Dear friends, although I have been eager to write to you about our common salvation, I now feel compelled instead to write to encourage you to contend earnestly for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints.

I will therefore put you in remembrance, though ye once knew this, how that the Lord, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed them that believed not.

You also know that the angels who did not keep within their proper domain but abandoned their own place of residence, he has kept in eternal chains in utter darkness, locked up for the judgment of the great Day.

So also Sodom and Gomorrah--and the neighboring towns in the same manner--having been guilty of gross fornication and having gone astray in pursuit of unnatural vice, are now before us as a specimen of the fire of the Ages in the punishment which they are undergoing.

In the same way these dreamers make the flesh unclean, having no respect for authorities, and say evil of rulers.

Now when Michael, one of the chief angels, was fighting against the Evil One for the body of Moses, fearing to make use of violent words against him, he only said, May the Lord be your judge.

But these speak evil of those things which they know not: but what they know naturally, as brute beasts, in those things they corrupt themselves.

These people are stains on your love-feasts; they have no qualms about carousing in your midst, they look after none but themselves ??rainless clouds, swept along by the wind, trees in autumn without fruit, doubly dead and so uprooted,

Now Enoch, the seventh in descent beginning with Adam, even prophesied of them, saying, "Look! The Lord is coming with thousands and thousands of his holy ones,

But as for you, my dearly-loved friends, remember the words that before now were spoken by the Apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ--

These are makers of sects, fleshly, having no spirit.

Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy,

To the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever. Amen.