Love and Truth (God is Love part four)

"Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth." - 1 Corinthians 13:6

Here we come to the second-to-last post in my series God is Love, going through 
1 Corinthians 13:4-7 and discovering how the various attributes of love adhere to God, because He is love (1 John 4:16).

First up, what does delighting in evil look like?

Well, we know that evil and sin are the same thing (in the ESV version it says "[Love] does not rejoice at wrongdoing," aka, sin), thus sin is evil, and doing evil is sin.

You could rephrase the first part of that verse as "Love does not delight in sin."

Man, that packs a punch.

Love doesn't delight in sin.

But, we've still got the question, what does delighting in sin look like?

It looks like being glad when we've rejected or ignored God in favor of our own ways. It looks like enjoying other people's failures so we can feel better about ourselves.

Delighting in sin takes lots of forms, but it always ends up being an empty pleasure. It's never the enough we think it is, and it stings every time we come to realize that.

Luckily for us, our sin isn't the end of the game.

It's not even the end of this verse, because this verse ends with what we need.

Truth. I'll be the first to admit the truth can be scary. It's something completely out of my control, and it will tell me things that I don't want to hear. Truth won't hesitate to tell me when I'm wrong.

So, how are we supposed to delight in the truth?

To find that, we've got to find God.

What is God saying about who He is?

First up, God's giving us a clear message.

He's not okay with evil. He's on the opposite side of sin, both the sin inside of us and the sin that's running rampart in this world. He never delights in the sin in us, and He never delights in the evil that hurts us.

So, if God doesn't like all the sin in the world, why doesn't He just get rid of it?

Truth.

Nothing makes light seem so bright as darkness. And, God wants us to look more and more to that light, He uses every struggle to help us see His truth, whether for the first time or the forty-second. He wants us to see His truth and to delight in His truth.

But, when we're so messed up, how are we supposed to delight in truth?

Jesus.

How can we delight in the truth when we're so messed up that the light burns us? 

We look to Jesus. Because Jesus is that one truth that makes all the rest of them so beautiful.

Because of Jesus we don't have to fear because of our sin. Our sin was beaten a long time ago, and now God wants us to move on and rejoice in His truth.

His truth is different than our truth. His truth is eternal. His truth is solid. His truth is true when we want it to be true and when we don't. God's truth shows us more and more about Him, and we can have joy in knowing that God's truth is going to ultimately win. In us and outside of us, God's truth is going to win.

We can delight in truth because Jesus has saved us, and He's saved us for another world, a world where we will love His truth more than ever, and we'll be able to see Him more clearly than ever.

Let's chose to delight in the truth that Jesus is big, and He is love.

~Rebecca P.