Lo-Truth-ve
Have you ever struggled balancing truth and love? I know I have. It seems the two are often placed on opposite ends of a continuum and we’re sliding the dial in one direction or the other. Too much love and we’re selling out or too much truth and nobody cares to listen. It’s like I’m conditioned to think of truth and love as two little brothers always together but seldom in agreement?
In all the volleying between truth and love, I tend to forget that the admonition is “speaking the truth in love.” Love and truth aren’t the guardrails along the path of Christian ethics; they’re the very means by which the path is traveled.
Both truth and love are loaded words in our vernacular making it a challenge to understand the interdependence of the two. Maybe a holdover from the culture wars or just collateral damage from a position of power, truth has become synonymous with a referee’s penalty flag. I’ve been guilty so many times of reducing truth to actions not in line with the Christian ethic and throwing my flag with subjective resolution.
Love on the other hand is often portrayed as the opposite of truth. If I love people as they are, I’m turning an eye to sin or worse condoning it. Love is soft and weak; perhaps even dangerous. The beginning slide on a downhill slope that will inevitably lead to the moral degradation of oneself and others.
Herein lies the challenge we face in successfully reuniting these two terms that have unfortunately grown apart. Truth and love are like two old friends who gradually grew apart but now looking back, can’t even remember the original conflict. When truth becomes the penalty flag, it’s truth and love that take the hit.
The Psalmist in 119:2 says, “Happy are those who keep His decrees and seek Him with all their heart.” Did we hear that? Happy! God’s truth is a source of delight; like a glass of tea on a hot summer day. If we have an unending source of refreshment would love not compel us to joyfully share it with the thirsty? Would the loving thing not be to uphold the truth as the source of abundant life and pull others up rather than using truth to hold others down?
Truth in love is such a beautiful thing and I believe our only way forward if our desire is to impact a culture for Christ. But that is a question we’ll all have to answer. Is our desire to impact our culture for Christ and help our brothers and sisters grow in Christ-likeness? Or has truth become the leverage by which we compare ourselves to others or worse protect our control over a culture?
But speaking the truth in love, let us grow in every way into Him who is the head- Christ. Ephesians 4:15