"Ye that love the LORD, hate evil..."
This phrase stood out to me when I read it yesterday. Yes, we know that we are supposed to love God. We know that we are to abstain from evil. But how much do we HATE evil?
We are to love the Lord. The more we get to know Him, the more we see His perfection, His hatred of evil, His love for righteousness. As we get to know Him, we should want to KNOW more about Him, which naturally means that we would want to know more of His righteousness. As a relationship with Him develops, we begin to BECOME more like Him. It is like the illustration of married couples...when they get older, they start looking more and more like each other. I wonder, sometimes, if this happens because they are each trying to please each other, and they know what the other person likes, so the adjust the things they do to themselves (they way they do their hair, their facial expressions, etc.) so that they look more like what the other person wants them to look. This is what God wants for us to do: for us to find out what God likes and then adjust our thinking and habits to reflect what He wants in our lives. Included in that is loving what He loves (perfection, peace, righteousness) and hating what He hates (evil).
Most of the time, I think we Christians have a distorted view of evil. We know that we are supposed to stay away from it, but we don't think of it as being as bad as it really is...we don't HATE it. We put up with it, maybe even a little in our own lives. We justify it by saying that we aren't "as bad as..." someone else, that our sin is not as evil as someone else's sin. But how does God see sin? Well, the verse says here that we are supposed to HATE evil, to despise it. When He forgives us, "As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us." Psalm 103:12. And since we are supposed to be like Him, should not we also remove sin as far from our hearts? God hates evil, and it is His desire for us that we should hate evil just as much.
About Me
- mbbcbc
- I am so thankful for my God and how He loves me, no matter how many times I fail! He continues to lead me in the way that He wants me to go and to do what is best for my life. I love Him and all that He has done for me! I also love hanging with my friends, being involved in my church (especially with the music program) and meeting new people!
1 comment:
Excellent post. I couldn't agree with you more. That's something God's been working on me about. Josh Harris, on his blog, wrote a post about not feeding the flesh. I've got the link in a recent post on my blog, but can't remember what it is right off. Anyways, he talks in the post about how so often instead of throwing away the things of the flesh, we file them away to come back to at our convenience. This isn't the action of someone who hates sin. It's the action of someone who's disgusted with it, perhaps, but not someone that sees it as God does. Thanks for the reminder on that.
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