Interesting Devotional

The following is from "Christ In Our Home". I read these devotionals to Alexis while we are waiting for the bus in the morning. Sometimes we finish them, sometimes we don't. But I found this one interesting and wanted to share it.

The passage is Psalm 97

"Good Hate"
The Lord loves those who hate evil. (v.10)

God loves a good hater. Whoa! That's not what we expect from the Bible! But there it is: "The Lord loves those who hate evil." Most hate, of course, is bad. It can move us to violence at the same time that it eats us from the inside out.

But there is good hate, just like there can be good anger-what some call "right wrath." Good hate resists evil and gives no ground. The "right wrath" born of hatred never seeks to harm others, only to redeem what is wrong.

When Martin Luther King Jr. shared his dream of racial justice, he reminded Americans of the "fierce ungency of now"-now was the time to make justice real and promises a reality. He hated the evil of segregation and could not wait to end it. Confronting evil requires good hate, the best hate we can muster. It motivates us to change what is wrong, never to harm the wrongdoer.

Only one has ever lived who hated perfectly. Only Jesus perfectly loved the evildoer while still confronting the evil deed. He is our salvation, both when evil assails us and when our best attempts at good hate go badly.

Forgive me, God, when I don't resist evil as I should or when my attempts to do so harm others. In Jesus' name. Amen.