The line between speaking the truth…and speaking in love. What a difficult line this is. Being loving, speaking the truth.
The average Christian does not want to offend anyone, but God uses us to refine each other…and we let each other down when we do not tell the truth.
Perhaps one of the most unloving thing we can do is either….not tell the truth…or perhaps worse than that…speak to truth about someone when they are not in the room!! What I mean is that Jesus’ process of speaking the truth in love, as found in Matthew 18…is pretty clear, and fantastic as it gives the best practical solution to how to speak the truth in love.
Good thoughts Mark.. Matthew 18 certainly sets the context of speaking truth in a relational setting.
Good post. I’ve been thinking a lot about this sort of stuff atm.
Jesus was deeply and deliberately offensive in much of what he said, hence his ‘shock value’. He once called his Jewish audience ‘children of the devil’. Was he speaking the truth in love? One could argue, yes. E.g. he needed to judge evil and make himself a pariah for the sake of the Atonement, etc. But this is a far cry from speaking non-offensively, which is what many Christians take ‘speaking the truth in love’ to mean.
The truth is often offensive. Lets just make sure we are telling the truth for the sake of love…not for the sake of ‘discernment ministry’