Jesus’ Warning about Hate

Listen Online:

Watch Online:

Transcript:

Well, last Sunday morning I talked to you about the concept of love from the Bible, what the Bible means by it. And I told you, as I’ve told you many times before, that part of our problem with the word love is that it’s a vastly overworked word in the English language. We just don’t have enough words for it.

And that’s why I can say I love Whataburger and I love my wife and not in the same way, right? And not in the same order either. I said that wife and then Whataburger last week.

We may need to go to Whataburger today. I’ve just got it on the brain, I guess. I don’t love my wife and Whataburger in the same way.

That would be weird, right? The word hate, it works the same way. Sometimes I think in English we just have an underdeveloped vocabulary for these things.

But hate has been misused and misapplied to the point that nobody even really understands what it means anymore. Anything can be hate. And just to give you an example, I hate snakes.

Hate them. I hate raw onion. But I don’t hate them in exactly the same way.

For example, Charlie can have raw onion at the table, and I’m not going to react the same way that I would if there was a snake at our kitchen table, right? And I could make a list of things that I hate. Things and ideas that I hate, and none of them are quite the same.

It’s because we have expanded the definition to where it really doesn’t mean anything anymore. I shared with you a few weeks ago that John MacArthur preached a message that I don’t recall what the entire purpose of the message was, but in a brief section of the message just recently, it was back in January, he preached out of Genesis about how God created male and female. And I listened to the comments that he made on the subject.

There was nothing that was hateful or hostile in there. It was a straightforward presentation of what God’s Word says. And yet he’s being threatened with being kicked off of YouTube for hate speech.

And if you recall me sharing that with you, I said, I remember when the term hate speech was reserved for groups like the Ku Klux Klan that literally stood out there and said, we hate and then named groups and individuals by name. Right now, right now, the former minister of the interior in Finland is on trial. has been brought up on criminal charges for quoting Scripture on her Twitter account because her government says it was hate speech on the same subject that John MacArthur was talking about. And by the way, her comments were not directed toward any group of people.

Her comments, her quoting of Scripture was directed as a rebuke toward the false prophets that are now in charge of her denomination who have decided it’s okay to compromise with what God’s Word says about right and wrong. she wasn’t calling out the world we can only expect the world to do what the world does she was calling out the supposed Christian leaders who’ve decided to get on board with it but that’s hate speech that’s hate yet I saw a picture on the internet of a man at a protest who was carrying a sign that said if Jesus comes back kill him again and oh that’s so edgy and so avant-garde and I thought well some people just get wound up about things and maybe that was just a moment of. .

. He just got caught up in the point he was trying to make. No, no, I found who the man is and he sells t-shirts with that slogan on it.

But that’s not hate. That’s not hate. See, we’ve gotten confused about what hate actually is.

And over the last few weeks and over the next few weeks, we have been and we’ll continue to look at some words that have become redefined in our culture. We don’t have time to do all the words that have been redefined in our culture. but some of the ones that affect how we read and understand the Bible and how we understand the gospel some of these are are important and so we’re going back and we’re spending some time looking at what does God’s word say about these words and these concepts hate is one of these that we need to understand because many of you have probably been in a situation where you think I know God’s word says this, I know this is right, and I want to stand with this, but people around me are telling me it’s hate speech.

I don’t feel hateful. I don’t feel hatred toward anybody. How can these things both be true?

I want to share some of this with you this morning about how the Bible explains and how the Bible understands the concept of hate. Now, unfortunately, unlike last week where I could go to 1 John 4, I believe it was, and say, here’s where God says, this is what love is. I did not find a passage of Scripture where God says, this is what hate means.

What I found instead was a passage of Scripture where Jesus talks about how the world would hate Him, and we can draw some conclusions from His description of hate. We don’t have the definition in Scripture, but we have an example that we can learn from. And so this morning we’re going to be in John chapter 15.

John chapter 15, if you want to turn there with me in your Bibles, If you’re using a device, there’s a link in your bulletin that’ll get you right there, or it’ll be on the screen. And once you find it, if you’re able to stand with me without too much trouble as we read from God’s Word, we’ll do that now. John 15, starting in verse 18, this is Jesus on the way to Gethsemane, on the way for Him to be betrayed and arrested and led off for trial and crucifixion.

He is teaching His disciples and He’s praying with and for and sometimes about His disciples. And this is part of what he said that evening, starting in verse 18 and going through verse 25. It says, If the world hates you, you know that it hated me before it hated you.

If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet 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 for my name’s sake, because they do not know him who sent me.

If I had not come and spoken to them, they would have no sin. But now they have no excuse for their sin. He who hates me hates my father also.

If I had not done among them the words which no one else did, they would have no sin. But now they have seen and also hated both me and my father. But this happened that the word might be fulfilled, which is written in their law.

They hated me without a cause. And you may be seated. So Jesus warned here that the world hated Him and would continue to hate Him.

And that as a result, the world would hate those who followed Him. But we need to back up, as I said, and understand what does the Bible mean by the concept of hate? Is it the same thing that society has led us to believe that hate is?

The way hate is popularly defined, it really kind of depends on who you want to ask. Hate can be an extreme dislike for something. or someone.

Kind of like my issue with the snakes and onions. Just don’t care for them at all. Not together, not separately.

I just don’t care for them. Somewhere along the line, we got the idea that disagreement is hate. That disagreement is hate speech.

I disagree with lots of things. It doesn’t mean that I hate the people who believe or do those things. I may be in trouble for this later, but I’m going to put my wife on the spot for just a second.

Do we agree on 100% of things? No. For those at home, she’s shaking her head no. Do we sometimes disagree on important things?

Yes, and then we talk them out and come to a conclusion, often hers, but we come to a conclusion. We can disagree even on important issues. We can disagree on here’s how we’re going to handle this situation with the kids.

We can disagree on here’s what we ought to do with this financial issue. We can disagree on important things, and it does not mean I hate my wife. There used to be such a thing in Western civilization as being able to disagree without being disagreeable.

And I think most of us would like to go back to that, right? Hate can be defined as a lack of approval. I can walk and chew gum at the same time, right? I can disapprove of what somebody does and still not hate them.

I’m going to put my children on the spot. Do I approve of every choice you ever make? No.

I’m getting eye rolls with that one. Do you think I hate you? Okay.

By the way, I ask these questions because I know what the answers are going to be. First rule of lawyering and pastoring. Don’t ask questions you don’t know the answer to.

We can disapprove of somebody’s choices. Sometimes I look back, I don’t approve of my own choices, right? Sometimes hatred could be to hold a position that makes somebody uncomfortable.

Listen, if y’all knew everything about every aspect of my political views, some of you might be uncomfortable. even if we’re generally on the same side. Now, don’t think I’m a radical, you know, anything.

I’m not a Nazi. I’m not a communist. I’m just, sometimes I’m a little too libertarian for my own good. But we’re not going to agree on everything.

And sometimes our views may make each other uncomfortable. That doesn’t mean that we hate one another. But the Bible shows us what hate is, what hate really is, by showing it as the reverse image of love.

We talked last week about what love is. love is demonstrated by how Jesus sacrificed Himself. Love is demonstrated by the way Jesus sacrificed Himself for our good so that we could know God.

And hate is the opposite of that. Hate is pictured in the way the world reacted to that sacrifice. It’s what Jesus said.

He came here to go through this sacrifice. He came here to show us God’s righteousness and God’s judgment and came here so that we could be saved. And the world reacted like it had been invaded by Mongol hordes.

The world despised Jesus Christ. When Jesus talked about hate, he used a word here, meseo, that describes just an overwhelming disgust. And he described this disgust as the kind of thing that’s going to overwhelm somebody and drive them to act. Because he says in verse 20, he ties this idea of hate to the idea of persecution. And he says, if they persecuted me, they will also persecute you.

He said that about the hate, and He said that about the persecution. If they hated Me, they will hate you. And as a result, if they persecuted Me, they will persecute you.

So between the meaning of the Word and the way Jesus applies it, we get a picture here of how the Bible understands hate. Because love in the Scriptures is always demonstrated. If you walked away from here last Sunday understanding nothing else, I hope you understood that love to God is more than just a warm, fuzzy feeling.

It is an action. Hate is the same thing. It’s this hostility that wells up deep inside of us and leads us to act.

It motivates us to destroy something. And from that standpoint, I can’t even say I hate the snakes because we’ve got one that decided to live in our flower bed in my garden and he and I kept surprising each other. Big, like four-foot coach whip.

He and I were about to give each other heart failure all growing season last year. I didn’t want to kill him. I just wanted him to not live on my property.

I never went after him with the hoe. I never drew my gun and tried to shoot him. I just tried to shoo him to the neighbor’s property.

Stupid thing kept coming back, though. So I wasn’t motivated by hatred. I didn’t want to kill him.

I just didn’t want him around. But the biblical idea of hatred is this hostility. Hatred would be if I was so incensed by the very fact that snakes existed that I went and hunted them down all over my property and went and hunted them down all over the neighbor’s property.

See, the world was so incensed by Jesus and what He taught that the world came and hunted Jesus down. All throughout the Gospels we see mention that they plotted to kill Jesus. All throughout the book of Acts we see plots where they were plotting to kill Jesus’ followers.

There’s an internal hostility here that compels a person to act and seek the destruction of somebody else. That’s hate. Not that we disagree.

Not that our views make somebody else uncomfortable. It’s that. And I don’t know any Christians who feel that way about any other people or any group of people.

And by the way, if you do, you’re doing it wrong. You’re doing Christianity wrong. We can look at all sorts of things around us and disagree with the choices people make without being driven by hostility or seeking their destruction.

As a matter of fact, we as Christians should be motivated by love and our dealings with those people. Even when we say something is wrong and something’s going to hurt them. And it doesn’t matter what it is, folks.

Homosexuality, adultery, drunkenness, whatever it is, you name it, that the Bible says is wrong and is hurtful, is going to hurt somebody. When we point that out, it should be out of a heart of love toward wanting to see those people redeemed in Jesus Christ rather than saying those things because we want to hurt them. So again, if any part of our Christianity is driven by hostility toward another human being, we’re doing Christianity wrong.

Jesus warned that the world would hate his followers. As he gives us this image of hate, he warned that it was going to be turned on us. Jesus told his followers that there was going to be hostility between the world and the church.

He said in verse 18, if the world hates you, you know that it hated me before it hated you. We shouldn’t be surprised by this. If we’re following Jesus, they’re going to react to us the same way that they reacted to him.

And by the way, don’t take this word if as kind of a squishy word. Well, he says, if they hate it, if this happens, maybe there’s a way we can get out of it. By the way, some well-known evangelical leaders have started talking like, well, maybe we can approach the culture in this way and that, and we can kind of ease around things and maybe they won’t hate us.

Stop that, Timothy Keller. It doesn’t work that way. The construction in the Greek here doesn’t mean that it’s a condition that maybe they’ll hate you because maybe they hated me.

It assumes that it’s the case. It assumes that they’re going to hate us. The world will hate us for Jesus’ sake.

Now, that doesn’t mean that. . .

I want to be very clear on this. This does not mean that every individual in the world is driven by hostility toward Christianity. I know plenty of non-Christian people that don’t particularly feel hostile toward us.

It’s kind of a you-leave-me-alone-I’ll-leave-you-alone approach. And so I don’t want you to think that I’m saying that you’re non-believing family members, or if you’re watching online, or even if you’re here in person and you’re not a Christian, I’m not saying that you’re a hateful person. This does not mean that every non-Christian is hostile toward every Christian.

What it means, and it also, by the way, doesn’t mean that every believer is going to experience the same degree of persecution. When the cashier at Starbucks refuses to say Merry Christmas, that is not on the same planet as what believers are experiencing right now in North Korea and Eritrea and Turkmenistan and Vietnam and Cuba and all over the world. There is hostility, but we don’t dare pretend that we all experience the same degree of persecution.

What this does mean is that hostility between the world and the church is the normal state of things. Sometimes if the world reacts in hostility toward the church, we wonder what’s wrong with us, what’s wrong with our message, what’s wrong with our handling of the message, our communication of the message, it doesn’t necessarily mean that anything’s wrong. Hostility is the normal state of affairs here.

The great evangelist George Whitefield, back in the 1700s, said if you’re going to walk with Christ, you are going to be opposed. In our day, to be a true Christian is really to become a scandal. It’s not that we can avoid the hostility of the world by just wrapping the gospel up in different packaging. Eventually, you get to the cross and the Bible says the message of the cross is offensive.

The only way to completely make our message unoffensive is to get rid of the cross and the blood. And I’m going to tell you this in love. If that’s what you want to do, go to another church.

I promise I don’t mean that ugly. I would hope you would say the same to me. If that’s what I want to do is remove the cross and the blood, send me to another church.

Because without the cross, without the blood, there’s no point to any of what we’re doing. If we are being faithful to Jesus Christ, there is going to be hostility between us and the world. But understand this, the church should not escalate this hostility by adopting a belligerent posture toward the world around us.

Sometimes we look at principles like this and we think it gives us an excuse to be a jerk to people. We don’t get to look at this and say, oh, the world hates us, so we’re just going to hate them right back. And we’re going to hate them better.

That has happened. That’s happened. I’m not going to defend every statement ever made by any professing Christian.

I’m not going to try to defend everything that every church has ever done because not all of it’s been Christ-like. But when Jesus said the world’s going to hate you, it’s a warning about what’s to come, not a goal to shoot for. This is not a badge of honor in the sense that the more people hate you, the better.

I’ve known preachers like this. I guess I can call him a friend. I had a preacher friend who used to brag about the fact that he’d never been invited to preach at the same place twice.

I’m not sure that’s something to brag about, but well, because I just tell it like it is. You can tell it like it is and still be a kind person, all right? So this does not give the church an excuse to go out and be hateful toward the world because, well, they’re going to hate us first. But neither should we run from compromising the truth.

God’s Word tells us to speak the truth in love. Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is to tell somebody the truth. If my child’s about to run out into the middle of the busy street, the most loving thing I can do is jerk them by the arm and say, that’s going to hurt you, don’t ever do it again, even though it’s not what they want at the time.

So the goal here is not to adopt a posture of hostility of our own. It’s also not to compromise with the world. Instead, Jesus is telling us that we just need to accept this as the natural result of following Him and continue following Him and loving people in the way that requires.

Just accept that the world is going to be hostile sometimes, and that’s just the cost of doing business when you’re advancing the gospel. And know that as I’m telling you this, this is really hard for me. I am by nature a diplomat, and so I like for everybody to get along.

where Jesus said, blessed are the peacemakers. I cling to that. And so it is not the idea that some people are just going to be unhappy with us, no matter what we do, is not something that I enjoy.

But it’s just the natural way things work here. And so Jesus warned us that that was going to be the case. The world’s hatred is inescapable because the world hates Jesus Christ. He said in verse 19, if you were of the world, the world would love its own.

So the only way to escape the hostility of the world The only way to make sure that the world just loves you and your message is to stop following Jesus Christ. The only way to make sure the world just embraces everything about our church and about our message is to become exactly like the world. He said at the end of verse 19 though, Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you. Here’s the thing.

Following Jesus Christ requires us to be different. It’s a requirement. We cannot please Jesus and seek the praise of the world at the same time.

We’ve been called out. We’ve been set apart to Jesus. That doesn’t make us better than the world outside.

That simply means that He’s chosen to use us in spite of our imperfections, in spite of our flaws. And it shouldn’t surprise us, given that He’s given us things to do in His service, that we work for Him and we follow His marching orders. Given those things, it should not surprise us that the world opposes us the same way it opposes Him.

they hated him first they hated what he taught they hated what he represented so it’s not particularly shocking when they hate what we teach and what we represent again I’m not saying that every non-believer is equally hostile I’m just saying we can’t we can’t expect the continuous applause of the world if we’re being faithful to jesus in verse 20 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 keep yours also.

I don’t know if anybody else in here is like me, but sometimes when I’m going through a difficult circumstance, I start to whine at the Lord a little bit. Anybody else ever do? You don’t have to show your hands.

I’ll show mine. Just know I know you’re out there. I start to whine to the Lord a little bit.

God, this is not fair. I sound like Charlie. It’s not fair.

I’m doing what I’m supposed to do. I’m being obedient to you. Why are they acting that way?

A few times I’ve even said, God, I shouldn’t be having to put up with this. Sometimes I wonder who I think I am. The servant is not greater than his master.

I’m the servant. You’re the servant. He’s the master.

If he endured hostility, what makes me think that I’m too good to go through it too? Tell you what, I just need an attitude adjustment every now and then. When we start to think we don’t deserve the baggage that comes along with the gospel, the way the world reacts to it, when we start to think it shouldn’t happen to us, we need to be reminded we don’t deserve better treatment than our master.

He deserves better treatment than us. The hatred of the world is inescapable, and the world hates Jesus for revealing God’s holiness and man’s sin. That’s why the world reacts in disgust to his message today oftentimes, because I’ve noticed even sometimes in our government, you can get by with mentioning God.

You mention Jesus, and everybody goes crazy. Nowadays, sometimes you can’t even mention God. But it started with hostility toward Jesus.

The world is disgusted by some of what He taught. Some of the things, like the Sermon on the Mount, people will still go along with, but I am the way, the truth, and the life, and no man comes unto the Father but by Me. People don’t want to hear that.

Let me rephrase that. The world as a whole does not want to hear that. Thank God that there are still people who hear the gospel and respond in faith and are saved today.

The Holy Spirit is the variable here. The Holy Spirit still works in people’s hearts and can overcome this hostility anytime, can break through that hostility anytime. So it doesn’t mean that just because somebody’s hostile that we write them off and say they’re a lost cause.

But the world reacts in disgust and hostility toward what He actually taught, toward the whole thing of what He actually taught. And that’s why in His day, they were driven to act. They were driven crazy by the things that He taught and the things that He said.

And so they plotted to kill Him and they actually went out and did it. It says in verse 21 that Jesus represented the Father and He put the holiness of God on full display. It says, These things they will do to you for My name’s sake because they do not know Him who sent Me.

They didn’t want to see the things that He revealed about the Father. They didn’t want to know God’s standards. God’s standards don’t make us feel good.

I like to think I’m a pretty good person. But then I look at God’s standard of perfection and say, have I ever fallen short of it? Yeah.

Have I ever told a lie? Yes, I have. By God’s standard, I’m a liar.

Hey, please don’t discount everything I’ve told you up to this point because I don’t make a habit of it. Have I ever taken something that didn’t belong to me? Yeah, I have.

That makes me a thief. I stand condemned by God’s standards. I’d much rather be judged by my own human subjective standards.

The world doesn’t like to hear God’s standards of holiness. And that’s exactly what Jesus put on full display. And verses 22 and 24 teach us that He’s shown a light on our sin by revealing how far we have fallen short of God’s standards.

He said, if I had not come and spoken to them, they would have no sin. He said in verse 24, if I had not done among them the works which no one else did, they would have no sin. Now that does not mean that they would have been sinless.

That means they wouldn’t have known their sin. They wouldn’t have understood their sin. but Jesus came and shone the light on it.

And He says now as a result in verse 22, but now they have no excuse for their sin. And verse 24, but now they have seen and also hated both me and my Father. So as Jesus showed us how holy God is, we saw God in human flesh came and walked among us full of grace and truth, as John says.

And He was there and mankind got to see the holiness of God on full display and realized how far short we fall. because the light always reveals all the flaws. There’s a reason why people talk about they’d much rather be seen in candlelight than under fluorescence.

Charla has a little lamp in the downstairs bathroom and it just gives off enough of a nice little glow that you can see what’s going on in there. And I look pretty good in the mirror in there. And sometimes I come into the office where we have the fluorescent lights in the ceiling and all that and you step into a bathroom and look under the mirror.

those lights where you can see your skeleton. And I see every flaw and I think, can I get one of those little lamps in here? The brightest light shows all the flaws and that’s what Jesus did.

He showed us how far short we fall of God’s standard of holiness. And the world did not like it. The world doesn’t like it.

Even as Christians, sometimes we don’t like it to see our flaws pointed out in light of God’s holiness. But the world’s hatred of Jesus during His time on earth was not an accident. It was part of God’s plan for dealing with its hatred of God, with the world’s hatred of God over all.

Because sinful men despise and reject God, Jesus came to be despised and rejected all the way to the cross. Because our hatred and rebellion as a species toward God, because of that, Jesus came to be hated and despised all the way to the cross where He would shed His blood and where He would die for the forgiveness of the very people who put Him there. Out of this incredible hatred and hostility came the greatest act of love that history has ever recorded.

By His suffering and by His death on the cross, He paid the price for our rejection of God so that we could be spared the horror of rejection by God. Because in our sin, God has to reject us. But He sent Jesus so that sin could be forgiven.

Jesus took all of the hate, all of the hate that the world heaped on Him, that hostility, that rage, that anger that wells up deep inside of us and drove them to cry out for blood. He took every bit of that on Himself and He was nailed to the cross. And there He also endured God’s hatred towards sin as He took our punishment.

And when He died there on the cross, He made it so that our sin was paid for so that we could be forgiven. And then He rose again three days later to prove it, to give us hope, so that the love of God could give hope to those who hated God. And if you’ve never trusted Christ as your Savior, you can do that this morning.

In just a few minutes, I am wrapping up here, but in just a few minutes, we’re going to stand and sing together as we prepare to close out the service. And when we do that, you have the opportunity to respond to what you’ve heard. And if you realize that your sin has separated you from God, and you believe that only Jesus Christ could make a way back to the God who loves you, He’s the only one that can purchase your forgiveness from the hatred and the hostility and the rebellion against God.

And you believe that He died on the cross to do that and rose again to prove it. You can ask for the forgiveness that God offers. It’s a free gift.

We don’t have to earn it or deserve it. He just offers it because Jesus already paid for it. And if you’ve never trusted Christ as your Savior, that’s what you need to understand today.

God’s Word is not filled with hate toward the world. The world hated God, and God responded with love. And if you are a Christian this morning, what we need to understand is that enduring hostility is just part of the cost of following Jesus Christ. We may be tempted to think there’s something wrong with us if the world rejects our message.

We may tend to think that there’s something wrong with our church if the world doesn’t climb on board as we think they ought to. But Jesus said it was going to be this way. Jesus told us it would be this way.

We cannot avoid the hostility altogether and follow Jesus. It’s our job to continue following Him faithfully in spite of the hostility, in spite of the hatred. And it’s our responsibility to respond to that hatred in love the way He did.

Going back to the biblical definition of love we discussed last week, that doesn’t mean climbing on board with everything the world thinks either. But it means loving in a sacrificial and unconditional way that points people to the hope that they have in Jesus Christ. I’m going to ask our musicians. .

.