Speaking the Truth in Love - Part 2 - Eph 4 and 1 Corinthians 13

We'll open your Bibles back to Ephesians chapter 4. Ephesians chapter 4. And let's read again verses 11 to 16. Ephesians 4, 11 to 16. Paul says, "And he himself gave some as apostles, some as prophets, some as evangelists, some as pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the full knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ, so that we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness and deceitful scheming." Verse 15, "But speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into him who is the head that is Christ, from whom the whole body being joined and held together by whatever joint supplies, according to the properly measured working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love." We last looked at this passage way back on November 23rd.

And because it's been so many weeks, months really, since we were here, we really need to do a more thorough review than if I'd preached part one of this two-part sermon last week. It's not as easy to pick up where we left off as it would have been under those circumstances. So please be patient as we reset the stage, as we ease back aboard the train of Paul's thinking here, okay? Paul tells us here that Christ gave gifts to his church, apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, and teachers. And that wasn't just an organizational detail. That was Christ exercising his authority as the risen head of the church.

He didn't leave his people directionless. He didn't leave his body without structure. He didn't leave his flock without leadership. Rather, he gave shepherds. And why did he do that? For the equipping of the saints for the work of service. The shepherd leaders are not the whole of the work. The saints are equipped. The sheep serve. The body builds. The church participates in its own growth.

And Paul tells us the goal of that growth when he said, "Until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the full knowledge of the Son of God to a mature man to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ." See where it says, "To a mature man?" That word "mature" is critical. Not an immature man, but a mature one. And he immediately contrasts that maturity with the opposite when he says, "So that we are no longer to be children tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine." Children are unstable and easily swayed. They're reactive. They're impressionable.

Children are, in a word, immature. Paul is saying the church must not remain like that. But how does the church grow out of instability and immaturity? Verse 15 answers that question. "But speaking the truth in love." So by speaking the truth in love, by speaking truth and doing so in love. Not truth instead of love, not love instead of truth, truth in love. One commenter said it this way. He said, "Our love grows soft if it is not strengthened by truth, and our truth grows hard if it is not softened by love." Because Christ is both full of grace and of truth.

And the Spirit who conforms us to Christ does not produce just half of that likeness. He produces both. This is not a personality preference. This is Christian maturity. This is Christ-like, Christ-exalting, God-glorifying, church-edifying speech in Christian community. If Paul continues in verse 15, "We are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head." That is Christ. "Into Him." The standard is not each other. The standard is not a better temperament. It's not improved rhetorical skill. The standard is Christ.

The goal and the guaranteed outcome for the redeemed is Christ-likeness, which is formed by union with Christ and produced by the Spirit of Christ. Church, if we leave this Ephesians passage thinking, "I must try harder to balance truth and love," we've already left the gospel. No, Christ, the head of the body, gives gifts. Christ establishes maturity. Christ defines the goal and Christ achieves the goal. Christ is the measure and Christ is the source. So when Paul commands us to speak the truth in love, he isn't handing us a burden detached from grace.

He is describing the kind of speech that flows from a body, from a church that is alive, attached to and under its head, which is Christ. That's where we started back on November 23rd. We started with the recognition that truth and love must never be separated because in Christ they cannot be separated. Then we said, "If that's the kind of speech required for maturity, then we needed to ask ourselves, if we're going to speak the truth, what is the truth that Paul is describing?" Remember, when we first worked through this passage, we made it clear that Paul did not mean simply say things that are accurate.

He didn't mean, "Tommy's beard is gray." He didn't just mean, "Don't lie." Of course we mustn't lie. The Scriptures are crystal clear about that. But Paul's being far more specific than that. And he didn't say, "Speaking truth." He said, "Speaking THE truth." Glanced back at verse 14, you'll see that Paul describes spiritual immaturity as being tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness and deceitful scheming. That's the first time I've said that phrase correctly today. So whatever the truth is, we know at least this much. It's not unstable doctrine.

It's not shifting ideas. It's not clever manipulation and it's not persuasive scheming. The truth must be the opposite of all of that. It's firm. It's grounded. It's revealed and it's objective. It's God's reality. Remember we said that? And we said before that the word translated "speaking the truth" has the idea of "truthing." Not only speaking truth, but living it, embodying it, walking in it. But what truth? What truth should we speak? What truth should we live? What truth should we embody? What truth should we be walking in? Or what truth should we be truthing? We noted that Paul answers that question elsewhere in this very letter.

In Ephesians 1.13 he calls the gospel the word of truth. In Ephesians 4.21 he reminds us that the truth is in Jesus. In Galatians he speaks of the truth of the gospel. And our Lord Himself said in John 14.6, "I am the way and the truth and the life." Then in John 17.17 Christ prayed to the Father, "Sanctify them by the truth. Your word is truth." So when Paul commands us to speak the truth, he means the revealed truth of God.

The gospel, the whole counsel of God, the glories of Christ, the apostles' doctrine, or as Jude says, "The faith once delivered to the saints." Not preference, not opinion, not cultural trend, not even things that are merely factually correct, like Tommy's beard is gray and very manly. No, the truth Paul commands us to speak is God's revealed word. That's what matures us. That's what stabilizes the church. That's what conforms us to Christ. And we are commanded to speak it. Silence doesn't lead to maturity, and silence is not an option. Truth must be spoken, but it must be spoken in love.

So then we needed to answer the question, if we are to speak the truth in love, what does that look like or sound like? What sort of love is involved? And we learned that the word for love, Paul uses here in Ephesians 4, is the same word used in 1 Corinthians 13, the love chapter, and that word is agape or agape. So last time, we didn't just define love in a vague way. We walked slowly through 1 Corinthians 13 and allowed scripture to describe what agape love actually looks like or sounds like when it shows up in real conversations between Christians.

So turn to 1 Corinthians 13, please, let's read again, verses 1 to 8, 1 Corinthians 13 verses 1 to 8. Paul says, "If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I'll become a noisy gong or clanging cymbal. And if I have the gift of prophecy and know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I'm nothing.

And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing." Verse 4, "Love is patient, love is kind, is not jealous, does not brag, is not puffed up, it does not act unbecomingly, does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, it does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails. But if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away. If there are tongues, they'll cease.

If there's knowledge, it will be done away." Last time we focused our attention on verses 4 and 5 in which Paul begins to tell us what love looks like. In Ephesians 4, he gave us a skeletal framework when he said, "speaking the truth in love." But beginning in 1 Corinthians 13, verse 4, he hangs some meat on those bones to flesh out, as it were, what the love in which we are to speak the truth looks like and sounds like. First, we saw that love is patient, not theoretically patient, not, "I'll tolerate you as long as you agree with me patient," but patient with a long fuse, long suffering, steady patience.

We saw that God himself models this patience, this long suffering patience, because he's so very merciful. And we saw that if the Spirit of Christ dwells in us, then impatience cannot be excused as a personality defect or because I've had a bad day. Rather, impatience must be mortified as sinful flesh. Then we saw that love is kind, and we learned that the kindness mentioned here is not weakness or passivity or permissiveness or even niceness, really. Rather, we learned that this kindness is really, quote, "active benevolence." Remember that? It's a kindness that seeks to bestow benefits on another person.

It's possible to win arguments and lose people. It's possible to be correct and yet not be Christ-like. It's possible to defend the truth in a way that does not resemble the one who is the truth. Love isn't like that because love is kind. We also saw that love is not jealous. It does not resent the blessing of another. It does not get mad when someone else gets ahead. It doesn't compete for superiority. It doesn't use truth to elevate self. No, love rejoices in another's good. Love celebrates grace wherever it appears. Remember that? Next, we saw that love does not brag and is not puffed up. Theological pride often cloaks itself in orthodoxy.

It can disguise itself as conviction. Admittedly, it's hard to be humble when you're most concerned with being right. But if our speech communicates in superiority instead of humility, if we speak as though we are the ones that invented truth or that truth belongs only to us rather than having been entrusted to us, then love is absent. Then looking at verse 5, we learn that love does not act unbecomingly. In other words, simply put, love is not rude. That's not complicated. It's not complicated and it's not hidden, nor is it buried in some obscure interpretive closet behind a locked door with a key only possessed by an enlightened few.

Nope, it's right there in the plain reading of the text for all to see. And it's impossible to miss unless you miss it on purpose. Love does not act unbecomingly. If our tone, our posture, our volume, our sarcasm, or our dismissiveness dishonors the image bearer in front of us, then even if our theology is sound, our love is not. And can I tell you something? If our love is not sound, our theology likely isn't sound either.

If I can't discuss a doctrinal position with you without barking at you or biting your head off, then not only is my love not sound, but my Christology is certainly not sound either because that's not how Christ behaves, is it? That kind of hits me where it hurts. Does it hit you? Next we saw that love, the sort of love that should describe our speech when we speak the truth does not seek its own, Paul says. Why do we speak the truth? Is it to serve, to heal, to restore, to build up? Or is it to win, to protect our own ego, to secure a position, or to settle a score or land a crippling blow?

Love refuses to make self the center of the conversation and refuses to make self-promotion or self-protection the goal of speaking the truth because love does not seek its own. Paul also taught us that love is not provoked. That means love does not have a hair trigger. It doesn't erupt when challenged. It doesn't lash out when misunderstood and it doesn't launch into an angry defense when accused of wrongdoing regardless of the truth of the accusation. Truth spoken from irritation may be accurate, but it's not Christlike. Love is not provoked. And the verse doesn't say love is not easily provoked either.

It says love is not provoked, as in at all, neither easily nor eventually. No, love is not provoked, period. And finally we saw that love does not take into account a wrong suffered. Love does not keep ledgers. Love does not carry balances forward. Love does not stockpile grievances to deploy as weapons at a convenient moment. Truth is never meant to be revenge. We said that love speaks like a physician, not like a prosecutor. Remember that? We said that not only does love not keep records of wrongs committed against us, but love shreds the records. Love burns the books. And that's where we left off last time.

We learned that we are to speak the truth, God's truth as found in the Scriptures, and we are to speak the truth in love. And so far we know that that means we are to speak the truth patiently. We're to speak the truth kindly. We're to speak the truth without jealousy. We should speak the truth with humility, seeking the other's benefit rather than our own. We can't speak the truth in a rude or unbecoming way. When we speak the truth, we can't allow ourselves to be provoked at all. And we can't speak the truth to settle the score or as payback for a wrong suffered.

Now that concludes our review of part one, which also serves as the introduction to today's part two message. And that brings us to verses six and seven in the first part of verse eight. First Corinthians 13 starting in verse six, Paul says of this kind of love that it does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things, and love never fails. So in the first part of that verse, he says of love it does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth. Love is not morally neutral. It does not just tolerate everything. Love has affections.

Love delights, but also love refuses to delight. Paul tells us first what love does not rejoice in. It does not rejoice in unrighteousness. The word rejoice means to take pleasure in, to celebrate, to delight in. And unrighteousness means wrongdoing, injustice, moral crookedness, sin. Love does not celebrate sin. It does not applaud wickedness. Love doesn't quietly or loudly enjoy the downfall of someone we have disagreed with. Love doesn't find any satisfaction in the deeds of the flesh in Galatians chapter 5. You remember those? Love doesn't celebrate or enjoy sexual immorality, impurity, or sensuality.

It doesn't revel in idolatry or sorcery. It doesn't thrive and strive for jealousy. The love with which we are to be speaking the truth doesn't do so in outbursts of anger or operate with a motive of selfish ambition. Neither does it promote dissensions or factions or envying, and it doesn't rejoice in drunkenness and carousing, or any other "things like these" as Paul says in Galatians 5.21. Because, as he goes on to say there, "Those who practice such things will not inherit the Kingdom of God." That's pretty clear.

But sometimes, if we're honest, we can feel a little bit of satisfaction when someone who opposed us is exposed as being involved in some public sin. We may not say it out loud, but we feel it. Love doesn't feel it. Love doesn't even want to feel it. Because love does not rejoice in unrighteousness, Paul says. But he doesn't stop there. He gives us the contrast. Right after he tells us love does not rejoice in unrighteousness, he immediately says, "But it rejoices with the truth." See, love delights when truth wins. Love rejoices when repentance happens, and especially when reconciliation happens. Love celebrates when righteousness prevails.

Love is not merely against sin. Love is for truth and for holiness. It means we delight when God's reality is upheld, when His Word is honored, when repentance replaces rebellion, when righteousness replaces crookedness, when reconciliation replaces separation. That's what love celebrates. Love delights in what God delights in. Now look at verse 7. Paul says, "Love bears all things." Paul isn't saying you just absorb everything, put up with everything, begrudgingly endure everything, and never address anything. Because Paul's already ruled out moral compromise in verse 6. Love doesn't rejoice in unrighteousness.

So when Paul says love bears all things, he's not saying love covers up sin in the sense of excusing it, or celebrating it, or treating it like it doesn't matter. No, love rejoices with the truth, remember. So whatever bears all things means, it must harmonize with truth, holiness, repentance, and restoration. The Greek word translated "bears" is "stegae." And the basic idea of that word is tied to the word for a roof, or covering, something that shields. So when Paul says love bears all things, one of the primary pictures is that love covers, not covers up like a criminal, but provides a cover, like a shelter.

Love doesn't cover up wickedness, but it covers a brother, it covers a sister, a spouse, a friend, in a way that protects them from unnecessary or untimely exposure. Love is not eager to broadcast weaknesses or failures. Love is not quick to put somebody on blast, especially with an audience. Love keeps confidential matters confidential. Love is not a leaker like we hear about in the news all the time. No, love covers. Love protects. Love shields. Love maintains confidence. And Paul uses present tense verbs here yet again, meaning this isn't an occasional heroic moment of sheltering. It's meant to be our pattern, our ongoing posture.

So love doesn't bear once in a while or every now and then. The verse doesn't say that love bears some things occasionally. Love is a continual bearing of all things as a way of life. And that word "stegae" has two shades of meaning. It can mean to cover or conceal in the sense of protecting, like we just discussed. But it can also mean to bear up under in the sense of enduring or holding up a heavy weight. And that makes perfect sense, because if you cover someone in a fallen world, you will often have to endure something in the process. If you refuse to expose, you may have to absorb.

If you refuse to retaliate, you may have to suffer quietly. If you refuse to spread the matter, you may have to carry the weight of it. That's bearing. What does it look like practically for love to bear all things? It means love doesn't gossip. It means love doesn't recruit secret allies through whispered stories or text messages. It means love doesn't take someone else's sin or weakness or disagreement and use it as social currency. It means love doesn't say, "I'm just asking you to pray," when what you really mean is, "I'm about to tell you something juicy." Or, "Share the tea," as the kids say these days. Love doesn't share the tea.

Love bears. Love covers. Love protects. And mark this, please. Love knows the difference between protecting a person and protecting sin. Love never protects sin. But love is anxious to protect the sinner from needless harm while still pursuing repentance and restoration. That's not softness. That's maturity. That's love acting like a roof. And can I tell you something? This is one of the clearest ways to measure whether we are actually speaking the truth in love or whether we are using truth as a weapon. Because while weaponized truth exposes Christ-like love provides a protective cover. Only the Holy Spirit can produce that.

Your flesh can't do this. My flesh can't do this. The flesh loves to expose. The flesh loves to score points. The flesh loves to say, "See, I was right." But the Spirit makes a man steady. The Spirit makes a man restrained. The Spirit makes a man safe. And brothers and sisters, you want to see Grace Life Church explode in spiritual growth? You'll see it as we develop into a place filled more and more with safe men and safe women. People around whom others know they can safely confess their sins and weaknesses and failures with zero fear of exposure or humiliation. Sir, does your wife feel safe with you?

Safe enough to share her weaknesses and troubles? How about your children? Ma'am, what about you? Are you a safe harbor for your husband? Are you a place in which he can discuss his trials and the storms of temptations where he can feel protected and covered? Folks, the Lord will do great things in a church in which love bears all things and provides a protective covering for its members. So to bear all things is not to pretend sin doesn't exist or put up with all things. Instead, it's to be firm but not fatal. It's to protect, not parade. It's to cover like a roof. That's the way we are to speak the truth in love.

That's the first phrase in verse 7. Look at the next phrase. Paul says that love believes all things. We're going to have to be careful here because Paul's not promoting gullibility. Rather, he's promoting charitable judgment, benefit of the doubt, refusing suspicion as a default reaction. The Greek word translated believes is pistui. And it is again in the present tense, meaning again, this is not a one-time act. It's a posture. It's a settled disposition of the heart. But what does it mean? Here's the idea. Love is inclined to believe the best, not the worst. Love doesn't default to suspicion. Love doesn't assume bad motives first.

Love doesn't interpret ambiguous words in the harshest possible way. Now let's be clear. Love doesn't deny evidence. Love doesn't ignore patterns. It doesn't close its eyes to sin. Love is not naive, but love refuses to assume evil where evil has not been proven. Love gives the benefit of the doubt. And that's profoundly difficult, impossible really, because our flesh tends to move in the opposite direction. The flesh assumes bad motives. The flesh fills in the blanks with the worst possibilities. The flesh says, "I've seen this before." The flesh reaches negative conclusions quickly. But love believes all things.

Now, God has been our pattern from any of these characteristics of agape love. But God doesn't believe in the same sense that we do, or as Paul is describing here. God doesn't assume. He doesn't infer. God doesn't interpret. God knows. In fact, God knows all things, all at once, at every moment, forever. His knowledge is perfect. For Him, there are no blanks to fill in. But we, unlike Him, are not omniscient. We're finite. We're limited. We can't see into a person's heart, and we don't know all the facts.

We don't know the internal struggles of another person, or what they've just been through, or maybe the horrible diagnosis they've just received. And listen, love restrains us from pretending that we do. So when Paul says love believes all things, he's describing a charitable posture toward fellow image bearers, especially within the body of Christ. Not dull ability, not doctrinal compromise, but charitable interpretation. And this leads naturally to the next phrase in verse 7, "hopes all things." If believes describes love's posture in the present, hopes describes love's outlook toward the future.

And we need to be just as careful here as we were with believes, because this is not a vague sort of optimism. This is not the power of positive thinking. It's not blindly pretending everything will work out comfortably. The Greek word translated "hopes" is "el piso." And like the other verbs in this verse, it's also in the present tense, meaning this is not a one-time surge of confidence. It's also an ongoing continuous posture. But what is hope in the biblical sense? In Scripture, hope is not wishful thinking. Hope is a confident expectation grounded in God's promises. Let me say that again.

Hope is a confident expectation grounded in God's promises. Hebrews 11.1 says, "Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for." Hope is not fantasy. Hope is tethered to God's promises. So when Paul says, "Love hopes all things," he's not saying love imagines the best outcome and then wishes upon a star. He's saying that love refuses to despair because God's redemptive promises are both real and assured. Numbers chapter 23 and verse 9 says, "God is not a man that he should lie, nor a son of man that he should repent. Has he said and will he not do it?

Or has he spoken and will he not establish it?" Joshua 21.35 reads, "Not one promise of the good promises which Yahweh had promised to the house of Israel failed, all came to pass." And here is 2 Corinthians chapter 1, verse 20, "For as many as are the promises of God in Him that is Christ, they are yes." Love hopes because God saves sinners, just like He said He would. Love hopes because God sanctifies believers, just as He said He would. Love hopes because Christ bills His church, just as He said He would. And love hopes because the Spirit completes what He begins. That isn't sentiment. That's sound biblical theology.

Hope looks forward with confidence because God has spoken and whatsoever He speaks shall with certainty come to pass. So when Paul says love hopes all things, he's not saying love ignores reality. Rather, he's saying love looks to a reality that's more certain than what our natural eyes can see. Because of the promises of God and His flawless record of delivering on those promises without fail, and because He didn't write us off, aren't you glad about that? Because of those things, love does not write someone else off prematurely. Love doesn't say that person will never change. Love doesn't conclude that marriage is finished.

Love doesn't say they're stuck with that struggle. Love doesn't say my children will never be saved. Rather, love says yes, this is hard. Yes, this is messy. Yes, this is painful. But God isn't finished yet. That's hope. When we were dead in sin, we didn't know it, but there was hope. When we were enemies of God, we didn't care, but there was hope. When we were blind, we couldn't see it, but there was hope. Why? Because Christ saved sinners. Because the Spirit gives life to the dead. Because the Father finishes what He begins. So if God didn't write us off, how can we be so quick to write others off?

I say again, if God did not write us off, how can we be so quick to write others off? Look back at verse 7, where Paul now says about love, "It endures all things." After saying love bears all things, after saying love believes all things, after saying love hopes all things, Paul now says love endures all things. The Greek word here is "hupomene." It means to remain under, to stay put, to stand firm under pressure, to persevere, to not run when things get hard, to not abandon your post. And like the others, it's present tense, which you probably guessed if you've been paying attention. It signifies ongoing endurance, habitual steadfastness.

This is not a superhuman endurance for a day or a week or a month. This is settled characteristic perseverance. Now, notice something. If bears had the sense of covering and protecting, if beliefs had the sense of charitable interpretation, if hopes had the sense of confident expectation in God's promises, then endures is like a backbone that keeps all that from collapsing. Because love that hopes must also endure when the fulfillment of that hope takes time. Love that believes must endure when evidence is slow to appear or is hard to see. Love that bears or covers must endure when covering costs something.

No roof leaks when it isn't raining, right? But an enduring covering protects those who are sheltered beneath it over and over and over again, storm after storm after storm. The word "hupomene" is used elsewhere in Scripture for perseverance under trial. In fact, James uses it exactly like that when he says, "Blessed is a man who perseveres under trial." That's James 1.12. Same rude idea. And it's used of Christ himself in Hebrews 12.2, which says, "Who for the joy set before him endured the cross." He endured the cross. He remained under it. He did not step out from under it. And he didn't climb down off of it. He didn't escape it.

And he didn't call down legions of angels. And he could have. He would have had every right to just say, "Enough of this. People aren't worth this." And condemned us all to the eternal punishment that we very well earned with just a single omnipotent thought. But he didn't. Instead, he endured. Because of love, the very sort of love Paul's been painstakingly describing for us, agape love, which is a love that endures. Love stays. Love remains. Love persists. Love endures. Not because the other person deserves it, but because Christ endured for us, even though we didn't deserve it. Look now at the first part of verse 8.

"Love never fails." And that's where everything we've set up to this point comes together. Love never fails. And that's pretty plain. That doesn't mean love never hurts. It doesn't mean love never suffers. It doesn't mean love is never rejected. It means instead that love never quits. Love is all the things Paul has said in the previous verses, always. And in the context of this chapter, Paul is contrasting love with some of the spiritual gifts. Prophecy, it'll be done away. Tongues, they'll cease. Knowledge, it'll pass away. But love, love abides forever. Why? Because love is rooted in the very character of God.

God is love, according to 1 John 4, 8. Not sentimental love, not weak love, not permissive love, but holy love, righteous love, covenant love. It's a love that is unfailing and unselfish. It's a sacrificial love. It's agape love. The kind of love that made promises before the foundation of the world. The kind of love that sent the Son. The kind of love that endured the cross. The kind of love that raises the dead. The kind of love that will present the church as a spotless bride to Him who bought her with the price of His blood. That kind of love never fails. Because Christ never fails. It never fails because the Father never breaks His word.

It never fails because the Spirit never abandons His work. Think about this, in John 13, 35, Christ said, "By this all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." He didn't say we'd be known for our perfect doctrine or our good preaching, lovely music, or any such thing. He said the mark of a true Christian, a true church, is the love we have for each other. And it's the kind of love we've been studying in these two messages. This is the mark of Christian maturity, which is the goal Paul set for us in Ephesians 4. It's the evidence of union with Christ. It's the fruit of the Spirit.

So let me bring this full circle. Paul in Ephesians 4 told us that we are to grow up into Christ by speaking the truth in love. In 1 Corinthians 13, he tells us what love looks like. In our previous message, we learned love is patient, love is kind. It's not jealous, not puffed up, doesn't act unbecomingly, doesn't seek its own, is not provoked, it doesn't take into account a wrong suffered. And this morning, we've seen that love bears all things. It believes all things. It hopes all things. It endures all things and love never fails. We're commanded to speak the truth, God's truth, God's word, and we are commanded to do that in love.

And it's a very specific love that we've spent two mornings defining. And I hope I've also communicated that what we're called to do, we cannot do. I can't do it and you can't do it, but Christ can. And that is our hope. Just as the law of God shows us our desperate need for a Savior, passages such as Ephesians 4 and 1 Corinthians 13 show us our continued desperate need for ongoing sanctification and the feeling of His Holy Spirit. So in the words of Paul in Philippians chapter 2, "Work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure." Work on this.

Work on speaking the truth in love. Ask the Lord to help you, knowing that it is God working in you to accomplish it for His glory and our good. Let's pray. Father in heaven, we thank you for a love that never fails. We confess that ours often does. We grow impatient. We grow suspicious. We grow weary. But you do not. Your promises stand. Your purposes hold. Your love endures. So we ask you now by your spirit, producing us what we can't manufacture. Make us a people who speak the truth without compromise and with a love like Paul has defined for us. Make us safe men and safe women. Make us steady. Make us hopeful. Make us enduring.

Form in us the likeness of Christ, the one who bore our sin and is patient with us, who hoped in the joy set before Him, enduring the cross, and whose love has never once failed and never will. As we come down to your table, remind us that our hope is not in our love for you, but in your unfailing love for us. We ask these things in the matchless name of our faithful Savior. Amen.