Luke 14:26 LOVE AND HATE?

Luke 14:26, “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.”

Dr. John R. Rice, in Luke, The Son of Man1, explains it well:
“… the meaning is that love for Christ and loyalty to Him should so far exceed all other loves and loyalties, that they can hardly be expressed in the same terms. If you say that you love your father and mother and love God, that puts God and parents in about the same relationship, and that is not what Jesus requires. So here, to hate father and mother and wife and children and brothers and your own life also does not mean malice. It does not mean one should dishonor his parents. This Scripture does not here contradict the plain statement of Ephesians 5:25, that a husband is to love his wife, as Christ loved the church and gave Himself for it. As a car at sixty miles an hour passes a car at twenty miles an hour “as if it were standing still,” so the love for Christ and loyalty for Christ so should supersede all other relationships of life, as to not even be labeled with the same terms … If people are to have the love and loyalty that will let them burn at the stake for Christ, be torn by wild beasts, be tortured on the rack, or eaten by cannibals — as many have been — then they must have a drastic love and loyalty for Christ not measurable by human comparisons.”

The key to having Spirit empowered life is real love for the one that saved us from Hell! This real love will make a Christian what God intended: a vessel fit for the Master to use.
“And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.” Deuteronomy 6:5

1Luke, The Son of Man, Dr. John R. Rice, Sword of the Lord Publishers, 1971, Pg. 352.