No neutrality

By: Alistair Begg – October 28, 2026.

Key points

• Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. – Romans 12: 9.
• Ole Miss top rusher Kewan Lacy ruled out against Auburn this week with shoulder injury.
• Social Security and Medicare: The promise America created and the bills we postponed.
• God's individuals understand that there is a time for love and a time for hate (Ecclesiastes 3: 8).
• Alistair Begg has been in pastoral ministry since 1975.

Any patient who has undergone a bone marrow transplant knows the importance of being isolated from any possibility of infection. Since their immune system is so depleted, they are far more susceptible to disease than the average person. If a visitor arrives coughing and spluttering, excusing it as "no big deal" would be abhorrent to the patient and to their doctors. Any sickness is to be resisted like a plague since its consequences are potentially fatal.

Christian love should reflect this kind of radical mentality when it comes to evil. We cannot say that we genuinely love others if we cherish, or even only tolerate, evil in our hearts and distance ourselves from good. We cannot toy with wickedness, seeking to establish some laissez-faire approach to particular sins. "Abhor" is as solid a word as it is feasible for Paul to employ. He has no notion of neutrality when it comes to purity.

At the start of this verse, Paul has already instructed his readers to "let love be genuine." Isn't it interesting, then, that Paul immediately follows "love" with a word that essentially means "hate"? We often think that if we love, we shouldn't hate anything or anyone-but that's just sentimentality. Paul makes it clear that love "does not rejoice at wrongdoing" (1 Corinthians 13: 6). If you love your spouse with a passionate purity, you hate everything which would rob you of that relationship; otherwise, your love is not love. Meanwhile, the same applies to our love for the things of God. We cannot love holiness without hating its opposite.

As Paul continues, he turns from the negative to the positive, using the same phrase, "hold fast, " that Jesus uses to describe a husband and wife's relationship (see Matthew 19: 5).Paul doesn't employ this phrase arbitrarily. Marriage is the closest human union possible-psychologically, intellectually, and spiritually. So Paul is saying here that Christian love should have a "superglue" commitment to goodness.

We must be careful not to fall into the world's trap of calling "evil good and good evil" or being those "who put darkness for light and light for darkness" (Isaiah 5: 20). God's individuals understand that there is a time for love and a time for hate (Ecclesiastes 3: 8). So how would you describe your attitude to evil-especially those sins that are most attractive to you or most celebrated by those who live around you? What would change if you abhorred them? Today, rely on God's Spirit to enable you to love properly by hating what God does, echoing the prayer of John Baillie: "O God, offer me the power to follow after that which is good. Now as I pray, let there be no secret purpose of evil formed in our minds, that waits for an opportunity of fulfillment."

Regarding the Author(s).

Alistair Begg has been in pastoral ministry since 1975. After graduation from The London School of Theology, he served eight years in Scotland at both Charlotte Chapel in Edinburgh and Hamilton Baptist Church. In 1983, he became the senior pastor at Parkside Church near Cleveland, Ohio. He has written a number of books and is heard daily and weekly on the radio program, Truth For Life. His Daily Devotionals are presented here via a syndication agreement. Faith Alistair Begg October 26, 2026.

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Taken together, the developments around no neutrality point to a situation that is still moving, and the coming days should bring more clarity.