Truth matters. Yet one of the reasons truth is being so readily abandoned in our day is because of something else that matters: love. It seems strange, but because we do not understand the interplay of truth and love, we are abandoning truth in the name of love.
Here’s the way the dynamic is meant to play out: The love we are meant to express cannot be separated from the truth we are meant to embrace. You cannot have the love without the truth, just as you cannot have the truth without the love. No application of love (if it’s truly love) can be at the expense of truth. If you feel love is calling you to abandon or turn a blind eye toward truth, then you are misunderstanding the proper application and demonstration of love.
Yet that is precisely the plague of our day. We are sacrificing and compromising truth in the name of love.
This very issue was addressed by the apostle John in his second letter recorded for us in the New Testament. Some people were using the command to love to do away with the truth, to do away with any sense of right or wrong, to do away with any sense of doctrine or authority. In the name of love, they were abandoning firm commitments to truth. John essentially thundered in reply: “No—love is based on the truth! When you divorce truth from love, you don’t have love, you have lifestyles that descend into immorality and thinking that degrades into heresy.”
This is what people get wrong about something like the idea of grace—to get grace right, it’s not just about grace. When we think about grace, we think about love and forgiveness and acceptance. And well we should because that’s what grace holds. But grace isn’t just about grace; it’s always part of a package, and that package is grace and truth. Grace and truth go together. They are inextricably intertwined. You take away truth, and you don’t have grace anymore. You have a cheap, sentimental, lifeless, powerless idea that requires you to accept everybody and affirm what everybody does. You’ll never find that in the Bible, much less in the life and teaching of Jesus. No one was more loving or grace-giving than Jesus. No one was more accepting than Jesus. But you’ll never find Jesus once affirming a lifestyle that went against the truth.
Or as John also wrote, “[Jesus] came… full of grace and truth” (John 1:14, NIV). As Henry Cloud has written, grace is accepting relationship. Truth is what is real; it describes how things really are. Truth without grace is just judgment, but grace without truth is just deception. Or as John Stott once put it:
Our love grows soft if it is not strengthened by truth, and our truth grows hard if it is not softened by love.
This article originally appeared here and is used by permission.
