Don't Let Them Hate Jesus Because of You

Written By Joel McMaster

Joel and Tim are both preaching John 15:18 to 16:4 this weekend — the passage where Jesus tells his disciples that the world will hate them. They're comparing notes on how they've approached it, and Tim offers an observation that reframes the whole passage.

Jesus says: a servant is not greater than his master. If they persecuted me, they will persecute you. The logic runs in one direction, they hate Jesus, therefore they will hate his disciples. But Tim notices what happens when the order gets reversed. When Christians behave badly; when they act hypocritically, when they use their faith as a weapon, when they do un-Christlike things in the name of Jesus. People don't reject the Christians first and then work backwards to rejecting Jesus. They reject Jesus because of what they've seen in his followers.

The crusades. The celebrity pastor scandals. The sex abuse. The hypocrisy. The moments when those who claim the name of Christ have done exactly what the name of Christ is supposed to undo.

Don't make people hate Jesus because of you. Let them hate you because of Jesus.

That's the order. And getting the order right changes everything about how you show up as a disciple.

Wes Huff and a Generation That's Searching

Before they get to John 15, Joel and Tim open with Wes Huff's appearance on Steven Bartlett's Diary of a CEO — one of the biggest podcasts in the world.

Wes Huff is a Christian apologist whose particular expertise is the historicity and textual reliability of the New Testament. He can argue with academic rigour for why we can trust the documents we have. He doesn't show up to win arguments or own the opposition. He's genuinely warm, genuinely curious, and genuinely interested in the person he's talking to. He's clear without being aggressive. He's confident without being dismissive.

Steven Bartlett, for his part, brings the kind of deep curiosity and prepared vulnerability that makes for genuinely good conversation. He grew up in a Christian home, was influenced by the new atheist movement, but has started looking for something more.

For church leaders working with young adults who are asking similar questions, this episode is worth studying not just for the content but for the tone. There is a generation that is genuinely curious about Jesus. The question is whether the Christians they encounter will be the kind of people who make them want to go further, or the kind who make them want to run.

30 Facts About Childhood Today That Will Terrify You

Jonathan Haidt's After Babel Substack published a piece recently that does what it says on the tin. Thirty facts about childhood today, nearly all hyperlinked to the research behind them, painting a picture of a generation under significant stress.

Unfortunately, the post has now been taken down, but some of it is familiar territory for anyone who has been paying attention: the dramatic reduction in outdoor play, the mental health crisis among adolescents, the link between smartphone access and anxiety and depression. Some of it is more surprising.

Number 27 for instance: an increasing number of children have no siblings and no cousins. Young people are increasingly operating as social loners, without the extended family networks that have historically provided an informal community of peers across different ages and stages.

The observation that follows is worth sitting with for any church leader. Cousins occupy an interesting relational category; they're not quite friends and not quite immediate family. They're familiar strangers, in a sense. You share blood, you see each other regularly enough to have a history, but not so regularly that you lose the slight novelty of the relationship. They're the people who understand something of where you come from without being inside your daily life.

As that category shrinks, as fewer children have siblings and cousins to grow up alongside, the church has an opportunity to step into the gap. Not as a program or a service, but as a genuine community of people across generations who know each other, have a shared history, and are committed to each other's flourishing. The church can be the place where a child without siblings finds peers. Where a teenager without cousins finds people who feel like family without the claustrophobia of home. Where adults whose extended families have scattered across the country find the kind of belonging that the industrial revolution, the car and social media have quietly eroded.

We are designed for community. That's not a nice sentiment, it's a theological claim about what it means to bear the image of a God who exists in eternal relationship. When children grow up without community, they are growing up without something they were made for. And churches that take their third-place calling seriously are uniquely positioned to provide it.

The Collective Action Problem of Smartphones

The screen time conversation in this episode is honest in a way that a lot of Christian commentary on technology isn't. It's easy to point at teenagers and worry about their screen habits. It's harder to look at the adults in the room.

Half of kids surveyed say their parents should be worried about their screen time. Sixty-two percent say they wish they could take their parents' phones away. Technology is the number one reason kids say they fight with their parents. And the kids are aware that the double standard exists, that the same parent who confiscates their phone at dinner is sitting on the couch scrolling an hour later.

Joel checks his screen time during the conversation. His most used app this week: YouTube, five hours. His second: X. He estimates half the YouTube time was podcasts he was listening to while doing something else. The point isn't to condemn anyone — it's to notice that the collective action problem of smartphone culture doesn't exempt the people who are most concerned about it.

Cal Newport's suggestion about teenagers is useful here: the phone isn't their phone. It's your phone. You're allowing them to use it for specific purposes at specific times. This reframes the relationship from rights-based — it's mine, you can't take it — to something more like shared stewardship, which is both more accurate and more productive as a frame for the conversation.

But the deeper issue is the one Tim names toward the end. These platforms are not neutral. They have been deliberately designed to capture and hold attention, to make it as difficult as possible to put down the device and do something else. The same smartphone that books your parking and accesses your prescriptions and communicates with your kid on public transport also delivers an algorithmically curated feed of content designed to keep you scrolling past the point where you intended to stop.

That's not an accident. It's a design choice. And the Meta lawsuit, with its allegations that the company knew for years about the serious risks to young users and chose growth over their wellbeing, suggests the cigarette comparison people keep reaching for is not entirely unfair.

None of this means technology is evil. The cultural mandate includes technology. There are redemptive possibilities in every medium. But wise engagement with these platforms requires naming them honestly, which means acknowledging both what they make possible and what they are designed to do.

Preparing a Sermon

Before the John 15 conversation, there's a quietly useful exchange about sermon preparation that's worth pausing on — especially for those, like Joel, who are earlier in their preaching journey.

Tim's process: print the text with wide margins and double spacing. Read it several times without commentary, noticing repeated words, natural flow, the big idea and the supporting ideas. Then turn to commentaries, at least two, more if time allows. Write all over the printed page. Look for the connections you didn't see. Then build the structure: intro, big idea, supporting points, conclusion. Think in slides because it helps to storyboard the sermon before filling in the words.

But the most important part of his preparation philosophy isn't the mechanics. It's the distinction between teaching and preaching. Teaching unpacks the text. Preaching answers the question: so what? What does this mean for a person sitting in a church in their suburb in 2026, trying to follow Jesus in the specific circumstances of their actual life?

The goal of a sermon isn't that people leave understanding John 15 better. It's that they leave knowing how to be a disciple of Jesus this week because of what John wrote two thousand years ago.

The gap between those two things is where most of the preparation work actually happens.

The Vine Grows in a Tough Environment

Tim's big idea from reading John 15:18 to 16:4, drawn from Paul Barnett's commentary: abiding in Jesus will sometimes bring rejection. The vine grows in a tough environment. The disciples are about to be kicked out of synagogues, rejected by their communities, and in some cases killed for following Jesus. And Jesus is telling them this in advance so that when it happens, they won't be surprised. I have told you this so that you will not fall away. The preparation for suffering is knowing that it's coming and understanding why.

Joel's angle is slightly different — he wants to push against a reading that becomes self-pitying. He goes back to the very beginning of John: the Word was with God, the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. Jesus is divisive because he is light. When we abide in him, you carry that light. And light, by its nature, exposes what darkness would prefer to keep hidden.

The application isn't to go looking for confrontation. It isn't to be deliberately provocative or to make yourself a martyr. It's much simpler: abide. Stay close to Jesus. Let the Spirit produce in you the fruit that looks like him; love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. When you live like that, the contrast will take care of itself.

And when the world responds badly to that contrast — and sometimes it will — you can know that what they're rejecting isn't you. It's the kingdom you're representing.

Don't make them hate Jesus because of you. Let them hate you because of Jesus.

Joel McMaster
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Life With Jesus — Not Just Life From Him