Because sometimes I need help remembering to speak the truth in love…
As I continue to move through the study notes of my Bible as I mentioned in this post…//www.laurareimer.net/?p=6832
and trust me…I am moving through them at a SNAIL’S pace…
I keep finding little nuggets to apply.
My recent venture is exploring the importance of speaking the Truth IN LOVE…and this is such a difficult thing to conquer when we live in a world where there is such confusion about truth.
We have everything from…”truth is what you want it to be” to “let’s just speak love and then hope they get the truth on their own”.
So as I read from the notes in my study Bible this week, I love these reminders:
<3 We will most likely be very passionate and urgent in delivering truth as lies escalate around us. If we carry God’s truth in a weighty way in our hearts, and are heavily burdened with Christ’s heart for the lost and wandering and confused; that sense of concern over the eternal state of others will most likely cause us to appear to them as almost fanatical.
Guilty as charged.
I carry such a burden for those who are walking in deception. I want desperately for them to know Jesus and the freedom I have found in Him. So I can tend to be like a bull in a china shop as I erupt with passion for His Passion.
I was raised in a home where we sounded angry and fired up just discussing the cartoons in the Sunday paper.
We were loud and emotional and intense about E.V.E.R.Y.T.H.I.N.G.
And my enthusiasm can definitely be anything but loving if left to my own natural inclinations and default nature.
The study points out that anger…impatience…irritation…are not characteristics of the Spirit of God.
So I have to ask God to help me temper my sense of urgency with a generous dose of His patience and grace and yes, love.
One thing I picked up this month that helps came from a lovely meditation shared at the end of an exercise class.
Trying to insert here….hope it works.
http://://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgzXXKjaPZA
if my link doesn’t work, google The Inheritance Message Graham Cooke….
In this meditation, he says how God loves us 100%…whether we are trying or not…He loves us 100%…and so when I am thinking of or speaking to anyone who I want to reach for Him, I spend as much or more time reminding myself of this TRUTH…so that when I speak TRUTH…it is anchored 100% in HIS LOVE…because I do not have it in ME to give life…
ONLY The Spirit gives truth and life….TRUTH and LIFE…and I am simply a willing vessel of His Spirit.
The teaching in my Bible convicts me…we can speak the Truth very accurately but if it is not accompanied with love…it does not give life.
That does not mean we speak love without truth…that would be equally impotent and would not give life.
The Truth in Love…
{Use the spiritual gifts that He has given you}…for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ, till …we all come to the unity of the faith…and of the knowledge of the Son of God…to the fullness of Christ…that we should no longer be children that are tossed to and fro with every wind of doctrine or by the trickery and deceit of men…but instead…to speak the TRUTH in LOVE so that we may all grow up and be matured into Christ, who is the head…all of us …joined and knit together as one body under the Lordship of Jesus Christ, as each part does what it is meant to do so that the whole body grows and flourishes in love .
paraphrased from Ephesians 4: 11-16