kayfromhome

You can’t claim to love God, but hate or ignore those made in His image.

Get fed up? Sure. Wish you didn’t have to deal with them? Absolutely. Go out of your way to cause them injury and pain? Not a chance.

Injury can be something as seemingly insignificant as making a snide, backhanded comment or thoughtfully avoiding an individual and purposefully withholding your love. Anyone who says that they love God, but hates their brother (or sister) is a liar and the love of God is not in them.

Last year, I wrote a blog post titled, “Can I still be a Christian on the days that I can’t stand anyone?” The short answer remains yes, but the long answer is more involved.

The more you get to know about people, the harder it is to love them. But, the more you get to know about God and yourself, the more you understand that you are also “people.” And, outside of grace, you aren’t worthy of being loved the way God asks us to love one another either.

If you are a child of God you can’t ignore the people that you don’t like.  That’s called favoritism. You also can’t pretend that they don’t exist, because that’s exclusion. You can’t exempt them from your attention, or the cross of Christ, because grace doesn’t belong to you. It might be yours to give, but it’s definitely not yours to keep.

In short, this is a friendly reminder that you cannot love God but hate people. (Even if you really, really want to.)