My friend Calvin Miller once went to speak at a chapel service at Columbia International University, a Christian school and seminary. Down one of the long hallways on the campus there were a number of framed pictures of people. Dr. Miller asked his guide, a student, who the people in the pictures were. The student replied, “All of these people are former students who were killed somewhere in the world for the cause of Christ.”

In telling me this story, Dr. Miller added that at the seminary he was affiliated with at that time the only framed pictures were those of the Presidents of the school. He said, “We frame our Presidents. They frame their martyrs.”

A friend of Shane Clairborne’s once told him, “Our problem is that we no longer have martyrs. We only have celebrities.”[1]

Suffering for the faith, or even dying for the faith (what we call martyrdom) has been a part of Christian experience from the beginning. Tertullian, the 2^nd century African church father, famously said, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”

We recognize this, especially as a fact of history, but I do wonder if we sufficiently appreciate the fact that there are people who have given their lives for Jesus Christ all throughout the world for two thousand years now? Furthermore, I wonder if we realize and properly appreciate how often people are suffering for the gospel of Jesus in our very own day? The age of the martyrs has not ended. In fact, many suggest that there are more martyrs for the faith today than there ever have been in any other era of Christian history. I wonder if we sufficiently appreciate the honor and sacrifice of martyrdom for Jesus.

For instance, I once pastored a church where I made a very serious mistake. I forgot to acknowledge Veterans Day. Now, I did not do so on purpose. I think we should acknowledge and applaud our veterans. It was simply a mistake, an oversight in the midst of a busy Sunday.

The next Sunday an elderly man in our church, a veteran, was waiting to speak to me. He was visibly moved with anger. He said to me, “I did not think I would ever live to see the day around here when we failed to acknowledge our veterans on Veterans Day.”

Perhaps it was pettiness on my part, or perhaps just irritation at the confrontation and what I took to be an insinuation that I had done so on purpose, but I responded, “You are right. I did fail to honor our veterans. It was an oversight which I regret and for which I apologize.” Then I added, “But you know what I think we should do one of these days in church? I think we should honor our martyrs for the faith. My whole life I’ve seen the church recognize, rightly, those who have served and risked and given their lives for our national freedom. But I wish we would grieve over the oversight of not honoring our Christian martyrs with just as much passion.”

He responded, “Well, maybe so.”

I think we should. We should honor our martyrs and those who suffer for the faith. But there is a lot more to this issue of suffering than our failure to acknowledge and properly appreciate the price that other believers have paid and are paying for the faith. In particular I mean we have not appreciated the inevitability of suffering and persecution and possibly even martyrdom when and if we truly decide to follow Jesus in our own lives.

The simple truth of the matter is that Jesus foretold the opposition of the world against the church as a matter of fact. While Jesus never said that every Christian will be killed, or that every Christian will suffer in the exact same way and to the exact same degree, He nevertheless prophesied the opposition of the world against His people as a standing principle of reality. In truth, He did so clearly, and with such force and reasoning, that we may rightly wonder what it means that so many of us never seem to suffer for the sake of the gospel at all.

I would like us to consider, first, Jesus’ words in John 15:18, then follow the train of thought from v.20 through v.25.

¹⁸ “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you.

Notice that Jesus immediately creates a link and a corollary between His church and Himself. When the church receives the hatred of the world, it should immediately remember the hatred that the world had and has for Jesus Himself. He continues this train of thought in v.20 and following:

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. ²¹But 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.’

The thought is clear and profound: if the world hates Jesus, then, by extension, the world will hate those who are like Jesus and who follow Jesus. Since the church is the body of Christ that carries on the life of Christ in the world, the hatred of the world against the church is to be expected and is natural. To use the image from the beginning of John 15, if the world hates the vine, will it not also hate the branches attached to the vine that bear the fruit of the vine?

Or, we might put it like this, using the model of , “If A=B and B=C then A=C”:

The world hates Jesus.

Jesus’ presence in the world today continues in His church.

The world will hate the church today.

The Lord Jesus does not make this truth conditional upon geography or time. He offers it as a timeless, transnational, transethnic, rock-solid truth: to be Jesus to the world is to invite the hatred that Jesus received from the world. This is as much the case in North Little Rock, AR, as it was in first century Jerusalem, even though many, then as now, seek to deny that suffering is a part of the Christian life.

For instance, itinerant speaker Richard Owen Roberts once preached on 2 Timothy 3:12. It is a crucial verse, and one I would like for us to note this morning. In that verse, Paul says:

“Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.”

Roberts spoke on this verse and on the reality that all who seek to follow Jesus will suffer.  Afterward, a man came to him protesting the point. “You were wrong on that point,” he said.  “It’s not true that everyone who lives a godly life will suffer persecution. I’m the city attorney, and nobody persecutes the city attorney.”

“Allow me to offer you a syllogism,” Mr. Roberts replied.

“Major premise: All who want to live a godly life in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution.

Minor premise: The city attorney suffers no persecution.

Conclusion: The city lawyer does not want to live a godly life in Christ Jesus.

It is a painful truth, and a crucial one. If Satan opposes Jesus, always and everywhere, will he not oppose those who live the life of Jesus, always and everywhere? R. Kent Hughes put it bluntly: “A Christian who follows Christ mustexpect to be hated. (The form of the Greek word in verse 18 suggests certainty: “you will be hated.”)”[2]

What is more, the hatred of the world is directed at the church for the exact same reason that the hatred of the world was directed at Jesus: Jesus challenged prophetically the very assumptions and foundations of the world order. Jesus’ mere existence, not to mention His incendiary message, was a threat to the world’s comfort and security. Jesus spoke of this reality in terms of being “in” the world but not “of” the world.

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.

The church is therefore in the world, but not of the world. It is not of the world because it is of another world, another Kingdom. It represents, then, the foreign interests of a foreign Kingdom within the fallen world. As a result, the world hates the body of Christ because the world is diametrically opposed to the Kingdom that the church represents: the Kingdom of God.

The world hates the church when the church is faithful to Jesus because when the church is faithful to Jesus she holds up the same painful mirror to the world that Jesus held up to the world. The world wants to live in blissful ignorance of God. When the Kingdom of God is brought into the world, it removes the world’s excuse of ignorance and challenges it from the inside.

R. Kent Hughes has passed on a fascinating story that helpfully illustrates why the world hates the prophetic witness of the church:

            Once an African chief, in this case a woman, happened to visit a mission station. Hanging outside the missionary’s cabin, on a tree, was a little mirror. The chief happened to look into the mirror and saw her reflection, with its hideous paint and evil features. She gazed at her own terrifying countenance and jumped back in horror exclaiming, “Who is that horrible-looking person inside that tree?” “Oh,” the missionary said, “it is not in the tree. The glass is reflecting your own face.” The African would not believe it until she held the mirror in her hand. She said, “I must have the glass. How much will you sell it for?” “Oh,” the missionary said, “I don’t want to sell it.” But she begged until he capitulated. She took the mirror. Exclaiming, “I will never have it making faces at me again,” she threw it down and broke it to pieces.

Do you see? The church is the mirror that God uses to reveal to the world its fallen state. This does not mean that the church’s primary mission is to point out fault. It simply means that the church, by definition, by its very nature, represents the life of Jesus and His gospel. As it does so, it inevitably reveals the fallen nature of the world by proclaiming a message that contradicts the world’s message and by offering a contrast in the way we live to the dominant way of life in the world.

When the gospel uncovers the fallenness of the world, the world in turn hates the messengers of that gospel. They seek to smash the mirror that reveals its distance from God. They hate the church because they hate the Jesus they see in the church.

What this means, then, is that the church does not have to seek the hatred of the world. It is wrong, in fact, to manufacture suffering, to seek to invite it through deliberate means. For instance, in a telling scene from Dostoesvky’sCrime and Punishment, Porfiry Petrovitch describes to Rodion Romanovitch how some Russian prisoners, especially Christians, invite and seek after suffering:

“Do you know, Rodion Romanovitch, the force of the word ‘suffering’ among some of these people! It’s not a question of suffering for some one’s benefit, but simply, ‘one must suffer.’ If they suffer at the hands of the authorities, so much the better. In my time there was a very meek and mild prisoner who spent a whole year in prison always reading his Bible on the stove at night and he read himself crazy, and so crazy, do you know, that one day, apropos of nothing, he seized a brick and flung it at the governor, though he had done him no harm. And the way he threw it too: aimed it a yard on one side on purpose, for fear of hurting him. Well, we know what happens to a prisoner who assaults an officer with a weapon. So ‘he took his suffering.’”[3]

This is wrong. To manufacture suffering is a kind of pride, like the “Cult of the Martyrs” who used to charge into battle so that they could throw themselves onto the swords of the opposing armies and embrace martyrdom.

No, we do not rush to suffering, we do not seek it, we do not desire it and we will not manufacture it. But the words of Jesus are clear and true: when the church is faithful to Jesus it will receive the same opposition that Jesus received from the world.

At this point, let us raise a very uncomfortable but obvious and crucial Christian: if the church will suffer when the church is faithful to the Lord who suffers, what does it mean when the church does not suffer? To be sure, not all absence of suffering for a season means unfaithfulness. The Lord is faithful to grant seasons of peace and we praise Him for it! But when a church can look over a long history and see that it has never paid a price for following Jesus, does it not raise the question of whether or not that church is really following Jesus at all?

Is this not the reason why we do not quite know what to make of biblical passages that speak of suffering? John Piper has passed on a helpful story from the life of Brother Andrew:

[Some] years ago in Ermelo, Holland, Brother Andrew told the story of sitting in Budapest, Hungary, with a dozen pastors of that city teaching them from the Bible. In walked an old friend, a pastor from Romania who had recently been released from prison. Brother Andrew said that he stopped teaching and knew that it was time to listen.

After a long pause the Romanian pastor said, “Andrew, are there any pastors in prison in Holland?” “No,” he replied. “Why not?” the pastor asked. Brother Andrew thought for a moment and said, “I think it must be because we do not take advantage of all the opportunities God gives us.”

Then came the most difficult question. “Andrew, what do you do with 2 Timothy 3:12 [“Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.”]?” Brother Andrew opened his Bible and turned to the text and read aloud, “All who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.” He closed the Bible slowly and said, “Brother, please forgive me. We do nothing with that verse.”[4]

Perhaps we do not know what to do with verses like this either. Perhaps we do not know what to do because suffering for the gospel is so far from our actual experience as to make it an utterly foreign concept. Perhaps it is this far from our experience because we are far from the gospel that invites suffering. And perhaps we are far from the gospel that invites suffering precisely because we are so close to the wealth and comforts that shield us from the gospel.

Is it not possible that the greatest coup the devil ever hoisted upon the church was the coup of wealth and comfort? We have become adept at shielding ourselves from suffering. In fact, you might could say that our entire culture is predicated upon a mad and frenzied rush to shield ourselves from suffering. When this kind of mentality seeps into the church, it manifests not in a rejection of the gospel, but rather in a dulling of the sharp edges of the gospel.

So we convince ourselves that we believe, but we shield ourselves from the inevitable results of true belief. We convince ourselves we are following, but we do not follow into those areas that would require of us a price.

The church will be hated when the church is faithful. A church that is never hated is a church that is not being faithful.  The great New Testament Greek scholar A.T. Robertson reflected on our text this morning and asked, “Does the world hate us? If not, why not? Has the world become more Christian or Christians more worldly?”[5]

It is a great question.

What does this mean, then? Does it mean that the Christian life must be one of misery and pain? No. The inevitability of suffering is not the same thing as the inevitability of misery. In fact, one of the great and grand truths of the gospel is that Christ sustains us through suffering and in the midst of it. We are a people of great joy and of great hope. We are hated by the world, but we do not despair as a result.

This is why Jesus continues thus in vv.26-27:

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. ²⁷ And you also will bear witness, because you have been with me from the beginning.

Jesus points to the Holy Spirit to comfort the believers. In particular, He says:

·         The Holy Spirit is coming.

·         The Holy Spirit is our Helper.

·         It is the Holy Spirit who will speak of Christ through the church.

What suffering the church faces, then, it never faces alone. The courageous message it proclaims that is hated by the world it never proclaims on its own strength.

The church is the vehicle through which God the Spirit points people to God the Father in the name of God the Son. What this means is clear:

To proclaim the gospel is an act of joyful worship.

To suffer for the gospel is an act of joyful worship.

To die for the gospel is the ultimate act of joyful worship.

The greatest act of worship we have is to lay down our lives for Jesus.

I conclude with a story that the late John Stott shared about Dr. Josif Ton, who Stott called “a follower of Jesus Christ, who has shown by his life and teaching that suffering – and even death – is an indispensable ingredient of Christian discipleship. ”

Josif Ton is a Romanian Christian leader, born in 1934, who became pastor of the Baptist Church in Oradea, which today is a world-famous Baptist center. After four years of his faithful pasturing, the curiosity of the authorities was around and he was arrested and interrogated. He was then given the opportunity to leave the country and settle in the United States, where he pursued doctoral studies and was awarded a doctorate by the Evangelical Faculty of Belgium. His research topic was “Suffering, Martyrdom and Rewards in Heaven,” which was later published as a book.

            During the oppressive regime of Nicolae Ceaucescu, Josif Ton in one of his published sermons told how the authorities threatened to kill him. He responded: “Sir, your supreme weapon is killing. My supreme weapon is dying.”[6]

Let us embrace this as our great creed when the world hates us: “Sir, your supreme weapon is killing. My supreme weapon is dying.”

It is an honor to suffer for Jesus.

Follow Him in such a way that you attract the devil’s attention. Then cling to the victory you have over the devil in Christ.

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