Good Morning My Beloved,
I'm glad you're all here today
Thank you all for joining us
Heavenly Father,
Thank You for your patience and understanding
we know there's nothing, no level of temptation, no amount of persecution
that we have faced, that You didn't experience Yourself
You came face to face with those who hate You
I get overwhelmed by the seriousness of this
You have explained the world to us: we get it, we see it.
Your Word opens our eyes. We understand why it is the way it is
Thank You, this is all so helpful, so helpful
You bless us in so may ways, its beyond my understanding
we are so undeserving, so unworthy of all that You bestow on us
Lord, we seem to have some kind of issue with us
that makes us long for Your grace, mercy and blessing,
and so yet some kind of twisted idea of Your role
and position in our lives, failing to realize that
You are Sovereign, You are holy, You are righteous,
You are Lord of Lords, King of kings
I pray that through Your Holy Spirit, I am able
to bring clarity and understanding to Who You are
that we all may humbly give You the praise
the reverence and worship You deserve
You Are Lord!
In Your name I pray
Amen
"This I command you, that you love one another. If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you, ‘A slave is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you; if they kept My word, they will keep yours also. But all these things they will do to you for My name’s sake, because they do not know the One who sent Me. If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have sin, but now they have no excuse for their sin. He who hates Me hates My Father also. If I had not done among them the works which no one else did, they would not have sin; but now they have both seen and hated Me and My Father as well. But they have done this to fulfill the word that is written in their Law, ‘They hated Me without a cause."
John 15:17-25
Today's Message: If The World Hates You - Part 6
Beloved, we're here still here in the 15th chapter of John, and we may be here a while.
We concluded the message last time, I know we didn't get terribly far, I believe we end with verse 15,
John 15:15.
Let's see how far we get today, as I have stated previously, that is an important Scripture, and it does take some time, to unpack the different verses in such a way, that brings clarity and gives them the attention they deserve. It might not be evident, but I'm trying to do both here. I don't know how well, I'm doing, but I'm trying.
When we left off, we'd been discussing the New Testament, that as it refers to Jesus, it primarily refers to Him as Kurios, Lord. And I know that we mentioned it before, that our Lord is referred to 94 times in the book of Acts; 94 times, we also looked at He is called Lord; 92 of those times and He is called Str, which is Savior, 2 of them. I stressed the point, that the lordship of Christ is clearly, declared throughout the entire New Testament. He is kurios, sovereign ruler. He is despotés, absolute ruler.
And that brings us back to where we left off. Now, let's start from there.
And I'm sure you all remember that all too familiar text; in Luke chapter 9, Luke chapter 9. It also appears in Matthew, we look at it a lot. Luke 9:23, "And He was saying to them all, "If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me."
In the simplest of terms: You’re done with you. You’re not in charge anymore. Your ambitions, your schemes, your wants and desires, your goals, your objectives, your possessions, your relationships are all set aside. You deny yourself. It may mean you hate your father, your mother, brother, sister; hate your own life. It may mean abandoning all of your possessions.
It may mean forsaking everything. Literally everything. You can’t even go home and say goodbye to the family, you can't go home and take care of all your things like the disciples in Luke wanted to do. So you had better count the cost. You had better understand just what He’s asking. You had better understand what you are saying, "You are Lord. You are absolute ruler of my life." So the obvious meaning of following Christ is you must deny yourself. That's what that means. It's no longer about you, it's about Jesus.
Now, another way to say it is in verse 24 of Luke 9, verse 24, "For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it...” You have to let go of all of it. You’re not in charge anymore. You’re not in control; that is just basic. Lord, despotés, master, Lord, ruler. Very bold, very strong words. A master and a sovereign with absolute dominion; and again, that is slave talk.
And by the way, wherever there was a kurios, there were slaves. Wherever there was a despotés, a master, there were slaves. That's just truth, plain and simple. If you were lord, then you were lord because you had slaves. And if you were a slave, you were a slave because you had a lord, or a master. One axiomatically implies the other. Its regarded as self-evident.
No one is lord over anybody, and no one is a slave of anyone. If Jesus is Lord and you call Him Lord, then He has a right to ask you the question of Luke 6:46, "Why do you call Me, ‘Lord,’ and do not what I say?" Because Lord means absolute monarch. It means He’s in charge. Point Number 1: Jesus is Lord, Jesus is Kurios. I've stated that 750 times, again 750 times, that is used in the New Testament. It's meaning, is an inescapable reality. If I've done my job. That’s Point 1 in a nutshell.
Now, Point number 2. Point 2: We are all slaves. We're either a slave to Christ or satan. Like it or not, you will serve your Master.
Christians are slaves. Christians are slaves. Christians are slaves.
We are slaves to our Lord, Jesus. Jesus is Lord. Again, I remind you, the Bible doesn’t condone slavery. It doesn’t even establish slavery. It doesn’t condemn slavery. It does however, recognize that it is and has been a social construct, and it assaults every unrighteous abuse of every kind of relationship, including that one. But the recognition, however, that may be, for some people, the best of all possible relationships because you are bought and owned, and cared for, and protected, and provided for, and rewarded, and loved. There’s a security in that, that for many doesn’t exist outside of that relationship. But in the case of the spiritual reality, Jesus is Lord, Kurios.
We are slaves, doulos. Have you heard that term, doulos? What does doulos mean? Slave. It’s all it means. That’s all it means. Doulos means slave. Period. Slave. Doulos. It appears 130 times in the New Testament; 130 times the word “slave” appears in the New Testament.
Now, I already know that many of you, you’re going to run to your New Testament, you’re going to look for all 130. Then you're going to bring it to my attention, that I'm way out of line. Been there, done that!
So let me start with a warning. I want to warn you, you won’t find them. You will not find them. You can get your concordance out and you’re just not going to find them. Why? Because almost all of those are translated by a different word. They are translated the words "servant" or "bondservant." Why? The word means "slave." That’s all it means; that’s all it’s ever meant. It means slave.
A slave is someone who is bought and owned. A slave was somebody who had no personal rights, no legal standing, couldn’t go to court, couldn’t own property, essentially had no freedom, no autonomy. That’s very different than being a servant. A servant is someone who does something, serves. A slave is someone who is something.
There are six words in the Greek language, six words for servant, and they all describe different kinds of functions that people do. A non-slave could serve; a slave could serve. Service doesn’t talk about the reality of your situation, it only talks about your function. But when you use the word doulos, if they wanted to translate servant in the New Testament in English Bibles or any other for that matter, they could translate servant six different ways. Because how the word is used kind of described its character.
One word for servant is diaknos. Diaknos which means "a table waiter." Another word for servant
is huprets, Huprets which means an under rower, somebody who pulled oars in a ship. It could be used metaphorically for people who served. But doulos does not describe any function, it describes a relationship.
Perhaps the most extensive and revered dictionary of Greek words is Kittel. Kittel. It’s about that thick on my shelf, about several feet of explanation of Greek words. And this is what the article on doulos says: "The meaning is so unequivocal and self-contained that it is superfluous to give examples and trace its history."
Usually when there’s a Greek word, they’ll go on for 25 - 30 pages, in order to describe all the nuances that feed into a settled definition. Not the case with doulos. Not the case. Why? Because everybody has always known what it meant. Everybody has known what it meant. What it meant is slave. slave. A slave is somebody who is dependent, obligated, subject to an alien will other than his own. It is not the word "servant." It doesn’t describe a function. But sad to say, I don’t care what version you have It doesn't matter, even up to the NIV, ESV, NASB, whatever it is and going all the way back to the Geneva Bible, way back with the Geneva Bible, way back in the Middle Ages, there was a certain stigma about slavery. So translators sort of moved away from the word slave to the word servant; they felt it had less stigma associated with it. A more acceptable terminology. People would be less likely to cringe when they heard it.
Now, one interesting article, at least I found it to be any way, is in a theological journal back in 1966, and it says this: "By the end of the 13th century, slavery disappeared from northwestern Europe. Slavery, therefore, was known to the 17th century Englishmen, at least at the beginning of that century, not as an intimate accepted institution, but rather as a remote phenomenon. Slavery in their minds evoked the extreme case of a captive in fetters or chains, so they doubtless wanted to avoid the implication of cruelty inherent in that imagery. But in so doing, they have unwittingly diminished the force of the actual biblical term."
Wait! What? So the powers that be, have essentially decided to play fast and loose with a word that actually means slave, and you will find doulos translated slave as we found it in John 15 because here, it is referring to an actual slave as an illustration. Whenever it refers to an actual slave, or an illustration of a slave, or an inanimate kind of slavery or like slavery to sin or slavery to God, Romans 6, they’ll translate it "slave."
However, whenever it refers to a believer, there’s an equivocation on that and it ends up being usually some form of servant, bondservant. Sometimes, some have translated it as bond-slave, but it’s all arbitrary, it's arbitrary. So what has happened is you read through your New Testament and you get the idea that we are servants of God, we are servants of the Lord, we are servants of the Lord and that’s how we've come to think. The truth is, we are what? Slaves, slaves, slaves. We are slaves. I have done my best with a long, drawn out request, a plea with the evangelical Christians to join together, a request that the newest translations, use in churches of any denomination, to please please translate doulos "lave," plain and simple.
In Closing.....
Before we conclude today's study, I just wanted to demonstrate to you just how embedded this idea is in the Old Testament, which is Hebrew, there’s a Hebrew word ebed. Which, again, is a word for slave. Which appears 800 times in the Old Testament, 800 times! 800. In the King James Version, which was once translated slave. There’s just this running away from the reality of the idea of slavery.
But, I want to offer this, it's not servant, bond-servant, It's salve. Why? Because slavery is exactly what God wanted to communicate through those words because it describes our relationship to Christ. He is Lord. He is Master. We are slaves.
Look, once we understand Who Jesus Christ, once we understand His Deity, His significance,
there isn't a person alive that should have an issue with being His slave. I certainly do not. And I don't believe that you should either. Jesus is Lord. He out ranks them all.
I've seen people stand in line to see their favorite celebrity, stand for days to buy an iPhone.
It may sound a bit harsh, but I'm OK with this, they're nobody! Nobody!
Jesus Christ.. Are you guy getting this? It's Jesus we're talking about.
I'll be the first to say it, I am a slave for Jesus Christ!
And I have no shame in saying that, none...
And now may the Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make His face shine upon you,
And be gracious to you;
The Lord lift up His countenance upon you,
And give you peace.
Now and forever, in Jesus' name
Amen
Brian Monzon Ministries