“Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” – John 12:25
Hate and love are really two opposite ideas. It’s not as light and darkness that the definition of darkness is the absence of light. Hate and love can coexist in this world. There are times that we hate someone, but deep inside we love them too. See? Hate and love can sometimes go together. However, in the principle of the Bible, there is really no middle ground. Either we hate or either we love. If we are grounded in love, there is no place for hate in our hearts. Although, as we live in this fallen world, sometimes we don’t understand what we are feeling if it is love or hate.
Now, as we are talking about love and hate, our verse today reminds us to love one thing and hate the other thing. What Jesus is telling us is that whoever loves their life will lose it, but whoever hates their life in this world will gain eternal life. We have to understand first what God meant by loving our life and hating our life. This simply does not mean we should grumble and not be content with what we have right now. Hating our lives does not mean we have the right to kill ourselves. However, what God meant by this is complete submission to Him.
Loving our life in this world means submitting to the whims of the world. It means following the desires of our flesh and completely compromising our faith to what the world thinks is right. So, if we love our life in this world, we will lose eternal life— the life that is incomparable, eternal, and a gift from God. However, if we hate our lives here in the world, we will be able to have our eternal life through Christ. It may sound hard but once we receive Christ as our Lord and Savior, everything follows. Our desire to be with God forever will be instilled inside us so that we will desire to love what is coming instead of loving the life full of sin, unrighteousness, and death.
In short, God wants us to align our lives to His Will. He is calling us to submit completely to Him so that we will not love this world that is full of hate, but we will love and have a futuristic mindset to the eternal life that we will be having through Christ in the future. We must understand that this is also a grace of God that He is informing us and reminding us to not love the world and everything in it. Instead, He is calling us to hate our lives (not hate that we will kill ourselves) and everything that is constantly tying us up with sin.
Therefore, we must always understand that there is no middle ground. Either we hate our lives here and love our future with God or we love our lives here and hate the future we will have with God. We must always put in our minds that loving this world should not be our goal, but submitting to the Will of God must come first. Thus, let us always align our desires to the Will of God and surrender our lives to Him.
