“Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ.” Ephesians 4:15 NIV
Yesterday I looked at the verse right before this one, verse 14, and in it Paul wrote about new Christians being immature, being able to be tossed back and forth. The idea of being able to be confused by people saying things that are not in line with God’s word. Today, let’s look at the next verse, verse 15, and see what Paul has written here.
In this verse, unlike verse 14, Paul is writing about how we can mature in our walk of faith. Growing from an infant to an adult requires growth, physical growth, mental growth, emotional growth and in regards to our spiritual self, spiritual growth. As we mature as people, we begin to master things such as eating, walking, learning skills, and one of those areas we should work on very hard is the area of social skills or relationships.
Relationships are important in the body of Christ. The Kingdom of God is full of people who are saved by grace and have been shown mercy, however, you would not always know that by watching the interactions we have with each other. An important ingredient for interaction in the Kingdom of God is love. We are instructed to do a lot ‘in love’, accept those around us that society has deemed unlovable, think of others’ needs and serve them, be there for each other when there are burden’s to carry and build each other up by being truthful with each other. Paul specifically speaks to that last one of being truthful with each other in this verse, it is singled out as an important concept to develop in our growth or maturing in our spiritual life.
What does it mean to ‘speak truth in love’? Truth can cover a large number of topics, it can be the truth about ourselves, the truth about the gospel or word of God, the truth about God, the truth about how we are to live. When we don something “in love”, we are not to be harsh and judgmental but we are also not to be so fragile that we are not able to decide what we want to say or look afraid to be having a conversation.
The Gospel or Word of God tends to be contradictory to how society believes that life should be lived. The Gospel tells us to serve each other and the world says we should have others serve us, the Gospel tells us to think about other’s needs before our own and the world says we should only think about ourselves and the Gospel tells us to love each other but the world says that we should only love those who are good to us or are like us and we should hate those who are mean or different from us.
So how do we speak truth in love? Speaking the truth about the Gospel, about how God wants us to live, which is found in God’s word, and about ourselves, our thoughts, feelings and actions, can be thought of as tricky. We have this mix of ideas in our minds most of the time about the way the world says we should be and the way the Gospel says we should be. I believe we want to do what God wants us to do most of the time but then the world creeps in and the devil plants ideas of a selfish nature in our minds to try and lure us into acting the way the world wants us to act.
Thoughts like ‘you are being taken advantage of by others because you think of them before yourself’ or ‘you are never going to get anywhere in this world if you don’t do things that need done to move up’. I believe these thoughts run through Christians’ minds a lot of the time because the devil places them there. It is our job to decide if we are going to focus on them or determine that they are not of God, not what God wants us to focus on and dismiss them, making room for the thoughts that God wants us to have such as figuring out how to love the way He wants us to love.
Speaking ‘truth in love’ can be accomplished but we need to do some things first. We need to be praying the entire time about the situation and listening to how God wants us to handle our part in the conversation. We should be gentle and keep the attitude of our words and the attitude of our heart in line with each other. We can be well meaning but if we speak harsh words, it doesn’t matter if we had good intentions in our heart or not. We need to accept that we don’t know every part of the situation that we are going to talk to a person about, so we should be humble and willing to hear the other information.
Growing, maturing in our spiritual life and speaking truth in love are not easy things but they are attainable. When we focus on God, what He wants from us and follow how He wants us to live, we are on our way. God wants us to be imitators of Christ but He also knows that we are flawed human beings who need a lot of practice and forgiveness to help us get where He wants us to be.
My question to each one of us is…..Are we growing or are we standing still?