TEXT: Psalm 97:10

SUBJECT: Seven Reasons to Hate Your Sin

Today’s sermon is called Seven Reasons to Hate Your Sin. Before we get to the seven reasons, I have to say something about the other words in the title, the first of which is hate.

Hate is a strong feeling, of course, stronger than any but love. To hate a thing mentally is to disapprove of it, to know it’s false and wrong and hurtful. Emotionally, hate makes you mad or turns your stomach, or sometimes, both. And while mild hate can be bottled up in the mind or emotions, intense hate boils over in action—either in fleeing the hated thing or fighting it.

The best example of Hate we have in the Bible is…whom? The first names that come to mind are Pharaoh, Haman, and Judas Iscariot, men who enslaved God’s people, tried to annihilate them, and even sold the Lord for thirty pieces of silver. They were great haters, to be sure, but there’s a hate far hotter than theirs. We think of the devil, always plotting against us and finding a perverse happiness in our every failure. He hates more than they ever did.

But there’s one who hates far more than the devil; and, as weird and wrong as it sounds, the one I’m thinking of is our Lord Jesus Christ!

No, He doesn’t hate in the malicious way Satan and wicked men do—of course He doesn’t! His hate is of the same chararcter as He is, and He is--

This hate is a quality indispensable both to His identity and to His mission. Who is Jesus? Much can be said here, but the shortest answer is: God. And God hates sin. The Medieval Church had its Seven Deadly Sins, and while I agree with its list, I prefer Solomon’s—

A knowledge of Hebrew is helpful in reading the Old Testament, but you don’t have to be a scholar to know that words like ‘hate’ and ‘abominations’ suggest more than a mild dislike of these things.

Amos 5:21 is another verse worth thinking about. Speaking to impenitent sinners who think they can buy God off by ‘going to church’, the Lord says—

You can feel the intensity of his hatred of sin.

This is who God is, and in His calling to reveal God to us, this is what Christ did: He hated sin with a perfect hatred, with a passion the angriest and most self-righteous Pharisee never felt. His hatred of sin was on display throughout His life, but it came into sharp focus when He cleansed the Temple.

The Temple belonged to God Himself and He opened it to all, promising His favor to anyone who wanted it. But the Sadducees acted like they owned the place and might turn it to their own profit. Seeing what they were doing to God and to the world, our Lord drove out the livestock, overturned the tables, and rebuked the moneychangers (with their masters)—

This is hate—not the petty blow-ups we have—but the real thing. This is the hate God has for sin, the hate His Son has for sin, and the hate you ought to have.

SIN

The next word is sin. This is what you’re to hate—not people, of course, and not material things as though evil resided in them, instead of in how they’re used.

What sins should we hate? The sins which are hateful to God, which is to say, every sin. Now, you know, all sins are not equally hateful to God, surely a moment of lust repented of is not as odious as adultery lived in for years, but, whether the sin is big or small or in-between, you can be sure God hates it. If you go back to the list I quote a few minutes ago, you’ll find some of the sins are:

If you refer to the Bible’s other lists of sins (of which there are many) you see the same mixture—sins directly against God (idolatry and blasphemy); sins against other people (theft and murder); and sins against yourself (fornication and suicide). All of these things are abhorred by God, and we ought to feel the same way about them, Romans 12:9—

Maybe the most important word in my title is the word, ‘your’. While it’s true we ought to hate the sins of other people, that’s fairly easy—especially when we’re on the other side of them.

The hard thing is to hate your own sins, to look at them as bad as the sins of other people. When others sin, we’re quick to condemn and slow to understand. But when we do it, we’re the other way around: quick to understand and explain away, and slow and gentle in our condemnation.

The best example I can give of this unevenness is a grudge. Suppose a friend does you wrong, and the wrong he does you is a big one. You get very mad at him, tell others what he has done to you, and take it out on him anyway you can. For years, you hold it against it, and if you formally make up, that’s all you do—make up formally. You’re indignant at his sin—How could he do that to me?

But what about your grudge? That’s a sin, too, if I read my Bible correctly, and I might add: it’s a big one, probably bigger than the sin that caused it. Are you as hard on yourself as you are on others? If not, you hate sin, all right, but only the sin of other people. And this is a Pharisee’s thing to do.

The disciple of Christ hates his own sin.

If you know the story of Job, you know he was the holiest man in the world—God’s servant he was called—a man who feared the Lord and eschewed evil. But if Job was a good man, he was still a sinner. His friends kept pointing this out to him, but to no effect, because they were far worse than he was. But when the Lord came to him in a whirlwind, he saw his sins for what they were, and cried—

You ought to hate your sins—not yourself—but your sins. If, for no other reason: God tells you to—

The commandment is not made up out of thin air, not a senseless rule. If it were, you’d still be obliged to do it because God is your Lord and He has every right to make the rules whether we can see the whys and wherefores in them or not.

But this is one is easy to understand—not easy to obey—but easy to see why we ought to. Why then, ought you to hate your sins?

FIRST REASON: YOU’RE A CHILD OF GOD

To be a child of God is to be loved by God. Sin, therefore, is a hateful thing, because it’s not just breaking God’s rule; it’s breaking God’s heart. There’s no part of God’s Word more moving to me than the Parable of the Prodigal Son. It begins with a jolt modern Americans don’t feel the way the First Century Jews did—

Our translators have gotten the words right, but not the meaning. What the young man was saying to his father was: Drop Dead! Israel was a conservative and family-oriented culture; no son said that to his father! It was not only a sin, it was crime, a capital crime! But that’s how the story begins. Later, of course, the boy comes home in rags, hoping to be hired as servant, but the father takes him back as a son—and not a son to be scolded and put on probation—but a son in good standing, as if he’d never run off in the first place.

How do you think the welcome made the son feel? It must have made him happy, of course, but I suspect it also made feel ashamed of himself. Of all the fathers in the world, how could a son tell this father to ‘drop dead’?

God is this Father. The greatness of His love for sinning children is a good reason to hate our sins.

The Corinthian church had a big problem with fornication. Not just the one man living with his father’s wife, but many of them were having sex outside of marriage, and some with prostitutes.

How would the church today respond to the problem? We might start with AIDS. A generation ago, we would have said, pregnancy. A generation before that, reputation. One more back, Hell! Paul’s first lesson in sex education, however, starts with something else, I Corinthians 6:15-16—

When the Christian commits fornication, he takes Christ to bed with him. Would you do that? Would you involve the Lord Jesus Himself in an act of uncleanness? But this is what we do when we sin—and not in this way only—for our whole bodies belong to Christ, and every wicked thing we do with them brings Him along with us.

Our union with Christ is a good reason to hate our sins.

What is a Christian? We can answer that in a number of ways: he’s one who believes in Christ, one whose sins are forgiven, one who will go to heaven when he dies, and so on. These are all good answers. But there’s another good as well. A Christian is one who is indwelt by the Holy Spirit—

Now, does the Holy Spirit live in our bodies or in our souls? He lives in both. This means both body and soul are His Temple. And, if the Bible teaches anything at all, it teaches the Temple of God has to be kept clean. When it wasn’t back in the day awful judgments fell on the people, the last time in 70 AD.

Paul picks up the imagery in I Corinthians 6—

He assumes we know the Temple was not the priests’ house, but God’s house. When the officers defiled it with their sins, they made it unfit for God to live in it.

This is what our sins do: they soil the Temple of God, or maybe ‘soil’ is too mild: they desecrate it. They make it an unhallowed place.

The Holy Spirit lives in us is a good reason to hate our sins.

The Church is the Body of Christ, and this means every member is connected to every other member. The way a hand is connected to an arm or an esophagus is connected to a stomach.

If something is seriously wrong with my esophagus, food doesn’t get into my stomach, and this, in turn, makes me sick all over. Sin, therefore, is not a private matter between you and God only. It affects the whole church (both local and universal). You think you’re not hurting anyone but yourself, but you are—your sins are hurting other people—and not just directly, the way my punch hurts your nose—but indirectly too, in ways too many and complicated to get into at the moment.

We belong to the Church and what we do affects us all. This is a good reason to hate our sins.

What are we here for? When a person believes in Christ, why doesn’t God take him straight to heaven and exempt him from all the pains and losses of life in this world? The reason He doesn’t do that is because He has something for us to do in the world.

What is it? We are in the world to reveal God to the world. Our Lord put it this way—

We reveal God, not only in our sermons, Bible studies, or Gospel tracts, but also—and more so—in how we live. When we live selfishly we make the world think God is selfish. Speaking of David’s adultery, murder, and the cover-up that followed them, Nathan the prophet told the king—

If they blasphemed David, that would be okay! But it wasn’t David they bad mouthed, it was the Lord. Years later, Paul generalized the verse by saying not one man, but the whole nation of Israel had done this—making the Lord’s Name a laughingstock in the world.

We have a higher calling than this. We’re called to show God to the world as He really is. But sin keeps us from doing that. This is a good reason to hate our sins.

For one thing, they discredit the Gospel. The Gospel is true, however we live. But how we live affects our credibility. Do we want the lost to listen to us, to trust us, to give us a fair hearing? If we do we have to live up to the Gospel we preach. When we don’t, they’re not likely to listen, and the end result of not listening is…eternal punishment.

It also confuses them on what conversion is. When I was a boy, we had an unsaved neighbor who kind of wanted to be a Christian, but not like my dad was because my dad didn’t get drunk, and our neighbor enjoyed tying one as often as possible.

There was another man living a couple of doors down from us who also professed Christ and drank like a fish. ‘This is the kind of Christian I want to be’ the first man said. And that’s the kind of ‘Christian’ he became, it seems to me, a drunken Christian, which is no Christian at all. Of course believers can struggle with alcohol, and many do. But drunkards don’t inherit the kingdom of God. The second man’s example badly hurt the first man, hurt him badly, and I fear, hurt forever.

If we want to love our neighbors instead of hating them, we have got to present the Gospel to them in a credible way and show them what a Christian is by how we live. Our sins hurt the lost, and that’s a good reason for hating them.

God does not tell us to love what is hateful or to hate what is lovable. He hates sin because it ought to be hated. We ought to hate it for the same reason. The Bible compares sin to a running sore, to a filthy rag, and to a gnawing maggot. No sane person would love these things: our disgust for them is not in our culture, but in the things!

But if sin is like these horrid things, it is not identical to them. Sin is far worse than they are, and consequently, it ought to be hated from the bottom of our hearts.

If our sins ought to be hated, we have to admit: they’re not always hated; they’re tolerated most of the time, and sometimes they’re cherished.

To hate them as we ought to means we need to see them as they are. There’s only one way to do that: To look at the cross and to see what our sins did to our Savior. Look at Him, stripped bare between two thieves; hear His cry, My God, My God, why have you forsaken Me? Feel the darkness that fell on Him from noon to three that day. Imagine what the wrath of God for the sins of the world felt like.

Then make light of sin. It cannot be done. No one who gazes at the cross can do anything but abhor the sins that sent His Savior there. Not their sins or your sins or even our sins, but my sins.

You who love the Lord, hate evil!