Today's Daily Lesson comes from 1 Peter chapter 1 verse 22:
Now that you have purified your souls by your obedience to the truth so that you have genuine mutual love, love one another deeply from the heart.
A word for a our time.
Peter calls upon us to love one another with pure and deep hearts. But this is not possible without first submitting ourselves in "obedience" to the truth.
"Obedience" literally means "to listen". So long as we love falsehood we will tolerate maliciousness and deception and refuse to listen. We will hate others and excuse ourselves for doing so. If we are not people of truth then we will accept lies about others and lies about ourselves. We will not listen to anything counter to what we want to hear, because the truth always demands something from us, primarily change and action.
This is the reason Pilate asked, "What is truth?" So long as he kept himself closed to the truth he could excuse himself for his lack of courage and justice, which is to say his lack of love. It was so much easier for him to sit there unmoved and without action. But it required being blind to the truth.
We know the truth, and the truth sets us free. But it also binds us. It compels us.
"Love rejoices in the truth," Paul says. And the one who wants to love -- really wants to love the other -- puts aside all prejudices, listens, acts, then rejoices in all that the truth has had to say and demand.
What is truth? It's staring us right in the face. But we have to open our ears to listen to what it has to say, and our hearts to act upon what it would have us to do and who it would have us to be.
Are we open? Are we really open to the true love?
Ryon Price is Senior Pastor of Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas.
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