I would like to talk with you for “a little bit” about “hatred.”
Hatred is a “complicated animal;” it is “the child of dark forces.” When you hate someone, he or she “has power over your life” and “infiltrates much of what you do.”
Your hate “slithers into your veins” like a serpent, wrapping itself “around your heart.” You take pleasure in witnessing this person’s “demise.” You want to watch them fail, to get hurt and to have a hard time with life.
You spend “an exorbitant amount of time and energy” thinking about “the target” of your hatred, stalking his or her social media accounts and talking garbage about them to anyone who will listen or hear you out-behind their backs!
You may “hate” this person, but you “feel” very, very strongly about them.
Even though you certainly do not want to admit it, “you care.” In some form or another, you care about them, if you didn’t you would not even waste your time on them…or so much, as a breath.
Apathy is “by far worse.”
“Apathy” is “its own state of mind.” That “smoldering rage” that comes with hatred … is “nonexistent” with apathy.
When you say, “I don’t care about you,” you’re basically saying, “I’m over you, you mean nothing to me and I don’t give a darn about you.” For all intents and purposes you are “dead to me.” You mean nothing to me. Do I even know you?
When you truly “don’t care” about someone, they have “no power.” They cannot “stir your emotions” or “hold your attention.”
When you don’t care about someone, they basically become an “inanimate object.” Where hatred is like “gasoline,” “apathy” is like “tepid water.” Tepid water is neither hot nor cold…it is nothingness…
It is just blah!
We are talking “indifference.”
You have NO REGARD for them.
You are completely “detached.”
There is a callousness, a coldness, an inattention. You are totally and completely alienated from them…
They might as well be on the opposite side of the world for all you care.
“Indifference is not caring.” There are no arguments or disagreements…and trust is not an issue. There is no respect. No commitment. No nothing…
Relationships can survive a lot, but they cannot survive “apathy and indifference.”
Jesus did not talk much about “hatred, indifference and apathy.” But he did speak a great deal about “love.”
Love is a feeling that goes beyond almost “all sense of physicality.” To love is to feel “such a strong feeling for another” that you can “understand them” in a way that few can. Their very existence is “a gift and a treasure” whether they are with you or not.
The mere thought of them fills you with “a deep hope” for both “the world and yourself.”
When we think about love we think of other synonyms like: “a fondness for,” a “warmth,” “an intimacy,” “an attachment,” “an endearment,” a “desire,” a “yearning for” or “an infatuation with,” a “warmth,” a “caring” and “a regard.”
This is the stuff of poets. This is the stuff of HallMark.
Jesus was referring to something different. Something deeper…
A middle easterner wrote this about “agape love:” (the kind of love that Jesus was referring to) “agape love” is firstly, “universal.”
It is a “universal love.” We love “each and everyone.” No exceptions. None.
We do not love you “for the color of your skin.” We do not love “just one race.”
We do not just love “a particular tribe or clan.”
We love “every race,” every person in this world. “Agape love” is like God’s Love. It says, “God loved the world.” Jesus loved all. God doesn’t just love the Israelites. God loves the Arabs, too.
God loves everybody. Iraqis, Iranian, Egyptian, Palestinians, Syrian, Jordanian- God loves them all…without exception.
Again, as I said; “It is a universal love.” And, if your heart has not been touched by “agape love,” you will probably still be “biased or prejudiced” against another race. This is not good.
If you have “a prejudice in your heart” against another tribe or race or even “people of different social position,” your heart has not been touched by this “love of God.”
You could only love those who are “emotionally bonded” to you. You cannot love the “agape love.” Agape love; “a universal love” to love everybody “without prejudice,” “without consideration of their worthiness” to be loved. It’s a “universal love.” This is the love Jesus wants for you to have.” Amen.