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God Is Love 11


Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. (John 14:6)

“God’s truthfulness means that he is the true God, and that all his knowledge and words are both true and the final standard of truth.” (Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology, 195)

          This seems to me to go hand-in-hand with wisdom. Love deals with truth. Our society screams “I want the truth,” but when it is told the truth, it can’t handle the truth. It’s very hard this morning not to get side-tracked with examples of this. Love deals with the truth. It doesn’t pretend that something that someone is doing is OK when it’s not because that person enjoys the something or wants the something. It deals with that something, and the someone in light of the truth. Of course, part of the trouble we face is the question of how we are to know what is true. My number one answer to that is: Scriptural principles. What God’s Word says is true is true, even if I don’t want to believe it. My number two answer is the flip side of that. What the world – what society says is true can generally be understood to not be true unless it corresponds to Scripture. Too often, we are told “the science is settled” on something that happens to conveniently correspond to Post-Modern philosophy, which claims there is no truth and then propounds that something is “scientifically proven” to be true. Um…. 
          Today, I am trying to love by facing the perception others have that my insistence on what I believe to be true is unloving, because 1) they don’t agree with me, and 2) I can be more than a little stubborn and rather tactless, particular toward people that I see as attacking a person instead of the person’s ideas. I do not put other people’s feelings ahead of what I believe to be truth. If I did so, I would not be loving them. It seems to me to be a fine line, and I agree that I am not always especially good at knowing where both my feet, my mouth, and that line are. 
         If I am going to love, if anyone is going to love, we must deal from truth, with truth, in truth because lies separate. The truth and love together bring together. I’m going to have to work on being gentler in telling the truth without ever backing down from what Scripture declares to be truth – because that is what love does.

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