For the hard conversations of our day, may the Lord help us to have both love in our hearts and truth on our lips.

3 min read

A long, long time ago in eternity past two very different but essential virtues were joined in union. Though they had meaning and significance as individuals, they would be even better together. They were good alone, but in tandem they would complement and complete one another.

Their names are Love and Truth.

In Jesus, these two unlikely singles would form a beautiful couplet.

Love…rejoices in the truth.

1 Corinthians 13:4-6

I will have the honor of quoting the above words from the first epistle to the Corinthians at a wedding ceremony this weekend. With a bride and groom in front of me, and a crowd of people witnessing, everyone will yet again hear the Apostle Paul’s inspired description of what love is and what love does.

Love is patient, it says. Love is kind…gentle…and so on.

But there’s something else about love that’s easy to overlook.

Paul adds that love, godly love, also rejoices in the truth. These two, he says, are in relationship.

Notice it is not your truth or my truth, but the truth. Grammatically, the word truth is preceded by the definite article the, meaning there’s only one – not multiple options.

In other words, the highest form of love imaginable is a love that embraces and rejoices in the truth.

This classic biblical passage, the gold standard on love, proposes that there is such a thing as fixed, absolute truth. Yes, indeed.

Though they had meaning and significance as individuals, they would be even better together.

Unfortunately, however, the deceiver has pulled a fast one on us on this point. He has talked us into believing that we can all have our own personalized, make-it-up-as-we-go truth. Rather than dealing with truth as it is, we can make truth what we want it to be. Putting ourselves in the place of God, if we find the manifest truth too intolerable to live with, then we just paint over it.

But can we admit that this experiment is not going well? Is it possible that one of the reasons why our very foundations are cracking is because we’ve untethered ourselves from objective truth? We have liberated ourselves from Truth with a capital “T” and we are now free. We are free like a little boat swept out to sea is free…free to be driven wherever the winds take us and free to be tossed and turned in an angry ocean of conflicting opinions.

Still together

In spite of efforts to tear them apart or separate them, Love and Truth have not succumbed to the pressure. They remain united. After all, truth is not really truth apart from love and love is not really love apart from truth. All representations of love that at the same time deny truth are mere pretensive impostors. All claims of truth that are divorced from a heart of love will ring hollow and hopeless.

Love and Truth have always gone together. They are still together and will remain together. If we want one, we must take both, for they are a package deal.

It’s a new day with God. Run with it.