The Hospitable Leader DevotionalSample

“The truth hurts.” We have all heard and felt this saying; it’s never easy to absorb unflattering and difficult truths. The truth hurts sometimes, and because it hurts, we often assume that truthfulness is antithetical to love. “If I love someone, I won’t hurt their feelings by saying difficult things to them,” you may hear someone say. We draw a dividing line between loving someone and telling them the truth.

However, as we see in today’s passage, telling the truth isn’t simply not unloving, it is integrally connected to loving someone. Difficult truths and love go hand in hand. In this passage, the apostle Paul is writing to the church in the city of Ephesus and encouraging them to grow in “maturity.” The church in Ephesus is full of “gentiles,” or people who weren’t Jewish and therefore have “pagan,” non-Jewish ethics, which could be full of sexual promiscuity, idol worship, and so on. Paul, addressing the new Jesus believers, says some of them can be infants (or young and immature in their faith) who are tossed back and forth easily because of their immaturity. But the antidote to this immaturity is for someone to speak truth in love. Because the immature waver back and forth, we must speak truth because we love them, or else they won’t grow into maturity.

In many of our relationships, we have contact with people who need to grow in certain areas. Our first instinct is often to just love them—not confront the actual issue because it may hurt them. We may feel selfless in these moments because we’re neglecting how upset we are with the person, and we’re being “bigger” and looking past the area of concern, thereby showing love. However, a strong argument can be made that this approach does not display a love for the other person, but is selfishly self-protective because we don’t want the discomfort of confrontation! If our primary goal is, in fact, to help the person into maturity, then we must speak truth in love. Only when truth is confronted can growth occur. 

As Terry Smith says in The Hospitable Leader, “We do not need to make a false choice between love and truth.” As leaders, we can be the forerunners who are willing to accept truth in love, and to then give truth in love. When we do so, we promote a hospitable and loving leadership geared toward growth.