Biblical love compels us to share the truth.
If you pay any attention to network news or social media, you have surely heard the expression “hate speech.” Several proposals for legislation that would outlaw unpopular words and ideas are currently pending. Among many of our society’s thought leaders, demands for government restrictions on free speech are steadily becoming more passionate and more popular than ever. After all, who wants to hear or read words that actually promote and glorify hatred?
But clear, workable definitions of hate speech are missing from the discussion. In the minds of many, simply stating facts that contradict popular narratives constitutes hate speech. Quote a verse where Scripture says homosexuality is sin; point out that biological sex and gender are synonymous and designated by God; or criticize any of the radical public policies that overthrow some long-established moral standard and you willbe sharply castigated as unfeeling or unloving. You might even get banned from Facebook or Twitter for your opinion.
The underlying assumption is that truthand love are incompatible values. Indeed, as Western culture becomes more and more secularized, those two virtues are being radically redefined and perverted in a way that deliberately sets them against one another.
Love, of course, is the subject of countless popular songs and stories. In a trend that goes back at least to the sexual revolution of the 1960s, every hint of moral purity has been systematically purged from the popular understanding of the concept. So the word love is routinely used to signify every corrupt affection from mawkish sentiment to seriously perverted lust. The result is that the dominant notion of love in fashionable culture today has virtually nothing in common with the biblical idea—because authentic love, according to 1 Corinthians 13:6, “does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.”
Truth? That word has likewise been twisted and tortured—and sometimes used to signify the polar opposite of what it is supposed to mean. Stylish ideas like Darwinism and critical race theory are widely treated as self-evident. Blatant falsehoods are widely embraced as “settled scientific truth.” These range from the transparently bogus claim that life came from nonlife billions of years ago to the equally unscientific notion that human gender is nonbinary and infinitely fluid. That’s not all. The simple question of whether two plus two really equals four is currently being debated in earnest by people whose job is to teach math.
Ask anyone whose worldview has been shaped by these distorted ideas to name some objective truth they are certain about, and you are almost guaranteed to hear an echo of Pilate’s cynical question, “What is truth?” (John 18:38).
Personal feelings and individual preferences automatically trump both sound logic and established facts in just about every debate.
Indeed, the central canon of postmodern belief is that objective truth cannot be known with any degree of unwavering certainty. In practice, how a person feels about a truth-claim is far more important than the question of whether it is factually true. Truth is thus being subjugated to human sentiment. Personal feelings and individual preferences automatically trump both sound logic and established facts in just about every debate.
That’s why people commonly speak of “my truth” and “your truth”—as if truth could be made to order for each person. Facts don’t even matter if you feel strongly enough about your point of view. A recent article in the New York Times noted “the tensions between a student’s deeply felt sense of personal truth and facts that are at odds with [that personal truth].”1 The article implied (and there is no shortage of people today who emphatically believe) that it’s OK to ignore facts that refute popular or passionately held opinions. Call your opinion “my truth,” and all debate must end. The result is that the word truth has little meaning anymore for most people.
That is why those who defend facts and truth when they contradict popular opinion are not only told they are wrong, but are typically derided as unkind, unfeeling, overly harsh, and intolerant. Love and truth have not simply been redefined—the new definitions have been weaponized against real love and authentic truth.
But sometimes the best way to love your neighbor is to challenge a false belief that is holding him in confusion, discouragement, or some worse state of spiritual bondage. The idea that it is unloving to defend truth or confront lies is one of the arrogant opinions of this postmodern age that needs to be torn down (2 Corinthians 10:5).
Symbiosis
Scripture teaches that love and truth are perfectly symbiotic. Try to separate truth from love or vice versa, and you destroy both virtues. Either virtue without its mate is merely a pretense. Love without truth has no character. Truth without love has no power. Love deprived of truth quickly deteriorates into sinful self-love. Truth divorced from love always breeds sanctimonious self-righteousness. Truth absent from love is harsh and heartless. Love from absent truth is hollow and hypocritical.
Try to separate truth from love or vice versa, and you destroy both virtues.
Nowhere in Scripture is the essential connection between these two cardinal virtues more clearly highlighted than in 2 John. Love and truth are the key words in that brief 13-verse epistle.
John was the perfect apostle to write on this theme. Jesus had nicknamed John and his brother James “Boanerges, that is, Sons of Thunder” (Mark 3:17)—doubtless because of their fiery zeal for the truth. At first, their passion was not always tempered with love, and we see a glimpse of that in Luke 9:54 when they wanted to call down fire from heaven upon a village of Samaritans who had rebuffed Christ.
In later years, however, John distinguished himself as the Apostle of Love, specially highlighting the theme of love in his gospel and in all three of his epistles.
And yet, as we see in all of his epistles, he never lost his zeal for the truth. He did, however, learn to keep it wedded to a proper, Christlike love.
John’s second epistle was addressed to “the elect lady and her children”—most likely an esteemed Christianmatriarch who had the means and the desire to make her home and hospitality available to itinerant missionaries, church planters, and teachers in the early church. Extending such hospitality was a tangible way she could fulfill the Lord’s New Commandment.
She was probably familiar with John’s first epistle, where he warned “that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come” (1 John 2:18, 22; 4:3). Such men were “false prophets”—teachers who claimed to be believers but whose teaching undermined true faith. And many of them had already gone out all over the known world (1 John 4:1).
For this woman whose ministry entailed showing kindness to strangers, those were unsettling words. Could she no longer show hospitality indiscriminately? What was the loving response to someone who claimed to be a brother in Christ but taught the doctrine of antichrist?
She had evidently written John personally to ask. The epistle is his reply.
Walk in Truth by Manifesting Christlike Love
Verses 1–5 of 2 John highlight the symbiotic nature of love and truth, and John affirmed the primacy of love. “All who [genuinely] know the truth” dolove. (Verse 1 is an echo of 1 John 3:14and its cross-references.) Love itself is at the heart of all truth, because love is just what the truth demands. Love is the perfect fulfillment of all our Lord’s commandments (cf. Romans 13:10; Galatians 5:14). In no way did John want this woman or any other reader of the epistle to think for a moment that what he was about to say would denigrate the importance of love. Love, after all, is the New Commandment, given by Christ himself (2 John 1:5).
There are, of course, people nowadays who claim to be defending the truth by spewing hate. You see them on the news from time to time. They plaster angry messages on placards and picket funerals or otherwise target distressed people in a purposely hostile way—all while claiming to do God’s work. They are usually religious fanatics so enthralled with the themes of human guilt, divine wrath, the curse of the law, and eternal punishment that they never talk about anything else.
That makes a mockery of truth and brings a reproach in the eyes of the world against anyone who genuinely loves the truth. At best, these angry people, whose messages are merely slogans that fit on bumper stickers or protest signs, are proclaiming half-truths. And Satan himself—the father of lies—is a master at half-truths.
To declare a truth (especially a partial truth) in an unloving way or with unloving motives is, frankly, an assault on truth. Acts 16 gives a fitting illustration of this principle. Paul was in Philippi with his missionary team. They were “met by a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners much gain by fortune-telling” (Acts 16:16). Luke wrote, “She followed Paul and us, crying out, ‘These men are servants of the Most High God, who proclaim to you the way of salvation.’ And this she kept doing for many days. Paul, having become greatly annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, ‘I command you in the name of JesusChrist to come out of her’” (Acts 16:17–18).
Why did Paul silence her? Because in the mouth of a demon, even the truth is a blasphemy and an embarrassment. It is never good when some wantonly evil person pretends to be a proclaimer of gospel truth.
It’s even worse when the message is given in a spirit of hostility, condescension, arrogance, or contempt for one’s neighbors. Such attitudes are fruits of falsehood and human pride. They have nothing whatsoever to do with truth.
Indeed, the singular, distinctive fruit of truth is love—compassionate love; brotherly love; humble, warm-hearted, self-giving love; the kind of love embodied in the sacrifice of Christ: “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).
Love is therefore the supreme test of whether we are really walking in truth, and no one makes this point more clearly or more frequently than the Apostle John.
Whoever loves his brother abides in the light, and in him there is no cause for stumbling. But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks in the darkness, and does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded his eyes. (1 John 2:10–11)
We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brothers. Whoever does not love abides in death. Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him. (1 John 3:14–15)
Anyone who does not love does not know God. (1 John 4:8)
If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar. (1 John 4:20)
In other words, even if you can quote true statements, the truth is not in you at all if there is no love in you. Love is the fruit and the evidence that we are truly walking in the light.
Manifest Christlike Love by Safeguarding Truth
Halfway through 2 John, the epistle takes a dramatic turn. John pivots from the theme of love and begins to emphasize the equal importance of upholding truth. He reiterates the necessity of being on guard against deceivers and antichrists, for there are many (v. 7). He explains how to distinguish such people from authentic believers (v. 9).
All of this repeats in shorthand form the things he had already said in 1 John. Verses 10–11 are the only completely new content in this epistle. This is therefore the main point that John wants to address in this letter. It is John’s inspired answer to the question that seems to have prompted him to write the epistle in the first place: “If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your house or give him any greeting, for whoever greets him takes part in his wicked works” (2 John 1:10–11).
He calls for a strict separation between the people of God and anyone who comes in Christ’s name but denies Christ’s essential teaching.
John isn’t talking about simple matters of disagreement between brothers and sisters in Christ. He is not giving a mandate for speaking rudely to people, being hateful to one’s theological adversaries, or doing anything else that would violate the principle of 2 Timothy 2:24–26: “The Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kind to everyone . . . correcting his opponents with gentleness.”
But there’s no mincing of words here. He instructs the woman to withhold both hospitality and honor from itinerant teachers who deny essential matters of the Christian faith. She is not to open her home to them, neither is she to bestow on them any favor or tribute that might encourage them in their evil mission.
May we learn what it means to ground our love in the truth.
Love—love for the truth and love for souls—demands such a response to dangerous falsehoods. To the postmodern mind, that may seem like no love at all, but it embodies the best, deepest love for Christ. May we learn what it means to ground our love in the truth. Whether proclaiming the truth of a literal six-day creation, the guidelines given in God’s Word for marriage between a man and woman, or the biblical view of one human race, may we not succumb to the pressure of our age to spurn or subjugate Christ’s truth under a false and foggy notion of love.
Phil Johnson is Executive Director of Grace to You, the media ministry of John MacArthur. Phil is an elder and teacher at Grace Community Church, Sun Valley, CA. He founded and maintains The Spurgeon Archive and The Hall of Church History.
- We must speak the truth in love to our own hearts. Proverbs 27:19 says, “As in water face reflects a face, so a man’s heart reveals the man.” How can we help someone else if we aren’t being honest with ourselves first? Are we seeing clearly or are we clouded by bitterness or resentment? (See Matthew 7:1-5).
- We must speak the truth in love in our homes.This certainly does not mean that I have to speak my mind on every subject that comes up in a given day. But it does mean that if a child or a spouse or anyone else living in the home has an ongoing pattern of wrong attitudes or actions, then I am to address it.
- We must speak the truth in love in our houses of worship.This would include anyone who belongs to Christ. We have cited Matthew 18 already, so suffice it to say that when there is an offense, we have a responsibility to go to that person, and then make sure we follow through the steps if there is no repentance.
- We must speak the truth in love in our hostile world.Please know that practicing this will no doubt incur persecution and hatred. Jesus has given us full warning of this in John 15:18-25.
How Do We Speak the Truth in Love?
We should pray before, during, and after our conversation with them. Pray that God would open their heart to hear truth, pray while you’re speaking that your words would not fall on deaf ears or a hard heart, and pray afterward that the dear Holy Spirit would do the work of conviction of sin and lead them to repentance.
Coupled with prayer is patience, as Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 5:14.
What is the Result of Speaking the Truth in Love?
Paul gives us several results in 2 Timothy 2:25-26. The first fruit mentioned is repentance, which is a turning from sin. Paul mentions another result is that the person we’re speaking to may come to their senses. This means to change their thinking like one awakened out of a deep sleep. Another result is to escape the snare of the devil. This is a reference to his tricks. Many do not realize they are being held captive by the evil one.
“Speaking the truth in love” is a popular phrase which is used often in Christian circles, but are we actually doing it effectively for the glory of God? Speaking the truth in love in a post-truth world is challenging, but a wise Christian will remember the wisdom of Solomon’s words in Proverbs 8:7, “For my mouth will speak truth; wickedness is an abomination to my lips.”
God addresses five major aspects of love in His Word and God wants you to grow in each one. As you grow in each one, you will begin to experience more and more the abundant life He has planned for you.
- Receiving love from God. This is being able to recognize when God is loving you whether you are on the mountain or in the valley, whether things are going right or going wrong. God’s ultimate demonstration of love was through Jesus Christ on the cross, but He also continues to demonstrate His love to you in other ways in your life.
- Expressing love to God. This is where you demonstrate your commitment and dedication to God with your whole life: the way you think, feel, and behave.
- Expressing love to others. Throughout God’s Word we are told to love our neighbor, love one another, speak the truth in love, and love our enemies. God is pouring His love into you so you can love others no matter who they are.
- Receiving love from others. It’s one thing to love others and a complete different thing to let others love you. God wants you to receive love from others. Let them speak the truth in love to you, let them encourage you, let them bless you, let them correct you, let them help you get back on the right path.
- Learning to love yourself. This is seeing yourself the way God sees you. This is seeing yourself as valuable, precious, and worth saving. We are not talking about being selfish, but we are seeing ourselves as set apart. You see yourself as more than a conquer in Christ and as someone who has a significant purpose in life designed by God.
Today, we are going to focus on the first aspect of love. We want to focus on receiving love from God and understanding what God’s love is like.
Aspects of Love | Key Scriptures |
Receiving love from God
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“We know how dearly God loves us, because he has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love.” Romans 5:5
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Expressing love to God |
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.” Matthew 22:37
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Expressing love to others
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“Love your neighbor as yourself.” Matthew 22:39
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Receiving love from others
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“Love each other in the same way I have loved you.” John 15:12
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Humbly loving yourself
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“Love your neighbor as yourself.” Matthew 22:39
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One of the first truths you need to understand is in 1 John 4:8 which clearly and simply states that “God is love” (NLT). That’s His nature. That’s His character. Everything He does is out of love. Everything He doesn’t do is out of love. To understand what it means to have a God whose essence is love we need to wrap our minds around some incredible truths about God’s love.
God’s love is Uncaused
Number one, God’s love is uncaused. Sometimes experiences in life will falsely teach you that you must earn love or that others must earn your love. This false idea of love is seen when you must meet certain standards or conditions that will cause others to love you because of your good actions, attributes, or attractiveness. This is a weight we were not created to carry.
In many relationships, we generally do not love those who show unattractive or repelling actions or attributes. But God’s love for us is not like that: it is free, spontaneous, unprompted and uninfluenced. There is nothing we can do to cause God to love us, and there is nothing we can do to prevent Him from loving us. God’s love is uncaused. God loves us simply because He is God, not because we have done anything to cause it. God’s love is uncaused.
Listen carefully, nothing you will ever do could make God love you more than He does right now: not great achievement, not greater beauty, not greater intelligence, not great wisdom, not greater sacrifice, not greater levels of spiritual maturity. God’s love is uncaused. Nothing you have ever done could make God love you any less: not any sin, not any failure, not any guilt, not any regret or not any mistake. God’s love is uncaused.
This is what Paul is trying to explain in 2 Timothy 1:9, “For God saved us [that’s an expression of God’s love] and called us to live a holy life. He did this, not because we deserved it, but because that was his plan from before the beginning of time – to show us his grace through Christ Jesus” (NLT). Then we read in Ephesians 1:5, “God decided in advance [uncaused by you] to adopt us into his own family [expression of His love] by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure” (NLT). God’s love is uncaused. He loves you because that was His plan and He loves you because He wanted to.
Because God is God, He does as He pleases, and it pleases Him to love us without cause. Think of the first days of the first man and woman ever to exist. God made Adam and Eve, so they brought Him no secrets or surprises. They could offer Him nothing He did not already have. He loved them simply because it was His plan to do so. From the beginning of time, God does not love us because we love Him. According to 1 John 4, “We love because he first loved us” (CSV). God’s love is uncaused.
God’s love is Unreasonable
Number two, God’s love is unreasonable. I’m not using the word unreasonable in the derogatory sense. Let me explain.
From the day Adam and Eve sinned against God, mankind has continued to rebel, to drift away from Him, and to break every commandment given to us for our good. It would seem we have given back to God nothing but disappointment and heartbreak. Throughout the Bible and world history and your history – we see that if God has responded to us reasonably and reacted the way we do, He would have abandoned or destroyed humanity long ago.
This is why I say that God’s love is unreasonable. So while His love seems unreasonable, it is not irrational; it bears divine reason, which our finite human minds cannot comprehend. God said in Isaiah 55:8, “’My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,’ says the Lord. ‘And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine’” (NLT).
This unreasonable love is seen in Romans 5:6-8, “When we were utterly helpless, Christ came at just the right time and died for us sinners [unreasonable]. 7 Now, most people would not be willing to die for an upright person, though someone might perhaps be willing to die for a person who is especially good. 8 But God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us while we were still sinners [unreasonable]” (NLT). It makes more sense that a person would lay down their life to save a good person. That seems reasonable. However, to lay down your life for a bad person who is mean, rebellious, stubborn, and selfish does not make any sense. It’s unreasonable. But that’s what Jesus did on the cross for you.
God’s love is Unending
God’s love is uncaused. God’s love is unreasonable. Number three, God’s love is unending. The unending nature of God’s love is inseparably connected with God’s eternal nature, which is revealed in several places throughout the Bible.
- Genesis 21 describes God as “the Eternal God” (v.33, NLT).
- In Revelation 1 God is described as “the Alpha and the Omega – the beginning and the end” and “the one who is, who always was, and who is still to come – the Almighty One” (v.8, NLT).
- Psalm 90:2 says, “… from beginning to end, you are God” (NLT).
All those statements speak of God’s eternal nature. They tell us that He always existed and will always exist.
Unlike us, He is not limited by time or space, because He created them both.
- Because He created time and stands above it, He has immediate access to the entire scope of time from beginning to end.
- Because He created space and stands above it, He can be at all places in the universe simultaneously.
He transcends the ticking of the clock and pinpointing on the map. We cannot even imagine these mind-bending concepts because none of us have ever taken a step outside of time or space. This is part of what makes God… God.
However, God’s love reflects His eternal nature. God Himself tells us in Jeremiah 31:3, “I have loved you with an everlasting love” (CSV). God’s love goes on and on and on. You may have been loved by someone and that someone stopped loving you. That will never happen with God’s love toward you. He is not going to walk out on you. He is not going to abandon you. He is not going to leave you helpless. God has an everlasting love.
Romans 8:38-39 says, “I’m absolutely convinced that nothing—nothing living or dead, angelic or demonic, today or tomorrow, high or low, thinkable or unthinkable—absolutely nothing can get between us and God’s love because of the way that Jesus our Master has embraced us” (Msg). God’s love is on you and in you so strongly, so tightly, so permentately that nothing can remove it, nothing can shake it, nothing can break it, nothing can come between God’s love and you. God’s love is everlasting.
God’s love is Unchanging
Number four, God’s love is unchanging. God wants you to know that He is unchanging, perfectly consistent, and eternally unwavering. There is one thing that will always remain constant and that’s the character of God. God does not love you on Thursday, but not on Friday. God does not love you when you are good but changes His mind about you when you are bad. God’s love does not change.
- God said in Malachi, “I am the Lord, and I do not change” (3:6, NLT).
- The psalmist declared to God, ‘You are always the same” (Psalm 102:27, NLT).
- James simply stated about God, “He never changes” (1:17, NLT).
What a wonderful thought to know that because God is unchanging, His love is unchanging. God’s love is constant in its faithfulness and continual in its expression; it neither diminishes nor disappears, regardless of our circumstances.
Nothing that has happened or will happen could dislodge Jesus’ tenacious attachment to you. He is a living picture of the unchanging love I’m describing. His love is perfect and always has been perfect, meaning it never varies, grows, or diminishes. In other words, the love He will have for you in the future will never be greater or lesser than the love He has for you now. And His love for you now is no lesser or greater than it has been for eternity past. His love for you is nothing less than constant, unchanging, and eternal.
There is a good side and a better side to God’s unchanging love. The good side is that God will not wake up in the morning and decide He’s had enough of you. The better side is that even when we wake up in the morning and decide we’ve had enough of Him, He will still love us. God’s love is unchanging.
God’s love is Unconditional
Number five, God’s love is unconditional. God’s love does not have conditions that must be met before He will love you. God loves does not say, “I will love you if….” There are no “ifs” with God’s love. You will never hear or see God say, “I will love you if you go to church” or “I will love you if you stop doing this or that sin” or “I will love you if you start being nicer” or “I will love you if you are more generous” or “I will love you if you do this or that.” That’s not God’s kind of love. He loves you simply because He loves you. God’s love is unconditional.
Listen to what Deuteronomy 7:7 has to say to a group of people, “The Lord did not set his heart on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other nations, for you were the smallest of all nations! Rather, it was simply that the Lord loves you…” (vs.7-8, NLT).
You don’t have to do anything to be loved by God, you already are. You don’t have to change a thing, God already loves you. You don’t need to add anything to your life or take anything away, He already loves you. You can’t earn God’s love in any form or fashion. God’s love is unconditional.
Conclusion
God loves is uncaused, unreasonable, unending, unchanging, and unconditional. What is our response to this kind of love?
I think our first response needs to be to believe God’s love. 1 John 4:16, “And we have come to know and to believethe love that God has for us” (CSV). It’s one thing to have knowledge about God’s love and a complete other thing to believe it. When you believe in God’s love and are convinced God’s love is real, genuine, and personally applied to you it changes the way you think about God and yourself, it changes the way you feel and behave. Look, I realize there have been people in your life who said, “I love you.” They may have meant it at the time or simply said it because they wanted something from you, but God’s love is not like that. It’s pure and holy and genuine and unchanging and real. You can believe this love.
I think a second response would be to express God’s love. There is something wonderful that happens as you know and believe in God’s love, you begin to express it toward others. 1 John 4:11, “Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other. No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love is brought to full expression in us” (vs. 11-12, NLT). In other words, the people in our lives will get a glimpse of what God looks like as He loves them through you. There is something about being loved that causes you to be more loving.
He who rebukes a man will afterward find more favor than he who flatters with the tongue.
–Proverbs 28:23
In 1 Corinthians 13:5-6, the Apostle Paul wrote, “[Love] does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth.”
First, love “does not take into account a wrong suffered.” The Greek word used here is an accounting term that means to put a debit in a financial ledger. Recordkeeping is essential for personal business, but it is lethal in personal relationships. If you are always keeping a list of things people owe you for offenses they have committed against you, then you are going to have a hard time keeping harmony in those relationships. Instead, we are to treat other people the way God treats us. In Romans 4:8, Paul said, “Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord will not take into account.” Aren’t you grateful that there is no ledger in Heaven keeping a list of all of the offenses you have committed against God? If you are a Christian, that ledger has been destroyed; it has been erased by the blood of Jesus Christ.
Second, love “does not rejoice in unrighteousness.” That does not mean love does not enjoy sin. This verse is talking about how you feel about the misfortune of other people, especially your enemies. In the book of Proverbs, Solomon addressed this very clearly. He said in Proverbs 17:5, “He who rejoices at calamity will not go unpunished.” We are never to take pleasure in the misfortune of other people. God will not let that sin go unpunished. True love does not rejoice in the misfortune of other people.
Finally, love “rejoices with the truth.” Many people think that if you love somebody, you will withhold the truth to avoid offending that person. But that is not what the Bible says. If you truly love somebody, you are going to share the truth. Love means telling people what they need to hear, not what they want to hear. A lot of times we confuse truth and flattery. We are hesitant to tell people what they need to hear because we do not want to risk hurting our reputation or hurting the relationship. Yet did you know the Bible says that not telling the truth is a sign of hatred for another person? In Proverbs 26:28, Solomon said, “A lying tongue hates those it crushes, and a flattering mouth works ruin.”
When you flatter somebody, you are more interested in yourself than you are in the well-being of that other person. You are trying to get something out of them. You are trying to keep a relationship going for your own benefit. You tell them what they want to hear rather than what they need to hear. The truth is the most loving thing you can share with someone. Proverbs 28:23 says that in the end, people appreciate frankness more than flattery: “He who rebukes a man will afterward find more favor than he who flatters with the tongue.” True love tells the truth, even when that truth hurts.
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What the Bible Teaches
But the Bible teaches us to “Speak the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15). It’s difficult for many of us to balance truth and love. In the Bible God speaks the truth in love to us. More than that he takes on flesh in Jesus Christ who brings us the fullness of God’s grace and truth (John 1:14, 17).
As we grow to rely on God’s love and truth through Jesus Christ as our source of personal security and confidence it empowers us to be honest with others so that we can speak the truth in love to them as God does with us. “We love because [God] first loved us,” the Bible says (1 John 4:19). We need to learn how to take God’s love inside our person and learn to let it nourish us. (The first way we normally experience this is through Christ’s Ambassadors, as Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 5:20.) Then with God’s help we can learn in our relationships to be honest and direct and yet also calm, gracious and respectful.
Ask for Empathy
In marriage counseling, as well as in individual psychotherapy, we show people how to resolve their conflicts by communicating in this way: “When you do A, I experience B.” For instance, a wife might say to her busy husband: “When you take cell phone calls during dinner I feel unimportant. It’s disappointing to have our time together interrupted. I feel set aside, like I don’t matter much to you.”
Notice that in saying, “I feel…” you’re not speaking about your perceptionsof other people, but your emotions.Except for a brief reference to what happened (what he or she did to trigger your emotion) you’re not focusing on the other person’s behavior; instead you’re asking him or her to understand your personal experience. Take the posture ofinviting the other to understand what it’s like to be you.
Being honest with others in a gentle way invites empathy, builds trust and bonding, and facilitates reconciling after a conflict. It’s not just a skill to learn — it’s the character of Christ to develop.
“ … speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ” (Ephesians 4:15).
It’s easy to miss the substance of what Paul writes in this verse both because it is such a well-known scripture, and because most major English versions of the Bible translate it in essentially the same way. The idea of “speaking the truth in love” has thus taken on a kind of life of its own – a kind of poster scripture for the idea of spiritual “tough love,” which is based in concern, but doesn’t hold back on the truth.
To some extent, this idea is contained within what Paul writes in Ephesians 4, but it is only a small part of it at best. If we look more closely at verse 15 and consider it in context, we see the verse carries far more meaning – both specifically and in a broader general sense. Looking at the context of “speaking the truth in love” is not as obvious as it may sound in regular Bible reading because the context actually begins quite a few verses earlier. But we need not guess what the context is. If we patiently read backwards from verse 15 we will come upon the specific subject Paul was discussing, and we find that subject in verses 11-12:
“So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up”
If that doesn’t immediately connect in our minds with “speaking the truth in love,” notice the very next verse (Ephesians 4:13):
“until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ”
Do you see it? Verses 11 and 12 say Christ gave the various offices of the Church to prepare and equip his people for service – until we come to maturity in him (vs. 13), which is exactly the reason Paul gives in verse 15 for speaking the truth in love.
But let’s look at that expression a little more closely. The Greek Paul wrote is “alētheuontes de en agapē” which is literally “being true, yet in love.” The first word there – a form of alētheuō – can mean to speak the truth, teach the truth, or live the truth. This is important because the second meaning – to teach the truth – is obviously involved in the context of Ephesians 4. Paul is talking about the various types of preachers and teachers in the Church, and he doesn’t just mean they should not lie, but that they should teach the truth – that’s how the Church then grows into the stature of Christ (vs. 15).
Notice that the third meaning of alētheuō is that of living the truth. This may apply in this verse also. Clearly, it is only as we live the truth, not just profess it, that we grow towards the stature of Christ. That is why the Revised version, in Ephesians 4:15, gives an alternate translation of “speaking the truth” as “to deal truly,” and the Douay Rheims version translates it “doing the truth in charity.” The Amplified Version expands on this aspect of the verse by paraphrasing: “let our lives lovingly express truth [in all things, speaking truly, dealing truly, living truly]” (AMPC).
So when we look closely at Ephesians 4:15, the focus of the verse in context is one of the responsibility for those who handle the word of God to teach the truth, and the responsibility all of us have to make truth a part of our lives of love. The emphasis is not on our telling others the truth they need to hear – as in the “tough love” kind of truth we give – but on the true love kind of truth we live.
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