So, we’re this morning, we’ve been uh spending the last few months in a really rich section of scripture. These are Jesus’ words to his disciples in the upper room in Jerusalem. This is the same night Jesus knows he’s going to be arrested and betrayed. Uh one of his key disciples is going to deny even knowing him. And the following day, he’ll be tortured. He’ll be crucified. He’s going to die. None of that was, of course, by accident. We know that the king of the universe knew that his life, his death on the cross was the means by which he would draw people to himself. Earlier in the gospel of John in chapter 3, Jesus said of himself, the son of man must be lifted up, meaning on the cross that everyone who believes in him would have eternal life. So the crucifixion, the substitutionary sacrifice of the righteous for the unrighteous, Jesus knew that was the ordeal he was facing. and and there’s an urgency in his words to his uh his close disciples in the upper room. They’re they’re no longer going to be able to enjoy the day-to-day presence, human presence of Jesus. They’re going to enter a new phase of life which is going to be very difficult for them. But Jesus wants them to know that regardless, he will give them the the resources that they need to flourish. In the first part of John chapter 15, just a little review here. Jesus spoke of the essential connection of his followers with him as branches to a vine, saying, “If they remain in me, my words remain in them, then my lifegiving nourishment can be drawn up into them and they’ll bear much fruit in their lives, fruit that’ll last forever.” And next, Jesus shifted last week from the organic image of vine and branches, the relational image of friendship. Jesus said to his disciples, “I no longer call you servants. I call you my friends. I’m going to disclose my plans and my purposes to you, and I’m going to show my ultimate love by laying down my life for my friends.” And that brings us to our passage this morning where Jesus moves from talking about that warmth of friendship to the cold reality of hostility and persecution awaiting all those who would follow him. He wanted his 11 closest followers in that room. He wants us to know about the inevitability of hostility and the reasons why faithful followers of Jesus are bound to experience a certain hatred of the world in various forms and context. So speaking of the inevitability of hostility against followers of Jesus, that may seem a little fairy talish to us. Christians in Edmonton in 2026, we know there are mixed feelings in our city concerning Christians and Christianity. Some though they might be outside uh the family of God, outside of faith themselves, they appreciate and they celebrate the presence of churches and Christians because they see us as adding stability, adding value, uh adding service, providing some helpful social currency to our city. And others, maybe the majority of people, they just either ignore or tolerate our presence. Our buildings, our crosses are largely invisible to them, just kind of meld into the scenery of the city. were considered mostly irrelevant and our presence really makes no difference in their lives. Then there are some in our city who actively mistrust us. They think we have no business getting any special tax exemption for our properties or for donations. They might associate all Christianity with hypocrisy and moral prudy and backward stands on social issues and maybe even child abuse or just being out for people’s money. And there’s probably a really small minority in our city who are ve even more aggressive in their vehement hatred of all things Christian and the churches that we occupy. So, we live with a mixed bag. We’re respected by some, maybe mostly ignored or tolerated, uh, actively mistrusted, even hated by a few, but there’s no organized official hostility against us. I’ve never known or heard of a Christian in Canada being tortured or killed because of their faith in Jesus. So what are we to do here with Jesus’ words? He says, “If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. They’ll put you out of the synagogue. In fact, a time is coming when anyone who kills you will think he’s offering a service to God. I’ve told you this so that when the time comes, you’ll remember that I warned you.” Now, we could add to Jesus’ words there what he said earlier in a sermon on the mount. He said, “Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you, falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.” So, he’s not saying that the persecution of his followers would be a slim possibility. He’s saying this is a certainty. And the book of Acts then goes on to uh to show the fulfillment of Jesus’ words uh in the lives of the disciples who heard him that night because they faced many insults and arrests and beatings and even execution. And hostility was so prevalent and anticipated that the Apostle Paul would write to his young acolyte Timothy in 2 Timothy 3:12 and say in fact everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. So m maybe we have a tendency to dismiss those things as hyperbole or as something Christians might have faced in the first few centuries of Christianity. But the world has leveled out since then and it’s become much more pluralistic and and multicultural and tolerant and accepting of all religious beliefs and practices. But has it really? I mean, sitting here this morning in a warm, comfortable old building that’s never been attacked or threatened, we need to take our minds outside these walls and realize that our lack of overt persecution in Canada makes us outliers in the global picture of what’s happening in the world to our brothers and sisters in Christ. Every year, the Christian organization Open Doors releases its annual world watch list that documents persecution, states where it’s most dangerous in the world to be a Christian today. And their recent report was covered this week in Christianity Today, and reveals that in 2026, the 10 most dangerous countries in to be a Christian, they don’t come probably as a great surprise. North Korea, Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, Eratria, Syria, Nigeria, Pakistan, Libya, and Iran. But that’s only part of the story. Open Doors demonstrates that globally more than 388 million Christians live in nations with high levels of persecution or discrimination for their faith. Now, that’s actually comes down to 1 in seven Christians worldwide. One in seven. As recently as 2019, it was one in nine. But there’s been an increase of about 8 million Christians suffering persecution in the past six years. Comes in many forms in a given nation. It might be either come from top down or bottom up. It may be uneven and sporadic within countries. In India, Christians may comfortably gather in the southern state of Carerala where where Tom and Gu have their roots but mobs burned more than 200 churches in the eastern state of Manipur last year. Indonesia can vary island by island with Christians protected on one and opposed on another. And Open Doors attracts the the physical violence against Christians, but also women who are sexually assaulted or forced into marriages with non-Christian men. Government surveillance is another common form of hostility and against Christians. China ranks highest in that category, reached an all-time high this past year. Pressure against the church has grown as China enforces new regulations concerning the internet and social media, Bible apps, religious materials under constant government scrutiny. All of that’s greatly increased just since 2018. Independent churches that were previously tolerated are now being repressed. And some of the larger fellowships, they now meet quietly in cells of 10 or 20 believers in an attempt to stay underneath the government radar. Worldwide, Canada and other nations in our little slice of the Western world are outliers when it comes to overt persecution. And we’re largely unaware of what’s going on unless we pay attention to something like the weekly email that’s put out by the voice of the martyrs. Provides accounts of Christian persecution in the world and generally presents countries and churches and individuals that we can pray for. It’s a great resource to get on a weekly basis. And unless we pay attention though to something like that, we remain blissfully unaware of what’s actually happening in our world to our fellows and brothers and sisters in the family of Christ. So Jesus’ words concerning hostility against his followers hasn’t lost any force or relevance since the night he spoke them. In the gospels, Jesus spoke of hostilities ranging from people ridiculing and shaming and excluding, lying about us to other people, arrests, imprisonment, uh, driving us out or ending our lives. And that inevitability of hostility against Jesus and his followers, it’s borne out all over our globe. But the I think what’s of greater importance for you and I this morning is to look at the reasons why Jesus said that would be the case. What are the what what are the reasons why people like us who are friendly, nonviolent followers of Christ might attract hostility our way? Why might we magnetically attract the opposition of others? Let’s go through a few of the reasons that Jesus mentions in our passage. In the big scheme of things, Jesus says it’s because we really don’t belong to the world. Verse 19, if you belong to the world, oh, it would it would love you as its own. as it is, you do not belong to the world, but I’ve chosen you out of it. In thinking about this, Tim Keller mentions that one of his favorite books is Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. And he notes that at the end of that book, something very odd happens because the heroes, the hobbits, they began as simple, ordinary creatures, but a few of them answered the call to go and ally themselves with a high angelic-like race of beings. And with the help of those beings, they fought and they won and they achieved glory and honor. And in triumph, they returned to their homeland. This is a place and a people they loved for whom they had fought. But they discovered how much their adventures had changed them. They found that they they loved their land. They loved their people, but realized they no longer belonged as they once did. Those elves, those noble angelic beings that the hobbits had encountered, they came from a high immortal paradise far off into the western seas. And the hobbits found that the life force of that immortal land had entered them. And the greatness of heart they now felt, although it enabled them to be leaders among their fellow hobbits, also meant they didn’t really belong there. They were restless in their homeland and what lay beyond the sea. Tim Keller says of their change, “They laugh louder than other people. They laugh louder than their peers. They cry more deeply. They see further into the future. and they remember the wisdom of the past better because they’ve been taken out of their land and have a perspective that’s greater than the time and place of the people who’ve lived all their lives in that country. And so they’re recognized by their peers as having a certain greatness of spirit and they’re made into their leaders. And yet at the same time, their peers and their friends can no longer understand them because now they seem very strange. They’re always walking off to the ocean, standing on the shore, and the sound of waves sinks deeply into their hearts, and they sit there for hours, and everyone says, “What’s wrong with them? Why do they get comfort? Why do they get strength from doing something like that?” In other words, they love their homeland, but now their relationship with their homeland has become complex. The citizenship of their hearts, the rootedness of their souls no longer is there. It’s over the sea. They love their own people. They can help them in many ways, but they’re not easily understood. They’re singing a different song and they long at the end of their lives to go over the sea and leave their homeland behind forever. That’s what Jesus says happens with Christians. If you belong to the world, it would love you as its own as it is. You do not belong to the world, but I’ve chosen you out of the world. Peter Creef summarizes what it means to cast aside a typical secular modern assumption of a disenchanted world and embrace faith in God. He says, “It makes a total difference. A difference to absolutely every single thing in your life. It colors everything. Your fundamental attitude toward all reality is wonder and humility. You’re like a small child in a large house.” As Tolken has said in one of his letters, you’re inside a great story. You expect mysteries. You expect mourns, terrors to stop your heart and joys to break it. Reality is big. In this big world, there may be not only things like dragons, but even heroes. And as branches of the vine, Jesus says that the very life of heaven has entered into us. And it makes our relationship to our home nation of Canada quite complex. Jesus says, “I’m the vine, so I’ve cut off your roots to your race, your country, your political party, your social class, your identity, your citizenship has been transferred to me.” writer of the book of Hebrews in chapter 11 says of Abraham he was looking forward to the city with foundations whose architect and builder is God and then goes on to speak uh of other deceased saints in the Old Testament saying that all these people were still living by faith when they died they didn’t receive the things promised they saw them and welcome them from a distance and they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth people who say such things show that they’re looking for a country of their own If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. Instead, they were longing for a better country, a heavenly one. Therefore, God’s not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them. Once the life of Christ gets inside us, changes us, our relationship to our home country becomes complex. We love the people, but we don’t ever fully belong. If next month in Italy, an Olympic hockey team from heaven came down and participated, that’s where our true citizenship would lie. We would wear their colors. We would cheer them on. Of course, they’d win, but it wouldn’t make us very popular with our fellow Canadians. As we stood celebrating heaven’s victory after the gold medal game on White Avenue, people might smash the windows of our cars or throw beer cans in our faces. Jesus says, “I’ve called you out of the world.” and the New Testament that term the world is like a code word for all the peoples and plans and organizations and philosophies and values that belong to society without God. We’re instructed in John 2 not to give our love to that world or to anything in it. It tells us why. It says the world and its desires, they’re passing away, but the one who does the will of God lives forever. Romans 12 says, “Don’t be conformed to the world. Don’t let it wrap its tendrils around us and make us indistinguishable from it. James 4:4 expresses the same thing even more forcibly. It says, “Don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.” Jesus says, “I’ve chosen you. I’ve called you out of the world.” And the sound we hear that others don’t is the sound of waves breaking on a beach calling us to our home country. We enjoy Canada. We’re thankful for it, but we don’t fully belong here. We’re outsiders. And Jesus goes on in his passage then to describe some of the things that people in our world will hold against us. One is simply our association with Jesus. He says, “If the world hates you, keep in mind it hated me first. No servant is greater than his master. If they persecuted me, they’ll persecute you also.” It’s guilt by association. People who don’t like Jesus certainly won’t like us. And the specific thing the world holds against Jesus and by extension us are his teachings, his words. He says, “If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not be guilty of sin. Now, however, they have no excuse for their sin. He who hates me hates my father as well. If I had not done among them what no one else did, they would not be guilty of sin. But now that they’ve seen these miracles, and yet they’ve hated both me and my father, this is to fulfill what is written in their law. They hated me without reason. So what’s in there? The the words and the works of Jesus, they activate and they stir up sin and guilt in people’s lives. To not have heard the words of Jesus doesn’t make a a sinful person innocent in any way. All human beings are sinful in an ultimate sense. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. But to hear the words of Jesus clearly and reject them, it adds a deeper layer of guilt. to see a miracle of Jesus and to ignore it or to blow it off adds a deeper layer of guilt. If people reject Jesus’ clear words and works, they’re they’re rejecting bright 300 watt fully illuminated revelation and it the alarm goes off. They’re suddenly wide awake and Jesus’ words force them to face the day. Jesus once said to his home region, people in his home region of Galilee, that because they saw his miracles and wouldn’t repent, they would face more severe judgment than the pagan cities of Tier and Siden. Indeed, even worse punishment than the ancient city of Sodom. Luke 11, Jesus declared that the queen of Sheba would rise up at judgment of Jesus’ contemporaries in Israel. because she was so thirsty for the wisdom of Solomon, she traveled a great distance to hear it. And of himself, Jesus said, “Something greater than Solomon is here.” Jesus likewise said that the men of ancient Nineveh would rise up and condemn the generation that saw Jesus and heard his words, but rejected him. Through Jonah, the people of Nineveh had received little small shafts of revelation delivered grudgingly by a disillusioned prophet. Yet those shafts of light were sufficient to cause them to repent. When the clearest light of Jesus shows the stain in people’s hearts, stains they’d prefer to keep hidden than to ignore that light leaves people who were already sinful and guilty before God and exposed before God. It leaves them without the smallest sliver of an excuse. And you and me through our association with Jesus remind people about the reality of sin, the need to repent. We’re like the car alarm that goes off blaring in the neighborhood in the middle of the night when people just want to sleep. Jesus even boldly declares that it’s it’s just unreasonable to be hostile toward him and his followers. They hated me without reason. Even though my words calling them to repentance are for their healing for their very best. They don’t want to be told what to do. the world and the people attached to the world, they don’t want a body of instruction, a body of teaching that comes from outside the world. People don’t want a truth from outside the world that might judge their experience or the way they perceive themselves. In our culture, inner authenticity uh isn’t to be challenged by outside authority. But you and I remind the world that that’s not how it really is. Our inner intuitions are corrupt. Only the instruction from outside the world is pure and trustworthy. Jesus said his followers would be hated as he was hated because they were associated with him and his words. And the revelation of Jesus and the truth from heaven, it always incites discomfort and feelings of guilt in people who are working hard at rejecting him. So as Christians, we’re chosen out of the world. Our association with Jesus and his challenging message calling guilty people to repent, it puts targets on our back if we don’t give in to our current cultural narratives and beliefs. Jesus said, “If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own.” World would love and embrace Christians if we thought as the world does. And if our morals and ethics matched those of everyone else in our city, we would fit in. We would belong. We’d be loved. If the world thought they could co-opt our convictions, if the world thought it could own us, faithful Christians can’t afford to operate that way. Faithful Christians can’t be owned or co-opted by a cultural narrative that dismisses Jesus’ words. Those who abide in the vine and who remain in Jesus’ words will always be a threat to those who reject the authority of Jesus in favor of their own autonomy and independence. And let’s be uncomfortably specific for a few moments about why you and I might be hated by the people of Old Strath Kona and the people of our city. Alli Best Stucky. She’s an author. She’s a podcaster. She writes and speaks on the subject of empathy. And generally speaking, empathy is is a wonderful thing. It’s an emotion that allows us to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes and to feel something of what they feel. And at its best, empathy points us toward loving people, help us become better neighbors and better friends, better co-workers, better parents. But as Stucky illustrates, empathy by itself is an insufficient moral guide. It just doesn’t give us the same set of resources as God’s word gives us to truly love people and look out for their best interests. She writes, “Empathy and kindness are not synonymous. Neither are empathy and compassion. Kindness describes how we treat someone either in word or deed. Compassion means to suffer with someone who’s struggling. Both kindness and compassion are necessary components of love. But empathy literally means to be in the feelings of another person. Empathy by itself is neither loving nor kind. It’s just an emotion. Love on the other hand is a conscious choice to seek good for another person. So she writes, “Empathy can help us see their perspective and foster compassion, but that’s all it can do. It can’t guide us into making the right decisions or dawning the wise, moral, or biblical position. Toxic empathy bullies us into believing that the unwise, immoral, and unbiblical position is actually the righteous one. Now, here’s what she’s getting at. Let’s say we come across a young man who has abused children, and we spend time with him. We get to know that person. We listen to his story and we learn about the family he came from and the violence and dysfunction he witnessed as a child and his own experience with abuse. And the more we come to learn his story, the more empathy we would likely feel for him. And that’s entirely appropriate. We listen to his story and then we think to ourselves there, but by the grace of God I. But when it comes to the young man’s sentence and his punishment and his need to be kept away from children, the need for children to be protected from him, we couldn’t just listen to our empathy or follow where it leads. To really love that man and love those he might be tempted to abuse, we need to consider justice and constraint. Need to get the bottom of his sin and temptation. Make hard choices about what’s best for him and best for society. There’s a criterion beyond merely feelings of empathy that would direct our actions. So Stucky writes, “To love means to want what is best for a person as God defines best. God’s definition of what’s good and loving will almost always contradict the world’s definition, which will inevitably put us at odds with mainstream culture. While this is uncomfortable, the sacrifice is worth it. The truth can change lives.” So we we face this tension with God’s word when and and the cultural narrative when they differ on things like abortion and same-sex relationships and marriage and transgender issues. A toxic kind of empathy can be leveraged against us that says if you really cared about women, you’d support their right to choose. If you really respected people, you’d use their preferred pronouns. If you’re really a kind person, you’d celebrate all love and the freedom for everyone to love who they love. Stucky notes, “The goal of statements like these, examples of toxic empathy, is to get us to suppress our opposition to a particular issue or point of view by playing upon our desire to be a good person.” The erroneous conflation of love and empathy has convinced the masses that to be loving, we must feel the same way they do. Toxic empathy says we must not only share their feelings, but affirm their feelings and choices as valid and justified and good. There’s an important distinction. we all need to make between the feelings of empathy and acting in a truly loving way toward individuals and society. If if we have no empathy for a woman who finds out she’s pregnant and sees no way out other than having an abortion, and if we have no empathy for a man who, as far as they can tell, have never had any sexual attraction except for other men. If we don’t feel any empathy for those who are experiencing gender confusion, if we don’t feel any empathy for such people, there’s probably something wrong with us. It’s a broken world. There are broken people, including ourselves, everywhere we look. It’s not wrong to empathize with the problems and confusion that broken people like us face. However, if we allow our empathy to draw us away from God’s word, to have us not remain in the words of Jesus, then there’s something seriously wrong with our disciplehip. We believe that the words of God, the father, the words of Jesus are the greatest healing words that our world will ever see. In following Jesus, we believe we’re accessing the resources of the kindest, most loving, most compassionate person that’s ever walked the face of the earth. But in following his words specifically about men and women and sex and lust and marriage and children, we get accused of lacking proper empathy and of being uncompassionate, unkind, and unloving. And you notice that many of our convictions that people in old Strath Kona might hate us for have to do with what Jesus says about the proper formation of families. a Christian view, a Genesis chapter 2 view of family is somehow viewed as a threat by segments of people in our city. The world can’t own us. Jesus says it would love us as as its own if we belonged to it. If we conformed to its evershifting cultural narrative, but we can’t do that and remain faithful to Jesus. We can’t remain in Jesus’ words and expect unqualified love and acceptance from the world. So, the world hates us because Jesus has called us out of it. Because we represent the challenge that Jesus’ words bring out. Uh because we can’t be bought and we can’t be owned and we can’t be manipulated by expressions of empathy that are actually toxic, that do more harm than good in other people’s lives. We’re also hated because we won’t be silent about it. We won’t just keep our convictions privately to ourselves. We won’t never try to persuade people of the truth of the gospel and the truth of Jesus’ words. We’re called to speak boldly what we believe. And Jesus instructs us in verse 26, when the counselor comes, meaning the Holy Spirit, whom I will send to you from the father, the spirit of truth who goes out from the father, he will testify about me. You must also testify, for you’ve been with me from the beginning. So to be with Jesus is to be unashamed of his words and unashamed of how people might view us and unashamed of his gospel. May of 1963, a man named Sherwood Wart drove to Cambridge, England to interview CS Lewis at his office in Magdalene College. It would turn out to be CS Lewis’s final interview because he would pass away a few months later. One of the questions that W asked was, “How can we foster the encounter of people with Jesus Christ?” And Lewis replied, “Well, you can’t lay down any pattern for God. There are many different ways of bringing people into his kingdom. even some ways that I especially dislike. I’ve therefore learned to be cautious in my judgment. But we can block it in many ways. As Christians, we’re tempted to make unnecessary concessions to those outside the faith. We give in too much. Now, I don’t mean that we should run the risk of making a nuisance of ourselves by witnessing at improper times. But there comes a time when we must show that we disagree. We must show our Christian colors. If we are to be true to Jesus Christ, we cannot remain silent or concede everything away. So there’s our challenge. That’s our application from Jesus’ words to us this morning. We can’t be endlessly bothered. If the world doesn’t love us, it’s our own because Jesus says it’ll never do that. We’ve been called out of the world. We can’t allow the the toxic sympathy of others to control how we approach various issues. We can’t remain silent or concede everything away. And these are things, these are hard things that you and I need to pray about. And some of the things that you might want to include in prayer would thank Jesus that he really has chosen you and called you out of the world. And pray that while being committed and remaining committed to loving people and having proper empathy for people, you would also learn to live as an alien and stranger on earth. And then pray for boldness to testify about Jesus. This is your your next few moments with with Christ alone. and then I’ll close us off.