faith for faith

When the apostle Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, “We know that for those who love God all things work together for good” (v. 8:28), does he literally mean all things, or is the “all” limited in some way? To clarify his meaning, the apostles writes a few verses later, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or sword? … No, in all these we are more than conquerors through him who loved us (vv. 8:35, 37). In this, the apostle intimates that all things, no matter how terrible they seem to us in this age, work together for the good of God’s saints.

What is interesting about the apostle’s clarification is that he does not say, “What shall separate us from the love of Christ,” but he says, “Who shall separate us,” indicating that the tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, and sword are not things that Christians will endure, but persons. And the language that the apostle uses is not arbitrary, but he is referencing what he had written elsewhere. Earlier in the epistle, the apostle writes, “For those who are self-seeking and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, there will be wrath and fury; there will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek” (vv. 2:8,9). Taking this tribulation and distress defined by Paul earlier in the letter and applying it to those whom Christians must endure, is then the apostle saying that these who incur tribulation and distress from God, namely the unrighteous, are not only unable to separate us from the love of Christ but are also in some way working to the good of the saints? In other words, is Paul saying that the damned in their damnation are working to the good of those who love God?

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What is speaking the truth in love? It is a question that I seem to ask to myself incessantly, for there are many who take offense to many of the things that I write and speak, and there are many who claim that I do not write and speak in love. It is a question that judges me whenever I hear of the offenses and the hostilities that some of my writings raise, and it is one that causes to me to examine every topic that I address and every word that I use to address them. It is a question that haunts my soul and my very purpose for existence, and one that causes me to question the very path that I have walked thus far. And being such a reoccurring question, I have addressed it before in my soul and in my writings and will likely address it for the rest of my life.

What then is speaking the truth in love? If you were to take a random survey of people in our country, you would likely receive a host of different answers. If you were to ask the question of a person of a postmodern persuasion, you would likely get an answer similar to, “Speaking the truth in love is not speaking at all, for truth is relative to the individual, and to force one’s opinion of truth upon another is offensive and intolerant and therefore unloving.” If you were to ask it of another, you might get the answer, “Speaking the truth in love is sharing what is true in such a way that it presents one’s view of truth as an opinion thereby making compliance to it optional and thus making it inoffensive.” If you were to ask it of one who professes to be a Christian, you might get an answer like, “Speaking the truth in love is sharing the truth of God’s Word in a way that is not judgmental and that withholds matters that might offend a person and turn them away from a church or the Faith.”

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