Growing Up in Our Talking

These verses in Ephesians 4 show what God wants for His people, namely, that we grow up. Paul sets two pictures side by side. Infants are tossed about by the waves and carried around by every wind of teaching, while mature believers stand steady because they are growing into Christ. Between those two pictures Paul places one short phrase that tells us how the growing happens, “speaking the truth in love.” Paul’s word truth is larger than we usually assume.

When we hear the word truth, most of us think first of correct teaching or accurate facts, such as sound doctrine, a well-known verse, or simply the habit of not lying. Each of these matters, and Paul cares about all of them. Yet the truth in Ephesians is also personal. A few verses later Paul speaks of “the truth that is in Jesus” (Ephesians 4:21), and Jesus Himself said, “I am the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6), which tells us that, above all, the truth is a Person. When God wanted to show us what truth looks like, He sent His Son, and John tells us that “The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us,” and that He was “full of grace and truth” (John 1:14). Thus, the truth Paul has in mind is Christ Himself, and in Christ truth became something people could watch being lived out day after day.

This understanding changes what it means for us to speak the truth. If truth were only information, a husband and a wife could speak the truth while hurting each other, quoting the right verse in the middle of an argument or stating an accurate fact in a cold voice. Every word might be correct, and still our spouse would hear none of Christ’s kindness in it. John writes, “Little children, let us love not in word and speech, but in action and truth” (1 John 3:18). By setting truth beside action, John suggests that genuine love is something we do and live as well as something we say. James puts it more directly when he writes, “Be doers of the word, and not hearers only” (James 1:22). Speaking the truth, then, includes our words, and it also includes the life behind the words. As Christ lives in us and shapes us, what we say begins to sound like Him, and our spouse can trust that our words are genuine.

Paul adds two words that keep the truth from becoming a weapon, “in love.” Truth that is spoken without love can wound deeply, even when every word is accurate. At the same time, love that never speaks the truth falls short of the love Paul has in view. Many of us, especially those who value peace and dislike conflict, keep silent about what we feel or need because we do not want to upset the other person. In our experience, that silence often feels kind in the moment, yet over time we slowly stop knowing what is in each other’s hearts. Since Christ Himself is the truth, His love in us is willing to say a true and needed thing, and it says that thing gently and at a good time, for the sake of our spouse. Paul elsewhere asks that our speech “always be gracious, seasoned with salt” (Colossians 4:6).

James is very honest about how hard this is. He admits, “We all stumble in many ways. If anyone is never at fault in what he says, he is a perfect man,” and later he says that “no man can tame the tongue” (James 3:2, 8). James’s honesty can free us from relying on willpower to train our tongues, because our words change only as Christ Himself grows in us and becomes the source of what we say. Paul’s promise in verse 15 addresses exactly this difficulty. He says that we will “in all things grow up into Christ,” and his phrase “all things” leaves no area of our life out. It is possible for us to grow in Christ at a prayer meeting and still remain quite childish at the kitchen sink. The Lord wants us to grow up into Him at the sink as well, in the small exchanges of an ordinary evening.

In verse 16 Paul pictures a body “fitted and held together by every supporting ligament,” which grows “through the work of each individual part.” Paul is speaking of the whole church, yet a marriage is one of the closest places where we put this truth into practice, since Scripture says that a husband and a wife “will become one flesh” (Ephesians 5:31). When one of us speaks the truth in love, the other receives Christ’s patience and kindness through those words, while we hold both of us back when we speak carelessly or keep an anxious silence. Thus, the way we speak to each other affects the growth of both of us.

Most of this growth happens in ordinary conversations, as we answer a question at the end of a long day, respond to a small complaint, and decide whether to share what is actually on our hearts. Each of these conversations gives Christ, who is the truth, an opportunity to speak through us with His own love.

Ask the Lord each day to guide what you say to each other, and then let your words come from Him.