August 31, 2007
Feeling the Love
Not only does the truth hurt, it’s often friend-costly. There are times I struggle with finding a balance in ‘speaking the truth’ and ‘speaking the truth in love’. Although Paul instructs us to speak the truth in love, he also understood the cost of truth. Writing to the Galatians he said, “Have I now become your enemy by telling you the truth?” (Gal 4:16 NIV) Apparently the other guy doesn’t always sense the love.
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Gail;
-----Maybe it is like the old question of “wisdom” from our high school days: If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make any noise? If the truth is spoken in love, and there is no understanding to receive it, will there be any good effect?
-----This whole question bothered me until I focused some serious pondering on what is love. We take that idea for granted maybe more than any other. I have concluded that, stated in simplest terms, love is the ambition to do what is truly good to the loved one. Love does not park in the emotion. It may begin as an emotion, but if it does not move from there through the mind and develop into a thought process exploring both the truth about what is good for the other person and the actual means and ability of the self to deliver that good, it is not love. Love always seeks after the truth, and it always seeks the proper relating of the self to the other.
-----The truth may be that the self does not have the means to deliver what the other needs. Sometimes there is not the understanding in the other to grasp a truth that really does need to be told. If that truth is still told, and a misunderstanding is magnified, then has good been the effect just because good was the intent? Would it not have been better to work with the other to increase his ability to understand, rather than pitching the truth into the dark?
-----God certainly worked on the understanding of both man and angels in delivering the truth about the mystery of salvation. He did not jump up in front of Eve the moment she bit into the apple, slap His Son on the cross, torture Him to death, throw His body into a hole, yank it out alive, tell her she has to believe in Him, and go home to His throne. No! How many years did He take in developing understanding by making demonstrations in human history and His interaction with it?
-----I believe love has the patience to be kind and do what it can to develop understanding before delivering a raw truth. Love is not rude about it. Nor is it self seeking. But it seeks to protect and to preserve both the truth and those who need to hear it. So, when love delivers the truth, its delivery will be careful enough to do less damage than good. I believe that if the damaging effect is greater than the benefit of the truth, then love will be patient for a better time to reveal it. For Paul told the Ephesians to both tell the truth and to do it in love, not to do one or the other.
-----This places a tremendous burden of responsibility upon us. We must not only be responsible in properly assessing the actual truth of what we know and think to tell, but we must also be responsible in knowing the difference between detrimental results and beneficial results of telling it. What looks to be damage can really be the demolition and clearing of impropriety to ready the foundation for building what is proper. But what looks to be beneficial can be an augmentation of what is improper. Everything that is sweet is not candy - antifreeze for example.
-----The truth is, we live in an imperfect world. We never have done anything perfectly here, and we never will. Therefore, few things we do result in good alone, and no damage. Eventually the truth must be told, and if there is at least some understanding there to receive it, there will at least be some good effect. Just make sure the economics are right, that there is at least enough good done in telling it to be worth any damage.
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