Dick Lucas focuses on John 15:18, discussing the contrasting themes of the world’s hatred for Jesus and His followers and the love among believers. Lucas highlights the inevitability of persecution for Christians due to their association with Christ and emphasizes the importance of abiding in Jesus’ love and remaining faithful amidst adversity.
The following unedited transcript is provided by Beluga AI.
John 15:18. The world hates the disciples.
18 “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. 19 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. 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 also keep yours. 21 But all these things they will do to you on account of my name, because they do not know him who sent me. 22 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. 23 Whoever hates me hates my Father also. 24 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. 25 But the word that is written in their Law must be fulfilled: ‘They hated me without a cause.’ (John 15:18-25, ESV)
This is the word of the Lord. Thank you very much.
In a moment, we will pray, but first, to welcome you to our service, to ask you to turn over the hymn sheet, and you will see there once again the notice of this new course, new Basic Facts course that I want strongly to recommend, and it’s beginning on Wednesday the 26th.
As I said in the earlier service, even if it’s only to come and see the new St Helens Church office, that’s a good reason for coming. We hope especially you will come if you’re new to these things and would like to know about basic Christianity or would like a refresher course. Just fill it in and hand it to Doug or Hillary at the back somewhere. It’ll get to them if you hand it to a steward afterwards. So a warm invitation to that basic facts course.
And then I’m told the good news that there are one or two spare lunches available today at both places of operation. There at the back with delicious new soup, I gather, and over here with these sandwiches. Now let’s be quiet for a moment. We pray, Heavenly Father, that in this half hour, this very short time, you will speak to us through the Bible and that what we know not, you will teach us. What we are not, you’ll make us. What we have not, you’ll give us.
Because we are so needy and so easily stray, we ask it for Christ’s sake, amen. I’m going to leave my text for a little longer and start at Heathrow, where I was starting about two months ago, a very long flight. And in order not to be bored too much by the films on show, I grabbed a Penguin classic, not too hard going, from W.H. Smith at Heathrow.
And the one I chose was one I had read many, many years ago, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, that attractive rebel floating down the Mississippi with Jim the Negro. Well, I have to say that over nine hours, I didn’t tire of Master Huck, but I did get very tired of Mark Twain. What an old misery he is, isn’t he, with his moralizing, his preaching against Christianity, his tortured personality. He’s a very good example of the famous humorist, and he was a very great humorist, who ended his life as a very sad man.
He simply couldn’t come to terms with the difficult things. Couldn’t come to terms with death. Well, that’s reasonable enough. He couldn’t come to terms with the society in which he lived, whether south or north. He tried to escape from it all in a nostalgia, writing about his youth in the old days on the Mississippi. In the end, he tried to portray in Huckleberry human nature as a noble thing if left alone and not civilized. But, of course, it didn’t work.
The fact is that Mark Twain, by the end of his life, had given up on his fellow men. Lots of sensitive people do, by the way, don’t they? And they show it in all sorts of ways. I was thinking of someone I knew once who showed that they’d given up on human beings by spending their life entirely with animals. After all, dogs are always a great deal more loyal, aren’t they, than your next door neighbor? And horses are always brave and true. You can understand why people do that.
Well, it’s this incorrigible human nature that is our theme during October and November. And if you’re new to us, this may seem rather a gloomy theme, but it’s not, because we’re looking at the sickness of human beings, knowing that there is a cure. We’re asking, is there any hope for us? And knowing full well that in the Christian gospel, there really is. Can human nature be changed? That’s one of the things we’re looking at.
And if this is new to you, and if you think you’d be interested, do take one of our cards here, rather cleverly put on a kind of file effects card, and take it away and look at it, and perhaps pass it on to others. Now, hatred, which is the one part of our fallen nature that we’re looking at. We could have looked at a thousand, but that really would have been gloomy.
Hatred, this one symptom of the four which we’re looking at, we’ve discovered in a number of great texts that I’ve given to you week by week. We started with Paul, we went on to the Psalmist last week, and I’ll have these printed on our hymn sheet for next week, so that you can see the momentum that we are getting together through the Bible on this particular theme. But I realized a fortnight ago, when we were looking at Paul, with that devastating description of paganism that he gives us in Titus.
I realize that that wouldn’t satisfy everybody who comes at a lunchtime on Tuesday. You want to know what Jesus himself said, not Paul. And that’s why I asked Fred Tow to read this amazing paragraph in John chapter 15. And if you care to, I’d like you to turn it up now on page 1083, John 15, because I think it’s the most thorough description of human hatred that we have in the Gospels. It’s a description I never really looked at seriously before, and one that I’m sure we’ve never had on a Tuesday down the years.
So it’ll be good, won’t it, to do something for the first time. Now, when you come to this page and just look at the page, you face what I had never again quite seen, an extraordinary contrast. In that last column on page 1083, starting with verse 9 of chapter 15, the first great paragraph is all about the love that God has brought into the world and the love that he wants us to show to one another. Love is the keynote of that paragraph, and it’s actually mentioned nine times.
It’s what we are capable of in the hands and by the power of God. There are very famous sayings in it. Look at verse 13. Everybody knows this one: “Greater love has no one than this, that he laid down his life for his friends.” So, there’s a paragraph that we might expect to find in the Bible. We might expect to find it in the Gospels. We might expect to find it from the lips of Jesus Christ. He is the expert on love. He brought love into the world.
He knows what he’s talking about, and he commends it to us. And then suddenly, the blue sky disappears. The sun is hidden behind dark clouds, and we come across a paragraph in complete contrast with that starting at verse 18. And this time, the key word is hate. This appears seven times in the paragraph. Now, this is not because John the Apostle is an old miser, like Mark Twain. It isn’t because John is a pessimist. It isn’t because John wants to teach us bad news, because his very book is called a gospel, which is good news.
It’s because John is a faithful writer, a faithful scribe, telling us what Jesus actually taught, that having said what Jesus taught about love as it can be under the power of God, he then contrasts that with hate, which we do find every day and everywhere in the world. He puts this hate in a focus by saying that people reject Jesus Christ. Now there’s nothing new in that. Every one of the gospel writers says the same. Matthew says it, Mark says it, Luke says it. They all say it in their own different ways.
I had not noticed how John says it, and John says it in a much more stark way. Again and again he draws our attention to the fact that right from the beginning of the story people wanted to kill Jesus. Now we haven’t time to make a study of John’s gospel in a Tuesday lunch hour, but I chose these at random, and I’d like you to take up your Bible and flip through the pages with me just for a couple of minutes.
We start at John 5:18, and you’ll find that this little sentence is like a refrain running through the gospel. It’s obvious that John wants us to sit up when we hear it. Chapter 5:18. For this reason, the Jews tried all the harder to kill him.
I’m not going to look at the context each time; that would take us far away. Here are people hearing him and wanting to kill him.
19 Has not Moses given you the law? Yet none of you keeps the law. Why do you seek to kill me?” (John 7:19, ESV)
37 I know that you are offspring of Abraham; yet you seek to kill me because my word finds no place in you. (John 8:37, ESV)
Verse 25 of the same chapter. At that point, some of the people of Jerusalem began to ask, “Isn’t this the man they are trying to kill?”
25 Some of the people of Jerusalem therefore said, “Is not this the man whom they seek to kill? (John 7:25, ESV)
Notice that John, as a good writer, puts this in the mouth of many people. The crowd said, the Pharisees said, Jesus himself is forced to say, “They are trying to kill me.”
In Chapter 8:37, Jesus says, this time, I know you are Abraham’s descendants. I know your bona fides are good; I know that your pedigree is the very best, yet you are ready to kill me because you have no room for my word. It’s as stark as that, as brutal as that.
One more example, chapter 11, verse 8.
8 The disciples said to him, “Rabbi, the Jews were just now seeking to stone you, and are you going there again?” (John 11:8, ESV)
And then verse 53 of that chapter, this is after one of the mightiest miracles of Jesus: a man has come back from the tomb. Who would have thought people would rejoice at such an incredible defeat of death? And in verse 53, we read,
53 So from that day on they made plans to put him to death. (John 11:53, ESV)
Now, does not this seem absurd? If only we could sit back and see this for the first time. Imagine yourself to be somebody who had never read the Gospels before, and you turned to the Gospels and you began to read. You saw this wonderful life of Jesus, and then you suddenly realized that everybody is trying to kill him. You would hardly believe it. You would say this is absolutely absurd, it’s irrational, it’s without any ground or warrant. And you will notice that that is exactly what Jesus says when we come to my text, which is verse 25. Will you look at it?
25 But the word that is written in their Law must be fulfilled: ‘They hated me without a cause.’ (John 15:25, ESV)
Now that is exactly what Jesus says. This hatred against me is completely irrational. There is no reason for it. All I have presented to them is the love and purposes of God. All they want to do is to destroy me.
I was here quite early this morning, and so I started to fiddle around with the hymn book to see if I could find some good hymns for us, and I came across that block of hymns in the middle of Mission Praise about Jesus. Now, you may have thought, as I used to think, that Mission Praise compilers believed that all good hymns began in 1950 and there were none before, but I’ve had to eat my words this morning, because I find on this particular page two hymns from the twelfth century. Here is one.
Jesus, the joy of loving hearts, true source of life and light of men, from the best bliss that earth imparts, we turn unfilled to you again. By the way, it is quite something, isn’t it, to write a hymn that lasts for eight centuries? That’s what they thought eight centuries ago, and they’ve been singing it ever since. Bernard of Claveau. Jesus, the very thought of thee with sweetness fills the breast, but sweeter far thy face to see and in thy presence rest.
No voice can sing, nor heart can frame, nor can the memory find a sweeter sound than thy blessed name, O Saviour of mankind. Early twelfth century, sung by people ever since against the background of these people who sought to kill him.
Now, I take it that that is why when we read in the New Testament the pictures of the Judgment Day, for example, Paul describes what it is to face up to the judge. Paul makes it clear that when the lost, the damned, are faced with the Judgment Day, their mouths are completely shut.
By that, he means they have nothing to say. This means that though there seem to be plenty of reasons in our corrupt human society, plenty of reasons for being an unbeliever, in fact, most sensible people are. When they were faced with God on the Judgment Day in the light of heaven and the facts were all before them, all those reasons disappeared. It became clear to them immediately that to reject the way of Christ was just plain silly. It was nonsensical. In fact, it was preposterous.
That, I think, is why the Apostle Paul says that on the Judgment Day, the unbelieving, the lost souls, will have nothing whatever to say by way of excuse or reason or justification of their behavior and their lack of commitment to Christ. Now, what evidence is there that what we read here in this chapter has any relevance to the world of the 20th century? One of the things we try to do on a Tuesday is to open the Bible to see what Jesus really said.
That’s rare enough often in church today, isn’t it, for people to take the trouble to do that. We try to take the trouble to do that in the middle of a busy day. We don’t want to hear what I have to say or a bishop has to say or anybody else has to say. We say, this is what Jesus said. Does it ring any bells in the 20th century? Now, look at this paragraph. I haven’t time to unpack it.
It’s very, very dense and concentrated, but you’ll see that he says two things about this hatred of himself. In verses 18 to 21, he says, the evidence for this hatred of himself in the world is that the world will continue to hate his disciples. There in verse 18, “If the world hates you, keep in mind it hated me first.” Now, I take it that when Jesus says this to the disciples, he’s not simply giving them information for information’s sake.
I take it that when he says this to the disciples, he’s wanting to warn them of what is going to lie ahead of them if they continue to be his disciples. There, listening to his words on that day, were twelve men who would be his apostles. Only one of those men was to die in his own bed. The rest of them, in one way or another, would be persecuted and martyred for Jesus’ sake. Is there any evidence, any echo of this in the 20th century world, in this great century through which we have lived?
Well, of course, there is. Wherever a civilization has been overrun by tyranny, that is, by man in the raw, whenever a man has got untrammeled power without democratic restraints, whenever man has been left to himself to do what he wants with the country, there has always and invariably been bitter opposition to the Church of Jesus Christ. I mentioned the Imperial War Museum to you last week because I’d had a visit there.
If you’ve got young children at home, I do recommend it for half-term next week. It’s one of the very best visits you can go on. And I mentioned that extraordinary clock that whizzes round all the time there. It’s going to whizz round until the end of the century, where every time it goes round, in a few seconds, that’s one more person it commemorates who’s died from war in this century. It will reach 100 million by the end of the century. But we might have another clock, mightn’t we? We might suggest this at St. Paul’s Cathedral. We might have it here in our new St. Helens.
A clock that ticks out all the people who have been martyred for Christ in the 20th century, and the number comes to 25 million at a conservative estimate. Twenty-five million. What did you look for in the paper when you read it this morning? Well, what I wanted to know was whether President Yeltsin had given the Queen a bear hug. I rather like bear hugs.
I’m British, of course, with a stiff upper lip, and therefore it’s taken me time to get used to the bear hug, which you always get from Christian pastors and leaders in other parts of the world when you visit them. So I suppose we wanted to know whether Her Majesty the Queen would get a bear hug in Moscow. But it is perhaps worth pointing out that the particular Russian bear, until a few years ago, had very, very sharp claws. That is, in the 75 years of the Communist experiment, the martyrs were numbered by millions.
Ninety percent of the church buildings were either destroyed or seized for other purposes. The leadership, unless it was cowed, as some were, were shipped off to Siberia. I’m not sure that I wouldn’t be cowed rather than go to Siberia. Children who professed to be Christian or came from Christian homes or church homes were harassed and denied education. Thousands of ordinary Christian people were shipped off to the wastelands and to labor camps. And many of the more intelligent ones were given that most vicious of all persecution treatment, and that is mind bending at psychiatric clinics.
Yes, I wouldn’t have wanted to be in the bear hug of Russia, would you, if I’d been a Christian for those 75 years.
18 “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. (John 15:18, ESV)
And not only there, of course. It’s not often in the media. We don’t have time to see all the horrors. But in southern Sudan today, as you know, the church services are bombed. There are mass crucifixions. There’s a holy war going on against the Nubian people because they are strong believers, or rather there are strong believers amongst them.
And this is but the beginning of their sorrows. Of course, we live in a much more comfortable time. Nobody is likely to do that, as are they in the city of London. And yet actually, if we’re honest, we know that if the church is alive rather than dead, and if the members of the church are Bible believers who try to win their friends and deny the world and honor Christ, they are still disliked. And they’re disliked not only by the world, but by the church very often.
The denominations feel very uncomfortable with that kind of Christianity. The first half, then, of this paragraph says that the evidence that the world hates Jesus Christ will be shown down the centuries in the fact that the world hates his disciples. And the stronger his disciples are in following Christ and witnessing to Christ, the more the church, the more the world, will be antagonistic to it.
Now, the second evidence that he gives, and there will not be time for me to go into this now, but you will find it in the second part, verses 23-24, is that if people hate Jesus, they will hate his father as well. And I will. We’ll just read this again. Verse 23 of John 15:
23 Whoever hates me hates my Father also. 24 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. (John 15:23-24, ESV)
And then look at verse 26, which we didn’t cover. When the counselor, that’s the Holy Spirit, whom I will send you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who goes out from the Father, when he comes, well, we won’t go on with that, the persecution will get even stronger.
26 “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. (John 15:26, ESV)
Now, I was taken to task by two Christians very rightly last week. I had made the point that we think we are apathetic towards the things of God, when really, deep down, we are antagonistic.
These two Christians came up to me afterwards over the coffee and sandwich and said, “We entirely agree with you about that, but you didn’t make the point enough. You didn’t explain why it is. You didn’t explain why it is that apathy is really a cover for antagonism.” Let me try to explain it again in the time I have. I think there is the beginning of an explanation here in our passage in verses 22 and 24.
You see, if you think about God in the abstract, a God of love, it’s a lovely thought, isn’t it, to make feelings, a sort of nice feelings in the stomach. Or if you think of the teaching of Christ, we approve of it, really, and we don’t have time for it, of course, but we’re not against it. But notice what Jesus says,
22 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. (John 15:22, ESV)
He’s come to them and spoken, and now a different situation has arisen.
A delivery boy aged about 16 came to our offices in Plantation House a month or two back with some stationery. He was extremely extraordinarily uncouth, casual, unhelpful, and rude. It would be difficult to find someone who was representing his company in a worse way. He virtually threw the boxes of stationery at the girls in the office.
One of the staff was standing there and said very gently and reasonably to him, “you know, if you behave like that, you won’t keep your job very long in the city, and you won’t make much of a success of your work here.” And perhaps understandably, the lad immediately bridled and said, because I was standing nearby, “Oh, I don’t want to be posh.” Now, I reckon that boy was as near unemployable as you can be.
You see, when someone spoke a kind word to him, he immediately reacted, “I don’t want to respond to that word; I don’t want to be posh.” I’ll translate that into New Testament terms. When Jesus came into the world, we were confronted with his words and his works. His words, verse 22, he spoke to us, and his deeds, what he did for us. And the moment we were confronted, we saw how unattractive and unacceptable we were. In fact, it isn’t that we saw it; he told us.
He told us that we were utterly unacceptable in the Father’s presence, that we were on the road to destruction, and that unless we turned from that and turned to him there would be no hope for us in the long term. And what did we do? Well the human race does exactly what that sixteen year old lad did. We bridle and we say, I don’t want to be acceptable, thanks. I don’t want you to change me. I don’t want you to make me acceptable to the kingdom of God. I want to remain as I am.
I joined many, many tourists on Saturday on a lovely, lovely autumn day at Rye. Some of you will know Rye, it’s a most beautiful little town. It really looks like a Hollywood set at times. And it’s a delightful place for lunch because there are 46 places in two small streets to catch the tourists. And I suppose naturally because one walks up the hill first to have your lunch and then you see this magnificent parish church, my friend and I wandered into this beautiful church to see it.
I don’t think anybody would be disapproving of that church. It’s a lovely old building and all sorts of things around, memorials and flowers and so on and postcards for sale. But right at the back I find what you often find now in churches, something that used to be right on the east wall that everybody saw as they came in that nobody could miss. And that of course is a card board with beautiful gold lettering with the Ten Commandments.
And there it was, needless to say, you’ll find this in most churches, old churches today, stuck in the far back corner. I think there’s a little moral in that, isn’t there? We can all approve of Christianity as we look at these beautiful old stained glass windows. We see the old clock ticking away as it’s ticked away for four or five centuries. We go up to the east end and we see the flowers that the ladies have arranged and how beautiful it all looks. And suddenly we see, thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not steal.
14 “You shall not commit adultery. 15 “You shall not steal. (Exodus 20:14-15, ESV)
We are confronted. We have a lad who came into the office of Plantation House who said, I don’t want to be posh, thank you. That is the issue, isn’t it, and why we come on Tuesdays. We bring our friends on Tuesdays, we hope that they’ll listen. But we know that when they do listen they will find that their apathy which they thought was their natural response to God isn’t really apathy at all and that in our minds we are all hostile towards him.
It’s a terrifying thought, isn’t it, in a country like this, dotted with churches and open Bibles, to realize that we carry around in every heart an enmity towards the things of God until, in His great grace and mercy, He subdues it.
Well, let’s pray for ourselves.
Heavenly Father, we need your mercy because deep down in us, there’s hateful hostility towards the things of God. We ask you to have mercy for Christians being persecuted in the world today.
We pray for young Christians in our own culture who find it hard to hold their heads above the parapet and take the sniping of their friends. And we pray that we may have the courage, as the Apostle John did, to write down in our minds and hearts the truth as it came from the lips of Jesus. “If the world hates me, it will hate you also.” We ask it for Christ’s sake. Amen.
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