Hated but Helped

Good evening, Christ Covenant. If I haven’t met you before, my name’s Zach. I’m one of the interns here. I’m not American; I’m English, as you can tell. I’m here studying at RTS. I’m very thankful to Christ Covenant. I don’t think I or my family would be here without that support and I’m thankful to all of you for welcoming me and my wife and my children in and making us part of your family. We’ve made many close friends while we’re here and if I haven’t met you, I’d love to do so in the weeks and months to come.

We’re going to come to the Lord’s Word. If you’ve got a Bible in front of you, do pick it up and turn to John chapter 15. We’re continuing in the Last Supper discourse where the Lord Jesus is addressing His disciples before He goes to the cross.

John chapter 15. Before we come to the reading of God’s Word, let me pray for God’s help.

Lord Jesus, we’ve been coming to You over the last few weeks and we have sat at Your feet in the upper room and joined with Your disciples. You have been teaching us how to be servant-hearted. You’ve been giving us words of comfort. You’ve promised us Your Holy Spirit. You’ve urged us to abide in You as a branch is bound to its vine. Now we come again this evening and ask that one more time You would come to us by the presence of Your Spirit and preach to us those words that You preached 2000 years ago to Your friends and to Your servants and You made them fresh and living in our hearts once more. We ask for Your glory. Amen.

John chapter 15, starting at verse 18.

““If the world hates you, know that it has hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you. If they kept My word, they will also keep yours. But all these things they will do to you on account of My name, because they do not know Him who sent Me. If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have been guilty of sin, but now they have no excuse for their sin. Whoever hates me hates My Father also. If I had not done among them the works that no one else did, they would not be guilty of sin, but now they have seen and hated both Me and My Father. But the word that is written in their Law must be fulfilled: ‘They hated Me without a cause.’ But when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, He will bear witness about Me. And you also will bear witness, because you have been with me from the beginning.””

Well, there is an anxious feeling that we are all very familiar with, an anxiety that is present across personalities and context and coaches. It’s the kind of feeling you have when you walk into a room full of strangers and you know you’re going to need to talk to one of them. Or when you send a text or an e-mail on a sensitive issue and you’re not quite sure how it’s going to be received. Or you post on Instagram and know that everyone will look at it. Or when you wake up in the morning and you’re choosing what to wear knowing that everyone’s going to be watching you. Or perhaps when you start at a new school or a new job or move to a new neighborhood, an anxious feeling.

What is it? Well, it’s the desire to be liked, the desire to be thought well of, to be approved of, to be accepted, to belong in a place, in a community.

So far in the Last Supper discourse Jesus has been speaking to us of comfort and love and joy and fruit and a home in heaven and peace and assurance, and now hatred, the hatred of the world. It’s a sobering thing this evening that if we are to be Christ’s disciples and to follow Christ, to be part of His Church, then that desire we have deep within us to be loved and to be accepted, to be admired, is a desire we’re going to have to crucify.

But Jesus says to us this evening, and this is my first point of three in verses 18 through to 20, Jesus says to us the world will hate you because you belong to Me. The world will hate you because you belong to Me. The world will hate the Church because the Church belongs to Christ.

Of course you know that Jesus is preparing His disciples throughout this whole discourse for the time when He is going to leave them and go to heaven and as a good captain would prepare his soldiers for the battlefield so they don’t lose hope, so they don’t give up, so they don’t abandon the fight, so Christ as our good captain is preparing us for what’s ahead.

Jesus says in verse 18 “if the world hates you,” but it’s clear from the rest of the passage as we’ve read through it that that “if” is not on the off chance, or perhaps the world may hate you, but rather kind of a “when the world hates you.” Not a mere possibility but a certainty. The world will hate you. The world, that is the unbelieving, the ungodly, the fallen humanity that does not know God, that is in darkness and under the power of the devil, the world will hate, that is, the world will malign, the world will reject, despise, abuse, suppress, seek to destroy, condemn, frown upon, you, the collective you, the Church, the world will hate you.

This is to be, according to Christ, the general expectation for the people of God and that has proved true since the time of Christ throughout the ages and across the world. If you were here last Sunday you would have heard of many missionaries who have been hated for the name of Christ.

But while that is a general expectation, the experience of separate churches and of individuals may differ from place to place. It’s true to say that the Western Church, of which Christ Covenant is part of, has not faced the same intensity or level of hatred that is normal for the church of Christ throughout the ages and across the world.

We do sense, don’t we, that it feels like the winds are changing, the tides are turning and that the balances are slowly shifting and that the devil in our world is beginning to stir up the hatred in the world against the Church in the West once more.

So that general expectation for what the Church will experience in the world should actually become increasingly our personal expectation, that we will start coming across more and more people who bear obvious hatred towards us. It might be your neighbor or your colleague or your family member, may hate you for being a Christian, and the Lord Jesus this evening sees to prepare us for that time.

Of course, I must say that for some of us that is not an expectation but actually a present reality already within our own workplaces and within our own communities and within our own families.

Why will the world hate you? Well, because you belong to Christ. The world will hate you because you belong to Christ.

That’s very clear throughout verses 18 through to 20, so you’ve got verse 18, “if the world hates you, know that it has hated Me before you.” I’ve paved the way for you to walk in, and that will be for the world to hate you.

Or verse 19 – if you were of the world, that is, if you thought like the world, if you had the same mind as the world, if you belong to the world, then the world would love you as its own, but because you are not of the world but I chose you out of the world, therefore, therefore the world hates you. The world stands opposed to Christ so the man who turns to Christ will also be hated by the world.

Or verse 20. Remember the word that I said to you, and here He referred back to Himself in John 13 verse 16. He says a servant is not greater than his master and in John 13 He applies that to say therefore you must love one another as I have loved you, you must serve one another as I have served you. But here He applies the same truth to say therefore you are going to share in My sufferings, you are going to share in My sufferings. You will be hated as I was hated.

All the way through those three verses it’s you/Me, you/Me, you/Me. You belong to Me, you are mine, you are united to Me, I am the vine, you are the branches and the world hated Me so the world will hate you.

I wonder do we sometimes forget that we have a crucified Savior. When we consider the cross we often look at the cross and you see the crosses around our sanctuary this evening and we look at the cross we have emotions of love and awe and wonder and joy because we look at the cross and we see Christ there crucified for us and we worship Him. That is right and that is good. But in doing that, sometimes we forget what a robe and cross really is, that on the cross Jesus experienced the full and final expression of the world’s hatred, that in the cross was the complete humiliation and the final rejection of a man as Jesus was first condemned then stripped then beaten then tortured then murdered.

Do we sometimes forget that we follow a crucified Savior and that we belong to Him? That they hated His claim that to be the Son of God and to have authority over all men and we are those who make the same claim about Him. That they hated His call to repent of sin and turn to the living God. And we are those who issue the same call as Him. They hated His character, a man of such burning holiness that the darkness in people’s hearts was exposed and they tried to be rid of Him.

Aren’t we those who are being conformed slowly, gradually, into the same character of Christ? We belong to Him, to the crucified Savior. We bear His name, we carry His message, we champion His cause, and they crucified Him. Do you think the world will not crucify us as well?

But of course, the reason for the world’s hatred, I belong to Christ, is also profoundly the reason for my comfort when the world does hate me. I belong to Christ. I belong to Christ. You see in the passage itself He has chosen me out of this world, out of the fallenness of humanity, out of darkness, and I belong to Him. He’s my Master and I am His friend so that the hatred that I bear for following Christ is actually a mark of the fact that I really belong to Him.

You know the story of the apostles in the book of Acts, how they were persecuted for following Christ, for preaching the Gospel. Do you remember that one story when the Jewish leaders took them in and said you must stop preaching the Gospel, you must stop speaking about this man Jesus. They said, well, we can’t do that. We must obey God. So they beat them and then let them go.

Do you remember what it says in that passage? They went away rejoicing. They went away rejoicing. I think part of that rejoicing must have been that the physical oppression they suffered was a sign to their own souls that they really were Christ’s and belonged to Him.

So what do you think belonging to Christ is worth? Is He worth the world’s acceptance and the world’s admiration and the world’s respect? He was hated by the world for your sake. Are you someone who’s willing to be hated by the world for His sake? Or you can put it another way. Have you this evening made Him the pearl of great price?

You remember that story that Jesus told about the pearl merchant who went in search of a pearl of great price and when he found it he sold all he had to gain it. Christ is that pearl and the cost is all He has, and the cost for us today includes the world’s love. Sacrificing the world’s love may mean sacrificing other things, like your reputation, your family, your friendships, your job, your freedom, maybe even your life.

Only if Christ is worth more to you than all those things will the world’s hatred be a cost that you are willing to bear joyfully and even willingly.

Well, our Lord Jesus takes us deeper still in these verses. Deeper into the reason for the world’s hatred towards us in verses 21 through to 25. This is the second point this evening. First point was you’re hated because you belong to Me. Secondly, Jesus says the world hates Me because I belong to My Father. The world hates us because we belong to Christ, and the world hates Christ because He belongs to God.

In this section of verses 21 through to verse 25, Jesus returns to one of His favorite themes, which is the deep unity and identity between the Father and the Son. So in verse 21 He says all these things they will do to you on account of My name because they do not know Him who sent Me.

Now knowledge in John’s Gospel or knowing someone is not just a knowledge of content, but it’s a knowledge of relationship. To not know God is to lack the desire to know God, to have in your heart an active avoidance of God, to want Him to be in your life out of sight and out of mind.

You can think about that in our own relationships. When a person dislikes another person they tend to cut that person’s presence out of their lives. Or think of a father who hates his son. What does he do? He might disinherit the son. Why does he do that? Because he does not want to know the son. He wants that son out of sight and out of mind.

Jesus said the world does not know God and He’s beginning to show us that the world’s hatred towards Him is really rooted in a hostile attitude towards God Himself.

You may or may not have watched the Harry Potter films, or maybe if you’re more keen have read the books, but one of the key relationships in those films is between Snape and Harry. Put simply, Snape hates Harry. Snape hates Harry. He embarrasses him in front of the class, he maligns his character, and he makes his life miserable at every opportunity. Early on in the story you have a kind of question mark – well, why is that? Why does Snape hate Harry so much? It’s later that we discover that the hatred he has for Harry is actually rooted in a much older and deeper hatred in Snape’s heart, and that’s a hatred for Harry’s father, James Potter. Snape hates Harry because there’s a sense in which when Harry walked into the room with him, he brought the presence of his father into that room. He looked like his father, he sounded like his father, and he acted like his father and he stirred up an old hatred in Snape’s heart.

If that is true, that the likeness between a father and a son is so clear on a human level between an earthly father and an earthly son, how much more true is it of Christ, who is the very image of God who has the exact imprint of His nature upon Him, who can say, as He has said, whoever has seen Me has seen the Father. And in the passage this evening, whoever hates Me has hated the Father.

Verses 22 through to verse 24, we have that exact truth laid out of the hatred for Christ is really rooted in the deeper hatred for God. It’s laid out for us in a kind of twice repeated threefold pattern. It’s a twice repeated, threefold pattern. The pattern is Christ reveals the Father, one. The world is guilty, two. And the world hates. One, two, three, and that’s repeated twice, first in verses 22 through to 23, and then again in verse 24. So first Christ reveals God in His words in verse 22, “if I had not come and spoken to them,” and in His actions, in what He did, in His deeds in verse 24. What He said and did He made God plain to those in front of Him.

By revealing God to them, He made the world guilty of sin because they rejected Him. Although He puts it in the negative. Did you notice that? He says, “If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have been guilty of sin.” In verse 22, and actually if you look there in your Bibles you should have a footnote, you’ll find that down at the bottom, it says in the Greek they would not have sin. It’s a very strong statement.

It raises a little question in our hearts. Did Christ by His words and His actions make innocent people sinful? Or guilty? Well, the answer of course, is no. But rather the acceptance or the rejection of Christ was a manifestation of a hostile attitude towards God.

There is a sense, I think, that if they had accepted Christ and the world had welcomed Christ and there had been no hatred, they would not have sin because sin is the rejection God. But they did reject Christ and so they proved that their hearts stood opposed to God, they manifested the heart attitude towards God and proved themselves to be sinners. So in verse 22 Christ says they have no excuse, they’ve shown who they truly are.

Until Christ confronts a man, the hatred that he or she has in their heart I think lies, can lie very, very quiet, has not been roused up. You might find that with many of your neighbors. You might think that, it says that the world hates God, but I don’t always find that to be true. That doesn’t always seem true of those around me. Well, the truth is, of course, that a person may not even know they hate God because they don’t think about God at all. He is out of sight and out of mind. A person isn’t even aware of the hatred in their heart because it hasn’t been stirred up and they can end up excusing themselves of any need for salvation because they don’t know their own heart.

But when a man is confronted by Christ, the hatred is stirred. Christ spells that out for us at the end of verse 22, 23, and in verse 24 – Whoever hates Me hates My Father also. And more clearly in verse 24 – Now they have seen and what? Hated both Me and My Father.

When men and women are confronted by the same God, in Christ through the Church, today, that is why they hate us as well.

It’s interesting now Jesus finishes this section. Isn’t it? In verse 25 He says but the word that is written in their law must be fulfilled. They hated Me without a cause.

I wonder, do you, when you read that, do you hear a sadness in His voice? That these are, after all, His fellow Jews that He’s talking about and they are standing condemned by their own Scriptures. There is a lament in Christ’s heart that they are so blind that their own law cannot help them see and that they hated Him without a cause.

Jesus is quoting Psalm 35 verse 19, and the psalmist in that psalm is lamenting the fact that He had poured out grace and favor upon people and they had responded by turning and abusing and hating Him. If that is true of the psalmist in Psalm 35, how much more true is it of Christ? The Christ who loved this world. The Christ who came down from heaven to save ruined sinners. Jesus didn’t have to. No one compelled Him to. But He came freely out of the fullness of His grace.

In the Scriptures we find that even to those who rejected Him, His arms were ever open wide. Do you remember that story where Jesus goes up on a high mountain and looks over Jerusalem, at this point in the gospels, in Luke’s narrative, and when He looks over Jerusalem He weeps, He laments, and He says, “O, but that you would come to Me and I would have gathered you in like a hen gathers in her chicks.”

He wept over the city that crucified Him. No wonder He said they hated Him without a cause.

The Church has that same open arms stance and we cry out to the world that it’s free salvation here, free grace, free eternal life. Here is the place you can find fellowship with the God who made you and loves you and He wants to know you if only you’ll come. Just come. There is no price to pay. Christ has paid it all.

The world hates our message. The world hates our Christ. So when the world hates you, can I say, do not pity yourself. Do not pity yourself. Pity those who are so blinded by their pride, so lost in their ignorance, so devoted to the love of themselves, that they will not have Christ.

We have found the only thing worth having, haven’t we? The world spurns it and that should cause us great grief in our hearts, as it did the Lord Jesus.

Well, our time is coming to a close and I’ve titled my sermon “Hated but Helped.” I’ve so far just talked about hated. So it’s time we talked a little bit about the helped. In verses 26 through to both 26 and verse 27. It’s my third point. The world will hate you but the Spirit will help you, but the Spirit will help you.

Jesus here speaks again of a promise He has already made to His disciples in chapter 14, verse 26, that He will send the Spirit to His church. That is, it’s in the text, the helper, the advocate, the one who draws alongside to help Christ’s people in their hour of need.

Of course, in this verse, in verse 26, that the Church has long recognized, that we catch a glimpse of the relationship between the Spirit and the Father Himself. Whereas Jesus says, talking about a future even of Pentecost and beyond, I will send you the Spirit, He then goes on to say in verse 26, that Spirit who, in the present tense, proceeds from the Father, and the Church has recognized a glimpse there of the eternal relationship between the Father and the Son and the Spirit has been the one who’s going out, proceeding from the Father, from all eternity.

So therefore it’s appropriate that He is the one that the Lord Jesus sends to us. It’s natural. It’s fitting. How wonderful that is the Spirit who has eternally proceeded from the Father is coming to be our helper, our advocate.

I have been recently trying to do war with the American tax system and it is baffling. I’m partly convinced that no one knows how it works so everyone kind of lives under a cloud of fear that someone else does their taxes for them and they live under a cloud of fear that the IRS can come knocking and take all your money. But if you’ve ever struggled with something like that, and you felt kind of lost and confused or for me, personally, fearful of being deported, the relief when someone steps in who knows what they’re doing is enormous. When that person is not just kind of a disinterested third party but is a friend who has a vested interest in helping you, how much better is it?

And that’s what Jesus promises about the Spirit. He’s the one who can draw alongside us and help us to do what we need to do. He’s the one who can do it rightly, perfectly. He knows what to do. The thing He comes to help us with, in verses 26 and 27, is to bear witness. Do you see that? He will bear witness about Me.

First of all, we’ve got to say that that witness bearing is to us and in us, for Christ is sending to us the Spirit. So it’s the Spirit who bears witness to our own hearts that the Gospel is worth believing in and that Christ is as precious as the Scriptures make Him out to be. He reassures us and comforts us and convicts us, in us. But then in us He witnesses to the world through us.

Of course, the apostles have a special role in this. We see that in verse 27. He says to them, “you also will bear witness because you have been with Me from the beginning.” They were the first evangelists. They were those with the eyewitness testimony. The Church was built on their witness.

The New Testament that we hold in our hands today, the passage that we read this morning, is built on their witness, empowered by the Holy Spirit. But it’s also very clear that the witness-bearing role of the Church was not exclusive to the apostles alone but was for all of us.

This is the hope we need. This is the hope we need. Witness to Christ, that is what draws such hatred from the world. Put it this way – a person may be disliked by people for reasons other than Christ. We know that. It might be true of people within the Church as well as without the Church because they’re unkind or unpleasant or unthoughtful. That’s quite a different hatred, it’s actually the fruit of sin, but the hatred in our passage, the hatred is for the faithful witness.

You could put it another way, that the Christian who hunkers down and says nothing about Christ very likely won’t be noticed by the world. Or the Christian who does merely social good, as good as that is in itself, may even be praised and admired by the world. But when a Christian takes up the cause of Christ and spreads the message of Christ, and builds his ethics on the laws of Christ and refuses to bow down to anything other than Christ, and when the world sees that Christian making a stand for Christ, then the hatred in the world’s heart is stirred up. It’s stirred up against him.

So the Spirit is sent to us by our Lord Jesus to strengthen our fail limbs, to put words on our trembling lips, and to make us stand against the devil himself so that we are willing and able to bear the hatred of the world.

He is a good Savior. Let’s pray to Him now. Let’s pray to the one who gave Himself for us and gives us the strength to stand for Him.

Heavenly Father, we have been confronted in no uncertain terms about the cost of being a disciple of Christ. It is not an easy matter. We know that when the Lord Jesus calls a man, He calls a man to come and die. So we pray that this week You would help us to embrace that call of self-denial, that You would be preparing by Your Spirit our hearts to be hated by the world and that rather than crushing us with fear, the knowledge that you are with us and that we have the only thing that’s worth having in this world, would give us joy and give us peace and give us freedom. So we pray strengthen our hearts to stand for Christ this week. In His name. Amen.