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What is the relationship between love and truth?
So many Christians measure the ‘love content’ of words and actions according to the way it makes them feel. If one feels rejected or hurt or ‘got at’ then what the other person is saying or doing is not loving. yet this seems to me to be a wholly spurious line of thinking. Love does not begin and end in feelings, rather it serves the truth. the truth is that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and that through Jesus Christ we have a way back into relationship with God. if, however, we are to walk that path back to God and then to live in a continued relationship with God we have to face the truth that there are many things in us that need to be healed or changed. It feels bloomin’ awful to be faced with the truth when that truth is our own shortcomings, but the truth sets us free because the truth reconnects us with God.
As a church leader i am not the most gentle, tea drinking, head patting man. If i believe there is an issue that is disrupting a person’s relationship with God then i will speak it out… and that is not always very popular. Many people would much rather live in the bliss of feigned ignorance (I say feigned because most often people choose not to properly address those issues and habits that stop them knowing God), rather than face the painful truth.
Yet God loves us with an everlasting love. the Bible says God is love. At the same time God is the judge of all things. There is no tension between these 2 things. God judges because he is just and he is just because he loves. His desire is not to condemn us, but through judgement to redeem us. when we are inevitably found guilty of sin we can either go down or we can accept his offer to pay the price for us so that we are made innocent by Jesus.
It is the process of gaining the awareness of sin and addressing the results of sin in our life that the disciple goes through, and it hurts. We take responsibility, and it hurts. and then we allow Jesus to put it to death on the cross. As a real Pastor i am called to lead people into a closer relationship with God for the Glory of God, and to do that i must sometimes upset them even as i am myself upset by the same process of healing and wholeness in my own life as God continues to grow me as his child and Jesus’ disciple.
The truth sets us free, and the truth hurts. we cannot measure the content of love by the lack of pain. rather we measure the content of love by whether it calls us to a closer and deeper relationship with God who is by nature love.
