Understands You Can’t Love God And Hate Others

Understands You Can’t Love God And Hate Others

A HERO’S TALE

When you watch a superhero movie, what do you want to see? Action? Yes. Fights? Yes. Explosions? Yes. How about awesome gadgets, shocking stunts, and amazing special effects? Yes, yes, and yes!

What about love?

Ewwww, gross! No way!

C’mon, who wants to see kissing in a superhero movie, right? And for that matter, who ever heard of a movie where the superhero and supervillain love each other and never fight? Talk about boring!

But before you get too disgusted, consider this: the apostle John, a great hero of the Bible, talked about love all the time. No, not the romantic, smoochy stuff. John talked about God’s love toward us and the love we are to show others. In fact, you could say 1 John is a love letter. You can’t read more than a few sentences in the book without seeing the word love.

You see, true heroes for God understand you can’t love God and hate others.

DECODING THE MESSAGE

Be honest: there’s someone in your life who really irritates you, isn’t there? Perhaps it’s a sibling or that annoying kid in school or a neighborhood bully.

It’s tough to be around difficult people. Maybe you just plain hate them. After all, it’s okay to hate if someone deserves it, right?

Wrong.

The Bible teaches us to be kind to others (see Matthew 7:12; Ephesians 4:32; and Philippians 2:3-4, among other verses). But the Bible goes further than that. It says that you can’t hate someone else and love God. It’s just not possible.

Listen to the straightforward words of 1 John 4:20-21: “Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister” (NIV).

As we learned in the first devotional on the apostle John, he was once filled with hate and anger (see Luke 9:51-55). But by watching Jesus, he learned how to love.

God’s Word makes it clear: loving God and hating others don’t mix. That’s because loving God means being like him and obeying his commands. God is love, not hate, and he commands us to love others too. It’s that simple.

So feel free to turn off that lovey-dovey superhero movie. But don’t turn off your love for others.

BATTLE PLAN

Do you feel hatred toward some people? Ask for God’s forgiveness, ask for theirs, and make an effort to do something kind to them.