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“[Love] does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the
truth.” – 1
Corinthians 13:6
When
we read the definitions of love in 1 Corinthians 13, we may easily become
discouraged because loving patiently and without envy or boasting, can be
difficult, requiring God’s constant equipping and power. When I read verse six,
however, my first instinct is to shout, “Whew! I’ve got this one! No way would
I be tempted to rejoice over evil.
Rejoicing with the truth is easy.”
But then the testing comes.
When
we first sent our son to school after sheltering him in our homeschool
environment, he immediately came in contact with a bully named David*. David would shove and punch him and call my
little boy names. My first thoughts when my son told me about David was to
teach him to fight back and to confront David’s mother myself. After praying over the matter, I remembered the
following verse:
Do not repay evil for evil or
reviling for reviling, but on the contrary, bless, for to this you were called,
that you may obtain a blessing. (1 Peter 3:9)
With
that verse in mind, I sought out the truth.
David had been recently adopted from a foreign country and was new to
the school. He was trying to adjust to many
life changes and did not know how to make friends. It became apparent that David’s actions
flowed out of a heart hungry for love and acceptance. So, I encouraged my boy to repay David’s mean
actions with kindness and to invite him to be his friend. David’s actions changed immediately. When I picked up my boy from school at the
end of the week, I heard David cry out to my son, “Goodbye, friend. I love you.”
I had been so tempted to teach my son to repay evil for evil. Thankfully, remembering God’s truth kept us
from delighting in wrong defensive actions.
Choosing to delight in the truth
instead of evil is much easier when the difference between the two is obvious. But
the cunning enemy of our souls often distorts God’s truth subtly and gradually
such that only the most vigilant will notice the difference. Imagine that I have written the letters t, r, u, t, h on
separate sheets of paper and taped them to the wall to spell “truth”. Then consider how the enemy often uses something
in the world such as financial, health, family, or job issues to distract us,
so that our eyes stop focusing on the cross of Christ. To illustrate this point,
I will remove the first letter “t”, which looks like a cross, from the wall. With the letters r, u,t, h remaining on the
wall, I will next began scrambling the letters to show how the enemy takes God’s truth and reorders
or distorts it just a little to communicate a false message that will
ultimately hurt us. By hurting us, he
hurts God. When I finish scrambling the
letters, “ruth” now reads as “hurt”.
When
we strive to rejoice in the truth, let us be careful to rejoice in God’s truth,
not Satan’s distortion of it. God tells
us in James 1:17 that “every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down
from the Father of lights”, and John 16:23 declares that whatever we ask the
Father in Jesus’ name, He will give us.
But the world often distorts these truths into a false “name it, claim
it” gospel which feels good and right to those who are hurting but is still
wholly false. The truth is that
sometimes God’s good and perfect gift for us comes in the form of futility or
suffering for the purpose of conforming us into His image. (Romans 8:18-30). Do we rejoice in the trials God allows into
our lives recognizing that He doesn’t take anything away from us without giving
us more of Himself? Are we rejoicing in
the false notion that we can use God as a means to a material end instead of rejoicing
over the opportunities He gives us to use the things of this world as a means
to lead more people to an eternal end with Him?
When we do not receive whatever we ask from Him, do we rejoice that He
only gives us what we ask “in his name”, that is, according to His perfect
will, trusting that His plans for us are always better than our own?
When
we read about how good the law of the Lord is (Joshua 1:8), do we take delight
in obeying it out of love for God and his wonderful truth, or do we rejoice
instead in the enemy’s distortion called legalism? When we derive more pleasure in exalting
ourselves as more righteous than others, then we are rejoicing in evil, not in
God’s truth.
Conversely,
the enemy may take the truth of our freedom in Christ described in Galatians
5:1-3 and morph it into the false idea of unrestrained license. It is wrong to rejoice in our freedom in
Christ if we translate that freedom as permission to sin, for through Christ,
we have died to sin so that we cannot live in it any longer. (Romans 6:1-3).
Similarly,
the enemy of our souls may take all the good things God has given us and
attempt to change it into something harmful.
For example, when God give us righteous ambition that strives to do all
things with excellence for the glory of God and out of love for Him, the enemy may
attempt to twist it into selfish ambition.
Another prominent distortion we see across modern culture is the redefining
of the beautiful gift of sexual intimacy which was given by God as a symbol of the covenant and as a binding union between husband and wife. The world keeps trying to redefine that good
gift, remove it from its safe boundaries, and transform it into something
utterly destructive like a fire which brings warmth and light while in the fireplace
being removed from the hearth and placed where it can burn the whole house down.
As
we receive God’s love and strive to love each other unconditionally, let us
take care to rejoice in God’s truth and not some subtle distortion which is
actually evil in disguise. By abiding
in Him, spending time daily in His word and in prayer, and asking His Spirit to
guide us, we can discern the God’s truth from Satan’s lies, walk in wisdom, and
delight in God’s wonderful truth.
*Not his real name
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