Don’t Pit Love Against the Truth
Introduction
You meet a friend for coffee. You’ve known him or her since your time together in the youth group and have tried to keep the friendship alive over the last few years. Over the conversation you find out your friend has been living with their significant other for almost a year even though they aren’t married. Your friend still claims to be a Christian and have a close relationship with God despite only going to the big megachurch in town once in the last three years. What should you do? Should you run away out of fear their sin will get on you? Should you smile and pretend like their sin doesn’t bother you? What should a Christian do?
Well, the answer that all Christians agreed upon until five minutes ago was to encourage your friend to repent, stop fornicating, and start attending a healthy church. But we don’t do that stuff anymore. We’re afraid that if we speak too much truth, we won’t be loving enough. We remember from high school Chemistry that the fifth law of thermodynamics states, “truth and love cannot coexist; you must choose between one or the other.” That’s why Christians seek to obey the eleventh commandment. You know the one that says if you’re having trouble with the first ten, just be nice!
I hope to explain with this article why not speaking the truth is the most unloving thing of all. First, I will explain how virtues like love can turn evil. Second, I will show how modern notions of love no longer match up with the biblical definitions. Third, I will briefly address the topic of tone before giving my conclusion.
Virtue and Vice and Everything Nice
Love, kindness, and compassion are distinctly Christian virtues. Christians should pursue these virtues so much that we should wear kindness and compassion like they’re shirts in our closet (Col 3:12). We can say the same for love. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13:13, “But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love.” Christians should pursue love as one of the greatest virtues.
A few nights ago, I watched on YouTube a proposal of how the Chinese plan to build a huge hydroelectric dam that generates enough electricity to power all of the United Kingdom for a month. Imagine all the power from a huge river working to power your phone, microwave, T.V., and fridge. Now, imagine that river unleashed directly into your living room. Rivers bring powerful benefit or powerful harm depending on where they’re flowing. The same is true of virtues like love. When I love God, He blesses me (Deut 6:17-18). When I love money, I hate God (Matt 6:24). So, love by itself isn’t really a virtue. It has to be directed rightly in order to be virtuous. Loving God, my neighbor, and my family are good. Loving murder, money, and lies are bad.
Rivers and virtues have a lot in common. Like bodies of water, the greater the virtue, the greater the damage when that virtue goes where it shouldn’t. We should be careful of virtues when they go rabid, especially virtues like love. G.K Chesterton offers a helpful take on the danger of corrupted virtues:
The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful (Orthodoxy).
When you choose love over truth, you usually get untethered empathy. You want to love the person in front of you so much that you don’t see them moving you away from the truth. When you choose truth over love, you get gossip or ham-fisted applications of truth (like with Job’s three friends). We live in a day where most people choose love at the expense of truth. They may not have all the facts but they know whose side they’re on. But Christians should unite truth and love (Eph 4:15).
Back to the awkward conversation with the friend I mentioned earlier. We have in our mind that if we call someone out for their sin, then we must be unloving and arrogant. But the only way I can see that happening is if we condemn them for their sin WITHOUT offering repentance and restoration to Christ. I know this happens from time to time but it’s not normal. Usually we ignore their sin WITHOUT offering repentance and restoration to Christ. We’re so afraid of offending with the gospel we afraid to share it.
Now, let’s say you clearly lay out their sin and their need for the gospel, but you do so in a way you aren’t proud of. The same grace you proclaim applies to you when you proclaim it. Even if your attitude isn’t pure but you clearly preach repentance, Paul would say you still proclaimed Christ (Phil 1:15-18). When you tell your friend to repent of their sin and trust in Christ, you love God because you obey His word (Lk 24:46-47). You also love your friend because repentance is a joyous occasion for anyone caught in sin (Lk 15:7). This news is so good that it’s bad news not to share it at all.
But what if you choose to not offer repentance in that conversation? If you do so out of fear, then you love yourself more than your friend. If you refrain out of fear of losing a relationship with them, then you’re loving your friend’s opinion of you more than Jesus (Matt 12:50). Most of the time though, I believe we avoid telling people the truth because we want to be considered nice and loving by the world (1 John 2:16). We like a good reputation. We don’t have a stomach for confrontation. We don’t like a cross on our back.
But we’re Christians and Christians should love the way Christ says we should, which brings me to my next point.
What is Love?
The modern idea of “love” can be confused with giving someone what they want. Everyone goes along with this charade because when it’s our turn, we have a list of wants too. Love defined by our godless culture is synonymous with self-expression and self-fulfillment, which is why when you don’t give someone what they want, they accuse you of unloving behavior. Modern-day love is demanding of others, empathetic of like-minded people, and envious of those who have what we want. It celebrates pride and acts unbecomingly. It seeks its own self-interest, is easily provoked, and remembers every wrong suffered and posts it on Facebook. It rejoices in unrighteousness and rejects the truth. It takes care if itself, believes itself, hopes in itself, and endures for itself.
But the love Christ calls us to is different.
Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 1 Corinthians 13:4-7
Back to our fear of being too truthful at the expense of love. According to Paul, love and truth go together like your head and your body go together. Is it possible to separate the two? Sure. But why would you want to?
Just because you don’t want to separate truth from love doesn’t mean the modern world hasn’t wanted to for centuries. What we’re left with is a headless zombie of a culture wandering around aimlessly. Lewis summarizes modern society perfectly:
In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful ( The Abolition of Man).
The West has abandoned the truth and expected to find love. But all we’ve found are cheap knock offs like “nice,” “polite,” and “tone.”
Whatcha Gonna Do When the Tone Police Come for You?
Around here is usually the point where someone wants to mention the importance of tone and demeanor. “Before you tell your friend the truth, you better make sure you do so in a loving way.” I’ve already addressed how pitting truth against love isn’t helpful. But underneath that language is a purported concern for attitude. This concern assumes our tone of voice and demeanor can negate the truth if we aren’t careful. I disagree with this argument, not for the merits of the argument itself but for how we use it. Tone is pretty vital in communication.[1] However, the majority of us use tone as an excuse from speaking the truth at all.
Most of us have an idea of a “Christ-like attitude” that isn’t really an attitude like Christ. We think Jesus had the attitude of a nice, passivist hippy. We forget about the time he refused to heal a woman’s daughter before calling the mother a dog (Mark 7:26-27). We think Jesus modeled our church growth strategy of telling people the nice things in order to draw them to our church. Instead, Jesus often told people hard things that would repel them away (John 6:60, 66). We avoid telling someone to repent of a sin because we supposedly love them. But when Jesus showed love to the rich young ruler, He told him the one thing the young ruler didn’t want to hear (Mark 10:21-22). If the events of the New Testament were to happen today, the Sanhedrin wouldn’t have to arrest Jesus for claiming to be the Son of Man; they would just have to say His tone is not “Christ-like.”
I’ve only met two surgeons, each after a major surgery for a family member. Both of them had awful bed-side manner. They seemed more interested in the success of the surgery than about anything else. Despite their demeanor after surgery, both of them performed well during the surgery. I would rather have those guys in an operating room than the nicest person I know. Many Christians exaggerate the importance of our bedside manner as if it can substitute for the sword of truth in a loving hand.
A Conclusion to be Courageous
In the New Testament, few can illustrate how love and truth go together better than Stephen. When we’re introduced to Stephen, he’s ministering to the people in Jerusalem (Acts 6:8). He speaks with such wisdom that the experts don’t know what to do with him (Acts 6:10). So, they decide to do what they did to his Lord and slander him (Acts 6:11). Stephen seems to understand the stakes (Acts 6:15) and spends most of Acts 7 preaching the gospel one last time to the people. After they were sufficiently offended, they gathered a mob to kill him outside the city. Three things stand out to me about Stephen concerning speaking the truth in love. First, Stephen loved the people who were killing him (Acts 7:60). Second, if Stephen told the crowd what they wanted to hear, he probably could have earned the approval of the crowed and made it out alive. Third, he considered the approval of Jesus worth the reaction from the crowd (Acts 7:55).
Don’t let the world that hates God and His word win control over the dictionary. They’ve already redefined “love.” Now they are in the process of redefining “male” and “female.” Don’t let them control you. Submit to Christ. Love what He loves. There may even be times where the most loving thing you can do is be considered unloving by people who hate Jesus. But love anyways! Those living in unrepentant sin do not need your affirmation, they need your good news of repentance.
[1] The components of rhetoric are logos, pathos, and ethos. These three ingredients should work together. For example, if you’re teaching on evangelism, you need bible verses on evangelism (logos), an excited and sober demeanor for evangelism (pathos), and a track record that lines up with the bible verses (ethos). Your tone of voice and physical demeanor should line up with what you’re talking about and not contradict your credibility.