Speak the Truth In Love, Part 2

31 Jan

Speak the Truth in Love, Part 2

My husband recently reminded me of an old saying that, as Christians, we are called to preach the gospel all the time and use words when necessary. It is our lives and what we communicate through our holy living and love that demonstrates to the world that we belong to Christ. It is, in fact, Christ living through us that becomes visible and shows His love to a needy world.

Jesus, Himself, told His disciples, “A new commandment I give unto you, that you love one another. As I have loved you, you also love one another. By this shall all men know that you are my disciples, if ye have love one to another” (John 13:34-35). In 2 Corinthians 3:2-3 Paul describes Christians as “our epistle written in our hearts, known and read of all men… manifestly declared to be the epistle of Christ ministered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart.”

1 John 4: 11-13 further discloses that our charity for one another is authentication of our own individual relationship with God. “Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another. No man has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God dwells in us, and His love is perfected in us. Hereby know we that we dwell in Him, and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit.”

In the New Testament we are exhorted repeatedly to not only follow the commandment of Christ to love one another, but also to the practice of compassion, sincerity, sobriety, purity, and examples of mature faith, love, and patience. Titus 2 confirms this need among older men and women, adding “teachers of good things” to younger women by older women. Young men are also told to live above reproach (Titus 2:6-8). I Timothy 4:12 extends a similar list of character traits for the young pastor, “Let no man despise your youth, but be an example of the believers, in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity.”

It is only out of a heart filled with the unifying righteousness and love of Christ that we are able to speak the truth in love Ephesians 4:15-16 describes:

“But speaking the truth in love, [that the body of Christ] may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ, from whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplies, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, makes increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love.”