What About Hatred? — Morning Devotions

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Transcript

There are some ugly four-letter words around, and I think the worst would have to be the four-letter word, hate. How do you feel if you had someone say to you, Look, I just hate you. It is a devastating experience. Sometimes we hear young kids saying to one another or to their parents in a moment of anger or desperation, I hate you.

Hatred is this terrible disease that can overtake someone and end up controlling your life. In fact, it could destroy you. Hatred is a powerful negative emotion. A man who reached his 100th birthday was being interviewed by a reporter. What are you most proud of? The reporter asked. Well, I don’t have an enemy in the world. What a beautiful thought! How inspirational, said the reporter. Yes, he said, I’ve outlived every last one of them.

Is that your approach in dealing with your enemies, someone that you hate? Is it just to avoid and ignore them and hoping that, well, look, I’m going to outlive you anyway, and maybe you secretly hope and plan and pray that bad things will happen to that person.

So we’re talking today about hatred, a strong dislike for another person or another thing. I suppose it can easily tear us down to consume our day-to-day thoughts – it can turn happy moments into very dark, dangerous, dreary, dreary ones at that. It can even consume our entire personality and turn us into someone that, that others no longer want to be around. Do you want to be with someone who has the feeling of hatred toward you?

How do we deal with hatred?

I have got this feeling that many of us have experienced these bitter feelings, even though we may not talk about them, we may hide these feelings, because hatred is such a deep and strong emotion. It’s not something that can disappear overnight. In many situations, hatred takes time to dissolve. It takes a significant amount of effort to really push those destructive and harsh feelings aside.

And I think the first step to overcoming hatred is to realise that you have these feelings, then, put in the effort to get rid of it.

Now it takes time. It takes work. It was Tennessee Williams in The Sweet Bird of Youth who said, I think that hate is a feeling that can only exist where there is no understanding. How true is that? Like a bushfire, it gets out of control, does enormous damage. How many good families have been wrecked and how many marriages have been destroyed when hatred has overtaken people? Probably through a lack of understanding, as Sir Tennessee Williams says.

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And unfortunately, there seems to be a lot of hating going on in our world. Social media has made it easy to express hate, and we can say, I hate you from the safety of our own computer, and we can hate those that we’ve never met. Now, of course, we can have strong feelings against another. It may not be hatred.

It may be dislike, but it can get pretty close to hatred. History tells us that Leonardo da Vinci once had a terrible falling out with a fellow artist just before he began work on the famous Last Supper, and he was determined to paint his enemy, this person that he had this enormous fallout with, as Judas. He said it was a perfect likeness, but last of all, he set to work on the likeness of Jesus in the painting.

But after a while, no matter how he tried, he just couldn’t get it, and he realised he couldn’t paint the portrait of Jesus as long as his enemy was painted into the place of Judas. He had to get rid of that. And once it was corrected, he found that the face of Jesus came more easily. That’s a great illustration. If we profess today to be a Christian, we really can’t ignore what Jesus said in Matthew chapter 5:44, it says,

He said, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

We can’t paint the face of Jesus in our lives as long as we hold bitterness and hatred in our hearts. It can become a festering sore. Now, of course it’s OK to disagree with someone or even to be angry with something that’s said or done something wrong – but hate does no one any good. It only causes trouble. Way back in the Old Testament time in Leviticus, we read this command. You shall not hate your brother in your heart.

And Jesus spoke about that often.

So, the Bible says quite clearly, if you say you love God but you hate your brother, you are a liar. So we need to think about this.

Let’s Pray

Lord, look, we empty our garbage bins each week. We think nothing of it. But Lord, there’s garbage of our souls sometimes, the feelings of hatred, anger, and resentment. They’re hard to get rid of. Dear Lord, give us the resolve to get rid of that rubbish today. Amen.

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