Love Rejoices With Truth

Post date: Oct 31, 2017 12:05:08 AM

Lead me in your truth and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all the day long. Psalm 25:5 NLT

This journey through what God’s love in us, for us and through us means has been tremendously enriching and convicting all at the same time. What strikes me over and over, with each aspect of this love is how personal and intimate God desires to be with us and how personal and authentic He desires for us to be with each other.

When we think about the idea of love rejoicing with truth, it’s easy to think about the big things for which we would champion truth. Similarly to painting with broad brush strokes, if we were asked what our position was on human trafficking, discrimination or terrorism, many of us would unequivocally sense a burning passion to declare God’s truth and expose the terrible, oppressive lies of evil. We would sense a deep conviction to do what we could to bring truth and light to the apparent wrongs. This is good and right. Yet, while contemplating the truth of how love does rejoice with and champion truth, I thought about how difficult rejoicing or simply walking in truth can be when we bring it down to square number one--ourselves, our relationships and our interactions--having to make our brush strokes a bit finer, more specific.

I’ve found that it’s much easier to process hard concepts and principles when they’re big and far away--externalized, so to speak--outside the realm of my immediate struggles. It becomes a bit more daunting to process a difficult concept when God challenges me about my everyday practices in my relationship with Him, with myself and with others. What does rejoicing with truth and walking in truth look like on a more personal, relational level?

Search me, Oh God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. Point out anything in me that offends you, and lead me along the path of everlasting life. Psalm 139:23-24 AMP

Rejoicing with truth on every level of our lives calls for a commitment to allowing God to search us and know us. It’s us being aware of ourselves and our frailties and failures, even while being acutely aware of God’s ability to love us and redeem us, along with our mistakes. It’s a commitment to living from a place within ourselves that sees, hears and heeds God’s truth, speaks God’s truth and lives it, regardless of our inward or outward conditions.

As we go through this season, let’s have the courage to lean into the hard questions that call us to examine our hearts. Could it be that God is calling us to rejoice with truth by choosing to believe the best about someone who has hurt us? What about a commitment to being honest and true about who we are and the struggles we are facing? These all would be examples of rejoicing with truth on a personal level. As we continue our journey together, let’s allow God to show us the places around us and in us where we can learn to rejoice in the truth of who He is, who others are and who He has created us to be--no matter how difficult.