If the world hates you, realize that it hated me first.
We do strive to make our message enticing, to show how it answers the deepest desire of every human heart. We do try to lead with beauty and to affirm the good wherever we find it. But as followers of Jesus we can't avoid the fact that people might not want to hear everything that we need to say. We are called to proclaim a message of love. Although the world will pay lip service to the idea of love, as soon as it becomes a concrete reality we see that they are not speaking of the same thing. This is because love must invariably refer to the end of the thing loved, which for humans, is our eternal destiny with God. On the other hand love as the world understands it tends to be a system whereby we mutually keep one another distracted from that eternal perspective. We act out of worldly love when we help one another to fixate on idols like pride, power, and pleasure so that the deeper questions can't bother us.
If you belonged to the world, the world would love its own;
but because you do not belong to the world,
and I have chosen you out of the world,
the world hates you.
Does this mean that there is no love in the world apart from Christianity? Obviously we know this to be false. In many ways non-Christians often outdo Christians in love, at least to a point.
Yet for those in the world there is always a threshold, a place of safety beyond which they will not go so as to remain in control. It is this need for control that causes the world to often overstep in its efforts to love. This is where proportionalism comes in, the ideology wherein anything may be justified, no matter how heinous, as long as it is in service of a perceived good. It is also the origin of a willingness to ignore the facts of reality so that individual subjective truth can be exalted. When Christians suggest that our deepest purpose can only be found grounded in reality itself, not in what wish it to be (since it is precisely here in the realm of desire where sin has marred us most), the world can't readily accept this. It is intelligible. It is understandable. But it only fully makes sense to the heart on the far side of surrender.
If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you.
If they kept my word, they will also keep yours.
And they will do all these things to you on account of my name,
because they do not know the one who sent me.
We can be encouraged by the example of the Apostles in Acts who were undeterred by this warning of Jesus that they would encounter opposition. They took prudent steps when appropriate such as having Timothy circumcised. The could have insisted on his freedom and embraced that dispute all along the way. But they chose to focus on the core of their message instead.
Day after day the churches grew stronger in faith
and increased in number.
Paul and the others were willing to speak the message anywhere they could find people who would listen. Yet they did not go at random, but rather were led by the Spirit. They didn't simply charge headlong toward opposition although they didn't flee from it when they encountered it. Instead, they trusted in the Holy Spirit to guide their way.
When they came to Mysia, they tried to go on into Bithynia,
but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them,
so they crossed through Mysia and came down to Troas.
We sometimes become frustrated when the Spirit of Jesus says no to some plans which, humanly speaking, sounded pretty good to us. But we are meant to have the flexibility and plasticity of Paul, ready to be redirected at moment's notice. When this shift happens we may feel unprepared for the next move, since we had been planning on something else. But we can have the same courageous boldness of Paul for the same reason he had it: trust in the Spirit of Jesus.
Know that the LORD is God;
he made us, his we are;
his people, the flock he tends.
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