Daily Manna, Year Two · Day 5 · January 5
Truth in Love
“But speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ:”
A kitchen after a dinner party, two people clearing up. One said the thing at the table, in front of everybody, and is stacking plates now and explaining that somebody had to. The other has not said the thing for four years, and is drying, and says nothing about that either.
Speaking the truth in love reaches both of them from opposite directions, because each has taken half the phrase and called the half a virtue. Start with the one stacking plates. Paul builds a strict fence around this later in the chapter: let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers. The test is whether grace arrived at the hearer, and the speaker does not get to mark that paper.
Now the one drying. Leviticus forbids hating your brother in your heart and in the same breath commands thou shalt in any wise rebuke thy neighbour, and not suffer sin upon him, which files four years of silence somewhere she would not have filed it. Proverbs comes from the other side: faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.
The verse hands both of them one destination: may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ, and the next line has the body doing it fitly joined together, so neither gets there alone. You will have recognised yourself in one of the two by now. The other was at the same table and is probably still in your life. You are welcome to go and tell them which half of the sentence you keep dropping, and let them say what the missing half would have sounded like.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 5 is Drawn (Jeremiah 31:3).