Do You Ever Feel Tension Between Standing For Truth And A Call To Love?
Standing For Truth Versus A Call To Love
(Video and Audio are available at the bottom of the page.)
I recently finished teaching my Not Home Yet: A Glimpse of Revelation’s Treasures Bible study and immediately dove into studying and teaching about biblical tensions. The desire to study biblical tensions has simmered inside me for a long time, but I also felt the weight of that task. I avoided the study because my comfort in my biblical understanding felt good. However, comfort and the Christian walk don’t rest well together for long.
Praise God that we have the ever-present Holy Spirit living in us to nudge us until we step out and experience the new places He wants to take us. Let’s take that first step together and explore two messages Jesus spoke to two of the seven churches in Revelation 2-3.
In Revelation 2-3, Jesus spoke a specific message to seven churches. All seven churches received some form of a commendation from Jesus, and five of the seven also received some form of a condemnation. The messages He spoke to the church at Ephesus and Pergamos hold a familiar tension I feel in my Christian walk.
Take a moment to read the message to the Ephesian Church in Revelation 2:1-7 and the church at Pergamos in Revelation 2:12-17.
Contrasting Commendations and Condemnations
The Ephesians were commended for their stand for truth and condemned for their void of love. The church at Pergamos was commended for their faith and for holding fast to Jesus’ name. Yet, Jesus condemned them for allowing false doctrine, idolatrous practices, and sexual immorality.
These Churches In Our Current Culture
Let’s bring these two churches into our current day and time. Take a moment to think about the possible characteristics and traits of the Ephesian and Pergomos church, if we brought them forward into our culture.
As a side note, I’m not talking about naming names of churches or pastors. I think we have to be very careful about not pointing fingers at those who are different than us. But instead, let us identify the good and bad traits for the purpose of looking within ourselves and identifying where we need transformation. Our goal is to discover what we need to understand to help us evaluate our own beliefs and how we live out our faith.
The Ephesian church was probably works based and adhered to biblical teaching. From reading Jesus’ message, I thought they might be legalistic, pharisaical, and even stayed within their own community. They had absolutely no tolerance for false teaching. Sounds like a great biblically based church, right? But Jesus, who sees all things, knows all things, and make perfect judgements of all things identifies their problem. They stand for truth without love.
Last week in my blog I wrote about What The Bible Teaches About Love. If you didn’t read that, I encourage you to do that.
The church at Pergamos had strong faith in Jesus and an unwavering regard for His name. I loved that Jesus stated this commendation along with His understanding of their circumstances of being surrounded by Christian persecution and satanic influence. However, we must also notice that their circumstances did not give them a pass to tolerate false teaching, idolatry, and sexual immorality.
Dangers of Tolerance
The term tolerance kept coming to mind as I walked through this. Tolerance means the ability or willingness to tolerate something in particular the existence of opinions or behavior that one does not necessarily agree with. The Ephesians did a great job of standing for truth, completely intolerant of lies, but ignored God’s call to love. On the opposite side of the spectrum, the church at Pergamos tolerated lies and lifestyles opposed to the truth of God’s word. I even wondered if their tolerance was under the guise of love.
However, tolerating sin and not addressing sin in the context of church doesn’t please God or turn out to be very loving in the end. The final chapter of the Bible gives us understanding of how unloving tolerating sins of false teaching, idolatry, and sexual immorality ultimately is.
Blessed are those who do His commandments, that they may have the right to the tree of life, and may enter through the gates into the city. But outside are dogs and sorcerers and sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters, and whoever loves and practices a lie.
Revelation 22:14-15
In His perfect love and truth, Jesus called the church at Pergamos to repent of allowing false teaching, idolatry, and sexual immorality to continue in the church. These unchecked issues caused His people to stumble. When we look at this, we need to remember that these words were spoken to the church, not to those outside the church. How many times have we seen sin left unchecked in a church or in a church leader and it nearly destroy that church and even cause people to walk away completely.
HOWEVER
At the same time a legalistic church or people, can be the most unloving, ugly, and rude people any of us ever want to meet. They can come across as a know it all, who is always right, and have the potential to be obnoxious and intrusive. Doesn’t that sound like the person you want to listen to? Absolutely not! No one does! A google search of any well-known pastor exposes the ugliness in the heart of legalistic people who claim Jesus as their Savior. I also have seen the legalist shut down a conversation about Jesus in a split second.
So really, we don’t want to fall into either category of the legalist or the one with unchecked sin. Either way is not God’s way. God is truth and God is love. And Jesus embodied truth and love. Truth and love are inseparable and are found in the person of Jesus Christ. As believers in Jesus, Ephesians 4:15 says we are to speak the truth in love. 1 John 3:18-19 says not only our words, but we also love with our deeds and in truth.
My little children, let us not love in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth.
And by this we know we are of the truth, and shall assure our hearts before Him.
1 John 3:18-19
Expressing love through our actions and truth is how we assure our hearts before God. Love expressed in our actions and in truth comes out of a true, genuine relationship with the Truth. We can never really love or stand for truth apart from a relationship with Jesus and our genuine love for one our brothers and sisters in Christ tells the world who we belong to.
Walking in the Tension of Truth and Love
“By this all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
John 13:35
I see the perfection of our faith somewhere in the midst of these two churches. But I struggle. And the struggle most often happens in my closest or day-to-day relationships where we want to represent Jesus to those we love and want to come into a real relationship with Jesus. We feel the tension within ourselves as we wrestle with how to show those walking outside of God’s will and ways God’s love and still stand for truth. We don’t know what to say, when to say it, how to act, when to zip the lip and just let God do what God does. But Jesus does.
Standing for truth and this call to love isn’t easy and we probably won’t get it right every time, but that doesn’t give us a pass. In our relationship with Jesus, we daily come to Him, seeking His will, guidance, and transformation in our lives. He is Faithful and True. If we seek Him, He will be faithful to give us what we need in those situations. But if we go at it alone, in our own strength and wisdom, we will fail. Trust God. Seek God. Know that the one who calls us to live in truth and love, gives us what we need to fulfill His calling in our lives.
Much Love And Blessings!
