That You May Not Stumble

Prayers. I invite you to turn with me to the Gospel of John chapter 16. This evening we want to consider verses 1 through 4, the first half of verse 4. John chapter 16 verses 1 through the first half of verse 4.

Let's hear the Word of God. Do you stand for the reading? Yes, let's stand for the reading of God's Word. These things I have spoken to you that you should not be made to stumble. They will put you out of the synagogues.

Yes, the time is coming that whoever kills you will think that he offers service to God. And these things they will do to you because they have not known the Father nor me. But these things I have told you that when the time comes you may remember that I told you of them.

Amen. Let's be seated. Let's unite our hearts in prayer. Let's pray together. Father, we thank you for the greatest gift you have given us, your Son. We thank you that he is the Chief Shepherd, the Good Shepherd.

He is the pastor of his people. And Lord, as we turn our attention to this upper room discourse, this farewell discourse, as he prepares his church for life in this world, a life that will be difficult, a life filled with suffering, and yet a life filled with comforts by knowing that in life and in death we belong to our faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.

We pray, Father, send your Spirit to teach us. All of our works, all of our preaching, all of our listening is in vain apart from the Spirit, apart from his illuminating our minds and our hearts to love the Lord our God, to bolster our faith and our assurance and our confidence that our God is with us.

And so, Father, we pray, teach your people, grow us in Christ, grow us in courage to bring the word of Christ to those who do not know it, not fearing their anger, not fearing their hostility, but trusting always in Jesus Christ who always cares perfectly for his saints.

Father, bless us this evening in our meditation, we pray, we ask in Jesus' name, amen. Well, I know you haven't been with us at our church going through John's gospel, but here in chapter 16, Jesus continues the same line of thought that he introduced in chapter 15, that the disciples and the church will be hated by the world.

And while he's spoken to them already somewhat generically, here at the beginning of chapter 16, he now turns to the 11 and gives them a detailed prophecy. He is preparing them and us for the inevitable opposition that we will face as we carry the gospel into a hostile world.

And so, what I want to do is I want to consider the exposition of these four verses, and then we'll transition to doctrine deduced from these verses, and then lastly, we'll turn to application. And so, let's start with our exposition.

Exposition of John 16:1–4

Verse 1, he says, these things I have spoken to you that you should not be made to stumble. Now, these things is a direct reference back to chapter 15. For instance, verse 18, he told them, if the world hates you, you know that it hated me before it hated you.

And now, he reveals to them why he's been so direct, so that you will not be made to stumble. The word stumble here means to fall away from the faith, to apostatize, to abandon the faith. Matthew Henry says, Jesus' primary purpose in giving this stern warning is to keep you from stumbling and prevent apostasy.

The Lord is telling them these things plainly beforehand so that he would strengthen their immunity against caving under pressure, under suffering. And by the way, brothers and sisters, we would do well to follow our Lord's example here in our counsel of other people.

There's often a temptation for us, especially with new converts, for us to kind of sugarcoat and water down the cost of what it will cost you to become a Christian. But what that does is it actually sets people up for temptation and disillusionment when hardship does come.

And the Lord here, being our shepherd, he knows what suffering can do for the unprepared soul, and so he tells them beforehand. Verse 2, he begins to get specific. They will put you out of the synagogues.

I can imagine him elaborating, looking them in the eye, saying, men, do you remember what happened to the man born blind in chapter 9? How he was put out of the synagogue and even his own parents, in their own way, disowned him because they feared the same.

He's telling them, that is going to happen to you, each one of you. You will be hated by your own kinsmen, your own people, and you will literally be put out of the only religious system that you have known.

They'll be regarded as heretics, blasphemers. Now, to understand this, you've got to put yourself in their perspective. For the Jewish person, the synagogue and the temple was their life. And Jesus is essentially telling them, men, you need to prepare to be treated as Gentiles.

Your own households will turn against you. And I don't know your congregation the way I know my congregation, but I know for my people, there were many of them who've come out of Roman Catholicism. And in some sense, when they came out of Roman Catholicism, they weren't just cut off from the church, they were cut off from their families.

Because that was to turn against the family. Or perhaps some of you come from easy-believism, cheap-grace type Christian backgrounds. And the Lord opened your eyes to the truth, and you started to actually follow the true Christ of the Scriptures.

And all of a sudden, you're regarded by those others as a fanatic. You're a crazy person. They don't listen to you anymore at Bible studies because they think you're now part of some weird cult. The same is true today as it was in their day.

And by the way, that's a painful test for the Christian and their commitment to Christ. And Satan uses it to try to break our spirit and force us back into conformity. But then the prophecy escalates somewhat dramatically.

He doesn't stop at social exclusion. That's one thing we can handle that. He raises the bar to outright violence. He says, yes, the time is coming that whoever kills you will think they are offering service to God.

Brothers and sisters, how about we put that at the end of evangelistic tracts? After you get saved, when you read tracts, they often say, now what you need to do is you need to read your Bible every day.

You need to join a church. All of that is good advice. But what about things on the cost of discipleship like this, like, and you need to prepare to die if necessary for Jesus Christ? Quite literally, the Lord here is not just saying to them generically, some of my followers will die.

He's prophesying to them, men, my friends, people are going to kill you for my sake. And when they do, they're going to turn around and they are going to pray that God would bless them for their faithfulness.

That's what he means by they'll think they're offering service to God. The apostle Paul was one of those. So zealous for the tradition of his fathers, he considered, before he was a Christian, he considered his persecution of the church as the height of his devotion to Judaism, something that he would obviously later come to lament and regret.

But this is a reality. In chapter 21, the Lord is going to tell Peter how they are going to kill him and how Peter is going to glorify God in his death. And the Lord simply says to Peter, Peter, follow me.

Matthew Henry says that this, this is a quote, he says, this dangerous deception where human wickedness and cruelty are cloaked in the mantle of piety, making the persecution all the more insidious and difficult to comprehend.

Jesus is telling them, you're not just going to be hated by the evildoer. We expect that. But he's saying, you're going to be hated by the good people, the religious people, which has all the more power behind it to make the Christian kind of second-guess himself, have I done something wrong here?

I think of Martin Luther, how he stood against the entire church of Rome. And even Luther took 24 hours to come to his decision to make sure that he had not made some mistake along the way. And Jesus is telling them, when that happens, you press on.

You press on. Verse 3, he says, these things they will do to you because they have not known the Father nor me. This is the Lord's explanation of this underlying hostility. The world's hostility is not first and foremost a personal animosity simply towards the disciples.

But rather, this animosity is born out of a profound spiritual ignorance and blindness. They do not know the Father nor me. That is, they hate God. Jesus has said that all throughout this gospel. And that's why the world hates God's people.

They don't like God's authority. They don't like God's purity. They don't like his standards of justice, his holiness. They like what's right in their own eyes. They like their truth, their standards of morality.

And when God confronts the world through the mouths of his people, the world bristles at the messenger. Right? Who do you think you are? And that's why there's sparks. But that reaction is a revelation that they hate the God whom we as Christians represent.

They don't know the Father or the Son. And therefore, they remain hostile. And they might even persecute God's people thinking they are serving God. Paul talks about that in Romans 10 too, that the Jews have a zeal but without knowledge.

And so the Lord even reminds them here, he kind of reframes the way they think about their suffering, that yes, it's evil and it's sin on the part of the world, but it reminds us that we should see our persecutors not just as enemies of the people of God, but they're also spiritually lost individuals who need the light of the gospel.

And then lastly, the first half of verse 4, he says, but these things I have told you that when the time comes, you may remember that I told you of them. Okay, so he reiterates his purpose. This is important.

He wants them to pick up on this. His intention here is not to terrify them, but to provide an anchor for them. Matthew Henry, again, he says, this advanced knowledge serves to ease our fears and assure us that our suffering, however grievous, is part of a plan.

So that when this persecution unfolds, when these disciples are cast out of the synagogue, when their own families turn against them, they will recall Jesus' explicit words that these things would happen and they would take heart and take comfort.

That our Lord predicted this just as it happened with him. He said it would happen to us and thus we can trust his word and trust his provision. Okay, now let's turn our attention to our doctrine deduced here.

I want to draw out three things this evening, kind of going into some more detail of things that are embedded in seed form in these four verses. Number one, we are taught in this section that persecution is to be expected in the Christian life.

Persecution is to be expected in the Christian life. Christian. This is bedrock Christianity 101, Christian discipleship, and it runs exactly contrary to the many modern narratives that promise only ease and prosperity.

Nowhere does Jesus promise or even come close to indicating that our lives will be free of trouble as a result of following him. In fact, on the contrary, he explicitly warns us not only here but several places of profound social rejection and even violence.

Brothers and sisters, I promise you this text lands differently on the ears of our brothers and sisters living in, for instance, Muslim countries and other places in the world where real violence is a reality for being a Christian.

This is real for them and brothers and sisters, we should pray for them and we should pray that we would imitate their faith and their courage. But though suffering is promised, suffering is certainly not an indication of God's displeasure with us.

Rather, it's an indication of the world's displeasure of us and it shows that God has caused his light to shine upon us. He's opened our eyes, he's changed our hearts so that we follow a different course.

We're treading the path to the celestial city, to heaven, and the world is going right against us. And those sparks are evidence of our being truly in Christ. And in fact, our Savior loves us so much, God the Father loves us so much that he even disciplines those whom he loves so that he tests our faith, he refines our faith in the crucible of adversity, and he loves us so much he even tells us beforehand it's going to happen so that the furnace doesn't destroy us but rather purifies us.

So that's the first thing. Suffering and adversity is to be expected in the Christian life. Second thing, the Lord revealing these things to us beforehand is an act of grace given to strengthen our faith and prevent apostasy.

Okay, so the Lord is pastoring us here. He knows our frame. He knows how easily sheep get spooked and unsettled. And so he says, my brothers, I tell you this before it happens so that when it does you will not make shipwreck of your faith.

Back in chapter 15, he told the disciples, no longer do I call you servants but I call you my friends. And here he's speaking to us as a friend in that he's telling us the truth. He wants to set us up for success, not failure.

Unlike false teachers, false friends who always just say, no, peace, peace, when there is no peace. Rather, Jesus is like the proverb, faithful are the wounds of a friend. Now do we wish it could be some other way?

Of course. I understand that. Persecution in and of itself is not pleasant and it's not easy. But God has ordained every moment of it in perfect wisdom and he doesn't leave us in the dark to be blinded by it.

Rather, beforehand he shines light on that part of our journey, even the treacherous parts, so that when we get there we are not surprised and shrink back and think, what is this? But rather when we get there we think of his words.

He said this would happen. He told us about this and therefore we tread on. Trembling, maybe. Beat up a bit, maybe. But not apostatizing by the grace of God. Not turning our backs on the Lord we once professed.

This is part of the way God accomplishes our perseverance. He gives us these gracious warnings. It brings us to the third thing doctrinally. We should counsel others the same way the Lord counsels us.

Let me explain with an anecdote from my limited years in pastoral ministry. I don't know your congregation the same way I know my people but I'm sure this will strike a chord with some of you. I remember with some of my people when they first got converted things got really hard for them.

I honestly still can in my minds I remember all of those meetings, where we were sitting, what we talked about, where I as a pastor was just kind of watching the world do its best to squeeze out newfound faith.

I mean relationships were coming to an end, families were abandoning them, you name it, all sorts of hardship. They're alone, they're ostracized, and as a pastor you're kind of just, I mean you you can counsel to a degree, but you're also just kind of watching and you're praying, Lord bring out on the other side of this furnace purified faith, not apostasy.

Satan is trying to put them through the sieve so that their faith does not come through, but Lord show that true faith overcomes the world. And here's the point of that story. By the grace of God, I know it doesn't always happen like this, but by the grace of God every single one of those people are still with us following the Lord.

They're pressing on, they're persevering, and I believe that part of the reason from a human explanation, part of the reason for that is because we as their pastors refuse to lie to them and tell them that something strange was happening, and we refuse to tell them that this this is not what's to be expected, but rather they were counseled, this is exactly what the Lord says will happen to His people.

And honestly you might not even be through the worst of it yet, but He gives grace to face it. Brothers and sisters, I cannot tell you how many stories I have heard about people apostatizing from the faith they once professed and becoming angry with God and blaming God because churches told them that if they follow Christ everything will be perfect and peachy.

And when that life didn't happen for them, which it never does, what they do is they confuse the true Jesus with the bad counsel that they receive, and they blame Christ for that, and they become so disillusioned that they turn their backs on all of Christianity.

And they don't want to hear any of it again, because they were so disillusioned by a misrepresentation of what it would mean to follow Christ in the world. Brothers and sisters, what Jesus is telling them here is this is loving doctrine.

It's hard, it's hard to say, it's hard to hear, but it's loving. New believers need it, old believers need it, and the Spirit of God uses it in the heart of the true believer to strengthen them in faith rather than destroy their faith.

And so I guess this is somewhat of an application. Brothers and sisters, let's speak truth to one another. Let's speak truth to others that we're evangelizing. I know the temptation in our flesh to just want to tell someone everything's going to be better tomorrow.

We don't know that it's going to be better tomorrow, but you know what we do know on the basis of the Word of God? Christ will be with you tomorrow, and His grace is sufficient to uphold you, and so therefore keep trusting Him and keep walking with Him.

Remembering Christ’s Warning in Times of Trouble

Now let's lastly turn to our application. How do these things touch down practically? I just want to give us several, this is kind of a shotgun blast, several different ways that we can walk away from this text, hopefully not just understanding it, but actually being changed by it so that our lives tomorrow morning, Tuesday morning, this week, can actually be altered so that we live in light of it.

And I want to begin with this. What is probably the clearest application is this. Christian, remember the words of our Lord here. Remember. That's half the battle usually. I know what it's like. You can be sitting here on a Sunday, and you might not have anything really terrible going on in your life, and you're kind of getting the principle of these things, but then sometime down the line, something does hit.

Suffering, persecution, and the application doesn't kick in, and you're tossed. Why? Because you didn't remember. We have to actually internalize this text, meditate on it, hide it in our hearts for it to actually be our help in the day of trouble.

He says that when the time comes, you may remember that I told you. So let me try to put practical flesh on that. Your mom and dad might dislike you for being a Christian. I have members like that. To a certain extent, I've experienced things like this.

They might grow closer to your other siblings who more toed the family religious line, and that hurts. You might become the outcast of your family, the weirdo of your family that they talk badly about when you're not around, or your boyfriend or your girlfriend might not want anything to do with this Christianity business, and they give you an ultimatum.

It's either me or it's Christ. Are you ready to count the cost and follow Jesus Christ? Or kids, this is a hard thing to think about. You guys might not always be as close to your siblings as you are right now.

If some of them choose not to follow the Lord like you follow the Lord, that's painful. Or you might be here, you might feel like, no, none of those, I don't check any of those boxes. And you might feel like, you know, I've kind of largely escaped a lot of this.

Maybe you were born in a Christian family. But if that's you, don't make that think that you don't need this text. There is a big world full of hatred out there, and there are many things that you are yet to face.

The next season of your life could be very different from this season. And when trials strike, and when the world's pressure mounts, remember, Jesus said it would happen. And he told you beforehand for your comfort.

But we have to be alert and remember. Okay, second thing. So that's the first simple point, remember. Secondly, what's the point of remembering? The point of remembering Jesus's words is that they're saying to you, Christian, don't turn back.

Do Not Turn Back Under Pressure

That's the temptation. Remember the Hebrew Christians, the letter to the Hebrews. They converted from Judaism to Christ. They started experiencing the plundering of their property. Some of them were put in prison, threats.

And they were tempted to think, man, if we just dropped this whole new covenant thing, and we went back to the Old Testament types and shadows and animal sacrifices, we would just fit right in and life would be easy again.

We'd be accepted again. I mean, who doesn't want to be accepted, right? Young people. Do you ever feel like that? That's especially difficult for a young person, wanting to be accepted. But God is testing you.

Don't go back. How much is the Lord worth to you? And you're faced with that choice. I can go quiet on the Jesus thing and fit in and be accepted. And then a verse comes to your mind. Maybe something like, what does it profit a man if he gains this whole world and yet forfeits his own soul?

And that text and the Spirit using that text gives grace to your heart and it fuels your resolve so that you cry out, Lord, by your grace I will not be one who puts my hand to the plow and then turns back.

I will not be among those who shrink back. Lord, give grace to uphold your servant. I want to speak to, let's see, several different groups of people here in this line of thought. I want to speak to the new Christian, the new believer.

New believer, your early persecutions are probably among your most important. Not only because often, not always, but often Satan releases the onslaught of his attacks to quench young faith, but because your first battles and how you face them sets the tone in many ways for how you will either embrace or shun all future sufferings.

The road, I mentioned some of my people, I'm sure it's true for some of you, the road often is steep at first. But if you can, by the Lord's help, kind of get those first battles under your belt, Christ will teach you very early on that there is nothing you cannot endure by his grace and by his help.

Those early trophies of suffering well, they become our Ebenezers of the Lord's faithfulness. And I don't know you, I don't know what the Lord has for you, I don't know when he has it for you, I do know that Paul says all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.

And so I encourage you, young Christian, prepare for it. Get ready for it and when it comes, lean into it and lean into the Lord who told you it was coming and gives grace. Secondly, second group of people, I want to speak to us as parents.

Okay, this is a heart-wrenching one for me as a dad. Parents, in one sense, we have to let the Lord deal with our children in this regard. Let me explain what I mean. I understand as parents that we, oftentimes, we desire to shield our kids from hard things, but we need to also be careful that we not inadvertently shield them from the Lord's valuable lessons in their young lives.

It's hard for a parent, but it's good for our kids. Okay, and here's what I mean. It will not be good for our children if they never get a taste of what Jesus is talking about here until all of a sudden they turn 18 and they are disillusioned.

Why doesn't the world love me? We want to shepherd them according to their age to help them get adjusted to this, right? And then that's why we're their parents. We were there to help them with these very things so that they go through it with training wheels before they face it on their own.

Okay, so let me let me give you an example, a scenario. The neighborhood kid or kids come over to play, or maybe it's cousins, they come over to play. And they make fun of your kids, and they leave your kids out of things, and they exclude them on purpose, and they tell them, you're weird, your family's weird, you guys read the Bible, you pray, you spend all day at church on a Sunday.

The shielding route, this is in my opinion not the right way, the shielding route would be to talk to your child and either deny or try to explain away that the other kids don't like them. No, honey, they like you, they're just having an off day, don't worry about them.

That doesn't help your kid actually face this reality. The pastoral route is to say to them, honey, I know it's hard when people don't like us, especially when they don't have any good reason to dislike us.

In other words, let them feel the sting. You're not gonna be liked for being a Christian by the world. They can handle it, I promise. It's why they have mom and dad. But then we need to tell them, honey, but you've got to remember the reason they don't like you is because their hearts are not right with God, and they hate God, and that's why they don't like you.

And then what an opportunity that is to then teach our children, honey, you need to turn around and you actually need to pray that God would have mercy on them like he had mercy on you, so that their heart would be changed.

And you need to go to Christ, who is a merciful and sympathetic high priest, and you need to know that having him as a friend is enough in this world. It's okay that these other people are not your friends.

You have the God of the universe who has befriended you. This is second group. Thirdly, I want to, and this is my closing paragraph, this is for everyone, and this is just jumping on the last point of my doctrine.

Brothers and sisters, we also, as Christians in the church, we need to counsel each other in these things the way the Lord would have us. This is for new believer, seasoned believer, young, old. We need to remember this text, and oftentimes the way we're going to remember this text is by a brother or a sister reminding us of it.

And here's what I mean, and I've experienced this, you probably have. If we start hearing a brother or a sister speaking unbiblically about their sufferings and persecution, and they are self-pitying, saying things like, this isn't fair, this isn't right, or they're jealous of other Christians.

Why didn't they have to lose everything the way I did? Why did the Lord allot me this for me? I want to encourage all of you brothers and sisters, let's not go the world psychology route that just affirms all the complaints of the sufferer, as though everything the sufferer says must be right because they're the one suffering.

But instead, we need to let God's Word govern our counsel and their thinking. Let's try to help our brother think and feel more accurately about what is fair and right. I understand we need sympathy, we weep with those who weep, but bad theology hurts people.

It's not good for people, it turns people away from the Lord. Good theology says, brother, I know this is hard, but you need to remember the Lord has been nothing but gracious to you, and He's prepared you for this so that your faith is strengthened, not so that you would blame Him or accuse Him of wrongdoing.

What He has seen fit to give to others, that's God's business, but He's given this to you, and He promises to sanctify to you your deepest distress when you trust Him for His grace. And so, brother, let's move forward in faith, not in unbelief, and let's believe the Word of God more than our own thinking on these things.

Brothers and sisters, may God help us look to Jesus Christ, our faithful Savior, in times of adversity, times of prosperity, the Lord Himself who gave Himself for our sakes that we might not only be saved by grace, but that we also might walk through this life full of comforts in the midst of the world's persecutions and afflictions.

Let's pray that God would help us to look to Christ. Father, your Word tells us that you did not spare your own Son, and therefore how will you not also with Him give us all things? In all these things, like Paul talks about famine and persecutions and sword and peril, slaughter, He says in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.

Father, we pray now for that grace of assurance and faith to be ours, that we would not be shaken when persecutions come and when trials come, but that we would stand fast upon the Word of God, unmoved, bold in faith, trusting that every word of our Lord proves true, that He is a faithful High Priest who gives grace and help in our time of need.

Father, we pray, write your Word upon our hearts. Transform us more into the image of your Son who faced His persecutions with perfect trust and faith and trusting Himself to you, Father, who judges justly.

Father, help us, we pray, by your Holy Spirit. We pray these things in Jesus' name, amen.