By Anthony Wood

When I was a boy, a visiting pastor taught us about humility He opened his Bible and began, “Any preacher not wise enough to tremble when asked to preach on humility should not be preaching at all.” The congregation chuckled.

The pastor’s preaching then echoed through the church, enveloping the congregation in a sense of reverence and awe. The hush that followed was broken only by the soft rustle of pages turning as those gathered opened their Bibles to the passage about Christ’s humility.

Paul records the humiliation of Christ as:

Hatred of any human being is never an option for a believer in Jesus Christ.

It is easy to sinfully justify hatred, especially when the world, the community around us, encourages it. Hatred, a lust that already exists in the human heart in seminal form, doesn’t need a lot of stoking to bring it to a raging flame.

Many in today’s political movements, whether socialist or capitalist, constitutional nationalists and patriots or global order advocates, moralists or libertarians, religious or anti-religionists—influencers of all types and stripes—manipulate people towards hatred…

This is a series of brief devotional articles on The Orthodox Catechism (“OC”), a Particular Baptist document written by Baptist pastor Hercules Collins in 1680. Read the series.

When confronted with a moral failure, our instinct is to minimize or to blame-shift. Yes, we shouldn’t have said this, but it only happened because you said that. No, we haven’t quite gotten around to fixing the car like we promised, but that’s because you keep…