John 15:18-25

If the world hate you

Kosmos: unregenerate humanity

is here presented.

I. AS GLOWING WITH HATE.

1. It was a hatred of goodness. To hate the mean, the selfish, the false, the dishonest, and morally dishonourable would be right. But evil was not the object of their hatred.

(1) It was good as embodied in the life of Christ. “It hated Me before it hated you.” How deep, burning, persistent, and cruelly operative was this enmity from Bethlehem to Calvary.

(2) It was good as reflected in His disciples. Just so far as they imbibed and reflected the Spirit of Christ were they hated. “For My name’s sake.”

2. It was a hatred developed in persecution. It was not a hatred that slumbered in a passion or that went off even in abusive language, it prompted the infliction of the greatest cruelties. The history of true Christians in all ages has been a history of persecution.

3. It was a hatred without a just reason. “Without a cause.” Of course they had a “cause.” The doctrines of goodness clashed with their deep rooted prejudices, its policy with their daily procedure, its eternal principles flashed on their consciences and exposed their wickedness. But their

“cause” was the very reason why they ought to have loved Christ. Christ knew and stated the cause of the hatred (John 15:19).

4. It was a hatred forming a strong reason for brotherly love amongst the disciples. Christ begins His forewarning them of it by urging them to love one another (John 15:17). As your enemies outside of you are strong in their passionate hostility towards you, be you compactly welded together in mutual love. Unity is strength.

II. AS LOADED WITH RESPONSIBILITY (John 15:22). These words must, of course, be taken in their comparative sense. Before He came amongst them the guilt of their nation had been augmenting for centuries, and they had been, filling up the measure of their iniquities. But great as was their sin before He came it was trifling compared to it now since His advent amongst them.

1. Had He not come they would not have known the sin of hating Him. Hatred towards the best of beings, the incarnation of goodness, is sin in its most malignant form, it was the culmination of human depravity. But had they not known Him they could not have hated Him, the heart is dead to all objects outside the region of knowledge.

2. Had He not come they would not have rejected Him. “He came to His own and His own received Him not.” The rejection of Him involved the most wicked folly, the most heartless ingratitude, the most daring impiety. “If they which despised Moses’ law died without mercy under two witnesses,” etc.

3. If He had not come they would not have crucified Him. What crime on the long black catalogue of human wickedness is to be compared to this?

Conclusion:

1. Good men accept the moral hostility of the unregenerate world. Your great Master taught you to accept it. It is in truth a test of your character and an evidence of your Christliness.

2. Nominal Christians read your doom. (D. Thomas, D. D.)

The world

The children of this world as distinguished from the children of God. Called the world as indicating number, confederacy, and spirit. Three characteristics.

I. GOVERNED BY SENSE.

II. LIVING FOR THE PRESENT.

III. RULED BY THE OPINIONS AND CUSTOMS OF MEN. (W. H. Van Doren, D. D.)

The world

The world of John’s day we know, as to its actual condition, from other sources. Let anyone turn over the pages of Tacitus, Martial, or Persius, and what he learns will put “colour” into John’s outlines: nay, one dare not say, “turn over their pages,” for some of them can scarcely be read without hurt by the saintliest living. The same “world”--at heart--we still find in the present century, under modern conditions. It has grown in wealth. It has become civilized and refined. Law has become a mightier thing. The glory of science was never half so radiant. But, looking close in, we still find the old facts--a dislike of God and love of sin, pride and self-sufficiency, a godless and selfish use of things men “hating one another,” selfishness fighting selfishness--an infinite mass of misery. Look beyond the borders of comfort and respectability, and think of what exists today round about us. Think of the unblest poverty that is growing side by side with enormous wealth and luxury, associated in many cases with vice and crime, crushing the spirit in ways that comfortable people cannot understand, and frequently aggravated by the temper in which it is borne, and by added evils which do not properly belong to it. Think of the ignorance that has grown to such proportions under the very shadow of our schools and churches. (J. Culross, D. D.)

Sheep among wolves

1. These words strike a discord in the midst of sweet music. The keynote of all that has preceded has been love, and just because it binds the disciples to Christ in a sacred community, it separates them from those who do not share in His life, and hence there result two communities--the Church and the World; and the antagonism between these is perpetual.

2. Our Lord is here speaking with special reference to the apostles, who were “sent forth as sheep in the midst of wolves.” If we may trust tradition, every one of that little company died a martyr’s death, with the exception of John. But there is no more reason for restricting the force of these words to the hearer,, than there is for restricting any of the rest of this discourse.

I. WHAT MAKES THIS HOSTILITY INEVITABLE? Our Lord here prepares His hearers for what is coming by putting it in the gentle form of an hypothesis.

The frequency with which “if” occurs in this section is rely remarkable, but the tense of the original shows us that, whilst the form is hypothetical, the substance of it is prophetic. Jesus points to two things which make this hostility inevitable.

1. If we share Christ’s life, we must necessarily, in some measure, share His fate (verse 18). He is the typical example of what the world thinks of, and does to, goodness. And all who have the spirit of life which was in Jesus Christ will come under the same influences which carried Him to the cross. In a world like this it is impossible for a man to “love righteousness and hate iniquity,” and to order his life accordingly, without treading on somebody’s corns.

2. And then (verse 19), there are two bands, and the fundamental principles that underlie each are in deadly antagonism. We stand in diametrical opposition in thought about God, self, duty, life, death, the future; and that opposition goes right down to the bottom of things, and, however it may be covered over, there is a gulf, as in some of those American cations: the towering banks may be very near--but a yard or two seems to separate them; but they go down for thousands and thousands of feet, and never get any nearer each other, and between them at the bottom a black, sullen river flows. If the world loves you it is because ye are of it.

II. HOW THIS HOSTILITY IS MASKED AND MODIFIED.

1. There are a great many bonds that unite men together besides religion or its absence. There are the domestic ties, the associations of commerce and neighbourhood, surface identities of opinion. We have all the same affections and needs, do the same sort of things. So there is a film of roofing thrown over the gulf. You can make up a crack in a wall with plaster after a fashion, and it will hide the solution of continuity that lies beneath. But, let bad weather come, and the bricks gape apart as before. And so, as soon as we get down below the surface of things and come to grapple with real, deep-lying, and formative principles of a life, we come to antagonism.

2. Then the world has got a dash of Christianity into it. Thus Christian men and others have, to a large extent, a common code of morality, as long as you keep on the surface; and do a great many things from substantially the same motives. And thus the gulf is partly bridged over; and so the hostility takes another form. We do not wrap Christians up in pitch and stick them up for candles in the emperor’s garden nowadays, but the same thing can be done in different ways. Newspaper articles, the light laugh of scorn, the whoop of exultation over the failures or faults of any prominent man that has stood out boldly on Christ’s side; all these indicate what lies below the surface, and sometimes not so very far below. Many a young man in a warehouse, trying to live a godly life, many a workman, commercial traveller, student, has to find out that there is a great gulf between him and the man that sits close to him; and that he cannot be faithful to his Lord and at the same time down to the depths of his being a friend of one who has no friendship to his Master.

3. And again the world has a conscience that responds to goodness, though grumblingly. After all, men do know that it is better and wiser to be like Christ, and that cannot but modify to some extent the manifestations of the hostility. But it is there all the same. Let a man for Christ’s sake avow unpopular beliefs, let him boldly seek to apply Christian principles to the fashionable and popular sins of his class or of his country, and what a chorus will be yelping at his heels! The law remains still, if any man will be a friend of the world he is at enmity wish God.

III. HOW YOU MAY ESCAPE THE HOSTILITY. A half-Christianized world and a more than half-secularised Church get on well together. And it is a miserable thing to reflect that about the average Christianity of this generation there is so very little that does deserve the antagonism of the world. Why should the world care to hate a professing Church, large tracts of which are only a bit of the world under another name? If you want to escape the hostility drop your flag, button your coat over the badge that shows that you belong to Christ, and do the thing that the people round about you do, and you will have a perfectly easy and undisturbed life. Of course, a Christianity that winks at commercial immoralities is very welcome on the exchange, a Christianity that lets beer barrels alone may reckon upon having publicans for its adherents, a Christianity that blesses flags and sings Te Deums over victories will get its share of the spoil. If the world can put a hook in the nostrils of leviathan, and make him play with its maidens, it will substitute good nature, half contemptuous, for the hostility which our Master here predicts. Christian men and woman I be you sure that you deserve the hostility which my text predicts.

IV. HOW TO MEET THIS ANTAGONISM.

1. Reckon it as a sign and test of our true union with Jesus Christ. Let us count the reproach of Christ as a treasure to be proud of, and to be guarded.

2. Be sure that it is your goodness, and not your evils or your weakness, that men dislike. The world has a very keen eye, and it is a good thing that it has, for the faults of professing Christians. Many bring down a great deal of deserved hostility upon themselves and of discredit upon Christianity; and then they comfort themselves and say they are bearing the reproach of the Cross. Not a bit of it. Be you careful for this, that it is Christ in you that men turn from, and not you yourself and your weakness and sin.

3. Meet this antagonism by not dropping your standard one inch. If you begin to haul it down where are you going to stop? Nowhere, until you have got it draggling in the mud at your foot. It is no use trying to conciliate by compromise. All that we shall gain by that will be indifference and contempt.

4. Meet hostility with unmoved, patient, Christ-like, and Christ-derived love and sympathy. The patient sunshine pours upon the glaciers and melts the thick-ribbed ice at last into sweet water. The patient sunshine beats upon the mist clouds and breaks up its edges and scatters it at the last. And our Lord here tells us that our experience, if we are faithful to Him, will be like His experience, in that some will hearken to our word though others will persecute, and to some our testimony will come as a message from God that draws them to the Lord Himself. The only conqueror of the world is the love that was in Christ breathed through us. The only way to overcome the world’s hostility is by turning the world into a church. (A. Maclaren, D. D.)