The World Hates GG's, By Sarah K.

The World Hates GG's
By Sarah K.

Recently, this verse has been on my mind: "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." John 15:18-19.  Let’s admit; as teenage girls, we often feel out of place.  I have never met anyone who has not – at some time or another – felt inferior, like they don’t fit…like a "weirdo."

But as Christians, that feeling gets multiplied exponentially. If you want desperately to fit in, it’s hard to realize that you’re never going to. When God saves us, He transforms us radically from the inside out: "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!" (2 Corinthians 5:17). After salvation, the old part of us: our old desires, lusts, motives, etc. are taken away and replaced with a heart that wants what God wants – and what He wants completely differs from what the world wants. 

What does this mean for us girls as individuals? We’re still going to have problems fitting in, sometimes just because that experience is part of being a teenager. But at other times, it should not come as a surprise to us when our desire to follow God and His commands clashes spectacularly with what the world thinks we should do and say. When that happens, instead of feeling sorry for ourselves that we can’t have or do what everybody else has or does, we should rejoice. When our path leads away from the world, we are pointed back to Our Savior.   

After all, we are “aliens and strangers in the world” (1 Peter 2:11-12).

Our time in this world is astoundingly short, and also very transient. That means that "all men are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall" (1 Peter 1:24-25). So when we don’t fit in, or find ourselves on the outside looking in, and just wishing that we could have that kind of fun too…we need God to remind us to not despair. This world is dying, and as His Children, we really are strangers. If we loved as the world does, then we wouldn’t understand the joy awaiting us in our true home after death. So when the world and its ways hate us, remember that it hated Jesus first. And if it hates us – either passively or aggressively – then we are following in His footsteps: all the way home.

"Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus…who, for the joy set before him endured the cross…Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart" (Hebrews 12:2-3).