Balancing Lovingkindness and Truth…
Thy lovingkindness and Thy truth will continually preserve me.
Psalm 40: 11
Over the last few years I’ve notice that throughout the Bible there is this constant pairing of lovingkindness and truth.
Getting a good grasp of both lovingkindness and truth seems to be a hard thing for us. Like most things that require balance, we tend to lean farther on one side or the other.
Church culture today reflects the balance battle between lovingkindness and truth. You have one side that shouts about love, grace, and anti-religion while never giving any understanding or definition to what these words mean. Then you have the other side that wallows in understanding and definition while forgetting to put into practice the things they define.
Two extremes, and everyone is caught somewhere in the middle. Anger is stirred and error occurs when we begin to think that one side is more like Jesus than the other.
Lovingkindness and truth are equally important because they are equal qualities found in perfection, found in wisdom, and found in Christ. They are also equally wrong and sinful when one is present without the other.
Thinking about the greatness of God’s lovingkindness and truth is what made this verse resonate with joy in my heart. The perfect balance of both His shown lovingkindness and His dealings with me in truth is what preserves me.
In Christ, God has shown me His lovingkindness. God sent His only Son to die on my behalf so that I could be back in right relationship with Him again. Also in Christ, I am forced to face the truth of my sinfulness. I forced to face the truth of God’s anger at my sin and the need for wrongs to be righted. I forced to face the truth that giving real love isn’t like giving out candy…love is costly.
Walking in God’s lovingkindness and truth I am preserved. I am constantly receiving this gift of His unconditional love and forgiveness….and yet I can’t truly receive His gift of love unless I operate in the truth of WHY I need to receive it. When I know WHY Christ had to die and then I receive His undeserved death as the substitute for my deserved death…I rejoice, celebrate, and delight in the beauty of His lovingkindness and truth!
To be like Christ is to strive to balance both lovingkindness and truth in our lives. To accurately display Christ we must display both lovingkindness and truth.
To be practical, we can’t talk about God’s love as if it cost Him nothing. We can’t ignore the terrible role our sin plays in the Gospel. At the same time we also can’t harp on the role of our sin. We need to show and tell the world that…
“The law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set us free from the law of sin and death. What the Law could not do, weak as it was in the flesh; God did; sending his Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for sin.”
(Romans 8:2 emphasis added).
We can’t save or change ourselves by knowing the truth and trying to abide by the Law. We must humbly receive God’s gift and abide in His love. We must humbly present this gift to the world knowing that none of us deserve it. We must display the truth of costly love by giving our lives away to those around us.
Balance. We need a balance of lovingkindness and truth. But as we are figuring things out; we can rest assured that we are preserved by the perfect balance of God’s lovingkindness and truth.
Jonathan,
What if the trick is to see these two aspects of God not in balance but in overload. Almost like the make-up of Jesus… 100% God and 100% man. Well, of course, that seems impossible. I guess I’m saying that it is impossible to go overboard with how loving God is. You can’t overstate how gracious He is. And if you seek to balance it with truth…(like trying to “balance” Christ’s deity with his humanity) then you lose a piece of what God is. He is inexplicable.
In the same way, if we attempt to somehow mitigate God’s truth… His cutting, dividing, piercing truth by saying God is also loving… we somehow deflect the blade. It’s like it is impossible for us to see both sides at once. Sovereignty and free will. Humanity and Deity. Truth and Grace. They cause our heads to explode but our hearts to find hope.
I wish I could hold a Brennan Manning understanding of Abba while holding a John Piper reverence for a Holy God. I think they are both correct. However, I seem to -at different times- feel drawn to one or the other. And at those times… I don’t need balance… I can’t achieve balance. I just want an overload of God.
I love your mind and your ability to write out your thoughts in a clear and provocative way. Thank you so much for this blog. I read every new entry and am challenged by your pursuit of God.
I’m loving the idea of God overload!
I’m honestly not sure if balance is the right word for what resonated with me in this Psalm about God preserving me with a combination of both His lovingkindness and truth.
It’s more just kinda what you’re saying…that there is the presence of both in who God is and the reality of our relationship with Him.
The negative part of my post was really meaning to address the part of our humanity that wants to say we have pinned God down in only His giving of love or only in His operating in truth. One without much consideration of the other.
I used balance to mean that in order to see God in His fullness we need to see both. Just as it would be strange and unsettling for a large part of the church to believe that Christ was mostly human…and another large part of the church to believe that Christ was mostly God; in the same way, the character of God is seemingly being polarized in the Church unsettles me a little…not in a mad way, but in a sad way…the fact that He was both fully God and fully man is a large part of what makes Him and what He has done truly amazing. (Phil. 2) If you don’t see Him as both then you don’t get the full picture and you miss out depths and riches of the story. In the same way, as God continues to reveal the depths of both His lovingkindness and His truth to me, I just have a longing to share the fullness and beauty of them coexisting in the fullness of God.
At the same time, that is the beauty of the Church. The iron sharpening iron, self-correcting nature of us all being the one body of Christ. I think this is where we become polarized, we see a genuine deficiency in a part of the body and so we tend to the other extreme in attempts to balance things out….so maybe balance isn’t the word. Maybe I’m meaning fullness…the fullness of God. God overload!
Thanks for reading and sharing Lance!