Are Your Words Grounded and Timed in Love? A Guest Post by Lori Roeleveld

It's my pleasure to welcome my friend, fellow-writer, and fellow-Rhode Islander (who just happens to share my name), Lori Roeleveld to Hungry for God ... Starving for Time today. I admire Lori for her courage to speak and write the truth, even when it's unpopular. Follow the link at the end of the blog to read more from her. But be warned, hanging around with her will make you do hard things, just like Jesus did.



Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins. (1 Peter 4:8) 

I was surprised when Carly invited me to lunch. Our church had been experiencing a conflict that had divided many. Carly and I had had numerous hard conversations about her attitude. Our last conversation had been particularly adversarial, so I was nervous that our meeting might be a vengeful ambush. 

Carly arrived after I did, and once we ordered, she didn’t keep me in suspense. “I need your help and your prayers. My doctor called me to discuss my most recent test results, and I don’t want to face it alone. Can you come along?” 

I was taken aback. “Of course. Still, I’m surprised you’re asking me.” 

“Why?” she said, leaning back in the booth. “Well, our last few exchanges haven’t been the most comfortable,” I replied. 

She nodded. “In fact, I hated those conversations. But through everything, one thing that’s always been clear is that you love me. It takes a huge commitment to love to stick with someone through talks like that. Other people probably have thought those things and just given up on me or walked away. I’ll take the tough talks as long as there’s the love.” 

Love is a multidimensional quality. It’s both a noun, representing a feeling, and a verb, representing actions that put others first. In John 21, after Jesus has risen from the dead, He appears to some of the disciples on the shore of the Sea of Tiberias. 

In verses 15–19, over breakfast, Jesus asks Peter three times about his love for Him. Peter answers three times that He does, indeed, love Jesus. Jesus’s response to each affirmative answer is to call Peter to action—feeding Jesus’s sheep—in demonstration of this love. 

To say that we love others is to say we’re willing to risk our own discomfort to speak hard things to them. 

To say that we love Jesus is to say we are ready to obey Him by living and speaking the truth. 

To say that we love Jesus is to say we are willing to reflect Him by loving and serving others. 

To say that we love others is to say we’re willing to risk our own discomfort to speak hard things to them.

Love is a feeling that leads to action. When we prepare for any hard conversation, we must ask ourselves questions about love. Do I love this person, and if not, what am I going to do about that? Am I being loving to speak this truth in this way, at this time, to this person? 

Some believers falsely assume that to be loving means to stay silent about truth or to compromise it in some way. Others are so afraid that loving feelings will lead to a softening of truth, they harden their hearts toward others and eschew mercy. 

This is dangerous thinking—both for the church of Jesus Christ and ultimately for the world. The world (meaning people who don’t follow Jesus) has absconded with love, replacing God’s idea of love with a facsimile that many buy as the real thing. 

And not just the world. Some parts of the body of Christ believe that to be loving, biblical truth must be muted or modified. 

Not so. 

Jesus walked on Earth living out perfect love while delivering perfect truth. It is possible. It’s not possible without Jesus, but it’s possible. Love and truth can occupy the same space, just as surely as Christ was fully human and fully God.

I’m aware that these two words frustrate, frighten, or trigger a wound reflex in some people. We’ve heard this phrase before, perhaps tossed around the church like a beach ball (or a dodge ball). 

“I’m just speaking the truth in love, is all.” 

“Well, don’t you know you have to speak truth in love?” 

Intended for useful instruction, this power-filled phrase from Ephesians 4 is too often snapped from its context like a tree branch and used to club innocent passersby in Jesus’s name. The misguided speaker is often leaning heavily toward a personal interpretation of truth, while offering only a passing nod at anything others might recognize as love. 

Inhale. 

Exhale. 

It’s tempting to edit from Scripture any passage that’s been misused, but this would be detrimental (not to mention heretical). Agreed, there has been a shameful amount of bullying that’s occurred in Jesus’s name. This speaking the truth in love concept has too often been the last word spiritually bludgeoned victims hear just before they hit the mat. 

The worse thing we can do, though—worse than lancing the wounds—is to allow the bullies and abusers the last word on God’s Word. It will challenge some of us to revisit “speaking the truth in love,” but these are our Father’s Words. We must reclaim them from the bullies. 

Of course, we can fairly represent love and truth simultaneously. Parents do it with children every day. Spouses do it. Church leaders, doctors, friends, and others all speak truth and communicate love, sometimes in the same breath. 

Love is our high calling. The highest. We need to be trained and transformed by love, so that love is our first language, our initial reflex, and our emotional default setting. We need to foster loving hearts, if we want that love to influence our words. 

(Excerpted from The Art of Hard Conversations, Lori Stanley Roeleveld, February 2019 by permission Kregel Publications)

Lori Stanley Roeleveld is an author, speaker, and disturber of hobbits who enjoys making comfortable Christians late for dinner. She’s authored four encouraging, unsettling books. Her latest release is The Art of Hard Conversations: Biblical Tools for the Tough Talks that Matter. She speaks her mind at www.loriroeleveld.com.

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