One of my devotional ramblings...
















I've been thinking a lot thru the past month about Paul's admonition in
Ephesians 4:15 that we are to "speak the truth in love."

But how often do we forget one or the other? How often do we try to explain to an unbeliever their sin and their need for Christ's payment for their sin, but we don't do so in a loving manner? (ED: i am often guilty on this..really..moreover i sumtimes indulge in the wrong things too)


Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 13 that without love, we are nothing.
Jesus said in John 13:35 that all people will know we are His disciples by our love.

If people can't see His love in our lives, are we really His disciples? If we aren't speaking the truth in love, then is the Lord giving us the words (Mark 13:11, Luke 21:14) or are we trying to do things on our own? I don't think He would give us opportunities to share the Gospel with others without also giving us the means--and the love--to show others what He is like.

But it can be so easy to want to hammer home the truth that we forget about the love.

It's not our job to "convince" others that the Gospel is true;
it is our job to proclaim the Gospel and to show them God's love.

The funny thing about His love is that it makes absolutely no sense that He should love such totally unworthy creatures as us--but those of us who have encountered His love know how inexplicably irresistible it is once we've experienced it.

We don't have to understand it; but we're going to crave it more and more once we've seen in our lives what it truly is like.
(ED: Its like drug addiction.. u dunno why it makes u feel good but u just long for more of it.. )

The only answer is to wait on the Lord to give us opportunities to tell others about the Gospel, but trust Him to give us the words and the love to share with even
the most difficult people in the world--because those difficult people could
be any one of us before we knew Him. And we can look at our own lives to see
how the Lord transforms difficult people through His love.

But that's just half the story. The flip side of forgetting to speak the truth in love is speaking about God's love, but forgetting the rest of the truth: Yes, God loves us, but He still demands obedience. And the cost of disobedience...do any of us really want to pay this? But how many of us are in congregations today where everyone from the pastor to talk all about how much God loves us and forget that unless we obey what He tells us to do, we'll end up with all of the other hypocrites and disobedient servants in the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and
gnashing of teeth? (Matthew 25:14-30)

Get ready for this piece of cold hard truth okay...

God's love won't save us from hell

I'm willing to bet there are too many churches out there where people are being told that because God loves everyone and He won't send anyone to hell, at least not forever. But they're playing with fire to assume this, and they're not giving the full gospel/story: God's love will not SAVE us from hell, but in His love for us, He has provided a way out for us through grace.

Do any of us here NOT know John 3:16? If we preach the love of God but don't tell people that His love demands a response, then people aren't getting the whole truth--and that can be worse than no truth at all. (Remember the Garden of Eden?)

I think there's a third element in all of this that we shouldn't overlook, but unfortunately a lot of us probably do--I know I have. After the Lord has used us to plant a seed of the Gospel in someone's life or has used us to water the seed that someone else has planted, we need to pray for these people--to get on the same page as God, who wants to make these seeds grow and become fruitful.

Check out 1 Corinthians 3 where Paul reminds us that unless the Lord makes things grow, nothing we do by ourselves will matter. Plainly said.. we r nothing...

We can plant seeds, but if we don't let God use us to give His love to those people, those seeds won't grow. Likewise if we plant seeds buth they don't get proper nutrition -- the full truth of the Gospel--then those seeds will do nothing but wither and rot.

Think of the front line of an army that doesn't have troops and resources to back them up--will the people on the front lines survive very long? We can be the backup that can help strengthen the foundation that God puts down in others lives. Without that backup, I hate to think of what kind of shape those on the front line would be in.

its like planting a seedling and puttingit into a pot with good fertilizer but leaving it out in the sahara dessert without any water supply..