“[Love] does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.” 1 Corinthians 13:6
July 8-9, 2022
One of the conceptual causalities of our times is confusion about the relationship between truth and love. Love has been kidnapped and redefined by our secular culture. It has been reduced to whatever makes one feel comfortable. Truth has suffered its own fate at the hands of a godless worldview that dumbs truth down to personal preferences. It’s “I have my truth. You have your truth.” This disassembling of truth and love has for decades now reshaped the way many Christians think about the place of doctrine in Christianity. Carl R. Trueman in his book, The Creedal Imperative, offers a perceptive observation when he says, “That Christianity is a way of life and not a set of propositions has become something of a mantra among younger Christians in the last ten years.” We even hear from adult Christians such silly assertions as “Love is more important than doctrine.” “Love edifies,” we are told, but “doctrine divides.” Things, we are to believe, would be better if we subordinated our different interpretations and experiences to loving one another. Such thinking is a theological disaster. The biblical fact is that “love as God defines it is totally conditioned, directed, and interpreted through and in truth (Jn. 14:15,21,23,24)”(JCW). When you remove doctrine and push it to the end of the line of priorities, love suffocates and dies. “But truth may survive and even multiply without love (Phil. 1:15-18)” (JCW). The bottom line is that truth is greater than love. We are called to speak “the truth in love” (Eph. 4:15). Love rejoices with the truth. It is exclusively truth we must speak. “Love is not the message, but the ultimate goal and motivation of the message” (JCW). The essential atmosphere (truth) has made it possible for those fragrant gardenias (love) to flourish around our back porch and on our kitchen table. “It is God’s revealed truth that ultimately controls all human virtues by defining and limiting them” (JCW). H
A time to pray: “O Lord of all revealed truth, may a lost world know the truth of who Christ is as I love my brothers and sisters in Christ.”
The initials, JCW, are those of Dr. John C. Whitcomb who has written sublimely of truth and love in “God’s Truth Circles” in an unpublished article.