![]() Keep returning to the home base of love, the reason why you’re needing to speak the truth.Ĥ. Your words have the power to restore and creatively rebuild, but they also have the power to harm relationships in a lasting and damaging way (James 3:9-10).ĭon’t be afraid to speak words of love throughout the exchange. It’s OK to be angry, but don’t sin in your anger (Ephesians 4:26). You can’t take back some things that you say. Ecclesiastes 3:7 teaches that there is a time to remain silent and a time to speak.ĭo you harbor hidden motivations? Are you dismissing your role in a perceived offense? Are you speaking in order to “set someone straight”? Ask God to reveal the meditations of your heart (Psalm 19:14). Make sure you understand the other person’s perspective by asking good questions, taking time to hear their perspective. How do we speak the truth in love? Here are five guidelines. That truth points to the power of the gospel to redeem and transform. The context is the truth of the gospel, in the myriad ways that apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds and teachers share the truth of who Jesus is, what God has done and what God continues to do through the Holy Spirit. That difference lets people know there is something greater than ourselves at work in us.Įphesians 4:15 counsels us to speak the truth in love. We must stand for truth and tell the truth. Our heritage as followers of the man from Nazareth is that we are people of truth: about God, ourselves and the world. That’s what happens when the truth is undervalued, exploited or flat-out ignored. The immediate impact is that we’re collectively developing a hard heart. ![]() The greatest untruth is there is no truth. What’s true? What’s not true? If there’s nothing really true, what can we trust? There’s only my truth, your truth. The effect of such a casual approach to the truth is demoralizing. If people don’t like the news, they call it fake news. It’s among our top leaders, but also throughout our culture. In the U.S., we have a crisis of truth-telling. She would have felt a growing distance from her father. He knew that if his daughter had continued lying, it would corrode her from the inside out.Įven worse, over time she could develop a hard heart: a heart insistent on maintaining a falsehood and pretending to be something she was not. The father related that story with tears streaming down his own face. “Is there something you want to tell me?” he said. A few hours later, his daughter came to him in tears. “No, daddy, I don’t know where the cookies went.” His daughter wouldn’t look him in the eye. He pressed, “Are you sure that you haven’t been stealing cookies?” “Have you been taking cookies when you knew that was breaking the rule?” my friend gently asked. The rule was one per day, but he began to notice that the amount of cookies in the jar was rapidly decreasing. A fellow pastor once shared with me about a time when his 5-year-old daughter was stealing cookies.
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