Howard C. Wilkinson - "The Truth in Love" (September 13, 1959)
MP3
Loading the media player...
Transcript
- Download transcript as:
-
Text
-
PDF
-
WebVTT (includes timecodes)
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
| - | The text of the sermon today is Ephesians 4:15, | 0:29 |
| "speaking the truth in love, | 0:36 | |
| we are to grow up in every way". | 0:39 | |
| This is Freshman Sunday in the Duke University Chapel. | 0:44 | |
| The service is being conducted | 0:50 | |
| by the members of the Religious Life staff. | 0:51 | |
| Following the service, | 0:56 | |
| all of us will be standing in the north transept | 0:59 | |
| and we'll be glad to meet any of you and all of you | 1:01 | |
| who would like to take the time to meet us individually. | 1:06 | |
| During the year we hope to come to know you, | 1:10 | |
| in your dormitory, | 1:14 | |
| in your denominational group, | 1:15 | |
| and here in the chapel. | 1:18 | |
| The sermon is prepared for those who today | 1:21 | |
| stand on the threshold of a four year search for truth. | 1:26 | |
| The reason why you have come to Duke University, | 1:33 | |
| is that you wish to learn truth, | 1:38 | |
| to fill your minds with knowledge, | 1:42 | |
| to collect facts, to grasp ideas. | 1:46 | |
| You have come here to get an education. | 1:52 | |
| I think it is a more than passing significance, | 1:57 | |
| that you have begun this search for truth | 2:01 | |
| at a juncture in history, | 2:06 | |
| when the flow of information is at an all time high. | 2:08 | |
| Information is the greatest commodity in the world today. | 2:15 | |
| Nothing else compares to it. | 2:19 | |
| And never before in history, | 2:22 | |
| has there been so much to know about so many things. | 2:26 | |
| Certainly at the time that your parents were in college, | 2:33 | |
| they did not have before them in books and in lectures, | 2:38 | |
| in libraries, in movies | 2:43 | |
| and in other mediums of communication, | 2:47 | |
| the great array of facts and ideas | 2:50 | |
| and thoughts that are spread out before you, | 2:54 | |
| as you commence your college education. | 2:58 | |
| Consider a few of the rather tantalizing bits of truth | 3:04 | |
| that have been uncovered recently, | 3:09 | |
| to which you can address your minds | 3:13 | |
| that previous generations did not known about. | 3:15 | |
| As an illustration, our leaders of learning | 3:19 | |
| found out during the international geophysical year, | 3:23 | |
| that the surface or crust of the earth | 3:28 | |
| very likely slipped back some centuries ago, | 3:32 | |
| almost like the Rawhide covering of a Baseball | 3:39 | |
| sometimes slips when it gets wet | 3:43 | |
| and turns on the string and the rubber | 3:46 | |
| that is in the center of the ball. | 3:49 | |
| So that very likely, | 3:53 | |
| according to the information that was gained during the IGY, | 3:54 | |
| what once was the Arctic | 4:02 | |
| now is probably located in the Tropics, | 4:04 | |
| And what now is the Arctic ocean | 4:09 | |
| may have been many centuries ago a Tropical ocean. | 4:12 | |
| We will not bother at this time to go into the question | 4:17 | |
| of whether it's likely to happen again during our lifetime. | 4:20 | |
| Here on this campus, there was developed | 4:26 | |
| only a year ago a bubble chamber, | 4:30 | |
| which now makes it possible for scientists to photograph, | 4:34 | |
| yes to photograph, | 4:38 | |
| the movement of the particles of an atom | 4:41 | |
| after it has been split. | 4:44 | |
| Also on this campus, | 4:48 | |
| there is a man who is directing a worldwide project | 4:50 | |
| to cut a fire and to correlate all of the law of the world, | 4:54 | |
| national law and local law. | 4:59 | |
| So that when a problem appears | 5:02 | |
| somewhere on the face of the earth between two nations, | 5:05 | |
| they can look in their card file | 5:09 | |
| and find the law that bears on this | 5:11 | |
| and seek to solve this dispute without war. | 5:15 | |
| Cures for cancer are just around the corner, | 5:21 | |
| some of them already peeking around the corner. | 5:24 | |
| The leaders in physics are today tackling | 5:29 | |
| the problem of hydrogen fusion. | 5:32 | |
| And if they solve that problem, | 5:36 | |
| as it is said, there is a possibility they can, | 5:38 | |
| there will be a farm or a revolutionary | 5:42 | |
| effect on human life brought from this, | 5:45 | |
| that has come from nuclear fusion. | 5:49 | |
| These are only a few of the very advances in learning, | 5:54 | |
| in all lines not simply in science | 5:59 | |
| but in others that have come recently | 6:02 | |
| and which are dangling before your eyes and ears | 6:06 | |
| as you come into your college education. | 6:10 | |
| There is a great deal to be known today, | 6:14 | |
| That is fascinating and important. | 6:17 | |
| Well, this not only is true, | 6:21 | |
| but it also is true that far more people today | 6:22 | |
| are truth conscious than ever before. | 6:27 | |
| Millions and millions of people today around the earth | 6:32 | |
| are reading newspapers, magazines, books, | 6:36 | |
| they are watching television, | 6:41 | |
| they are seeing movies in the classroom and in the theater, | 6:44 | |
| they're listening to radios in their car, | 6:48 | |
| in their rooms, everywhere, | 6:51 | |
| and in these and many other ways are learning facts, | 6:55 | |
| are collecting information, are getting wisdom, | 6:58 | |
| never before we're doing. | 7:02 | |
| The enrollment of schools is up all across the country. | 7:05 | |
| There are far more dinks at Duke this year than ever before. | 7:09 | |
| And so it is that people are becoming | 7:15 | |
| vastly more information and truth conscious. | 7:18 | |
| Now this presents a problem, | 7:23 | |
| and this is forcing us to face and to answer a question | 7:29 | |
| which mankind should have settled long ago, | 7:35 | |
| we cannot any longer evade the settling of this question. | 7:40 | |
| And I believe that the finest challenge, | 7:45 | |
| which faces this student generation, that is you, | 7:48 | |
| is the challenge of demonstrating | 7:53 | |
| the answer to this question | 7:56 | |
| and in a sense of being the answer to it. | 7:58 | |
| what is the question? | 8:04 | |
| How are we going to handle this truth which we have? | 8:07 | |
| Here is a great array of truth before us | 8:15 | |
| volumes and volumes of information. | 8:17 | |
| How are we going to handle it? | 8:20 | |
| What are we going to do with it? | 8:22 | |
| In what setting are we going to place it? | 8:25 | |
| I say, we cannot escape the facing | 8:31 | |
| and the answering of this question | 8:34 | |
| because truth never exists in the mind of a person | 8:37 | |
| in an unrelated environment, | 8:44 | |
| it is always related to something | 8:47 | |
| in that person's mind and heart. | 8:50 | |
| It is said in a context, | 8:54 | |
| just as a diamond is in a context | 8:57 | |
| when it relates to a person, | 9:01 | |
| a diamond has to be in some kind of setting, | 9:05 | |
| it always is when a person owns it. | 9:08 | |
| I doubt that very many of your fathers | 9:12 | |
| obtain the consent of your mothers to marry them | 9:16 | |
| by saying, now look, honey hold out your hand | 9:18 | |
| I want to drop a loose diamond in it. | 9:21 | |
| If you're prospecting father | 9:24 | |
| had said that to your prospective mother, | 9:26 | |
| she probably would have thrown the stone at him. | 9:28 | |
| The setting in which a diamond is placed, | 9:32 | |
| determines what that diamond means to the individual. | 9:35 | |
| And the setting in which truth is placed, | 9:41 | |
| determines the meaning of that truth to that individual. | 9:45 | |
| We could change the analogy for a moment | 9:52 | |
| and say that truth is like electricity, | 9:54 | |
| which can either aluminate your room in the dormitory, | 9:57 | |
| or it can kill you, | 10:00 | |
| it can bless your life, or it can blast it. | 10:04 | |
| Changing the figure again, truth is like money. | 10:10 | |
| Your money can bless you, or it can blight you. | 10:15 | |
| There may be some people who think that the only question | 10:19 | |
| that has to do with money is the question of, | 10:22 | |
| whether it is real or counterfeit? | 10:24 | |
| But why is our heads know that when you have settled | 10:27 | |
| that question and determined | 10:32 | |
| that all the money in your pocket | 10:32 | |
| is not counterfeit, that it is real, | 10:34 | |
| you have an even larger question to deal with, | 10:37 | |
| and that is what are you going to spend your money for? | 10:41 | |
| How are you going to use your money? | 10:44 | |
| And what do you do with your money determines | 10:47 | |
| the kind of person that you are in large respect | 10:50 | |
| and indicate your philosophy of life, | 10:54 | |
| measures the influence you will have for good | 10:57 | |
| or for ill in the world. | 10:59 | |
| So when you have settled the question of truth, | 11:04 | |
| is this fact which I have in my mind, | 11:07 | |
| which I think is a fact, true or false, | 11:09 | |
| is it counterfeit or real? | 11:13 | |
| You still have before you the larger question, | 11:15 | |
| why am I searching for truth? | 11:20 | |
| What am I going to do with the information | 11:24 | |
| that I gathered here at Duke University, | 11:27 | |
| during my college education? | 11:29 | |
| Why do you want an education? | 11:34 | |
| What do you want to do with more information | 11:36 | |
| about science, about history, about government? | 11:39 | |
| Somebody may say, well, | 11:44 | |
| I want to get an college education | 11:46 | |
| because it's the thing to do. | 11:47 | |
| But why is the thing to do, the thing to do? | 11:49 | |
| why do you want more information, | 11:56 | |
| to make a bigger salary when you get out of school, | 11:59 | |
| to impress members of the opposite sex a little better, | 12:04 | |
| to conquer the world, | 12:09 | |
| to conquer space as an astronaut, | 12:14 | |
| to heal the sick, | 12:18 | |
| to relieve misery and poverty, | 12:20 | |
| to correct injustice, | 12:23 | |
| to bless mankind, | 12:25 | |
| Why do you want it? | 12:27 | |
| We never are able to receive or apply information | 12:31 | |
| outside the context of our predispositions, | 12:38 | |
| our prejudices, our faith commitments, | 12:41 | |
| our goal, and purpose in life, our emotions, | 12:45 | |
| the whole context and complex of our personalities. | 12:49 | |
| A bit of truth may mean one thing to one person, | 12:57 | |
| and that same bit of truth means something | 13:00 | |
| entirely different to another | 13:02 | |
| because of the faith commitments | 13:04 | |
| of those two different persons. | 13:05 | |
| And do not let anyone tell you that truth | 13:08 | |
| in the human situation ever exists completely objectively, | 13:11 | |
| it does not, not in the human mind, | 13:15 | |
| It may in a textbook, it may in a test tube, | 13:19 | |
| but when it gets over into your mind, | 13:22 | |
| it becomes related to the whole complex of your personality. | 13:25 | |
| And therefore, you need to examine yourselves | 13:32 | |
| at the beginning of your college education | 13:36 | |
| and determine the context | 13:38 | |
| in which you will place the truth you seek. | 13:41 | |
| Well now, what context are we going to place it in? | 13:47 | |
| What is the setting in which we will place truth? | 13:49 | |
| The Apostle Paul suggested one, | 13:54 | |
| when he wrote his letter to the Ephesians Christians, | 13:56 | |
| he suggested how we are to speak the truth, | 14:00 | |
| he said, "speaking the truth in love, | 14:03 | |
| we are to grow up in every way". | 14:08 | |
| When I suppose we were to decide | 14:12 | |
| we didn't want to speak the truth in love. | 14:14 | |
| What other possibilities are there? | 14:16 | |
| There are a number that are different from love, | 14:19 | |
| one of them is to speak the truth in pride. | 14:23 | |
| Many people speak the truth in pride, | 14:27 | |
| they do not speak error concerning themselves, | 14:31 | |
| They speak only truth, but they speak at pridefully. | 14:36 | |
| And these proud people justify | 14:41 | |
| in their own minds their bragging, | 14:45 | |
| because they say I'm not telling anything | 14:49 | |
| about myself that isn't so. | 14:52 | |
| you see, they justify all the boasting | 14:54 | |
| with an even greater boast, | 14:56 | |
| this boasting that I'm doing about myself is justified. | 14:57 | |
| Think of the greatest braggart you know, | 15:03 | |
| and try to remember what he or she has said | 15:06 | |
| and examine the counterfeit question, | 15:10 | |
| is it true or false? | 15:13 | |
| And if you decide that it is all true, | 15:14 | |
| it still remains the fact | 15:17 | |
| that he is speaking the truth in pride. | 15:19 | |
| And believe me, that's a different thing | 15:24 | |
| from speaking the truth in love. | 15:26 | |
| There are several weaknesses | 15:31 | |
| in the practice of speaking the truth in pride. | 15:33 | |
| One of the weaknesses is, | 15:37 | |
| that the things of which we usually boast | 15:40 | |
| almost always are temporary and passing in nature. | 15:44 | |
| Occasionally some sophomore, | 15:50 | |
| now this never happens to a freshmen, | 15:52 | |
| but some sophomore we'll come up with a bit of truth, | 15:54 | |
| which he has gleaned in a book or a lab or from a professor. | 15:59 | |
| And it will seem to him that this bit of truth | 16:03 | |
| is going to unlock all the mysteries of the universe. | 16:05 | |
| And he is going to know everything | 16:08 | |
| about anything that is important. | 16:10 | |
| Instead of this making him humble, it makes him proud | 16:14 | |
| and he thinks of himself as being better than his friends, | 16:17 | |
| his roommate, his fraternity brothers, his fellow teammates, | 16:22 | |
| his parents, even in the professor who taught him this, | 16:26 | |
| is not as big as he is because the professor | 16:31 | |
| doesn't see all of the far-flung application of this. | 16:33 | |
| He becomes very proud with his knowledge, | 16:38 | |
| now this is what we call foolish pride, | 16:43 | |
| which is the meaning of the word sophomore, | 16:48 | |
| one who is foolishly wise. | 16:52 | |
| Such a person needs to remember the word | 16:58 | |
| which the Apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthian Christians. | 17:01 | |
| He said, "as for knowledge, it will pass away". | 17:05 | |
| He said, "love abides, but knowledge passes away". | 17:10 | |
| A better translation of that is the one | 17:14 | |
| that has been given as for knowledge, it will be superseded. | 17:16 | |
| Excellent illustration of that is the perfection stove | 17:22 | |
| which your parents had in their kitchens, | 17:26 | |
| whether any of you have the perfection stove | 17:29 | |
| in your kitchen at home now, or not. | 17:31 | |
| Some years ago, there were a group of men | 17:35 | |
| who thought they knew everything that was to be known, | 17:36 | |
| and every would be known about how to make | 17:39 | |
| a cooking stove operate correctly. | 17:41 | |
| And so they built the stove and named the perfection stove | 17:45 | |
| and put it on the market. | 17:51 | |
| And they explained to the prospective buyers, | 17:53 | |
| that the reason they named it the perfection stove | 17:56 | |
| was that it was perfect. | 17:58 | |
| Some of their engineers discovered | 18:03 | |
| only a few years later that there were improvements | 18:05 | |
| which could be made and which should be made in this stove, | 18:08 | |
| and they were a little bit embarrassed about it, | 18:11 | |
| but they thought, well surely this is the last thing | 18:12 | |
| that will be known about stoves. | 18:15 | |
| And so they marketed perfection number two | 18:17 | |
| and later perfection number three. | 18:20 | |
| And by the time I was a lad, | 18:23 | |
| my mother had the perfection number 17 | 18:25 | |
| in the kitchen at our house. | 18:28 | |
| A furniture dealer in Durham told me this summer | 18:31 | |
| that the last model of the perfection stove he sold, | 18:34 | |
| was perfection number 888. | 18:37 | |
| As for knowledge, it will be superseded. | 18:43 | |
| People who speak the truth in pride, | 18:47 | |
| have the weakness that they are magnifying | 18:51 | |
| all out of proportion that on which they boast. | 18:54 | |
| The second weakness about speaking the truth in pride, | 18:59 | |
| getting a college education for prideful reasons is, | 19:02 | |
| that usually the person who uses truth | 19:07 | |
| or information in pride does not use it constructively. | 19:09 | |
| When I was a student in a university in the state of Texas, | 19:18 | |
| there was a fellow student who printed | 19:22 | |
| an article in the college newspaper. | 19:24 | |
| This article contained nothing but a series | 19:28 | |
| of very damaging assertions about the university, | 19:30 | |
| not anything complimentary or constructive in it, | 19:34 | |
| but simply a collection of hot assaults on the school. | 19:37 | |
| Well now, at first reading, | 19:44 | |
| it seemed that here was a student whose heart bled | 19:46 | |
| for the dear university. | 19:49 | |
| And he alone had the insight to observe | 19:52 | |
| and point out its fatal weaknesses. | 19:56 | |
| But then the word leaked out of the newspaper office | 20:01 | |
| that he had bought 75 copies of the newspaper | 20:04 | |
| and had mailed them to his high school chums of former days, | 20:08 | |
| to all of his aunts and uncles | 20:13 | |
| and to the editors of college newspapers on other campuses. | 20:16 | |
| This shed a different light on the purpose | 20:20 | |
| and the significance of his article | 20:23 | |
| because the students began to reflect | 20:27 | |
| that the Dean at the school was a kindly | 20:29 | |
| and understanding person, | 20:31 | |
| and he wouldn't expel a student | 20:33 | |
| for publishing an article like this, | 20:35 | |
| so he was safe on that score. | 20:38 | |
| And it became clear that while | 20:42 | |
| he didn't care a fig about the university, | 20:43 | |
| he cared a deal about making a reputation for himself | 20:46 | |
| as being the kind of person who would stand up | 20:50 | |
| and dare the whole wicked university, | 20:52 | |
| you see a giant killer. | 20:57 | |
| Now the elements of truth in his article were so strangled | 21:01 | |
| by pride that they were not constructive, | 21:05 | |
| he was out to make a name for himself. | 21:08 | |
| This kind of speaking the truth in pride | 21:14 | |
| usually becomes self-defeating, | 21:17 | |
| because the more you do it, | 21:20 | |
| the more you have to do it to make it impressive | 21:23 | |
| until it last success becomes failure. | 21:25 | |
| It works like it did with the two little boys | 21:29 | |
| who were playing on the second story of the house, | 21:32 | |
| one of them fell out the window, | 21:35 | |
| and the other one explained to their mother | 21:36 | |
| that the reason his brother had a broken arm | 21:40 | |
| was they were playing a game to see which one could lean | 21:42 | |
| the farthest out the window and he said, he won. | 21:45 | |
| You get the point? | 21:51 | |
| Now the second kind of unfavorable speaking of truth, | 21:54 | |
| is speaking the truth in bitterness, many do. | 21:59 | |
| I've never fully understood | 22:06 | |
| why it is that people speak the truth in bitterness | 22:08 | |
| because it's more difficult to be bitter | 22:11 | |
| than it is to be pleasant, really. | 22:14 | |
| I'm told it takes 62 muscles to frown and only 13 to smile, | 22:16 | |
| why doesn't everyone smile? | 22:22 | |
| Why does anyone frown? | 22:25 | |
| Whatever the reason, | 22:28 | |
| many of us speak the truth in bitterness, | 22:29 | |
| and really we would much rather speak the truth | 22:33 | |
| about an enemy than to speak a lie, wouldn't we? | 22:36 | |
| Because when we speak the bitter truth about him, | 22:39 | |
| it's so much more convincing and damaging. | 22:42 | |
| If we make up a lie about our enemy, | 22:45 | |
| it seems to ricochet back and people know it's not so. | 22:49 | |
| But if we can find out something about someone | 22:53 | |
| that we don't like, that's true and bad, | 22:57 | |
| we like to speak that, is so much more successful. | 23:01 | |
| And we enjoy it so much more | 23:06 | |
| because we don't seem to have a guilty conscience about it. | 23:08 | |
| We hide our guilt of bitterness behind the facade of truth. | 23:11 | |
| We say I spoke nothing, but the truth, | 23:16 | |
| everything I said about him was so. | 23:19 | |
| And we delude ourselves into thinking | 23:24 | |
| that we are therefore, morally guiltless. | 23:27 | |
| You know, when Jonah was asked to go over to Nineveh | 23:32 | |
| and preach the truth to the Ninevites, | 23:36 | |
| he went and he did preach the truth, | 23:39 | |
| which was that if they did not change their way of living, | 23:41 | |
| they would perish. | 23:44 | |
| But they changed their way of living | 23:46 | |
| after they heard this and they were saved | 23:48 | |
| and Jonah was horribly dejected | 23:53 | |
| because he did not want them to be saved. | 23:55 | |
| He enjoyed telling them that they would most likely perish. | 23:58 | |
| He was speaking the truth in bitterness not in love, | 24:04 | |
| because Paul said to the Corinthians also, | 24:08 | |
| "love is never glad when others go wrong". | 24:12 | |
| "Love is never glad when others go wrong". | 24:20 | |
| Every marriage counselor though knows | 24:26 | |
| that a marriage is headed for the rocks, | 24:29 | |
| when husband or wife begin to speak | 24:30 | |
| uncomplimentary truth about each other to their friends. | 24:36 | |
| Love is on the way out, | 24:45 | |
| when we start speaking the truth in bitterness, | 24:47 | |
| whether it'd be between husband and wife, | 24:51 | |
| between parents and children, | 24:54 | |
| between members of a fraternity or a student body. | 24:57 | |
| Wars have been started, haven't they? | 25:03 | |
| Lots of them, by speaking the truth in bitterness, | 25:05 | |
| of course, after the war begins everyone knows it, | 25:10 | |
| whether something is true or false, | 25:13 | |
| doesn't matter as long as it is bitter. | 25:15 | |
| If we can say about our enemy something bad, | 25:17 | |
| we won't know whether it's true or false | 25:21 | |
| until after the war is over and then it will not matter. | 25:23 | |
| But the war gets started by speaking bitter truth | 25:26 | |
| and only bitter truth about our enemies. | 25:32 | |
| Well, it looks like that as we move | 25:37 | |
| from these uncomplimentary or unfavorable ways | 25:40 | |
| to speak truth into the proper way to speak it, | 25:44 | |
| that I'm about to come to the conclusion | 25:47 | |
| that what we ought to do is to withhold | 25:49 | |
| and suppress unfavorable or uncomplimentary truth. | 25:53 | |
| If we find out some information, | 25:58 | |
| just put it in a can and put a lid on it. | 26:00 | |
| Not at all, not at all, | 26:04 | |
| to come to this conclusion would be to miss the point | 26:07 | |
| of the whole revelation of God in Jesus Christ, | 26:10 | |
| because in the revelation, | 26:14 | |
| which God has made in his son Jesus Christ, | 26:16 | |
| he has delivered to the human race the most devastating | 26:19 | |
| information about itself that you can imagine. | 26:23 | |
| What has God said to us? | 26:27 | |
| Here is the truth that he has spoken to us. | 26:30 | |
| He said, "I made you human beings in my image, | 26:34 | |
| a little less than divine | 26:40 | |
| and destined you for happiness and greatness on this earth | 26:44 | |
| and in the world to come throughout eternity. | 26:49 | |
| And what did you do? | 26:52 | |
| You destroyed this image within you, by your sin. | 26:55 | |
| You turned your back on the eternal destiny | 27:01 | |
| that I had for you. | 27:04 | |
| And every one of you has gone astray | 27:07 | |
| turned everyone to his own way. | 27:11 | |
| And instead of deserving, life eternal, | 27:16 | |
| you have deserved hell." | 27:18 | |
| Now that is fairly discouraging news, isn't it? | 27:22 | |
| That is stating the naked frank truth. | 27:28 | |
| That's what God said to us. | 27:32 | |
| And this is a part of what we call the Gospel, | 27:36 | |
| which means Good News, it doesn't sound very good. | 27:38 | |
| But if you think that's bad, | 27:43 | |
| then listen to what else God says. | 27:44 | |
| He says, "even if you do recognize how bad you are | 27:47 | |
| and you repent, | 27:53 | |
| and say you're going to turn from your wickedness | 27:55 | |
| and you're going to be righteous for the rest of the time. | 27:57 | |
| You do not have the resources within yourself to do it. | 28:01 | |
| You can't do it". | 28:07 | |
| Well now, this is total discouragement, | 28:10 | |
| this is utter blackness up to this point. | 28:13 | |
| And if God had revealed this truth to us | 28:17 | |
| in any other context except that of love, | 28:20 | |
| humanity would have been at the end of its rope. | 28:25 | |
| But all of this is a part of what we call the Gospel, | 28:29 | |
| because God revealed this to us, | 28:32 | |
| He gave us this truth in love. | 28:34 | |
| He added to that this, "though your sins as scarlet, | 28:40 | |
| they shall be as white as wool". | 28:45 | |
| He laid our inequity upon his son, Jesus Christ, | 28:49 | |
| and said through him we might have forgiveness | 28:53 | |
| of what is bad in the past. | 28:57 | |
| And then even more thrilling news, | 29:00 | |
| "that he who would be righteous | 29:03 | |
| and who will ask for grace, | 29:06 | |
| may receive grace each day, | 29:08 | |
| to be Christ like in his attitude and in his life. | 29:11 | |
| So that what he did not have the strength | 29:16 | |
| and resources to do himself, | 29:18 | |
| he can through the resources of Christ do and be". | 29:20 | |
| Now when God gave us these terrible facts, | 29:26 | |
| this horrible information about ourselves, | 29:29 | |
| we would have been totally discouraged, | 29:33 | |
| if it had not been spoken in love. | 29:35 | |
| God has set us himself an example | 29:40 | |
| of how to speak the truth in love. | 29:42 | |
| And he wants us to follow that example in our own lives. | 29:46 | |
| When there is uncomplimentary truth, | 29:51 | |
| it does not need to be suppressed, | 29:54 | |
| but it needs to be spoken to be used in love. | 29:57 | |
| Your college education needs to be received | 30:03 | |
| and used in love. | 30:06 | |
| And this will help you to avoid speaking the truth | 30:09 | |
| in pride or in bitterness. | 30:13 | |
| And it certainly will help you to avoid | 30:16 | |
| the misconception that it is even possible | 30:19 | |
| to hold truth in a totally objective way. | 30:22 | |
| You must make a faith commitment of some kind, | 30:28 | |
| you are making a faith commitment, | 30:32 | |
| you will make some kind of commitment | 30:34 | |
| of your life and of the truth you learn, | 30:37 | |
| whether for selfishness, | 30:40 | |
| for bitterness, for pride, | 30:42 | |
| for unselfish service or whatever, | 30:44 | |
| and so make it in love. | 30:49 | |
| And if you do something very wonderful will happen | 30:53 | |
| that Paul told the Ephesians about, | 30:58 | |
| "you will grow up in every way". | 31:01 | |
| Let us pray, | 31:06 | |
| Heavenly father, today we ask | 31:09 | |
| that we may be given grace to grow up in every way. | 31:12 | |
| - | Stand for the benediction. | 31:26 |
