You Can't Love Jesus and Hate People

Do you love Jesus but struggle to love the people around you?

As Christians, we are called to love others the way Christ loves us, even when it feels difficult, undeserved, or inconvenient.

In this episode, we talk about what it truly means to live out the greatest commandment, why loving people can be challenging, and how God can transform our hearts to reflect His love.

My prayer is that this episode brings you closer to Him, gives you conviction with grace, and helps you love others more deeply.

If this episode speaks to you, feel free to reach out or connect with me on social media.

Love you all and praying for you 🤍

Transcript

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Hello everyone, welcome back to Janelle and Jesus. I am Janelle. Of course, we always have our Jesus. So today I want to talk about loving Jesus, but not necessarily loving his creation. I've seen a lot of people lately, or I guess maybe the Lord's opened my eyes to it because it's always been there, but I've seen a lot of people that claim themselves as Christians and claim themselves as followers of Jesus, but yet I feel a lot of anger towards either other Christians or to the world. Um, and I kind of want to address that. I also want to address things that I've learned in my personal walk. Um, because I used to be filled with hatred, and the Lord has redeemed me from that. So I kind of do want to talk about that a little bit. Today is also a little different because the last couple videos I've been more discussing my personal experience. And today we are cracking this bad boy open, and we are reading a lot of verses, a lot of good, good word. Um, so I do want you to have your Bibles ready and available by you if you have them. If you don't, you can always download the Bible app and read along with me. Um, I think it's important that we talk about God's word. I was praying before this. And I was just like, Lord, would you just speak through me? Would you, you know, I don't want it to be me. And he then gave me all of these verses. And it's like, how much louder could he speak when this is his living, breathing word? Um, so yeah, let's just jump right in. So as we know, God is love. God is love, and as believers, we get to experience his love firsthand. We cannot know the concept of love or how to fully engage in love without knowing him, because he is love, right? So just backstory about where the Lord's brought me from. I I've always been a very bubbly person, like I've always been like in a good mood, um, and just kind of like lighthearted with people either that I just met or like I'm kind of getting to know. And but people that I was really close with, um, specifically like my family or like my best, best friends, or things like that. I was kind of bitter. Like I I kind of had anger issues. Um, I could always just feel myself being bothered by someone's presence. Like if they breathed next to me, it was like, oh my gosh, shut up. Like that was the kind of person that I was behind closed doors. And I never understood why, because I do love to love people and I love to honor people. Um, the Lord's brought me a long way, but before that, I I really was just, I don't know, I just lived in this constant state of I couldn't be bothered. And I will let you know here and now that is not a personality trait. That is not something that we get to do as Christians, um, and say, this is how the Lord made me. It's not. The Lord did not create you to hate, He created you to love because He is love. So when I was younger and going through all of those things, I wasn't really sure what was happening. And then as I got older, I realized that there was a lot of unforgiveness in my heart. There was a lot of hurt that I had still been holding on to. There was a lot of pain, there was a lot of um things that happened in my family that I was kind of holding on to as well, that I wasn't releasing to the Lord. And I didn't know I needed to release to him in order to be free from all of the pain that I was feeling. And as I've gotten older and the Lord has delivered me from these things and helped me realize what they were, I no longer operate in that manner. And I mean, I am female. So I do have my hormone balances, whatever. So there'll be maybe a day. I'm not perfect. I'm not perfect. We're the Lord is a it's a work in progress. I will never be perfect until we get to heaven, right? Um, but it's very, it's very minimized compared to how it was. But I realized that unforgiveness, the the allowance of the seed of unforgiveness to sit in my heart for so long created a tree. And when that tree grew, it bore fruit. And the fruit of that pain and unforgiveness was hatred, it was anger, it was lashing out, it was rudeness, it was all of the bad things. And I didn't realize that a tree had rooted so much root that it produced fruit inside of me. The Lord is so gracious and kind that when he reveals these things to you and he uplifts the tree and all of its roots, he then fills it with his love. He then tends to the ground that had the hole, and he allows it to be filled with his love and a new seed, a new seed of hope, a new seed of his faithfulness, and then that produces a tree, and then we are able to have the fruits of the spirit, um, which is just so beautiful. So let's dive a little bit into scripture. I do want to talk about love and forgiveness, and then I do want to I have another topic in mind that I want to touch on, but we can get to that later. So, love. First and foremost, we love because he first loved us. John 3 16, for God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son, that ever whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life. And we know that God is love. In first John 4.8, it says, He who does not love does not know God, for God is love. So if we know that God is love, it means that everything he does is in love, which means he his creation when he created us was in love, which means we were meant to love, right? Which just makes sense. So John 13, 35, well, 34 and 35, it says, A new commandment I give to you that you love one another as I have loved you, that you also have love for one another. By this, all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. Now, when I read this, it's not saying because I have a cross necklace on, or not because I can recite a bunch of Bible verses on command. It's not by those works, it's not by those things that I can do, but it's my actions, it's the way that I show my love. Now, when we when I say show my love, I cannot physically love without knowing the father. That is love. If we try and love without the father, without God, without Jesus, we will always have a distorted image. We're only gonna get the perception of love through a broken lens. Because remember, anything that is not in God, how do I want to say this? The God is good. Let's say this. God is good. We know that God is good, God is perfect, God is holy. Anything that is not Him would be the removal of Him. What do I mean by that? The opposite of love is hate. Hate is the absence of love. What is darkness? It is the absence of light. So if we are removing the father from who he is, which is love, like we cannot try and love if he is not in it because he is love. This is a very convoluted topic. But when we say God is love, it means he is an all-encompassing love. Here on earth, when we say we love someone, we can only show them an expression of love. Like when you say, Oh, how do you know that you love someone, or how do you make someone feel loved? You can write them a card, you can give them a kiss, you can um buy them a gift, you can tell them all these things are expressions of love. But the actual being of love, the actual thing that encompasses all love is Jesus. So, how would we possibly love without him? And on the flip side of that, how could we not love while knowing him? How could we not exude that love that he loved us with? Once you experience the love of the Heavenly Father, once you experience Jesus' love that died on the cross for you, how can we turn around and have absence of that? If it fills us, how can we be void of it? Does that make sense? I mean, I I hope it does. Um, yeah, so in Luke 6.32, it says, but if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. This is basically saying if someone loves you, of course, of course I'm gonna love them back. But what is Christ like? What is to follow Jesus, what is to take up your cross every day and walk with him, what is to die to the flesh and live with him, is when you love those that do not love you. When you love those that actively hate you, when you love those that have hurt you. Ugh, I don't want that. It's hard. I'm not saying that it's gonna be an easy thing to do, but the Lord never promises easy in this life. The Lord promises us that he will be there with us, that he will give us the Holy Spirit to help us, but he never said it was gonna be an easy life. In fact, he he promises suffering. It is a daily battle with our flesh to kill our flesh, crucify our flesh. This is not soft language, this is not butterflies and rainbows language, this is not easy-going language, it is a violent language. I don't think we understand what it means to crucify our flesh. We're scared of being uncomfortable. We refuse. It's not even that we're scared, we refuse to be uncomfortable. We've gotten to this generation that it's like if I am mildly discomforted, if I am mildly annoyed, if I am mildly inconvenienced, it's not for me. I have to keep my peace. If I don't have God, if I'm not following him, I don't have peace. Because God is peace. The fruit of the spirit is peace. So when I'm not doing his commandments, when I'm not following the things that he is telling me to do, how can how can I live in peace? How can I live in harmony? How can I live knowing that he has his hand over my life? I don't even know why I said all that. Because I was not supposed to be out of my topic, but yeah, the Lord is, man, he is faithful and he is good and he is true. He is love. And another hard truth is that you can't love someone if you haven't forgiven them. And just because someone has hurt you doesn't mean that you're not supposed to love them. Just because someone has hurt you doesn't give you an excuse to not love them. And man, it's it's a hard thing to overcome. I've had many experiences in my life where people have hurt me mentally, spiritually, and physically. And the Lord has radically given me grace to forgive. And I think we're we're so scared to fully forgive, or we just hold on to it. We hold on to the hurt and the pain, and all it does is destroy us. All it does is cause a seed to be planted that grows into a tree, that causes bitterness, that causes hatred, that causes rebellion, it causes blockage to see him. And when you have full forgiveness, it's life-changing. And I know some of you are probably listening to this, and you're saying, Janelle, you don't know what they did to me. You have no idea the pain that they've caused me. And you're right, I don't. But I know someone that does. And it's Jesus. They nailed him to a cross while he was innocent. The messiah that they waited for, that they prayed for, that they read passages about for their entire lives. The innocent blood of Jesus. And he had every right in our eyes to curse them, to come down, to do all these things, and yet he said, Father, forgive them. Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do. And we hold grudges because you didn't get an invite to a party. I know some of them are more serious than that. A lot of mine are more serious than that, but when you hold them to the lens of that, I don't know. We see in Matthew 18 the story of the parable of the unforgiving servant, and it's it's pretty lengthy, but it's 18 uh 21 through 35. And I want to just highlight some parts. So the first part, then Peter came to him and said, Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him up to seven times? And Jesus said to him, I do not say to you up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven. That's a lot of time, guys. That's a lot of times that we forgive. And then from there, he continues on and tells the parable of the servant that was forgiven a debt, but then held forgiveness from someone that owed him money. So he got a debt paid that was insane. He would never have been able to pay it in his lifetime. And then he gets freed, someone owes him money, and he doesn't forgive them. So then the master that forgives him originally says, calls him a wicked servant and casts him out, basically. And it says at the very end, So my heavenly father also will do to you if each of you from his heart does not forgive his brother your trespasses. We have been forgiven from so much we have to forgive one another. No matter how painful it is, no matter how ugly it may seem, and I mean full forgiveness, not holding anything in your heart, anything. You have to let it go, you have to let it go. Not for their sake, but for yours. And allowing the Lord to show them compassion through your heart. It shouldn't make sense to forgive these people in society, right? In the worldly lens. But showing the Lord's grace to someone, showing the Lord's love to someone, even if they've wronged you. That's what we're called to do, guys. We are the hands and feet of Jesus on this earth, and we're not looking like it. Sometimes the only Jesus that people can see is you. How are you handling that? And some people might say, Well, I'm a sinner, you can't put that on me. Blah, blah, blah. The Lord's redeemed you of your sins. We are not long, we are no longer called sinners. We are made righteous in his eyes. We no longer have to live under the reign of sin over our lives. Yes, we live in a fleshly body, but we operate by the Holy Spirit. Death to your flesh, operating in the Holy Spirit. Where does the conviction hit? Where is the reverence for God? Matthew 5, 7 from the Beatitudes. Blessed are the merciful, for they will obtain mercy. Have mercy. We have to remember we are imperfect beings. Sometimes the people that have hurt us are Christians, but sometimes they're not. And when they're not Christians, man, we have to have a lot of mercy. This life is hard, and they are not operating in the Holy Spirit. And that's another thing that I want to talk about. Is I think that there's a lot of hatred towards the non-believer. And I've said this in my other podcast before, but I've been seeing a pattern in life, I guess. Christians are outraged by the world. Outraged by their sin and how they're flaunting it and how disgusting it is, and all of these things. How can you hate someone for being lost? How can you hate someone that looks like the world when they're living in the world? How can you hate someone for being sick when you know that they're dying? It just doesn't, it doesn't calculate in my brain. It's it's like we're we're shocked. I just I just don't get it. I don't get it. We are all sinners. We all need a savior. So why are these Christians that were saved from the world, saved from the wrath and the judgment, why are they hating on people? Like that's what you would have looked like if Jesus hadn't come and saved you. When we sin, it's a separation from God, right? I feel like there's, I guess the mentality would be like your sin is is louder than mine, I guess. Like that would be the hating point. I j I genuinely can't wrap my head around it, but I see a pattern of people that are calling out sin. Well, it is sin. I see a pattern of people that are calling out sin, and it's almost as if it's like, oh, but your sin is louder than mine, so I have to call it out. And we call it out with hatred, and we're like, This is ugly. We can't have this. You look like the world. Again, they are the world. And there's no grace. There's no love. And it says in the Bible that love covers a multitude of sins, not hatred. Love covers a multitude of sin. Jesus did not go around town and say, you're a sinner, you're gross, you're this, you're that. No. He did tell them to repent, but he did it in love. He had a conversation with them first. He sat and ate with them first. He pulled the outcast of society, sat them down at a table, loved on them, and they walked away, saved, cleansed, renewed. So go, I want to go back to something I said, but the louder, right? Like the sin is louder than mine. I want us to remember and know that all sin separates us from the love of God. So let's let's first remind ourselves, Romans 3 23, for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. All of us, all of us. There is none perfect besides Jesus. So when we sin, because again, I just wrote, we've all sinned. So what happens when we sin? Isaiah 59, 2, your iniquities have separated you from God, and your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear. When we sin, there becomes a barrier. There's a barrier, which is why Jesus had to come. But that's for another topic. Well, and we also have the argument that, oh, but like I don't kill people, I just, you know, I'll tell a white lie here and there. But James 2 10, for whoever shall keep the whole law yet stumble on one, he is guilty of all sin. He's guilty of all of them. And then of course, we also have the argument of I didn't act on it, I just thought about it. One, our thoughts are deceitful and our hearts are deceitful. But Matthew 5 21 says, You have heard that it is said to those of old, you shall not murder, and whoever murders will be in danger of the judgment. But I say to you that whoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of judgment. And whoever says to his brother, Raka, shall be in danger of the council, but whoever says you fool shall be in danger of hellfire. Therefore, if you bring your gift to the altar, and there that you rem and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go your way. First be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift. So two parts there. If we even think anger, lust, pride, any of those thoughts, we commit the sin in our heart. And if it's committed in our heart, it's as good as done. That is, we have sinned. It's done in that moment. And also, it's saying here, if you are going up to sacrifice, to repent of your sin, to ask for forgiveness, you can't, the Lord is saying, don't even try to do that if you have something against your brother. If you have something against someone else, that you are in an argument or you're you have you have any unforgiveness in your heart, don't even bother putting your sacrifice and coming to me, fix it first, and then come in sacrifice. That is how important forgiveness is. So I think all of this to say, we need to get it together, basically. We need to love people, we need to love them well. At the end of John, I love repeating this, but the Lord says, love my sheep, tend to my sheep, feed my lambs. And there's a the Lord does not waste words. If it is in here, it is because it's for a reason. He's saying, sheep and lambs, care for the people that love me and care for those that don't. Both love, love, love. Have you ever been at a grocery store or something, and the the cashier is in a really bad mood, and you just love on them? You're saying, hey, how are you? I hope you're having a great day. Like, and you just talk to them for two seconds. Do you you see how their mood shifts? Because love drives out hate. Love drives out fear, love drives out darkness. It gets rid of it, it's gone. When you love someone that's hurt you, one, it heals your wounds. It does, but it heals theirs too. I don't know why this person hurt me. I don't know what they're dealing with, but the love that I show them will get to the root of them. It will show them God's love. And I had a just in on this topic, I was praying and the Lord kind of downloaded something to me, but um, about hating his people, right? And it was like, if someone asked you, oh, who's your favorite painter? And you say, Picasso, and then they ask you, oh, okay, what's your favorite painting? Or what's your favorite thing about his art style? And you say, Oh, I don't, I don't really like his art, I just think he's a good person. You can't love an artist without liking its creation, so you can't say, I love Jesus and I love the Father, I love God, He's so cool, but I hate what He's built. We are all created in the image of God. Even the person you don't like. Even the person that hurt you. When you look into their eyes, would you remember that Jesus died for them too? He died to know them. He died that they would know him, just like he did for you. And I won't it's not an easy journey by any means. It's hard, but it's so rewarding. It's so rewarding, so refreshing, and so freeing. It's almost as if chains fall off when you forgive. Because the enemy wants to keep you in chains, but the Lord wants to set you free, and he does that with his love. So I hope that made sense, you guys. I was yapping, but I I pray that that this convicted you in some way, and that the Lord showed you his heart in some ways that you dive a little bit deeper into who he is, that you read your word a little bit more, and that you crave him a little bit more after this. Um He is perfect, He is holy, He is lovely, and He loves you so much. You just gotta give Him an opportunity to show you. And once you get filled with that love, it'll be a lot easier to spread it. Um as always, if you ever have any questions or you ever have any prayer requests or testimonies, please leave them in the comments or message me on Instagram or TikTok. Um, it is Janelle and Jesus on both, and of course here on YouTube. Um, if you like this video, like it, subscribe, share with someone that you think could benefit from this. And yeah, if you guys ever have any topic ideas or you have a question you want to discuss, um, please don't hesitate to leave those in the comments as well. And I will get to them. All right. I love you guys, but Jesus loves you so much more. I hope you have a beautiful, blessed week, and I will see you next week. Bye.