Will we show love, or will we stand unmoving on the truth? To me the issue is not a matter of one either being filled with doctrinal integrity or moved by compassion and empathy.

To speak the truth in love means love and truth are joined at the hip and cannot be separated from each other. Truth is the content, the message. Love is the modality, the way of sharing the message. Truth is inflexible. It remains the same in all circumstances because it is sourced in God. Love is ever flexing, adapting to each situation so as to communicate the unchanging word in such a way that it fits what the circumstance requires. I find this posture to be deeply evangelical.

This is exactly the point that Paul is making in 1 Corinthians 13:1-3. One may be ever so filled with the spirit and able to penetrate mysteries. Yes, be filled to bursting with all knowledge and truth. Yet without love, he becomes a resounding gong and a clanging symbol.

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In Zambia, in the great long ago, people used to protect their children by going to the local medicine man to get pouches of herbs they would put around the child’s neck and loins to protect it from malign spiritual influences. Some medical missionaries used to rip off these pouches before giving any Western medicine to the child. A bold stance for the truth, right? And yet it did very little except deprive that family of two or three months’ income, which they would have to expend again if they wanted their child to be protected from the evil “powers” all around. It didn’t change their hearts one bit, no matter how much the missionary spoke about the uselessness of those little pouches and the superiority of Western medicine.

How much better would it have been to learn first how those medicine pouches functioned within that worldview? To gain trust and to learn to see it as they saw it. The missionary would not come to believe that those medicine pouches—any more than any other idol—were anything of substance. Rather, this was a way of recognizing that, to the one who believes it to be real, it is real, in the sense that it exerts an uncanny power over the heart and conscience.

I suppose there are situations where that wall of false belief is best broken down by an overwhelming demonstration of God’s sovereign power. If we had the power of the apostles to do miracles, maybe that would be the way to go. No doubt there are situations where the strongest reproof is called for. But for most missionaries, most of the time, it turns out best when one fosters a relationship of trust in which the liberating gospel can be shared.

My point is that any missionary has to learn how to adapt to the ways of the people among whom he lives (at the very least their language with all its implicit distortions) if he has any hope of communicating to them the things that pertain to eternal life. This is compassion and empathy at work: acknowledging that other peoples’ views of the world are different than yours, and to connect and communicate will require you to bear with beliefs that you either don’t understand or may even know to be wrong. It is not to deny the truth, but to be wise in choosing when to apply it. This is what we mean when we say, “speak the truth in love.”

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Why can speaking the truth in love be such a hard equation for people in our circles to solve? It may be more due to our rather isolated existence than anything else. No doubt it is a great blessing to dwell in unity with dear brothers and sisters. We draw great strength from it. But it can also become harmful if we are so “set apart” we fear risking contact with people who think and speak differently. What’s more, we can succumb to the practice of using “insider” language to communicate. We may find it hard to understand others because we’ve unintentionally created our own unique dialect. As a result, good communication takes patience and grace.

In Paul’s hymn to love (1 Corinthians 13), one does not have to read too deeply between the lines to recognize “love is messy.” If love does not seek its own good but the good of its neighbor, then it’s going to be put in positions sometimes when the lover will have to bear his neighbor’s mess and say nothing about it, and do so gladly, just as the fabled Samaritan did.

After all, in the parable the rescuer didn’t just put his time and money at risk by helping the injured man. Any altruist can do that. It was even more than physical safety that he was putting on the line—the bandits may not have been far off, after all. No, we’re told for a reason that this fictitious man was a Samaritan. His culture had instilled in him an intense distaste for Jewish culture. He wasn’t just helping a vulnerable man, he was helping “one of them.” The Samaritan’s cultural values were on the line. He may have even been tempted to think, “Serves you right. That’s what you get for living life like you do.” And yet, through a heroic act of self-control and clear-eyed priorities, he saw his neighbor lying there and stepped into the mess with him even though it may have felt like a compromise of his values.

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How burdensome it must have been for Jesus to leave the bright bliss that he knew in his father’s presence! To come down into “this hall of death to breathe our poisoned air” as hymn writer Martin Franzmann puts it. Not only was Jesus surrounded by humanity’s woe, he was carrying its universal burden in his own soul. We see glimpses of it in his sigh before the healing of the deaf man (Mark 7:34). In his weeping over Jerusalem (Matt 23:37). In his encounter with the feckless disciples at the bottom of the Mountain of Transfiguration (Matt. 17). In the Garden of Gethsemane (Luke 22:44).

We see the same attitude mirrored in the lives of his apostles. Paul goes to Athens, where he discovers a learned city that fills him with paroxysms of grief—so thoroughly filled is it with grotesque idols! Yet when he addresses the Areopagus, he begins by saying, “As I walk through your city, I see how very religious you all are. (Acts 17:23)” He’s not lying. He sees they are filled with zeal and religiosity, vain and empty though it may be.

Love bears all things. It suffereth long. That which is wrong and misguided sometimes needs to be endured, just as Jesus endured the competitive arguments among his disciples over who deserved the best seat in the house. If he had rebuked them every time they engaged in that kind of squabbling, I would think the gospels would be filled with his constant scolding of his disciples instead of his loving teaching.

There is a difference between patiently enduring that which is not right and embracing an ideology with heart and mind and voice. The one is a matter of love. The other is a matter of turning away from the truth. We want to walk beside people in the struggle. But if they obdurately refuse to struggle (something which can only be established over time), then of course, with sorrow, we can no longer walk with them.

Yet at the beginning of the journey, isn’t it right to be curious, to listen, to try to understand their world on its own terms before launching into a jeremiad? Isn’t this one way of expressing love? To come to the point where I can imagine someone else’s realities and possibilities as if they were real for me. To see the world with their eyes.

Again, perhaps because we often live in a Christian bubble, we confuse curiosity with complacence, and listening to understand as if it signaled agreement. The result is either we don’t engage at all, or we engage first by counting down the list of all the things that we disagree with in another’s way of life to protect our own integrity.

The painful truth is that empathy is not going to win everyone. It just creates a setting in which the truth can be shared. The great evangelism encounters I remember in my own past are not the victorious ones where someone saw the light of the gospel. Rather, I remember the ones where I had come to love these people and yet they turned away. You don’t turn love on and off like a spigot. The enduring grief and pain are real. It’s part of the burden of evangelism—this carrying on one’s heart the soul of another who just does not seem to want the salvation that Jesus won for him.

But that’s nothing compared to the anguish Jesus felt. “Will you also go?” he plaintively asks his disciples. He came to his own people and his own received him not. That’s the burden of love! A burden we are willing to carry because he carried our griefs first and washed our sins away with his tears.