Without Truth, Love Means Nothing

I heard a pastor say that love is the mortar that binds the great cathedrals of our church together, and I agree with that statement, only to be astonished at the immediacy in which a congregant started chanting about loving someone in an enabling way and throwing the power of truth into the dark recesses of our minds to rot and fester.

If you pile up mortar, you do not get a building, a wall, a room, a home, or a great cathedral. You just get a pile of mortar. Without truth, love means nothing. Without love, truth is despotic.

Enter 1 Corinthians 13. Even if you can speak every language of man, and even languages of angels in heaven, without love, you will be a banging gong or clashing cymbal...a cacophony that is not understood. It is not that the languages that you speak mean nothing, it is that the love communicated in the truth of that language means more than just spouting off words for words sake. The truth and love must be married in the same way Christ is married to the church, and in the same way a man is to marry a woman, reflecting God's ultimate glory, just as Christ and the church reflects God's glory.

We must have language, and it would be even better if we knew all languages to speak to each other, but do not remove love, for if you do, you are removing the very creator and reason for our languages. "So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him." 1 John 4:16
In Matthew 17:20, "He (Jesus) said to them, 'Because of your little faith. For truly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.'” And Paul reiterates this, showcasing the importance of faith, and yet, even faith without love, means you are nothing. Meaning faith is important, and Jesus would back that, delivering healing and supernatural works to many who showed great faith. The truth is in the faith, and yet it must have love, in order to be something.

We often confuse niceness, enabling, allowance, and radical tolerance with love. Our modern working definition of love is often the aforementioned platitudes, but those are masquerading deceptions of love that provide momentary harmony, and devolve into long-term pain and evil consequences. Think about just a few acts of love in the form of niceness, enabling, allowance, and tolerance that have turned into a destroying fire of lies and evil: genital mutilation of a gender-confused generation; small, hard-working communities burned to the ground for equity of outcome; demonization of white men merely for having been born white and male; and the murder of 65 million defenseless babies because of the lie of their inconvenience--just to name a few. At the origin of these deceptions that turned into actual harm in the long term, was a tolerant, nice, enabling, and allowing person, "acting out of love." This is not loving in the least of its form, and it seems we have removed the Truth from love.

Know then in your heart that, as a man disciplines his son, the Lord your God disciplines you. Deuteronomy 8:5

Is rightly pursued fatherhood unloving? Of course not. Rightly pursued fatherhood is a Godly pursuit of love, and here in the outset, God is declaring that the loving thing for Him to do to His people is to discipline them. Love is discipline. To discipline yourself, your marriage, your children, your household is loving. Discipline is more than punishment for wrongdoing, it is training with consistency. Just as a dentist drills the rot out of your tooth to keep you from further damage, the Lord disciplines those that He loves, to show us love and to help us live in Him through Christ Jesus. Jesus's cross experience looks unloving from our modern definition of love, but is in fact, the most loving act in all of history.

13 He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever. 14 I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son. When he commits iniquity, I will discipline him with the rod of men, with the stripes of the sons of men, 15 but my steadfast love will not depart from him, as I took it from Saul, whom I put away from before you. 2 Samuel 7:13-15

4 “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 5 You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. 6 And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. 7 You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. 8 You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. 9 You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
Deuteronomy 6:4-9

Often the modern secular person allows divergence and distraction to rule their heart and mind, especially in their worship. One moment they are throwing themselves into the hobby of music and art collection, and the next they are headlong into understanding every aspect of football and their fantasy team, and then they are majoring in the different aspects of entrepreneurial pursuits. None of these things are wrong, when glorifying God, but let's be honest with where our hearts are in these diverging specializations. Our lives often take on the same aspects of YouTube rabbit holes, or endless Instagram scrolls. Are we loving the Lord our God with all of our heart, all of our soul, and all of our might? It does not take much meditation to realize our heart, soul, and might have been pursuing too many other things to love God. And then we can know that the follow-on verses will be an impossibility. If I am diverging my pursuits and distracted with the world:

• How can I have His commands on my heart?
• How can I teach them diligently to my children?
• How can I talk about them when I am going to and fro, waking up, lying down, and in the home?
• Are they in places that constantly remind you of who you love, and how you are to love Our Lord?

Love is consistency and commitment with all of your heart, all of your soul, all of your mind, all of your strength.

1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned,[a] but have not love, I gain nothing.

4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;[b] 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

1 Corinthians 13

12 When he had washed their feet and put on his outer garments and resumed his place, he said to them, “Do you understand what I have done to you? 13 You call me Teacher and Lord, and you are right, for so I am. 14 If I then, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. 15 For I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done to you. 16 Truly, truly, I say to you, a servant is not greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him. 17 If you know these things, blessed are you if you do them.

John 13:12-17

16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. 19 And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. 20 For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. 21 But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God.”

John 3:16-21

Love is given its power by Truth. The Truth is the Standard, and the standard is from God, and the standard is God. Jesus said, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Light. No one can come to the Father, except through me." God sets the standard by His own nature and being, it is not a standard outside of God, in which we can measure God to make sure He is actually loving. God is Love, and to know God is to know truth, and to know truth is to know love. Love doesn't do a happy dance on the things we think and feel and do, to make them meaningful. Love is established in the truth that is God. Before the foundations of the world was our Triune God, and God is truth and love.

Let us not start with ourselves when we are moved to love. Let us start with God. Understanding who God is, and then step out in love, without arbitrarily throwing away the truth that binds meaning to love. When God's grace plucks us from our own sin and death, and Christ imputes our sin onto Himself and His righteousness onto us, let us not ignore the truth that is in that love. We are His image-bearers, and that means loving in truth, and speaking truth in love. Acting like we can pile either one of those up, without the other, and make something God-glorifying, is to remove God in the act. God is truth and God is love. You cannot have one without the other.