Psalm 97.10 NLT



'You who love the Lord, hate evil! He protects the lives of his godly people and rescues them from the power of the wicked.'



One of the signs that we truly love God is that we start to hate evil. That kind of burning hatred is critically important, because the many great evils in the world will never come to an end unless people start hating them. The evil transatlantic slave trade only stopped when people started to identify its horror and start hating it. I once visited the ancient fort at Cape Coast in Ghana, where slaves were held before being ferried to the slave ships. For me, the most horrific discovery was that the dungeons in which the slaves were brutally held was underneath the chapel. As the slave traders worshipped God, they must have heard the cries of the slaves. For centuries, people lived with the slave trade as an acceptable, if regrettable, part of life. It was only when people started to hate it and fight against it that the tide turned. Eventually, albeit far too slowly, the slave trade
was dismantled.



There is plenty in our own world which deserves our hatred. We need to hate poverty, which occurs in every part of the world. Poverty distorts and cheapens life. It places enormous pressure on relationships and health and often leads to depression and violence. There is nothing good that can be said about poverty, but we live with it with surprising ease. We live in one of the wealthiest countries in the world but, incredibly, we all live close to poverty. This psalm suggests to me that, as we love God more and more, he wants our hatred of poverty to increase, because then we will start taking initiative to help to eradicate it. It’s so easy to respond to poverty by blaming others. The government is a popular target and, often, so are people living in poverty themselves. But this is a cheap way of trying to evade our responsibilities. The fact is, the government cannot do everything and although some people may well bear a degree of responsibility for their poverty, we have also played our part in keeping them poor.
This is one more illustration of the fact that true worship of the living God must lead us to action.




Question: How much do you hate poverty in your own community and what are you doing as a result of your hatred?
Prayer: Loving Father, help me to love you so much that I will start hating evil in the same way as you do. Amen

Released on 12 Jun 2022