Noisy or Nice?

1 Corinthians 13:1

​Angels. If one of these messengers from God happened to walk in and start talking to you, or came onto a platform and addressed a crowd, nothing that anybody else was saying at the moment would be of any interest to you whatsoever. And yet Paul, writing to the church in Corinth, said, “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” Even an angel, in other words—if speaking without love—might as well shut his mouth. There’d be no point in anything he had to say. In Corinth, they held firmly to the truth—they just didn’t love each other. And absolute truth in the hands of absolute sinners is absolutely brutal. Look, I’m not saying you shouldn’t be fired up about the truth. You should be. I’m just saying you to need to be fired up about the truth about truth-and-love. Because anything less is a lot of painful noise that’s probably better left unsaid. Unless you can say it in love.

Questions for further thought:
1. What’s been your experience with someone who’s all truth and no love?

2. If you see this tendency in yourself, what would you pinpoint as the root of it?

Challenge: 
Father, help me live with Your perfect love that puts others before myself and puts grace ahead of judgment. Show me how to trust more deeply in Your Holy Spirit to do the convicting work I sometimes try to hijack. I ask You to make me a person who sees love as the centerpiece, and sees truth as a loving part of it. I pray these things in the name of the One who personifies truth and love—the mighty name of Jesus. Amen.