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Jesus says, the world has hated them. You may be seated. In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Dear Saints of God, when we study the scriptures, one of the things that we always want to be looking for is those places where we see God talking to God. The Father talking to the Son, the Son talking to the Father, the Father talking to the Spirit and so forth. That’s some of the best stuff in the scriptures.
Ministers, and here we’re right in the middle of it, John chapter 17. It’s the middle of what’s called Jesus’ high priestly prayer. In fact, the whole section starting with probably John 14 all the way through the end of John 17 is called Jesus’ Valedictory Speech or Valedictorian Speech. It’s His last great sermon before His triumph on the cross. It’s given on Maundy Thursday, the night before His crucifixion.
But He ends this sermon with a long and extended prayer where Jesus prays for the disciples and then He prays for us, those who would believe through the disciples’ work and through their preaching. We’re right in the middle of it in the prayer that we, in the words that we heard in the gospel text and we want to dig into them a little bit more because while it is marvelous for us to know that Jesus is praying for us, it also indicates that we need His prayer.
Can you just imagine if someone came up to you and they said, I’m praying for you, and you’d say, oh, what’s wrong? When Jesus says, I’m praying for you, we should say, oh, what’s wrong? And He tells us what’s wrong. We’re in the world. That’s what’s wrong. We are His followers in the midst of this fallen world, and that means that we will have trouble. Jesus Himself promises it just a few verses before. He says, in this world you will have trouble, but be of good cheer, I’ve overcome the world.
You, dear Christians, are not of the world. Jesus has separated you from the unbelieving world, and this means that we have a life full of trouble. In fact, the world and our sinful flesh and the devil are constantly attacking us to destroy our faith, our faith in God and our love for one another. This Christian life is tough. That’s why Jesus prays for you, because you need His prayers.
Look at what He said in verse 12, while I was with them, I kept them in your name, which you have given me. I have guarded them. Jesus, like a soldier, like a shepherd, keeps us and He guards us because we need keeping and we need guarding. And now, Jesus says, I’m leaving, I’m ascending to your right hand, O Heavenly Father. So now keep them, continue to bless them, work in them.
Now, this is the first point that we probably need to get our heads around, and that is this: the Christian life is a difficult life. There is a lie that is preached to Christians nowadays. I think it’s always been preached to Christians, but especially in our own day.
And the lie is this: if you believe in Jesus, if you follow Jesus, if you’re a Christian, then your life will be better.
Now in some ways it’s true. For example, you have a God who is not mad at you, and that makes things better. But in a lot of ways it also makes things worse. You have as your enemy the devil himself and all the demons. You have the world and all the fallen powers of this world. You have your own sinful flesh fighting against you, and it’s best to know that.
I heard a sermon one time that said, it was an evangelistic sermon, and it was preaching to the people, and it said, if you don’t believe in Jesus, I want you to try Him out for two weeks and see if He doesn’t make your life better.
Now, I’m glad you’re laughing, because that is really bad. I suppose we have to laugh or cry, but I want to just press this a little bit. I heard a picture when I was just a baby theologian, a sermon, and it was very helpful. It was the analogy of the crashing airplane. I’m sure I’ve told it to you, but this is an important one.
There was a flight that was cruising along, and all of a sudden the engines exploded or something went wrong, and so the captain told the flight attendants that, hey, the plane is crashing, go hand out the parachutes. So the flight attendant, who was taking care of the people in first class, came and handed out the parachutes and said to the people there, said, here, grab a hold of this parachute. Put on this parachute. It’ll make your flight a lot better.
So they all strapped on their parachutes and sat there and thought, oh, that’s nice. You know, we paid the big bucks. We should have a nice flight anyways. And they’re sitting there, and then they’re starting to think, well, wait a minute. This isn’t—it isn’t making it better. This is kind of annoying. I don’t feel comfortable at all. And then the plane would start to shake a little bit and they would jostle and hurt their back.
So they took the parachute off and they put it in their laps, but then they were trying to drink the mimosas and the parachute kept getting in the way. And they said, this is not helping at all. Every time the rattle or the shake or whatever, they wanted to get rid of the parachute. They stuffed it under the seat in front of them. They put it in the overhead bin. They lied: this is not making the flight better at all. Then the plane crashed and they died.
But to the people in the back, the flight attendant brought the parachute and said, strap on the parachute, the plane’s going down, it’s going to save your life. And then it did not matter how uncomfortable it was. In fact, for those people in the back, the more the plane rattled and shook, the tighter they strapped on the parachute. They weren’t worried about the comfortableness of it because it was saving them from the crash that was to come.
And so it is with Jesus. Jesus does not come and say, hey, I’m going to make this life an easy ride, a more comfortable thing, or whatever. Jesus says, I will save you from the wrath to come. I am your hope, your only hope on the judgment day. Follow me. But this following of Jesus means taking up a cross. It means making yourself an enemy of the world.
Like Jesus says, the world hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. You and I, dear Christians, are not of the world. We, therefore, are enemies of the world and are hated by the world. Now, you know it. But one of the things we need to remember is that the world hates us just as much as it hated us in the ’80s, and just as much as it hated us in the ’50s, and just as much as it hated us 100 years ago, and 200 years ago, and 300 years ago, and 2,000 years ago, although that hatred can take on different forms.
And we’re going to talk about the hatred that we experience now in just a minute, but it’s important for us to remember that your parents in the faith and your grandparents and your great-grandparents were all hated by the world. The church was hated. I mean, remember the first century. The hatred of the world looked like throwing the Christians to the lions or setting them on fire or throwing them in prison or cutting off their heads or whatever. You Christians, we Christians have always been hated by the world.
But there’s a particular hatred that we are starting to face now that looks a little bit new, at least it seems new to us. I think I had three conversations with people, with you, and then we had a whole Bible study about it yesterday morning where people were asking, Pastor, what are we supposed to do about working in the midst of this woke culture? What are we supposed to do when the HR department tells us that we have to assign our preferred gender pronouns and we have to address everyone that we work with according to their preferred gender pronouns?
What are we supposed to do when we have job training that includes an extended discussion on critical race theory or just critical theory altogether? How are we supposed to face the hatred of the world? This is why the world hates the church nowadays: because we confess that God has created the world. We confess that God has instituted marriage as a man and a woman. We confess that children are a gift from God and that children even in the womb are persons to be honored.
We confess that this life is not about expressing our own authentic self, especially through sexual experimentation, but that the Christian honors abstinence before marriage and chastity in marriage. How are we to face this sexual revolution and the gender revolution and the whole LGBTQAI plus that we’re facing now? Don’t forget the plus.
What do we do? We realize there’s a clash of worldviews. There is a culture that we live right in the midst of that answers the fundamental questions of life very differently than we do.
How did we get here? Where are we going? What is the purpose of life? What does it mean to be a human being? All of these questions are answered fundamentally different by the world than by the church. And the result is, and let’s just say it very plainly, the result is that the world hates you. It hates your answer. It hates God’s answer to these questions, and it hates you because you believe them and because you confess them.
Now, what do we do about it? This is a very tricky question, and I asked the guys in the men’s Bible study yesterday morning to send me their own questions and concerns about how to be a Christian in the woke place. But it’s a very interesting phenomenon. I mean, it was the stuff that we used to worry about last generation in what happened when we went to secular college, but now it’s not just the universities; it’s the workplace, it’s the military.
I heard just before the service that the Boy Scouts now have a merit badge for diversity required for the Eagle Scouts. I mean, it’s in all of the institutions, all of them now. How do we manage this? How do we address it? It’s a big question that we’re going to have to answer, but Jesus already speaks of it.
Number one, we’re not surprised that the world hates us, and Jesus, though, has given us all that we need to face this. Now I want to pause just for a brief second and say that if you are not experiencing this, if, for example, you are retired, you should praise the Lord. Or if you are working or living in such a place where this has not come to your doorstep and it’s not knocking on your door, then thank the Lord, but do not forget to pray for the people who are next to you who are facing this every day. It’s a very difficult challenge. It’s going to be a more and more difficult challenge.
But Jesus tells us that we have enough in His Word. Plainly, here in verse 14, Jesus says, I have given them Your Word. The world hates them because they’re not of the world just as I am not of the world. But in response to the hatred of the world, the Lord Jesus has given us everything that we need in His Word. We must be people of the Word of God. We must be studying His Word. We must be praying for the Holy Spirit to give us wisdom and to give us courage, and we must look to the Scriptures for that wisdom and for that courage.
We have to pray the Psalms. We have to study the Proverbs. We have to know the biblical texts, especially those texts of what it was like to live in exile. The text of Daniel being thrown to the lions and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego being thrown in the fiery furnace. The text of the apostles going out into the unbelieving world and being arrested and thrown in jail. We have to know them, but if we know them, when we have the Lord’s Word, we have enough.
And then we should know that Jesus has different plans with this whole business than we do. When we look at it and we say, hey, the world hates us, which we don’t want that hatred. We don’t ask for that hatred. We are people of the God who is love, and we are handed over to a life of love, of sacrificial love in every way. We don’t want strife. In fact, when we see it, we want to know how we can get out of it, but Jesus has a different idea.
He does not take us out of this world. Not yet. And this might be the hardest but most important thing of all. Jesus says to the Father, I do not ask you to take them out of the world. Jesus wants you to be in the world. He wants you to be surrounded by the people who hate you. Just let that sink in a little bit.
He wants you to be in the midst of this adversity and this trouble. In fact, if you look down at verse 18, Jesus says, as you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. You are in the place where you are because that’s where Jesus put you. That’s where He wants you. He’s not trying to find a way out. He’s trying to find a way for you to get in. Because just as the Father sent Him into the world full of darkness that would hate Him, that would reject Him, that would tear out His beard and spit on His face and whip His back off and nail Him into the cross, He still went willingly into that world to save it, to save you, to bless it.
And He, who has rescued you and redeemed you, now sends you into the midst of the world as His servants, His friends, bearing His light to bless the world, because those who hate you, Jesus loves. And He wants the sinful world to know it, that He loves them, that He’s redeemed them, that He saved them, that He wants them to live forever in the resurrection.
Yesterday I was up at the doxology retreat for a couple of hours, and Pastor Fleming was teaching there. It was really quite wonderful, and he was reminding us of Luther’s view of the monstrance. You know the monstrance? In the Catholic Church they have a lot of times a chapel or at least on the altar a cross or some kind of tabernacle where they’ll have a window in it, and in it will be a consecrated host where the people can come and pray to Jesus there and to adore and worship Jesus there.
And then once a year, the monstrance or the cross is taken out and it’s marched around in a parade—the Corpus Christi, the body of Christ parade—and Jesus’ body is taken out into the neighborhood to bless the neighborhood and the people around it.
Now the Lutherans rejected this practice because Jesus didn’t say take and adore or take and worship or take and pray or take and march around. He said take and eat. So we take and eat, and all those other things have to go. But Luther says that we, then, when we come and take and eat the body of Christ and take and drink the blood of Christ, we are the monstrance.
You are the bearer of Christ to the world. You take His Word, His love, His forgiveness, His joy, His coming to you and calling you His friend, you take that out and you bear it into the world that hates you and scoffs you. It did to Jesus. It’s not a big deal. It’s what you were meant for. It’s what you were made for. It’s what it means to be a Christian.
Jesus says, the world hates you, and you know what I’m going to do about it? I am going to send you into the midst of it, like sheep into the midst of wolves, which doesn’t sound like a good plan, but it’s Jesus’ plan, so it’s the best plan. He sends you into the world as bearers of His light, bearers of His life.
And you might have to suffer for it, He’s told you. There might be some mockery. There might be a memo from HR. There might be some jail time waiting for us. Or lions, I suppose. What of it? We belong to Jesus, and He loves you, and He loves the world, and He wants you to shine as lights in the midst of a dark generation.
Our text ends with a difficult verse. In fact, the difficulty of it can be seen in the way it’s translated. Do you see verse 19 there? Jesus prays, for their sake I consecrate myself. The word is sanctify, but it’s so weird to think of Jesus saying, I sanctify myself, that they might also be sanctified in the truth. How is Jesus, who is holy, sanctified? How is He made holy? It’s really a quite stunning question.
But here’s the point. Here’s what it is: Jesus says, I go to suffer, I go to die, I go to the right hand of the Father, and I go to the Father to the glory of the throne of God so that you might rejoice in the world.
I sit on the throne so that you can live and die completely unafraid, knowing that you will be there also.” So, dear Christians, rejoice. The world hated Jesus before you even came around, but Jesus loves you more than you can imagine.
God be praised. Amen. And the peace of God that passes all understanding, guard your hearts and your minds, through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.
