I hope that your heart is filled with hatred this morning. Perhaps the ideal reality for you as you rose this Sunday morning would be for you to be aware, within fifteen minutes of your awaking, that there burns within your heart a murderous fire.
What a vast distinction there would be in our gatherings together in local church houses if we had spent the past week with an irrepressible despising bubbling like lava within our chests. Can we slow down to realize that, for the child of God, ransomed by faith in the sovereign Son, filled with the eternal Spirit and fitted for selfless love…that there should be a constant level of holy hatred within?
“Through your precepts I get understanding; therefore I hate every false way.” – Psalm 119:104 {ESV}
Is there a killer at work in us? There certainly must be if we are to lay claim to any kind of genuine conversion from the old self to the new. Paul taught us to “Put to death therefore what is earthly in you” (Col. 3:5) and said again in a different place, “For if you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. “ (Rom 8:13). The Psalmist has said above that a result of welcoming God’s truth to saturate our parched souls will be that we will obtain a righteous despising of every false way. Now how essential it is that we be tempered in the Holy Spirit in order to assure that this consuming fire serves as a beneficial, fueling flame rather than an out-of-control source of destruction. Most people will view hatred as negative; our default thinking is that all hatred is condemned as sin but Scripture does not allow us to exit the issue so mindlessly. We are actually empowered and expected to hate some things in this earthly life. The one who does not hate her own sin will fail to put it death. If a man does not grow in his detesting of his spiritual weaknesses he will, at best, look to manage the very sin he has been commanded to assassinate. We will take incremental sips of our poison instead of shattering the flask. God’s people are to lay hold of a radical, unapologetic wrath against every false way within us. When we learn to nurture an aggressive antipathy toward our sin, we have every realistic hope of putting it to death. It is when we choose to learn to live with it that a hope for victory begins to fade.
I don’t have enough writing space to ponder what it means to hate every false way as the Psalmist testifies in Psalm 119:104 above. Let it be said, though, that I have learned that it has been implanted in me by God. I hate lies. I hate disorder. I hate incongruity. My friends have heard me often jest about having OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) because I struggle immensely when things are not as they should be. With all of that joking, however, there is often a small voice which tells me that this trait is not altogether inappropriate. If we all learn to live with a tolerance for things being out of order, how do we, at the same time, live a life of commitment to the God of order and harmony? I’m unable to “let it go” at this point in my life. Perhaps the modern church could use a little dose of Holy Spirit empowered OCD. We seem to have a different affliction which I will call EIF (everything is fine) which enables us to ignore the herd of elephants in the room (or in the Church, as it is). Amazingly, the men who spoke for God in our bibles were men who could not tolerate the disharmony that existed around them. Noah preached repentance for recurring decades. Moses smashed tablets of stone. Nehemiah snatched facial hair off of his vacillating peers. Isaiah pronounced woes upon everyone around them and then upon himself. Amos had less tact than any OT prophet you can read as he scolded and warned and proclaimed. John the baptizer was less than diplomatic in his generation while Jesus Christ employed inflammatory terms which enraged the religiously comfortable. Paul and Peter never flinched when dealing with sins of the mind and body. James pummeled our souls out of religious complacency. Even tenderhearted John did not hesitate to challenge our unpredictable lives which might otherwise accommodate sin.
So what should we learn today?
When the unfathomable love of Jesus Christ is powerfully at work in our hearts and lives…there will be a flamethrowing discernment that cannot be quenched. God is mightily motivated to bring resurrection power to believing mankind – His grace, mercy and compassion are undeniable. However, lest we ever forget how filled with hatred He is concerning sin, let us cautiously glimpse at Calvary to become reacquainted with His intolerance of the unholy. How badly does God despise ungodliness on earth? He killed His only Son that it might be done away with. Let us hunt down our own sin as prey with the same brilliant blaze.