Truth and Love on the Balance Beam of Life

“Our love grows soft if it is not strengthened by truth, and our truth grows hard if it is not softened by love.”

― John R.W. Stott (1921–2011)

Marriage partners are truth and love,

We get them in balance only from above,

These two must be equal if life’s to be good,

If life’s to please God as we know it should.

WE are softened by denials of truth as much as we are hardened by denials of love. We need both in equal and ample portion. As Jesus was both fully human and fully Divine, we need one hundred percent truth as well as one hundred percent love. One might even argue that when love is betrayed there is a lack of truth, as also when truth misses full quota it has fallen short of love.

Life has made us hard for truth,

But just as much we are soft for love,

God always seeks for proof,

That we seek our wisdom from above.

Steadying the emotions,

Steadying the mind,

Control your devotions,

And virtuous balance you’ll find.

BALANCE can become such an irrelevant concept when it’s overused. But there are possibly no other more meaningful things in this temptuous world. There is the feeling that love can soften us too much and truth can harden us too much. But, as we have deduced, love and truth – under God – have an equal stake in each other. Without love, truth is undermined and ceases to be as we have come to know it. Without truth, love becomes weak and unreliable.

When truth and love are missing,

It’s like lovers getting no meaning from kissing,

There’s no significance in life,

And everything is headed for strife.

VACUUMS of both truth and love, simultaneously, are common in this life. The lover of dissension is also a lover of lies. They neither abide in love nor truth. They insist on a life that is far from the nature of God, which is to abide in both love and truth. They love darkness and hate the light. They hate justice, unless it’s something peculiar to their own values. They love pride. They hate humble people. It is not good to persist in such a vacuum of truth and love.

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We need God because we need truth and love. If we hate God we hate truth and love. But if we truly love God, we will value higher than anything truth and love. Our lives rest on these two in balance. We need to be not so softened to love without truth and not so hardened to truth without love.

© 2014 S. J. Wickham.