If you enjoy Asian foods, you recognize the interesting mix of sweet and sour flavors found in certain dishes. Usually, the sweet is some kind of sugar, and the sour is vinegar or lemon. Delicious!
What works for food, however, does not work in the Christian life. We cannot have a sour attitude toward people and a sweet intimacy with Christ. The two just don’t mix.
Here’s one definition of the word sour I found: “Something with an acidic taste, or someone who is resentful or angry. A person with a grumpy and rude personality who is angry all the time is an example of someone who would be described as having a sour personality.” I’m pretty sure we all know a few people who fit this description. Not us, of course, we aren’t sour :/
Sourness hinders
Today I’m not going to beat around the bush but just say plainly what is on my heart: We cannot enjoy sweet communion with the Lord if we have a sour attitude toward people.
If you are reading this, it is highly likely that you are striving to have a close relationship with God. You are serious about the pursuit of God and are devoting time to pray and read the Scriptures. If you feel like you are putting forth a hearty effort, but it’s not resulting in closeness with God, it could be because of a sour attitude. My heart is to uncover the sneaky little things that get into your head that separate you from the Lord.
It is my observation from decades of ministry that sourness hinders Christians in their relationship with the Lord more than any other thing. I’ve watched people who were renowned as great Christians fade like a leaf because of a sour attitude toward people. I’ve watched pastors slowly fall into cynical, grumpy, bitter attitudes—some no longer even like the people in their church! Sourness can seep into any of us.
Importance of love
I’m not talking just about unforgiveness toward a friend—that’s definitely important too—but sourness toward entire segments of the population and toward public figures who represent those segments of the population. First, let me share a couple verses from John’s epistle.
Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness. Whoever loves his brother abides in the light, and in him there is no cause for stumbling. But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness, and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes. (1 John 2:9-1)
If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother. (1 John 4:20-21)
If you’ve been a Christian for a while, you’ve heard these verses. We are quick to say, “Amen!” when they are read. Love is the centerpiece of Christian life; we all know that. Without love we are clanging cymbals (1 Corinth 13). But what exactly does it mean to love people?
What is love?
The kind of love God wants us to have isn’t an acceptance of everyone and everything they do. God Himself is perfect love, and He does not love people that way. We are called to hate what is evil (Rom 12). It’s sensible for us as people of righteousness to hate the sinful behavior of people. Love isn’t an attitude that acts like people’s sins are no big deal. Passive acceptance of evil is not at all the love we are called to. In fact, the more we love people, the more we will hate the sin that will destroy them.
While we are being like God in hating the sinful behaviors of people, we cannot adopt a hateful attitude against them. We are strictly forbidden to hate anyone, whether they are dead or alive. Jesus taught this so clearly.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. (Matthew 5:43-45)
Again, when we hear verses like this we are so quick to say, “Amen,” not thinking this is a problem for us. It’s easy for us to be in denial about our sourness toward people, or we even feel justified in our ill attitude. Sourness is one of those sins that doesn’t feel that sinful. It’s very different from a sin we choose to blatantly commit. Sourness is an issue of the heart. It’s the result of thousands of secret resentments, each so small and subtle that we don’t notice what is happening: a huge mountain of bitterness is forming within us. And it’s clouding our relationship with Jesus!
We don’t like certain people
Let’s face it: there are some people we don’t like. Again, I’m not talking so much about your uncle or your coworker or some other individual. We don’t like certain kinds of people. And we have good reason to not like them. They are, well—jerks! They aren’t decent humans. They are horrible monsters of evil. They are rude and mean, inconsiderate and exploiting. They do and say things that just irk us to no end. They make the world unpleasant. If only we had an eject button to send them into outer space ...
If you aren’t sure who you might be sour toward it’s pretty easy to figure out. When you are reading the newspaper or scrolling news feeds, what makes you wince? What causes you to shake your head in disgust and think, “this guy is a real creep”. What kinds of things do you read that cause you to think, “these people are just ignorant jerks”. Or here’s another question that might help. What segment of the population would you want to spend time with the least? Go ahead, pause, answer the questions in your head. Write them down.
I’m not saying we are all sour. I’m just saying that, if we are sour, it will be toward the kinds of people that we really don’t like and don’t like to even be around.
I want to stress that the people we could be sour toward may, in fact, be horrible human beings. Like, really horrible! Hitler horrible. But Christ calls us to love them. There is a trend in society today to interpret sympathy for evil people as “just so wrong”. When someone does something terrible, the wagons circle around the person, and they are stoned to death. Anyone who would even speak up and express sympathy for the terrible person is instantly looked at as a terrible human.
Way of Jesus
It reminds me of the story in the Bible of the woman caught in adultery. A great mob, thoroughly disgusted by her atrocious behavior, surrounded her and took up stones to stone her. They tried to pull in Jesus on this public display of condemnation. But Jesus takes a different posture; He shows mercy. He says to the accusers, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” Instead of condemning the sinful woman, Jesus defends her, protects her, and draws her close. He doesn’t condone her sin but says to her, “Go sin no more.” This is the way of Jesus we are to follow. Consider these words of the Apostle Paul:
The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost. But I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life. (1 Timothy 1:15-16)
Do you see the implications of these words? Paul was saying, essentially, that he was pretty much the worst sinner on the planet. But God had mercy on him as an example to all that the Lord God is a merciful God, and—no one is beyond redemption. Hallelujah!
Horrible humans
We are so enamored with the Apostle Paul that we forget who he was before He was converted. His name was Saul of Tarsus and he was an absolutely horrible human being. He was full of pride and rage. He was self-righteous and filled with zeal to destroy Christians. He dragged them out of their homes. He had them imprisoned, beaten and killed. He was there at the bloody stoning of Stephen giving approval. He terrorized the early Church. His raging passion was to exterminate the followers of Jesus. God chose the worst sinner to display the wonder of His grace.
America’s most despised
Let’s get real for a moment. Here are some of the most despised people groups and people of our day:
White supremacists
Black Lives Matter protesters
Conspiracy theorists
Conservatives
Liberals
Sex offenders
Top 1% wealthy
Police
Derek Chauvin
Those who stormed capital
Those who let it happen
Black people
White people
Uneducated people
Cultural elitists
Calvinists
Anyone not Calvinist
Coffee snobs
Art snobs
Snobs
Hypocrites
Donald Trump
Joe Biden
Nancy Pelosi
Hillary Clinton
Chrissy Teigen
Ted Cruz
Barack Obama
Candace Owens
Ben Shapiro
Ravi Zacharias
Richard Rohr
John Piper
Rob Bell
Harvey Weinstein
Franklin Graham
OJ Simpson
The Kardashians
People who love guns
People who hate guns
Mass shooters
Abortionists
Those who hate gays
Those who hate haters of gays
People who have confederate flags
People who topple statues
Those who wear masks
Those who wear masks wrong
Those who don’t wear masks
Liars and thieves
People who scam churches
People who prey on the elderly
Kanye
Grace
Oh I could keep going, of course. You get the point. It is very easy to develop a sour attitude toward certain people. Maybe we are careful not to show it but inwardly we don’t like certain people and have no interest in praying for them or reaching them. It’s funny how our “burden” is always for the people we like.
But this selectiveness is not the heart of God. We must love everyone. All people are candidates of God’s grace. When we write people off we are forgetting the sinfulness of our own sin. We are acting as though we are much better than those terrible people. That we would never do what they do. But listen. We don’t really know what we are capable of. We are what we are by the grace of God. Apart from grace, and put in certain environments, we might be worse than these despicable people we don’t like. But we are fools to think like this.
Despicable Me
Using the word despicable makes me think of the Gospel-saturated movie Despicable Me starring Steve Carell, who plays an evil horrible human being named Felonious Gru. Take out the humor of the movie, and list the horrible traits of Gru—and you realize he rivals Satan himself! He is a full-blown narcissistic terror to the earth. Part of his evil plan involves adopting three little girls, Margo, Edith, and Agnes, so he can exploit them to carry out his evil plans. But the girls are an instrument of grace who, over time, break Gru’s hardened heart. Who doesn’t love this story? This is what God’s grace is all about.
Yeah, but ...
Now, I know what you’re thinking—“But these people are just so, grrr, they are just so rotten and terrible.” Yes, I know. They really are. In fact, they are probably even worse than you realize.
But what I’m saying is that if we have a sour attitude we cannot experience sweet intimacy with Christ. It’s an impossibility. Intimacy with Christ is to come into union with His heart. This demands that we leave sourness behind. We cannot bring a sour spirit into the Holy of Holies.
Supernatural love
Recognizing our sour attitude is a huge start. Let’s be honest with the Lord and not pretend like we love everyone in the whole world when we know we actually don’t. What we need is a baptism of divine love. I don’t really think it’s even possible to love terrible people deeply from the heart. It’s just not in our nature at all. The only way we can love people who irk, irritate, sicken and appall us is if the Lord infuses supernatural love into our hearts. May we cry to the Lord for this fresh touch of love that enables us to love the unlovable. Amen.
… God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. (Romans 5:5)