re hate the sin from scott prism gatech edu scott holt subject hate the sin date may gmt hate the sin but love the sinner i ve heard that quite a bit recently my question is whether that statement is consistent with christianity i would think not hate begets more hate never love if you are questioning whether or not hating sin is consistent with christianity i ask you to consider the following scripture romans let love be without hypocrisy hate what is evil cling to what is good what is it that paul through the inspiration of the holy spirit is calling us to hate would god call us to do something that would eventually lead to hating our fellow man especially when he commands us to do the opposite to love your fellow man consider some sin now lets apply our hate the sin philosophy and see what happens if we truly hate the sin then the more we see it the stronger our hatred of it will become eventually this hate becomes so strong that we become disgusted with the sinner and eventually come to hate the sinner that has not been my experience i ve not found myself hating anybody as a result of hating the sin that may be in their life as a sinner myself i find myself having more compassion for the person jesus too since the bible teaches that he was tempted in every way that we are is able to have compassion on us when we our tempted and fall jesus is our very example of how to hate the sin but love the sinner in the account of the woman caught in adultery john jesus had compassion on the woman but he also called her to leave her life of sin this is what it means to love sinners but hate their sin it means loving them unconditionally while at the same time calling them to leave their sin in addition our hatred of the sin often causes us to say and do things which are taken personally by the sinner who often does not even believe what they are doing is a sin the blame for this can not always be laid at the feet of the christian i have seen and been guilty of taking offense by someone merely pointing out my sin and calling me to repent of it it was not unloving for the christian to call me out of sin in fact i believe it was the most loving thing that that person could have done he loved me enough to want to spare me the consequence of remaining in my sin after enough of this the sinner begins to hate us they certainly don t love us for our constant criticism of their behavior hate builds up and drives people away from god this certainly cannot be a good way to build love again i don t think that you can lay the blame for this at the feet of the christian if we have loved them as jesus loved sinners exemplified in john and the sinner hates us for it then we have done the best we can we will have extended to them the most perfect expression of love and they will have rejected it now it we hate the sin but forget to love the sinner then indeed we will ourselves be in sin in the summary of the law christ commands us to love god and to love our neighbors he doesn t say anything about hate i would like to encourage you to do a word study on hate in the new testament i really think that you will be surprised in fact if anything he commands us to save our criticisms for ourselves criticism is very different from calling a sinner to repent hope this helps in christ tony balsamo name antonio l balsamo company digital equipment corp shrewsbury mass work e mail balsamo stargl enet dec com
