Believers can at times let down our Lord by things we might say or do. We can do a lousy job of modelling and demonstrating who Christ is and what he is like. But some of the most loving, gracious and godly Christians out there will also find they are being hated on, fiercely opposed, and rejected.

When you have an interactive blog site, you receive plenty of interesting comments. Some of them are just plain false or foolish. Quite often I get some pretty bizarre comments. One that recently came in is a good case in point. It was in response to a post I penned 15 years ago.

Because this person did not share his name (as my commenting rules demand) I did not post his comment. But because it raises an important issue, and other folks might like to have seen how I would have responded to it, I share what he wrote here:

“I don’t believe people reject Christianity. It’s more likely they reject the Ugliness of some Christians who have lost the essence of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. Were I to step into the Purity of Jesus’ shoes, I would weep at what I see or read some people are perpetuating in ‘My Name’.”

Hmm, how should one respond to this? Two immediate thoughts come to mind. Are there some rather poor and unhelpful representatives of Christ out there that can turn off unbelievers and tarnish the gospel message? Sure. But people reject Christ and Christianity all the time, and it usually has nothing to do with how well or how poorly some believers model Christ.

And it certainly has nothing to do with how Christ modelled himself. Indeed, those points I had already made in the article he was responding to. So in a sense all I can do here is repeat these points and expand upon them a bit further. The main point to keep reiterating is this: being rejected is just what Jesus said would happen – about him and about his followers.

This is exactly what Jesus repeatedly warned about. Only someone who is biblically illiterate could make the claim that folks do not reject Christianity. To reject Christ of course entails rejecting Christianity, and Jesus told his followers that people would hate them because they first hated himself. As we find in John 15:18-21:

If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you. Remember what I told you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also. They will treat you this way because of my name, for they do not know the one who sent me.

And Jesus told us exactly why people would reject him and his followers as they proclaim the Christian gospel:

And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.
(John 3:19-21)

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