In the market for some real estate? Looking for somewhere to call your new home? Let’s take a spin around town and see some of the best properties for sale. After a quick tour of the properties you can decide which one you’d like to call your new spiritual home. Let’s start our tour at the center of town where two roads meet. We’ll take the one on the right first—Love Street. The houses on this road are nice, spacious homes. They have very beautiful yards and the wide front porches look inviting. The homes are very attractive, but when you get out of the car and inspect the houses for yourself you begin to notice that something is not right with these homes. The walls are not straight, and the corners are not square. Light switches turn on lights in other rooms, and water faucets are not connected to the water. The oven and dishwasher are stacked where the washer and dryer should be, which are in the kitchen where the oven and dishwasher should be. You quickly realize these homes are beautiful, but not functional. 

We return to the town center and take the other road—Truth Avenue. You eagerly begin inspecting some of these homes to see if they are functional. To your delight, everything works properly and they are all built exactly to code. Everything is square, light switches and faucets work, and appliances are in the right place. But these homes have a different flaw. Clearly, no effort was made to make these houses beautiful. They look grey, cold, and lifeless. The yard is full of gravel, and the house is boxy and drab on the exterior.

You hurry back to the center of town, disappointed in the houses that are beautiful but not functional and functional but not beautiful. And there on the corner of Love Street and Truth Avenue, you see the perfect house. It is both functional and beautiful. It has the best qualities of each of the other houses without the flaws they suffered from. Clearly, this is a beautiful home that was built with much care and hard work.

As Christians, we must build our spiritual house on the corner of Love and Truth. It is possible to prioritize one to the exclusion of the other. If we accept a watered-down definition of love and de-emphasize truth, we are like the houses that are outwardly attractive but not built according to the proper standards. On the other hand, if we staunchly emphasize truth but forget to be loving, we’re like the other houses. Yes, they’re “built the right way”, but who’d want to live there? It’s not right to emphasize love to the exclusion of truth, but neither is it right to emphasize truth to the exclusion of love. Paul told the Ephesians that growing into Christian maturity involves “speaking the truth in love…” (Eph. 4:15). Never let go of truth and never let go of love. We need both.