Telling the Whole Truth

It’s easier to say a bad idea is a good idea. It’s easier to tell someone they are doing fine when they are struggling. It’s easier to look the other way when someone cuts a corner, or several corners, than to hold them accountable for risk of angering them.

It is easier.

But, it lacks integrity.

It is not more loving. It lacks integrity.

Truthfulness is love’s best friend. They rejoice together. Love, “rejoices with the truth” (1 Cor. 13:6). There is no biblical love void of truthfulness. We are right to say that the truth sometimes hurts. However, it doesn’t always hurt. Even when it hurts a bit, it still sets us free. Good leaders, and good friends, can tolerate the pain truthfulness sometimes brings.

Love demands it.

I’m suggesting we build relationships with our teams and loved ones strong enough that they seek and accept honest feedback, even when it is critical—and leaders do so first. I also want to be clear I am not suggesting we lack care in how we communicate truthfully to others. Jerkfulness is not a sign of truthfulness. Furthermore, we must always begin with ourselves—never others, lest we suffer the scourge of plank-eye our Savior warns us about. Yet, we need to know how to honor God as loving truth-tellers in a world famished for lack of honesty.

Let’s begin with this: Truth and love are more than best friends. They are married. In fact, biblical love provides the greenhouse in which truthfulness grows. In his delightful book, I Told Me So: Self-Deception and the Christian Life, philosopher Gregg Ten Elshoff notes there are many circumstances where lying is the loving thing to do. For instance, if a murderer asks you for the location of someone they seek to kill, the loving thing would be to lead them astray. But most of our truth avoidance has to do with preserving our ourselves at the expense of others…and that isn’t love. It’s moral cosplay.

When someone says they love someone too much to tell them the truth, they usually aren’t being truthful with themselves. It’d be better to say, “my relationship to the offender might be put at risk,” or, “the offender’s immaturity makes it difficult to be truthful without painful consequences.” Perhaps, “I’d rather lie than hurt their feelings.” Maybe, “I’d rather not endure the pain.” Or, “Besides, I don’t think they’d apologize or change anyway. What good would it do?” In such cases, we aren’t avoiding telling the truth out of love. We are doing it out of cowardice.

Truthfulness with others begins by telling ourselves the truth. If we can’t be honest about why we aren’t being truthful with others, we will struggle to be truthful with others. If we struggle to be truthful with others, we often struggle to be honest with God, as well. However, God sees the truth in all things, so our efforts to cut corners with him are merely the wasted breath of our insecurity and self-deception.

Imagine a world with me. What if we were COMPLETELY honest with God, ourselves, and others about God, ourselves and others. Imagine friends opening up to each other, families talking to each other openly, couples truly communicating, pastors preaching God’s holy fire with the love of Jesus himself, congregations gobbling up biblical truth like it was running out forever in next ten seconds. Imagine knowing whatever you saw or read was completely true—seriously, imagine that. Imagine being truly vulnerable, without fear, before the God who knew you before you were born and rejoicing in the fullness of His grace—rather than your deeds.

This is only possible if we are willing to endure the temporary discomfort of telling and hearing the truth.

Universal niceness at the expense of truth is the source and preservative of much dysfunction. When we bring this to matters of faith, we set aside the clean mirror of Scripture for cheap filters that alter our appearance to fit the way we want to see ourselves rather than how we look in God’s sight. We often then take these filters into our relationships and professional world, and…yikes.

Let us begin with confessing our cut emotional corners to God, and asking Him for the strength to tell the truth to Him, ourselves, and others as he would have us to. Not as angry or bitter. Not as rude or boastful.

If we honor God as loving truth-tellers, we will enjoy the freedom truthfulness provides and hear in the background both the applause of heaven and love rejoicing with the truth. Love and truth go together. Their bond cannot put them asunder. There is no love without truth, and, “truth,” without love, is not truth, but violence against the greatest truth of them all: Love.