Love That Speaks

Have you ever come home from an enjoyable group gathering just to look in the mirror and find that you have a booger hanging from your nose? And then pondered how long it may have been there and whether others saw it? And if they likely did see it, have you ever analyzed why no one said anything about it?

On the flip side, have you ever been sitting around a table at a group gathering when someone catches your eye and graciously motions to you that you need to wipe your nose? And then analyzed what caused them to make you aware?

Who would you have appreciated more? Those who kept quiet though you know they saw it or the one who was willing to risk awkwardness by pointing it out?

To be fair, it’s quite possible that everyone in both scenarios could legitimately say that they were motivated by love, whether they made you aware or not. However, it’s also possible that there were some who didn’t say anything because they avoid awkwardness at all costs and would rather act like they don’t see the booger than to experience the discomfort of shedding light on the predicament for your benefit.

What Is Love?

What keeps us from speaking the truth? When it comes to friends and boogers, what camp do you typically find yourself in? Are you a person who points it out or a person who lets it ride? Which is the greater act of love?

Is it possible that either camp has a distorted view of love?

Our culture would have us believe the following things about love:

• Love never brings up difficult topics
• Love is never awkward
• Love always approves and never reproves
• Love is always easy to receive
• Love’s chief end is happiness
• Love never disagrees with anyone
• Love never confronts, challenges or disciplines

What if you parented your children according to this type of love? What if you always dodged all difficult or awkward topics with your kids because the main goal was for everyone to be happy 100% of the time? What if you validated and approved every desire of your daughter’s heart? What if you never challenged or disciplined your son? Does this spur our kids on to maturity? Is this how parents are to love?

Let Me Tell You A Secret About A Father’s Love

Let’s gaze upon the face of God. How does He parent His children?
Hebrews 12:6-8 “For those whom the Lord loves He disciplines, and He scourges every son whom He receives. It is for discipline that you endure; God deals with you as with sons; for what son is there whom his father does not discipline? But if you are without discipline, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons.”

Proverbs 13:24 “He who withholds his rod hates his son, but he who loves him disciplines him diligently.”

Proverbs 3:12 “For whom the Lord loves He reproves, even as a father corrects the son in whom he delights.”

God disciplines His children. Why is that? Haven’t all our sins already been forgiven? Hasn’t He already released us from any debt that we owe Him as a result of our sin? Absolutely! Through faith in Jesus, God has forensically forgiven us (Acts 10:43) and Christ’s death and resurrection have also removed any debt we would have owed Him as a result of our sin (Colossians 2:17). Yet God still disciplines us. God doesn’t call for our discipline because He is seeking vengeance or to get back at us for an offense we made against Him in the past.  God’s discipline is not a product of unforgiveness or a lack of love. He disciplines us BECAUSE He loves us and BECAUSE He wants things to be healthy moving forward. It is of utmost importance that we realize (as parents, as children, as brothers and sisters in Christ) that forgiveness can occur and yet discipline can still be called for. Forgiveness doesn’t necessarily remove the need for discipline. Forgiveness is about cancelling the debt of personal hurt caused by something in the past. Discipline is about seeking health moving forward. God wants to speak truth into our lives. So, He calls things as He sees them. He sheds light. He speaks truth.
Furthermore, even in the lives of believers, when we have unconfessed sin, we have broken fellowship with God until we are able to speak truth into our own situation, agreeing with God that we have indeed sinned (1 John 1:9). If He has removed our sin from us as far as the east is from the west, why is it that we can have broken fellowship with God? Does this mean that God has refrained from loving us? Absolutely not! He loves us so much that He has no interest in putting up a façade that things are hunky dory when they’re not. We cannot have fellowship with a God of Light while living in denial of the truth of our sin and trying to blend in with the shadows. So, not only is it important that God speak truth into our lives, but it is also important to God that we are able to speak truth into our own lives by agreeing with Him about our sin.

Speak Life

On top of that, God’s word exhorts us to speak truth into the lives of one another as an act of love.

Ephesians 4:25 “Therefore, laying aside falsehood, speak truth each one of you with his neighbor, for we are members of one another.”
 
Ephesians 4:15-16 “but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ, from whom the whole body, being fitted and held together by what every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love.”
 
Proverbs 27:5-6 “Better is open rebuke than love that is concealed. Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but deceitful are the kisses of an enemy.”
 
These verses from Proverbs 27 make it clear that sometimes an act of genuine love means saying the things that are hard to say. Sometimes being a true friend means storming the field of awkwardness, discomfort and pain for the sake of truth and health in the lives of your friends.
 
Believers need to be able to value the wounds of a friend and discern them from the kisses of an enemy. This is why Proverbs warns us so many times about flatterers.
 
Proverbs 26:28 “A lying tongue hates those it crushes, and a flattering mouth works ruin.”
 
Proverbs 28:23 “He who rebukes a man will afterward find more favor than he who flatters with the tongue.”
 
Proverbs 29:5 “A man who flatters his neighbor spreads a net for his steps.”
 
Flatterers can be quite dangerous because they oftentimes don’t care so much about speaking truth as they do manipulating and controlling others. An act of genuine love is to graciously speak truth even when it causes pain to do so.
 
Whatever our motivation is, when we separate love from truth, we are not loving the way God calls us to love. We may be sweeping things under the rug or trying to avoid uncomfortable conversations or awkward moments but we are not loving when we avoid truth.
 
Truth and Consequences (And Coming To Our Senses)

Within the last year I heard the story of a courageous young lady who was troubled because she had sought to confront someone she loved dearly concerning unrepentant outward sin in his life toward other people she also cared about. When he was unwilling to concede to the sin, she then met with one of the church elders who told her that she just needed to “let love cover it” and move on.

The elder was eluding to 1 Peter 4:8 which says:
“Above all, keep fervent in your love for one another, because love covers a multitude of sins.”
This elder was using the passage to encourage the young lady not to take any further action to address the sin. Don’t address it. Don’t confront it. Don’t say anything about it. Just do nothing.
It’s as if this elder was saying that the most loving thing to do, when you see clear unrepentant sin in the life of a fellow believer, is to just let it slide. Don’t address it at all. Just act like it didn’t happen. Is that what this verse is saying to do? Is this verse implying that the most loving thing you can do for a fellow believer in unrepentant sin is to do nothing? To address nothing? Or maybe to address it initially (in the case of beginning church discipline), but if the unrepentant sinner doesn’t want to listen or recognize it as sin, you just move to a different topic? Is this a biblical concept? Is the love Peter is referring to merely comprised of high fives and fist bumps?

The word “fervent” (ektenes) means “without ceasing”. If the application of love in this context means to take no action, then I guess Peter is exhorting the reader to unceasingly….do nothing. Does this sound right? Does “let love cover a multitude of sins” mean we are not supposed to address unrepentant sin in the lives of those within our sphere of influence?

Was Peter promoting that we just look past unrepentant sin in the lives of fellow believers in the name of love? Let’s look at some of the things Peter said in this epistle.

1 Peter 1:14-16 “As obedient children, do not be conformed to the former lusts which were yours in your ignorance, but like the Holy One who called you, be holy yourselves also in all your behavior; because it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy.’”

If it’s to be our goal not to be conformed to the world and its lusts but to pursue holiness in our experience, are we to tackle this goal each man for himself allowing each person to discover their own blind spots? Or are we to come alongside one another in this pursuit and lovingly hold each other’s feet to the fire, pointing out blind spots that may hamper one another’s service or growth?

1 Peter 1:17 “If you address as Father the One who impartially judges according to each one’s work, conduct yourselves in fear during the time of your stay on earth;”

Do we have a role to play in preparing one another for the Judgment Seat of Christ or are we supposed to leave each other alone and allow each person to live and learn without the involvement of anyone else meddling in our lives?

1 Peter 2:1-2 “Therefore, putting aside all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander, like newborn babies, long for the pure milk of the word, so that by it you may grow in respect to salvation.”

Are we meant to go through the process of spiritual maturity by living on our own islands without the help of others to challenge us and, if needed, to rebuke us?

I Peter 2:11 “Beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers to abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against the soul.”

As we wage battle against the soul, are we to do this like Rambo (a lone solider) or as a band of brothers? And, if it’s the latter, and we are to come alongside one another in this battle, are we to love each other by refraining to correct and admonish one another?

Did you know that there is only one other place in the New Testament (besides 1 Peter 4:8) that uses the phrase “cover a multitude of sins”? Do you think it backs up this idea that we are to love one another by turning a blind eye and not addressing each other’s unrepentant sin? Let’s see.

James 5:19-20 "My brethren, if any among you strays from the truth and one turns him back, let him know that he who turns a sinner from the error of his way will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins."

James seems to be promoting the idea that we are to address sin (certainly unrepentant sin) in one another’s lives as an act of love.  According to James, the love that covers a multitude of sins involves confrontation and speaking truth. It’s certainly not a call to stand down. And I have serious doubts that Peter would have advised someone to stand down from addressing unrepentant outward sin in the life of someone you love.

In Galatians 2, Paul tells about a time when Peter was acting hypocritically by holding himself aloof from Gentiles when some men came from Jerusalem. Peter was afraid of what the men might think of him if he associated with the Gentiles. This, of course, wasn’t the first time we hear of Peter being controlled by the fear of what others think. But Paul didn’t shrug this off as if to say, “Well, that’s Peter for you.” He opposed Peter to his face and publicly rebuked him. I’d be curious to ask Peter whether he felt Paul was acting out of a spirit of unforgiveness by speaking truth to him. But my guess would be that Peter would say Paul was justified in his rebuke.

As a different example, when Paul wrote 2 Corinthians, he was writing it as a follow-up letter to a previous letter he had sent this church. In the previous letter he confronted and rebuked the Corinthian believers for things they were allowing to take place without addressing. In 2 Corinthians 7 (verses 8-10), Paul refers back to the previous letter he had written and expresses that he didn’t enjoy writing that letter because he knew it caused them pain to receive it. But he goes on to say that he didn’t regret writing the letter because he saw that the sorrow he caused them led them to repentance and helped save them from an unfruitful state. Paul spoke the truth in love when it was difficult and God used this to bring health to the people who were “harmed” by Paul’s letter.

Closing
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God’s word is clear that one of the most important ways in which we can love one another effectively is by speaking truth to one another. Often the times when this is the hardest to do are also the times when it is most needed.
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In closing, I just want to say that……..if you ever see me with a booger dangling out of my sniffer, I’d sure appreciate it if you could come point it out to me.