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Pastor Jay's Blog

The Spiritual Siamese Twins: Truth and Love

 

Some things were just meant to be together: Captain Kirk and Spock, meat and barbeque sauce, government and taxes. Some things, however, must be together by necessity. There is nothing about chocolate that requires peanut butter to exist. But men must have women and women must have men. We have heard it lamented before, “can’t live with ‘em; can’t live without ‘em.” Without both, the human race will soon die out.

I would like to argue that love and truth are two things that must be together by necessity. If either of them is missing in a person’s life, then neither of them is actually happening. Let me start by simply citing the different verses that pair up truth and love. Eight different times in the New Testament the very words “love” and “truth” are found together. As we’ll explore below, various aspects of the truth/love relationship are found in those verses. Here they are: 1 Corinthians 13:6; Ephesians 4:15; 2 Thessalonians 2:10; 1 Peter 1:22; 1 John 3:18; 2 John 1, 3; 3 John 1. Let’s take a closer look.

Love Needs Truth

First, let’s think about love. Sadly, due to worldly perversions of the term, we must rightly define it before we can correctly think about it. The most succinct definition of love that I can come up with is simply this: Love is doing the best thing for someone. Truth immediately enters the discussion because we are forced to answer the question, “What is the best thing for someone?” Whatever that thing is, it will truly and actually be the best for them. Therefore, the only way you will ever be able to love someone is if you can know with certainty something is best for them, and then act on it. But that moves our question back a step. How can anyone know with certainty what is truly best for someone? The answer must come from an all-knowing God. And, thanks be to God, He has spoken about what is best for people. God’s Word is abundantly clear about the what, how, why, when, and where of loving people. Therefore, your ability to love someone corresponds to how well you know the Bible.

Let’s demonstrate using God’s word.

1 Corinthians 13:6 (NASB95) — 6 [Love] does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth;

Notice that love has both a positive and negative side. To love something means that you also hate and weep over other things. Love both rejoices and weeps. Love for someone means that you hate everything that causes unrighteousness in them. And love weeps when unrighteousness has come about because a lie has been believed. The opposite side of this is that love rejoices when the truth is known and embraced. However, if truth is not known, then what a person rejoices over and weeps over becomes arbitrary and subjective. But love weeps over unrighteousness and rejoices with the truth. Therefore, love needs the truth.

1 John 3:17-18 (NASB95) — 17 But whoever has the world’s goods, and sees his brother in need and closes his heart against him, how does the love of God abide in him? Little children, let us not love with word or with tongue, but in deed and truth.

John creates a situation. A person has worldly goods but does not share with a brother in need. A question is then asked, “How does the love of God abide in him?” This is a rhetorical question and the answer is: it doesn’t. Love depends upon action that aligns with what is truly good. Love needs the truth.

2 John 6 (NASB95) — 6 And this is love, that we walk according to His commandments. This is the commandment, just as you have heard from the beginning, that you should walk in it.

John has a lot to say about love and truth. John simply says that love is only love when it is walking according to God’s commandments. Love is like a hover craft in the jungle. It won’t go anywhere until it finds a flat and smooth clearing upon which to glide. In the same way, Love can’t operate until it knows the commands of God that are for the good of His creation.

Truth Needs Love

I realize that this one will need some extra defending. It would seem that truth remains whether or not love is around or not. This is the position of the “fighting fundy” that cares not about how badly someone gets bashed by the Bible. God’s word is true and it makes no difference how poorly it is communicated.

While I understand that objective, true facts can exist without love, the Bible seems to speak about truth in a different kind of way. Truth is more than objective realities. Truth is a person. Jesus said, “I am…the truth…” Every truth is true because of who Christ is and because He is upholding those true realities. You cannot separate truth and Christ. Therefore, what you do with truth depends upon what you do with Christ. And what you do with Christ depends upon what you do with truth. Therefore, if you don’t have love for Christ and the follow-on love for people, then the truth will never have an actual place in your life. As Romans 1:18 says, unbelievers who don’t love Christ “… suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” Truth needs love.

One of the best ways to demonstrate this is to consider Satan. I believe that Satan has the whole Bible memorized. He knows the character and majesty of God. Satan has a lot of experience with truth. However, look what Jesus said about him in John 8:44b. “He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him. Whenever he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”

So, Jesus says that there is no truth in him. How can he both know the truth and have no truth in him? Because he has no love for Christ. Thus, Satan only uses truth for deceptive and destructive ends. Jesus says that this disqualifies the truth he is using.

Therefore, we must speak the truth in love, as Ephesians 4:15 says, because if that is not done, then the truth is being undermined by a lack of love. Truth exalts Christ, but there is no exalting of Christ when Jesus’s demand for love is ignored. The truth cannot be lived out if love is not being lived out. Therefore, truth needs love to have an actual place in a person’s life.

May all that we do be firmly established in both truth and love.

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