Jude’s one-chapter letter was written to a church that was losing people. False teachers had slipped in, and some believers were drifting. The letter never tells that church to stop reaching for them. Lisa Fields, preaching from its closing verses, draws the conclusion plainly: the person you have quietly given up on is still within God’s reach. We usually stop hoping once our arguments stop landing. Jude points to a longer and quieter kind of work, carried by how we live and how we listen, that stays available long after the debate has gone cold.
So the useful question is what we have mistaken for a closed door.
Why we write people off
Lisa describes a moment many believers know. Faith comes up at Thanksgiving dinner or a catch-up with college friends, and the other person turns their nose up at the whole thing. They have had bad experiences with church. They have watched the headlines. They want nothing to do with Jesus, and they say so. After enough of those exchanges, rejection starts to feel final. We stop raising the subject, then stop praying about it, then speak about the person as settled.
She offers an image that exposes the logic underneath. While preparing her message, she read about how firefighters decide whether to enter a burning building. By her account, they go in only when they think a rescue is possible. When they cannot reach someone, they have to stand outside and watch. Writing someone off works the same way. We size up the flames, judge the odds poor, and step back.
Lisa rejects that calculation for believers: “there’s no hopeless situation with Jesus.” Her hope rests on Jesus, the Spirit living in believers, and the gospel itself. The rescuer’s skill and the person’s current openness are real factors, but they do not set the odds. Once that is clear, giving up stops looking like realism. It looks like a judgment we were never asked to make.
How Jude tells a church to contend
Jude 3 tells believers to contend for the faith. Lisa admits she first pictured that as a boxing match, and when she started Jude 3 Project she imagined a website with a boxing ring behind it. She now calls the idea horrible. The end of the letter explains why. Verse 3 gives the reason to contend. Verses 20-23 give the method, and the method has little to do with trading blows.
It begins with the believer. Jude 1:20-21 reads: “But ye, beloved, building up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Ghost, Keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life.”
Then Jude turns outward. Jude 1:22-23 reads: “And of some have compassion, making a difference: And others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire; hating even the garment spotted by the flesh.”
The KJV wording needs some unpacking. Many modern translations render the first clause as a call to be merciful to those who doubt, which is how Lisa read it from the NIV. The ancient copies of these verses also differ in their wording, which is part of why translations vary. The shared shape is clear. Jude describes people in different conditions and assigns each a fitting response: compassion, rescue, and rescue carried out with caution. Every response moves toward the person. The passage has no category for those the church should leave in the fire.
Your life speaks first
Lisa’s first point turns the attention back on the believer. “The first step to contending for the faith is not what you communicate to the world, it’s how you live.” She calls this mirror ministry. Do I know what I believe? Have I searched the Scriptures for myself? Have I wrestled with my own doubts? Do I have a prayer life?
Her reason connects directly to the people we have given up on. One of the most common objections she hears to Christianity is that Christians are hypocrites, that a gap separates what we say from how we live. When that gap is what pushed someone away, a sharper argument from the same person cannot close it. The argument arrives already discredited. Her airline comparison makes the order plain: secure your own mask before helping others.
This is also why the door stays open longer than we assume. Someone who has stopped listening to our words is often still watching our lives. The conversation can end while the watching goes on for years.
Mercy from people who have doubted
Lisa reads Jude’s call to mercy partly through Jude’s own story. Following the common view that this Jude was a brother of Jesus, she points to John 7:5: “For neither did his brethren believe in him.” Jude grew up with Jesus and saw his miracles, and for a season he still did not believe. On her reading, the man telling the church to show mercy to doubters remembers being one. That is an interpretation, and a reasonable one. It explains why the person who has doubted is usually slower to give up on someone else.
Her own doubts sharpened the point. As an undergraduate, a New Testament course built on Bart Ehrman’s textbook left her telling God she did not know what she believed. She found her footing in John 6, where many disciples leave and Jesus asks the twelve, “Will ye also go away?” Peter answers, “Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life” (John 6:67-68). Later, in seminary, the problem of evil hit her hard after she saw a video of terrorists killing babies. She knew the standard answers, and they did not touch the pain. She went to her professor, who directed the apologetics program, expecting depth. He told her me too.
That answer steadied her because of who gave it. Here was someone still following Jesus while admitting he did not understand. It showed her that faith could survive an unanswered question. A doubting friend may need the same thing: evidence that a person can carry their question and keep following Christ. Lisa grounds this in Jesus himself, who suffered with us. Hebrews 4:15 says, “For we have not an high priest which cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities; but was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin.”
What listening changes about the person
Writing someone off depends on taking their hostility at face value. Lisa’s experience is that the first thing people say is often a cover. In her words, “oftentimes we’re arguing about the fruit when we haven’t actually got to the root.” Fruit picked from a tree grows back if the root stays. We can win every exchange and still lose the person.
She tells of a friend who called because he was leaving the faith. They talked for four hours, ranging from science to hell and beyond. She sensed she should stop answering and listen. By the end, his real issue had nothing to do with any of those topics. He wanted to sleep with his girlfriend without feeling guilty. Arguing each point would have kept them circling the fruit.
Listening also changes what we see. Lisa tells of a young man from a Jacksonville mentoring program, the first in his family to go to college, who was ready to leave the faith because every image of Jesus he had seen was white. He asked her whether his skin color was a product of the Fall. On the surface he was asking about Genesis. Underneath, he was asking whether his life had value. On a college tour, she met a man connected to a group of Hebrew Israelites who asked, with tears in his eyes, why his people were suffering so much, and concluded they must be cursed. She had always wondered why anyone would believe that group’s teaching. That day she saw a brother wrestling with the problem of evil. “I didn’t agree with where he landed, but I understood how he got there.”
Her conclusion is broad: “I’ve never encountered people that doubt that don’t have, usually a good reason for doubt.” That sentence quietly overturns the habit of writing people off. Hostility heard only at the surface sounds like a final answer. Heard to the bottom, it often turns out to be a wound, and a wounded person is still within reach.
Isn’t patience just avoiding the truth?
The worry is fair. Patience can drift into silence, and listening can become a way to dodge anything hard. Lisa holds truth and love together: “It’s always communicating truth in love, but it’s also about your commitment to their process.” Her complaint targets one habit: “we love to just tell people the truth, but we don’t wanna walk with them through the process.” Truth delivered once and followed by absence tends to land as rejection. She names the stakes: “The difference between pulling someone from the fire and pushing them further in is how you love them, how you treat them.”
Jude keeps the same balance. The verse that calls for rescue tells believers to save others “with fear” and to hate the garment stained by the flesh. He takes sin seriously and knows rescue carries risk. He still sends believers toward the fire.
A sharper form of the objection points to the letter’s severe middle section, with its vivid language of judgment. Those words target the teachers who crept in to corrupt the church. The doubting and the drifting receive a different instruction, and it is mercy. Jude gives no one permission to move a struggling friend from the second group into the first.
How long the door stays open
Lisa’s answer is long enough to outlast the moment of rejection. “I’m not here just for a night. I’m here for a lifetime.” She describes checking on people, praying for them and loving them through the process, knowing they may not change now. Maybe in ten years someone else will speak into their life, and what she said a decade earlier will finally make sense.
Prayer is the last and quietest part of that commitment. Lisa grew up with a mother who prayed over her on the way to school and put oil on her forehead while she slept, which she admits annoyed her. She believes some of her plans fell apart and some places stayed closed to her because her mother was praying. She believes God calls believers to intercede the same way for the people they long to see come home.
None of this guarantees a return on your schedule, or in your lifetime. Scripture does not promise that, and neither does Lisa. What changes is the meaning of the wait. If your task were to produce someone’s conversion, years of silence would be a verdict on you. Your task is to live with integrity, listen past the first objection, and keep loving and praying. Measured that way, years of silence are simply years. The person remains within God’s reach, and you remain close enough to be there when the root finally shows.