The world hates you

"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.  – John 15.18-19

We in the West have had it made for a long time. We have been loved, like, tolerated, or at least endured for a couple of centuries now. In most of our Western nations society has been on our side and even legislated to support our views and our way of life. It has been relatively easy to be to a Christian.

That is kind of a comfy cosy feeling. But it is not the norm.

Jesus gave us a warning. He knew we were not going to be popular in the general scheme of things.

Take comfort if the world hates you because it hated me first. If you were of the world the world love you. But you are not of this world because I chose you out of it – that is why the world hates you.

So if the world hates us because we are living for Christ that is to be expected. That is the norm. It only makes sense really. Jesus’ message is totally opposite to the world’s message. They are incompatible. It only makes sense that the world would hate Christ’s followers.

That’s fine. We had better get used to it.

I think there is something else we can look at here. That is the reason the world hates us. Too often the world hates Christians because, well, we are hateful. To put it bluntly the world hates believers sometimes because we are jerks.

If the world hates us because we are jerks that’s too bad, we earned it.

But it if the world hates us for being too much like Jesus we can take comfort that it is not about us, it is because they don’t like Him.