2 John 1:3–4: “Grace, mercy, and peace will be with you from God the Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, in truth and love. I rejoiced greatly that I have found some of your children walking in truth, as we received commandment from the Father.”

August 22nd, 2022 by Pastor Ed in devotional

The Apostle John uses the word truth in all four opening verses of 2 John. He obviously wants believers to be careful to live in truth, as it is an essential part of the gospel message. He is saying that since we have received the truth, then we must live the truth, and then he also points to love. The practical application of truth and love in our daily lives is that both must be experienced or consistently lived out together. There is a constant danger of becoming so intense in our pursuit of truth that we fail to love. Years ago, Wilbur Smith said that the greatest danger to the church is “dead orthodoxy.”

We are in error when we focus only on love and not on truth, and we are also in error when we focus only on truth and not on love. The two must go hand in hand. The Apostle Paul wrote of this in Ephesians 4:15: “[speak] the truth in love.” He is echoing John by saying that speaking the truth must never be separated from love because sometimes giving only abrasive truth can be devastating and overwhelming to the hearer. Love without truth is too lenient. Truth without love is too legalistic.

From a chemist’s standpoint, love and truth can be seen as two essential elements of life, sodium and chlorine. Sodium is an exceptionally active element and is only found in nature in a combined form. In other words, it is so strong that it always bonds itself to another element. Chlorine by itself is a poisonous gas that we can easily identify in household bleach. As every junior-high science student knows, when sodium and chlorine are combined, the result is sodium chloride—common table salt. Salt is used to preserve and bring out flavor, just like love and truth together do in the lives of believers.

“LORD, help us to speak the truth in love to all we meet this day, in Jesus’ name we pray.”