Today on grace to you the doctrine of human depravity is the most hated doctrine. It is the most distinctively Christian doctrine. Only Christian truth teaches that. So where you have to begin with the gospel is the sinner has to know the true condition of sinfulness and the reality of the demonic nature of all false religions.

What in the world makes us so embarrassed about the gospel? I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him [Music] [Music] crucified. Let’s begin in John 15. John 15. And there’s a lot to be said about this. And I am going to do the best I can to be selective and helpful to you in communicating.

And I think the right place to start is with what our Lord said about hate. If we’re talking about the hated Christian doctrine, the most hated doctrine, then we need to learn from him. So John 15:18, Jesus is speaking in the upper room with his disciples and he says, “If the world hates you, you know that it has hated me before it hated you.

” One thing the disciples knew for sure was that the world hated Jesus Christ. That’s right. They hated him. This is not the pagan world. This is the world of Jewish religion. This is the people who were quote unquote following the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of the Old Testament, the creator God.

And in fact, Jesus is God incarnate, but they never recognized him. In fact, they fully rejected him. And he says here, they hated me. And he says, they hated me before they hated you. They hated him because he said they were he said they were sinners. He was clear, by the way, on the nature of their sinfulness. Turn back to John 8. It wasn’t a superficial sinfulness.