John: Being Hated and Belonging to a Higher Being

So back into John.

I think you'll took a couple weeks' break from our journey through John.

We've been in John for uh coming up on a year.

We've got a while left, maybe I don't know, maybe another six months, I'm not sure.

Um we're just going passage by passage through John.

So we're in John 15.

Our text for this morning is toward the end of John 15, it's going into the maybe the first four verses of John 16.

We have a little bit of work to do to get there.

And so first I want to read Hebrews 11 before we get to John 15.

So Hebrews 11 is this sort of kind of renowned chapter in the scriptures.

It's the hall of fame of faith.

You know, when I read it, I feel like it's everybody that's pretty much not me, is what it reads like to me.

I mean, it's like by faith, this guy did this incredible thing, by faith this lady did this incredible thing, and for most of us, most of us are going, you know, I listened to three Chris Tomlin songs this week, and I'm really feeling like that was real my act of faith, or I said, God bless you, to somebody in the aisle at Home Depot.

I mean, most of us aren't feeling like when you read Hebrews 11, you're going, oh, that's that's me.

You know, I'm pretty similar to these people.

Most of us aren't feeling that, okay?

So we can just be honest about that.

Most of us aren't feeling like that.

And I would even say most of us aren't feeling like that even when we are doing something great in faith.

I would say these people aren't even feeling that.

And so this list has gone on through Hebrews 11.

It's like by faith, I mean incredible things.

And then the writer says this in verse 32, and what more shall I say?

So he's getting to the end of this list.

I do not have time to tell you about Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, about David, Samuel, and the prophets, who through faith they conquered kingdoms, administered justice, gained what was promised, who shut the mouths of lions.

Wow.

Shut the mouths of lions.

You're going, yeah, okay.

Not really me, but wow.

Verse 34.

Quenched the fury of the flames and escaped the edge of the sword, whose weakness, their weakness was turned to strength.

Now you're going, okay, now you're getting near me.

I need that, whose weakness was turned to strength, and who became powerful in battle and routed foreign armies.

Women received back their dead and raised to life again.

We're going, yes, yet, yes.

Right?

We're going, first half of chapter 11, Hebrews, I am in.

I am in for this.

And then there's these three words.

There were others who were tortured, refusing to be released, so that they might gain an even better resurrection.

Some faced jeers and flogging and even chains and imprisonment.

Yeah, this wasn't on the flannel board at VBS when I grew up.

Like the the others, the ones who were tortured, this wasn't there.

They were put to death by stoning.

They were sawed in two.

They were killed by the sword.

And we go, no, no, no, first half.

Go back the first half of chapter 11, right?

Like that there were others not interested in that.

First half, stay in the first half.

They went about in sheep skins and goat skins, destitute, persecuted, and mistreated.

The world was not worthy of them.

And maybe, maybe you're here first, maybe first time, maybe neighbor brought you, family member brought you, going.

Maybe you brought somebody going, but let's don't read the second half of chapter 11.

Let's just tell them the first half of chapter 11, like this other part of the story.

But the other part of the story is reality historically.

Even now, in some places, this is reality.

I mean, this stuff happens.

Or maybe you're maybe you're here and um and you thought, man, I thought Christian was just like give me the give me the good stuff.

Just like tell tell me like the stuff you mentioned at the beginning of the service about being fulfilled, my identity to be in the Lord, and I've become healed and whole and fulfilled.

Like I'm I'm I'm in for that, but that there were others.

That stuff starts to scare me a little bit.

We love the good things.

So speaking of good things, I mentioned that we were in Colorado this past week, and so we we went to this little town.

I'm a researcher, I can research anything to death.

So Google is me and Google are very good friends.

Any curiosity, anything, I will Google it, I will research it.

And so when it came time for us to take a little trip, you know, I'm gonna research that thing, I'm gonna dial that in, I'm gonna read everything, I'm gonna talk to people who've been to Colorado who spent a lot of time there.

What's the best town to go to?

And everybody said, Tell your ride, go to tell your ride, go to telluride.

So we flew into this little airport Montrose.

Nobody's probably been to Montrose.

Drove an hour south, and you're driving down in the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado, just shooting up into the sky.

I mean, it's not like little mountains and then big ones kind of back in there.

I mean, it is just granite peaks shooting up into the sky.

Um, it is beautiful.

You drive up into this valley, Box Canyon, and just on both sides, three sides really.

Um just the mountains are shooting out, there's waterfalls in the back.

I mean, it is unbelievable, it's just a little paradise, is what it is.

And you're just surrounded by 13,000-foot peaks, and we rented this little shoebox condo right on the river, and you could open the door, you could hear the river.

That's what we like, right?

I mean, now I've now I've described that second half of chapter 11 of Hebrews.

No, don't do that.

This little storyline, this is what we like.

Did I mention we didn't have our children with us?

So that was great.

So that river with that stream wasn't being interrupted with other little noises that can be distracting.

Last Sunday we woke up and we opened those doors and we heard that river, and you know, you look up at the mountains, you sit out there, and um, we didn't go to church last Sunday.

I don't know if you go to church here on vacation.

I don't.

I don't know, just confession.

I'm like, we're on vacation, man.

This is fantastic.

I'm sorry you can think badly of it.

Judge me.

I'll judge you for something else.

And so we're sitting out there, we're having our little church, just me and Christy, and we're reading and just enjoying this, right?

I mean, this is it.

And I don't say this, I don't think I say it to the Lord, I don't say it to anybody else, but I sort of believe this within me is there's this expectation of God that He's just gonna constantly make my life better.

That's just sort of my default expectation, sort of like a Western individualistic Christian.

That's just sort of what I believe, even though scriptures are clearly not that.

I believe, even though that's not reality for maybe most Christians in the world, I still sort of default to that belief.

And what we're gonna see in John 15 this morning, it's about hostility toward Christians.

And maybe it's just gonna kind of blow our minds because we're going, man, I know I I thought my default is God constantly makes life better and easier and more comfortable for me.

So uh so John 15, we're gonna go through verse 18 through 16, verse 4.

The back half, the towards the very end of 15 and into 16, Jesus is sort of, he's just told them some pretty mind-blowing stuff.

And then he says, all right, because I've told you this, I'm telling you this so that when this happens, don't get disillusioned.

So when you feel hostility or hatred toward you because of a belief or because of what you how you live or something, don't get disillusioned.

I'm telling you right now, this is going to happen.

So, what we're gonna talk about is we're gonna look the first half of this passage and we're gonna talk about why does this happen?

Why is the world even hostile to Christians?

I mean, we love people.

First of all, love our enemies.

Why would this create hostility toward us?

So, verse 18, let's jump in.

If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first.

So when you when you think of hated, that word, you can think of hostility.

If you belong to the world, it would love you as its own.

So, you know what?

If you belong to the world, you're all about the world, we're gonna define the world in a second.

You know what?

Everything's gonna be fine.

It's gonna be good, you're not gonna face the hostility.

As it is, you do not belong to the world.

But I have chosen you out of the world.

This is why the world hates you.

So let's define this word world.

World, the world.

Here's the world is the system that operates in this temporary setting that we live in, and it's asking for your allegiance that you are the beginning of truth, and that you are the beginning and the end of your salvation.

So it's the system by which you are the center of the world, you are the beginning of truth, and you are you are the beginning and the end of your salvation.

When I say salvation, don't jump automatically to sort of like, oh, that's you know, when you die, you go to heaven.

It is that, but also we're talking about salvation now, so being saved from your inadequacy and your feeling that you're not fulfilled, and your feeling of where's my identity?

So you are the beginning and the end of your salvation for the forgiveness of your sins, for a sense of identity, for a sense of fulfillment, it's on you.

That's what the world is.

It's saying you are the beginning and the end of truth, you are the beginning and the end of salvation.

And so our relationship to the world, because we don't believe that, our relationship to the world, to our friends, to our work, to our bodies, to money, to the future, to sex, to investing, to race, to a whole realm of issues is forever changed when you become a believer.

Because you're receiving truth from outside of you and you're receiving salvation from outside of you.

We just belong to a different way.

It's a different source.

It sounds kind of old school a little bit.

You know, I was thinking about it this week.

It's you know, it sounds like the world is bad.

And then we are different, and we are good.

And I think maybe the problem with that is the way that those lines have been drawn.

And when you look at the context here, verses 21 through 25, um, Jesus is primarily talking, the people who are going to come against the disciples, the guys around this table at this conversation, you know the people who come against this group?

It's the religious moral people.

They're the worldly ones in the passage.

So for us, we so clearly draw the lines, well, you know, if you're in a conservative Bible reading, Bible-believing church, and you know, you're you're a moral person, well, that means you're in, you're not worldly.

But the passage is saying, no, no, no.

You could be that, and you could be extremely worldly.

If you're your own God, you're relying on your own merit, you're still worldly.

I mean, it sort of shakes it up.

It changes how we think and where we draw our lines, our relationship to the world has changed, has forever changed.

I mean, we're just not, I don't think we'll ever be a church that like burns books.

You know, I'm I'm not in that camp, you know.

I mean, we're not gonna burn books.

I mean, we dance at our house at night.

I mean, we're not gonna lick her up, but we might have a drink with friends.

Some of you might choose not to, and that's great as well.

But we're not gonna draw these lines.

You know what line you know where the lines are gonna be drawn for worldliness, not worldliness?

What do you believe about where truth comes from, and what do you believe about where salvation comes from?

That's where we'll draw the lines.

But at the end of all of this, I still read this hostility and I don't like it.

Okay, so I'm reading this passage, I'm coming back from Telluride.

You know, Telliride's where I want to live.

I want to live in that comfortable, perfect place.

And I come back, and John 15's waiting for me, and I don't really like this too much because I'm a I am at the end, I'm like you, I'm a Western, individualistic Christian.

That's my context.

I'm fighting against it, trying to figure that out.

So, you know, about my second day, our second day in Colorado, I I'm like you, and and probably maybe some of you, maybe not all of you, some of you are more spiritual than me, but I I start to you know kind of wonder like, oh, I wonder, I wonder what what the real estate around here goes for.

You know, and you walk by the little stores and they put the little pictures up in the glass, and you stop and you look, and you start going, you know, you start figuring it out, and you go, well, you know, if we you know, if we do well, we invest well, you know, if we make good decisions, maybe by the time we're like 115, we could afford we could afford something here.

I mean, wouldn't that be great?

You know, it is just this constant pull.

And there's this feeling of like, and if that happened, I somehow I feel like, you know, I will I will be a more um, I don't know, a fulfilled person.

Um it's not true.

But we we do it and we try it.

And then you come home and John 15's waiting for you, and you're going, hostility toward me?

Right?

I mean, I don't want that.

That's not that that's not what I want.

I mean, life has been pretty good, and this is this is strong words, hated.

That you'll be hated, that you could be hated.

Verses 20 and 21.

Remember what I told you, a servant is not greater than his master.

If they persecuted me, Jesus said, talking, he's saying, look at me.

I Jesus said, look at look at look at my life.

I loved people.

I was truthful about their condition, but at the same moment I was offering them grace.

And look, they persecuted me.

If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also.

If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also.

They will treat you this way because of my name, for they do not know the one who sent me.

So uh here's the big question here, and here's the outline for the sermon, wrapping it up, really.

Why is this hostility going on?

And there's three reasons, I think three reasons.

You might be able to come up with more, we could add them later in a conversation.

So, number one, we have a higher authority for truth.

The world says you determine your own truth.

What is right for me, what is right for somebody else, what is right for Joe, what's right for Cindy.

Determine your own truth.

And when you're a believer, you say no, truth exists outside of myself, and I receive truth.

And it it demotes me out of being the center of the universe and being my own God, and so it's humbling.

But it's exhausting to put yourself at the center of the world, so it's also freeing.

But it's very difficult for us at this point in history, so individualistic, to receive this.

It confronts us.

And what it does is it's gonna confront your political views, it's gonna confront many social views, it's gonna confront a ton of uh family views and personal views, because you're gonna read the scriptures and you're gonna have to decide am I going to receive truth from outside of myself?

And this is going to create hostility in people because it's going to threaten their autonomy when you speak against what they believe.

So the reason number one, what creates hostility is we have a higher authority for truth.

And as soon as we say that, we have to have reason number two, and reason number two is we have an outside source for rescue.

So the truth is confrontational and it creates hostility, but but the truth and the grace that rescues people come together.

So the truth from outside demands grace from outside, which we have, and that's what God provided for us in Christ on the cross.

He lived the perfect life.

We do not live, and he died the death that we don't have to die.

He took our sin.

We receive his righteousness, and so we fall short.

The truth from outside confronts us.

I'm not what I should be.

I don't pray like I should be.

I'm not a husband like I should be, I'm not a human being like I should be.

So it confronts me.

It doesn't just confront society, doesn't just confront other people, it confronts me.

And so as soon as it confronts me, I need an outside source for rescue.

But this is confrontational and creates hostility because what it means is it means you're not enough.

It means your efforts aren't enough.

It means you can't save yourself.

It's humbling.

And it is an interrupter to the system of the world.

And in this way, we don't belong to the world.

And this is what brings us reason number three.

So reason number one, we have an outside source for truth.

We receive it.

Reason number two is we have an outside source for rescue.

And reason number three is we have an ultimate loyalty apart from the world.

And the world doesn't like us when they can't nail us down.

Meaning, being a Christian makes you a loyal citizen, a loyal worker to your company, uh, maybe even maybe even a loyal member of a political party.

But what people won't like is that your ultimate loyalty is not to your company, or to a political party, to a group of friends, to a neighborhood association, to a race, to a clothing brand, to a social class.

And so we're loyal, but we we we cannot be owned.

And so any person or group of people that wants to own you and control you, when they meet up against this, this will create hostility.

They won't like it.

Because you can't be owned.

Those limits it puts on them will create the hostility.

So toward the end of the trip, I think I think it was toward the last day, maybe the second to last day, and Chrissy was off suffering at the spa, getting a treatment, and I was at the condo, and I was reading and uh sitting out listening to that river.

And so uh, you know what m makes noise from a river, right?

It's the water hitting against the rocks.

That that's what creates the noise.

And I was just thinking about this town, this perfect little picturesque town.

It used to be a mining town, and so it has all this history, and there used to be these little churches, and now these churches have turned into like stores and like an elk's lodge and stuff like that.

And people go, like, what happened here?

Like, at what point did we lose um influence here in this town?

Or at what point did we lose influence in culture?

I turned TV on later that day and Oprah Winfrey Network, Own, is anybody watching Owen?

You wouldn't confess it here, but you know you watch it some.

And so I'd watched a Rob Lowe interview, which I thought was really good about addiction, and so Sunday they had it was um Super Soul Sunday, is what she has going, 11 a.m.

on Sundays.

So that's church time, by the way.

Um, and she was interviewing Howard Schultz, who's the CEO of Starbucks, and I had read his book, and so I'm I'm watching this, and and and the show is designed to inspire and to be thought-provoking.

And I'm thinking, isn't that what we're supposed to be doing at 11 a.m.

in church?

I'm just sort of and I'm going like at what point did we lose all of this influence?

And then I'm hearing this river, and then I'm starting to think, come back towards thinking about church.

And um my mind just started to think a little bit about this passage and thinking, it's not easy to be a church, or to be a person, or to be a family that stands for truth and for grace, because it creates resistance, it creates noise.

See, you're the rock in the river.

I know you don't feel like the rock, and even the fact that you don't feel like the rock actually is what makes you the rock.

But that noise to broken people who are at the end of themselves, whether in the secular pursuits or whether in a religious pursuit, that noise will be unbelievably welcoming.

But for people who are not at the end of themselves, that noise will be as piercing as a gunshot.

And this is what makes it so hard.

And so the system of the world's gonna be hostile, and secular people are gonna look at you and they're gonna say, you are so judgmental on your view of truth.

And you know what religious and moral people are gonna say?

They're gonna look at you and they're gonna say, You're such a pushover.

You should demand more of people.

And really, it's that neither understand Jesus like you do, and that sheer grace that is totally unfathomable, that there's nothing else for you to add or for them to add to make yourself right with God.

And isn't this good news?

This is what we close with is the good news that wherever you've been, maybe you've never stood up for truth your entire life, or maybe you've been on a secular pursuit, or you've just been self-righteous for years, wherever you've been, that you are loved by the creator of the world, not because of anything you've done, but because what Christ has done for you.

And his truth outside of yourself, his truth will break you.

But his grace rescues you.

And so you don't have to attempt to arrive at some level of perfection.

We can receive that perfection of how Christ lived perfect for us.

That the rescue of grace is sufficient for you.

Your life might create hostility from the world, but it's okay.

That you are loved.

That you are loved by God and rooted into Him, but not into the world.

Let's pray together.

And we confess this morning that we do not like hostility.

Most of us don't count as a gain.

And this is a lack of faith, and we would love for you to increase our faith to be at such places.

Would you humble our hearts to stop deifying ourselves as the authority for truth, to stop deifying ourselves as the deliverer of ourselves or of somebody else?

Free us to trust you, free us, to rely on the sufficiency of Jesus and Jesus alone.

We pray this in Christ's name.

Amen.