faith, then, is not primarily to defend our opinions. It is to refuse to make Christianity mean whatever the surrounding culture — or our own hearts — would prefer it to mean.
But What About the Person?
This is where Christian apologetics can become unnecessarily harsh. When someone professes Christ while holding beliefs inconsistent with Scripture, we can be tempted to settle the matter immediately: “Then you aren’t really a Christian.”
There are circumstances in which Scripture demands serious warnings about false profession, and Jude certainly does not minimize that danger. But Jude also refuses to treat everyone caught in error exactly the same way. Near the end of his letter, after some of the strongest warnings in the New Testament, his attention turns toward those affected by error:
“And of some have compassion, making a difference: And others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire…”
— Jude 22–23
Manuscripts differ on exactly how Jude divides the people he has in mind, and we should not build more on the precise wording than the text can bear. But across the major readings, the pastoral direction remains clear: error requires neither indifference nor indiscriminate condemnation. Jude calls believers toward mercy and rescue while maintaining vigilance against the error itself.
We can test the confession without pretending we can see the heart. It is possible to say, with confidence, that a particular interpretation does not match what Scripture teaches, without claiming to know exactly what that mismatch means for the person holding it.
Take the Profession Seriously
So what should we do when someone tells us:
“I believe in Jesus, but…”
“I know the Bible says, but…”
“I believe God is love, therefore…”
Perhaps our first response should not be to pronounce a verdict on that person’s heart. Perhaps we should take the Christian profession seriously enough to examine what it means.
Which Jesus are we confessing? What does grace actually save us from? Who defines the love we say comes from God?
Those are not traps. They are invitations to return Christian words to their Christian meaning. Because eventually every profession must answer a fundamental question: will we allow the faith to define our beliefs, or will we redefine the faith until it agrees with beliefs we already hold?
Jude knew that Christians sometimes have to contend. But he also knew why. The faith is not ours to reinvent. It was entrusted to us. And when Christian words begin to mean something Christianity itself does not mean, faithfulness requires more than repeating the words louder. It requires returning to “the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.”
The purpose of contending, however, is not simply to expose error. Jude ends by directing believers toward people who may be endangered by it. The faith must be defended precisely because truth matters, and people caught in its distortion must be pursued because they matter.
Christian words cannot be permitted to mean whatever we want them to mean. Neither should the people using them wrongly become merely opponents to defeat.
Contend for the faith. Show mercy to those caught in doubt and error. Reach for those near the fire.
And do both, remembering that the faith was entrusted to us, not invented by us — with truth in one hand and mercy in the other.
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