The Inner Ring (John 15:18-16:4)

I had planned on preaching Daniel 10 this morning, but that just wouldn’t come together. Truth is—I just kept going back to John 15:18-16:4.

Now the two aren’t entirely unrelated. I think this little side jaunt into the gospel of John might help us as we work through Daniel.

In just a moment I’m going to read our text, starting in John 15:18, and there are going to be a few words that I read which will likely spark our imagination.

Words like “the world” and “hatred” and “persecution” are going to spoken throughout. And they will likely bring up images and feelings when you hear them.

As we read through the text, I want you to picture those things…be aware…what are you visualizing…what are you placing those labels upon as you hear those words?

John 15:18–16:4 ESV

“If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. 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. 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. But all these things they will do to you on account of my name, because they do not know him who sent me. 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. Whoever hates me hates my Father also. 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. But the word that is written in their Law must be fulfilled: ‘They hated me without a cause.’ “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. And you also will bear witness, because you have been with me from the beginning. “I have said all these things to you to keep you from falling away. They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed, the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God. And they will do these things because they have not known the Father, nor me. But I have said these things to you, that when their hour comes you may remember that I told them to you. “I did not say these things to you from the beginning, because I was with you.

I’ll tell you for me what happens when I first read this text—just how these words attach to my imagination.

I have been trained when I think of “the world” to think in terms of secular and godless people. So I hear “If the world hates you” and my mind immediately goes to people within American society who don’t have the values of the Bible…particularly in terms of things like sexuality, the nature of humanity, you know all those hot button issues we tend to argue about.

And that is where my mind goes with the word “hate” as well. I think about things like cancel culture. People getting mad and angry. And that is, in part, what I think about with persecution.

Though the word persecution tends to evoke images for me of other countries and believers losing their life for the cause of Christ. I’m more inclined to say something like “persecution is coming” in reference to here.

But is that what Jesus is talking about in this text? Is the world in this passage identified as “Rome” and the godless/secular society surrounding them? I want us to look at this with a fresh set of eyes this morning. To do this, though, we’re going to need to go on a bit of a journey.

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The first thing we need to do is decide if we believe this statement is true:

“Nobody wants to be hated.”

Now, some of you might be more inclined to quickly say, “it’s not true for me. I don’t care if I’m hated.” Others might kind of lean towards saying, “yeah, I think it’s true—I don’t like it at all when somebody hates me.”

Let’s try to tweak our statement a little…We’re going to add a couple words to the phrase “nobody wants to be hated…by the people they like or the group they want to be a part of.” Let me show you this...

There was a really interesting study done a few years back involving college students and a room filling up with smoke.

They started with the control group. That means there weren’t any “informed” people in the room. Nobody was pre-planted or instructed on what to do. They just had a group of people in a room and they slowly started filling it with smoke.

75% of the college students in the study got up and told somebody about the smoke.

But the second time they had a few plants in there—people who had been instructed to see the smoke, and then clearly ignore it. How would the college students react if the others around them weren’t reacting in any way to the smoke? The percentage dropped to 37%. Just a little over 1/3 of them now got up to tell somebody about the smoke. What does this tell us?

Todd Rose, in his book Collective Illusions, explains:

The simple answer is that we often conform because we’re afraid of being embarrassed. Our stress levels rise at the thought of being mocked or viewed as incompetent, and when that happens, the fear-based part of the brain takes over. Confused and unsure of ourselves, we surrender to the crowd because doing so relieves our stress. Caving to the majority opinion also diffuses our personal responsibility for our decisions, making it easier to bear mistakes. (Todd Rose, Collective Illusions, (New York: Hachette Books, 2022), 7)

Most of us don’t like to go against the crowd, as a general rule. But this is even more true when it comes to what C.S. Lewis called the Inner Ring. He argued that we all have certain circles that we want to be part of, we are driven to be included, and we can’t bear the thought of being dismissed.

So, “Nobody wants to be hated” isn’t exactly true. We’re okay, at least in some sense, with being hated by those who are “outside” of our in-group. What is really devastating is when we don’t line up with our “inner Ring”.

I’ll give you a couple of specific examples here. Let’s say you’re a lifelong Chiefs fan but you live in LA, or I mean Oakland, or I mean Las Vegas. One day you get tickets to wherever the Raiders home stadium is that week…you dress up in your all your Chiefs gear and you sit in a section filled with passionate Raiders fans…one of them says to security, “Hey, come get this guy…he’s not one of us!”

How do you feel? You don’t have hurt feelings, you really don’t care much that they hate you, you almost even wear it as a badge of honor...

But let’s change the story a bit. Same guy, lifelong Chiefs fan, finally gets tickets to KC! You’re going to be in the section with all of the super fans. You go to sit down and all of the people around you, all dressed up in their gear, some of the super fans—the inner ring that you just can’t wait to be a part of—says to the security guard, “Hey, can you get this guy out of here. He isn’t a real fan!” Now, you’re kind of angry, maybe hurt, feel rejected, want to prove you belong, all of that stuff...

“If a Raiders fan hates you...” that doesn’t hit the same does it? “If a Chiefs fan hates you...” Okay, now that one might sting a little.

We could make a similar illustration with some of the hot-button illustrations of today. If you want to be accepted by a half of our nation then you’re going to need to have certain views about sexuality, gender issues, etc.

You know that to not tow the line on this is going to get you in trouble. You’ll be cast aside as a bigot, homophobic, transphobic, possibly canceled from certain parts of society, etc.

Now some hear that and are saying, “that doesn’t mean anything to me! Let them cancel me! There is something passionate that rises up within you.” But others might feel a different weight attached there…that might seem incredibly unpleasant. Why? It all depends on what your inner ring is.

Let me show you one that is probably more common in our neck of the woods. We can do the same illustration with political parties. You’re a lifelong Republican, in fact things have just kind of merged a little for you—where you’ve almost come to put “follower of Jesus” as synonymous with being Conservative.

Okay, fair enough. But did you know that there is a growing secular Right? They hold to socially conservative values but NOT to the overall ethic of Jesus. They don’t attend church, they don’t believe in the deity of Christ, they might even use the name of Jesus, but any meaningful metric for being a follower of Jesus is not present.

They have a strong focus on nationalism, individualism, law and order, immigration fears, and populist right-wing ideas....DID you know that among evangelicals there is more danger of dechurching on the right than on the left?

One study showed that from 2008-2021 those who self-identified as evangelical Republicans who seldom to never attend church has risen from 12 percent to 27 percent.

I’ll just give one little example of what we see happening. A couple months ago a Republican congresswoman was leading a prayer breakfast and jokingly talked about telling her fiance they’d have to hold off on being intimate because her attending this PRAYER BREAKFAST was absolutely vital.

She checks all the boxes for the secular right…but doesn’t have a sexual ethic that matches up with historical Christianity. But it doesn’t cost her. Now, how in the world does that happen? I’m not that old, but I’m old enough to remember if this had happened even 15 years ago it’d have been somewhat scandalous for the party. But not today. Today we don’t even bat an eyelash at this. Why?

Because of the Inner Ring. We don’t want to speak up to OUR tribe because to do so is likely to get us booted out. And so there is a real danger here. As the secular Right increases and becomes more secular and less and less like Jesus but still RIGHT wing—there will be a real temptation for Jesus followers to not risk being booted out of their party.

There was another study done in the 1940’s. A sociologist put together a group of people who had to pick one social group out of four options. They’d meet for 45 minutes and then discuss a particularly difficult case about what to do with a troubled youth.

Should he be sent to juvenile department? Some other form of punishment? They had to answer questions on a scale of 1-7…all love or all punishment.

Now, the sociologist had put three paid members in the groups. One would be the deviate, he did the extreme opposite of the group. One stayed with the most popular view, another started in the minority view and moved to the majority.

You know what happened? The guy who took the minority view and didn’t deviate was cut off socially. 75 percent of the groups cut off all communications with him after 35 minutes. They had picked their tribe, they were all buds at the beginning, but after 35 minutes this guy became a hated outsider.

Let’s put all of this together. Whatever your Inner Ring is…you don’t want to be hated by that group…and you know how these groups work, you know that to deviate is going to get you booted out. Or to say it as we said earlier, “Nobody wants to be hated by people they like or a group they want to be part of.”

Now, how does all of this relate to what we see in the gospel of John? How does it relate to words like “the world”, “hated”, and persecuted?

Let’s think about the disciples who are hearing Jesus’ words. They’ve been Jewish their whole life. The synagogue was the center of their life. It was the heart of their aspirations. From Simon the Zealot to Matthew the tax collector—their world centered around the temple, Roman occupation, hoping for Messiah to come, observing the Torah. To deviate from this…oh, man. You just don’t do that…especially in a collective community like Israel. You just don’t go against the elders…THAT was their Inner Ring...

But what is happening with following Jesus? They are doing exactly that what shouldn’t be done. He’s not loved—he’s hated by the religious leaders.

Look at how Jesus is using the word “world” in this passage…The first few verses we could perhaps comfortably keep our view of the “world” as religious outsiders…secular people…godless society…progressive God-hating liberals...but look at how it shifts...

“if they persecuted me...”

Who persecuted Jesus? The Jewish religious leaders...

“If I had not come and spoken to them...” Who was Jesus’ primary audience? The Jewish people…The religious people...

And it’s explicit in verse 25. The word that is written in “their Law”…the “their” is still connected to the people he is talking about… “the world.”

And it gets really clear in 16:2… “They will put you out of the synagogues...”

There it is. So, who is the world? In the gospel of John it’s usually a reference to the godless society that has positioned itself against the Lord. But specifically here it is an indictment of the Jewish leaders who are about to execute Jesus. They are “religious” but godless. That is how Jesus is warning them.

And now the chilling words in 16:2, “the hour is coming when whoever kills you will think he is offering service to God.”

Yes, I think you can apply this even in a way where godless Rome fits the bill as well. They killed Christians because they called them atheist…by only believing in YHWH, by only bowing a knee to Jesus, they were going against their gods, they weren’t bowing to Caesar…and so to kill a Christian was to offer a sacrifice to god.

We could easily see the same thing today. Perhaps a Christian is killed in the name of Muhammad or Allah, or Buddha, or even in the name of Christ....

Or perhaps a believer is sacrificed on the altar of human progress and love of neighbor or tolerance...Whatever that god is.

But the nearest application isn’t Rome or secular society. The nearest application is that “the world” are those who look very religious. They are even claiming the name of the Lord as they are persecuting you for not being like them.

Let’s consider the reason all of this happens. Jesus tells us in verse 21 is on account of His name—because they do not know the Father.

Let’s take some of the religiosity out of this and just think about the life of Jesus, the way of Jesus, the rule of Jesus, how he interacted with others. Let’s think about the love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control which he exhibited.

Did you realize that it is THIS that got Him killed? It was Him saying things like, “I come to give you life....” It was talking about giving people Sabbath rest. Giving life. Reflecting the Father. Healing. Bringing flourishing to others.

Jesus says, “If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own...”

Friends, that is fruit of the spirit type of stuff. The “world” whether it looks religious or secular. Whether it’s right-wing or left-wing or some combination of the two. The “world” doesn’t like the fruit of the Spirit. Oh, we long for it…we want to live in a world with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, and self-control…but when these things challenge our fallen desires, when they expose where we lack, when it goes against our worldview, when it puts us in danger of not “winning”....we’ll throw them out.

Let’s look again at 16:2, “they will put you out of the synagogues...” Here is my point in this sermon…if we really want to be confronted and also comforted by this passage then we need to ask, “what is my synagogue.”

If you come into this passage and say, “I don’t care if they boot me out of the world!”…I suppose it’s possible that you’ve come full circle and you DO get this text…that’s possible. But it’s also possible that you might not be feeling the full weight here.

This isn’t a section that’s warning to watch out against entrenched enemies. That’s not what typically causes people to “fall away” as we see in 16:1. It’s a warning about being kicked out of the Inner Ring that we’re wanting to be in.

There will always be places where “the world” doesn’t jive with the path of Jesus. And that’s true if the world is “secular” or “religious”. That’s true if the world is conservative or liberal. And what Jesus is telling us here is that if we are to truly follow His path—then we aren’t going to have a home in the world system.

The world will hate you…that means boot you out…that means dismiss you…consider you stupid…that means say, “you aren’t a real Chiefs fan”…they’ll even give you a real zinger and accuse you of being one of the other outsiders, it’s a way of testing loyalty…and if the Inner Ring (being called a Republican, a Democrat, a conservative, a progressive, a free thinker, a loving person, a smart guy, whatever the title of your Inner Ring…) if that is what is truly the deepest desire…then it’ll work. You’ll swing into line. C.S. Lewis is correct,

The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and the other sound craftsmen will know it.

That’s just a way of saying that you’ll be one who stands upon principle. You’ll stand upon truth because it’s the truth. Even if it goes against party or the Inner Ring which you desire to be a part of.

When we look at Jesus, we see that His Inner Ring was to please the Father. Period. And look at how He lived as a result.

What is happening in the Farewell Discourse in John, is that he is inviting the disciples into that same world, into the Inner Ring, if you will.... “abide in me and you’ll bear fruit...”

He’s promising to give us the Spirit to lead us into all truth. What we see as the story of John progresses is that Jesus will die a sacrificial death in obedience to the Father. It will be a death for you and I. It’ll be a death that bring us into fellowship with all that is good and holy and loving and peaceful. It’ll provide for us the shalom that our hearts desire. Ultimately, it will bring us into union with God.

But Jesus is warning here…if you want the synagogue more, if you want to stay in the synagogue…you won’t be abiding in me. That world hates me…even if it proclaims to be all about offering service to God…you can’t have your synagogue and your Christ too.

He graciously says these words to keep us from falling away. To warn us that following His path, His rule, His way of life…even though his yoke is easy and His burden is light…the “world” (and hopefully you have a larger understanding of that word) is a savage place. It doesn’t bring peace it brings chaos. It’s yoke isn’t easy, it’s impossible to bear. It’s burden isn’t light—it’s brutal.

In just a moment we are going to observe the Lord’s Supper. What a beautiful picture this is showing our union with Christ. It is also, in some sense a way of us dropping anchor here. It’s a way for us to proclaim that in Christ we find our home. It’s not in the “synagogue”…it’s not in the world…it is here in Christ where we find our life, our sustenance.

This is my body…broken for you.

This is my blood…spilled out for you.

“But I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you...” Do you believe that? Plucked out of the world. Rescued. Saved. Redeemed.

If that’s the case then we partake of the Lord’s Supper. We proclaim that because of what He has done on our behalf, we are in union with Him. Not with the world…but with Christ.

There is one more thing to note here as well…all of these “you” words in John 15:18-16:4 are plural. They are y’all’s. That means we are in this together. When Christ united us to Himself, He also drew us in together. What that means is that as we partake of this it isn’t a solo project.

This is why both Paul and Jesus talk about making sure you are united with your brothers and sisters in Christ before doing this, otherwise you’re communicating a lie. And we don’t want to do that.

Opportunity...

repentance

restoring fellowship