Staying on the Log

Birling is a little known sport featured at lumberjack contests. The trick is to maintain one’s balance on a spinning log floating in the water longer than one’s opponent who is trying to do the same thing on the same log. Something similar is funambulism, or, walking on a tightrope. In both birling and funambulism, special gear is often used to assist the person, including the right footwear, and balancing poles (in birling, abandoned once the contest begins in earnest).

Imagery from these sports has found its way into popular speech. We might make a comment such as “he constantly has to walk a tightrope.” (One is reminded of the well-known section in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels describing how Lilliputian ministers were chosen or kept their rank by performing this task.) Or we might say that someone is trying to avoid falling off one side of the log or the other. When we point out that doing something is as “easy as falling off a log” (as Frank Gilbreth unwisely predicts about having his tonsils out without anesthesia in the original film version of the book Cheaper By The Dozen), we are stating the truth by declaring its opposite—that staying on that log is extremely tricky, while falling off of it is unbelievably easy.

Success means maintaining a delicate and difficult balance rather than lurching one way or the other, in the face of not only the difficulty of the task itself, but opposition and challenges by human opponents or natural forces. It is much easier to go one direction or the other than it is to stand upright. Constant vigilance and corrective action is necessary to succeed. And we who attempt to remain erect on our own proverbial floating logs or tightropes will, like those acrobats in training, have to frequently fail, get back on, and try again before we get any good at it.

It seems to me that the Christian life is filled with birling and funambulism. There are many areas in which fruitful and faithful service to Christ requires standing upright on a log or tightrope, often while life, the world, our own inadequacies, and the actions of opponents, and certainly our real enemy (Satan), makes being swept off to one side or the other almost irresistible. Heart or head? Both. Word or deed? Both. Work or rest? Both. Grace or law?  Both. Denounce sin or declare grace? Both. And just like folk doing birling or funambulism, we as Christians need to have the right equipment and know how to use it. For us, these include the Word of God; the Holy Spirit working within us and speaking to us in His wonderful “still, small voice”; the wise counsel of our spouses, families, spiritual overseers, and friends; sitting under regular and faithful preaching; and even at times enduring the solid truth embedded in the rebukes and attacks of our critics and enemies.

We can also see that maintaining equilibrium doesn’t simply mean keeping opposites in balance. Rather, it involves understanding the mutual complementarity of both sides in a marvelous whole. We must appreciate the ways one cannot really exist without the other. Both “sides” are mutually dependant and reinforcing. 

One of the hardest logs to stand balanced on is “truth or love.” In Ephesians 4, the Apostle Paul says that Christians need to be “speaking the truth in love” (v. 15). Note the larger context of this phrase. Speaking the truth, but doing it in love, is something Christians should be doing corporately and individually. It is integral to the Church growing in unity and believers developing in their Christian walks. It is a necessary balance we must strive for if we are to mature (‘no longer children”), and avoid being “tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men….” (v. 14). In sum, it is the saints within the Body of Christ speaking the truth in love and so growing individually and corporately while remaining faithful to sound teaching in the face of opposition, false doctrine, and our own limitations and sin. 

This applies so very clearly in the modern battles about marriage, sexuality, and gender identity being waged inside and outside the professing church. On the one side, we have those who are willing to compromise truth to be “loving”—and who therefore, ironically, fail to be truly loving despite their good intentions, because they withhold difficult truths from those who desperately need them. On the other hand, often (actually or in their minds) provoked by the increasing hostility of our culture to sound Christian teaching and practice, we have those who claim to pronounce truth but who do so in mean-spirited, hateful, rude, unbalanced ways. Since they are rejecting love in order to proclaim truth, they generally end up with neither. Why? Because their understanding of truth becomes twisted by their lack of love. 

Either way—truth without love, or love without truth—we end up falling woefully short of both. Love and truth each require the other. Because of our frequent failure to embrace both truth and love, we have less unity, less maturity, in fact, less of all of the fruits that God wants His Church, and His people individually, to be characterized by. And this means being less effective in reaching out to a hurting and unbelieving world.

When we hear about awful things like Pastor Steven Anderson celebrating the Orlando massacre of June 12, 2016 because its victims were (mostly) homosexual, we do not see truth, even though that is clearly Anderson’s intent. Rather, we see someone with a terrible black hole where love should be, wielding Scripture out of context as a weapon to destroy others. We see a man who is far more in need of forgiveness than the unfortunates he is denouncing and mocking. In the mouths of the Steven Andersons (or Westboro Baptist Churches) of this world, the Biblical teaching that God regards homosexual practice as sin is not magnified at all. Instead, that truth is lost within a terrible, sick, perverted, loveless lie—namely, that God would ever rejoice in a self-appointed executioner engaging in the mass slaughter of people just because they are gay. I cannot judge this man’s ultimate state before God, but I can say that, so far as I can tell, he and I do not seem to serve the same God, at least as far as this issue is concerned.

My God delays final judgment not because He winks at sin, but because He is “not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). In other words, my God presents truth in love. He presents truth because He loves. My God sacrificed His own Son to a criminal’s death on the Cross, showing Himself to be both just and our justifier (Romans 3:26). He endured the full horror of our just punishment, but He also forgave the men who stood at the base of the Cross who had hammered thorns into His head, nails into His hands, spat on, whipped, and mocked Him. My God will receive each homosexual—or any other sinner—who turns to Christ and repents of his or her sin—as His sons and daughters, fully and freely.

Love. Truth. Mercy. Justice. Grace. Holiness. Each in proportions of one-hundred percent, in harmonious, complementary, radiant harmony.

I learned something about this need for both truth and love, joined at the hip, when I was a fairly young college professor in my first teaching position. We had a couple of professors in this college who, despite the evangelical nature of the school and a clear statement of faith, were downplaying Biblical teaching on sex outside marriage, and defending abortion. Others simply avoided such topics. The Director of a local pro-life pregnancy center who sought me out told me, based on traffic to her center, that we had a high rate of sexually active students, pregnancies, and (sadly) abortions.

Sobered by this, where appropriate, I used my classes to tackle issues such as sex outside of marriage and abortion, using Scripture but also empirical research to underscore the damage, risks, heart-aches associated with both. I counseled students about it, trying to be honest and loving at the same time, though I am know that my carry-through was often worse than my intentions. (I imagine my students forgave me a lot!) At one point, I even sponsored a “standing room only” debate between two local church leaders on the issue of how to best protest (or not) at abortion clinics. Not everyone was happy about this. But many of our students seemed to honestly appreciate it. I wasn’t perfect, far from it, but I did try to be loving and truthful at the same time, and I did regularly get counsel from others to help me hit that balance, including from my pastors, as I tried to address these sensitive issues and too often fell of one side of the log or the other.

After I left this college, I accepted a teaching position in another state. One day, I was working in my office at home. My wife brought a letter to me that had just arrived from one of my former students. I opened it. Soon, I had tears falling down my cheeks. I will never forget it.

You see, the letter was from a young lady who had been in a number of my classes where I addressed these issues. And, unknown to me, she had gotten pregnant and had been seriously contemplating abortion while a student at this school. But she decided to keep the baby. And she wanted to let me know that my open discussions of this issue had played a major role in her life-affirming decision. She appreciated that I had talked about these issues honestly but kindly, including confronting false teachings about them while stressing the grace of God. She said something like this: “As I write this, I am holding my baby in my lap. She is alive because of you. I thought you would like to know that.”

In the New York City area where I lived at the time, a number of Hassidic Jews were involved in the pro-life movement, often quite actively so. They used to cite their Talmudic belief that “He who saves a single life, saves the entire world.” Whether or not that is a valid interpretation of the Talmud is beyond me. I do know that, as each human being is of infinite worth, logically, this statement is true.

Regardless, I realized then what I still believe today.

We who embrace Christian orthodoxy face pressure to compromise the truth. And best that I can see, that pressure is only going to get worse. It certainly has since my days as a young college professor. Not for our sake, or for our pride, but for the sake of not only our own souls but everyone and everything we care about, we must not do that. In handling truth, should we exercise wisdom? Surely. Should we use discretion? Absolutely. Must we exercise humility? Of course. But we must, imperfect beings though we are, speak the truth as best as we can comprehend it. That is what loving our neighbors requires. They need to hear the truth.

But we who embrace Christ and His truth also face pressure to neglect love. We are tempted to lash out, to hate, to be self-righteous, censorious, to think we are superior. It is so easy to focus more on winning arguments than upon embracing people. It is so tempting to seek the destruction, rather than the conversion, of those who oppose the truth. It is so easy to forget to be kind. The pressure to neglect the role of love in communicating truth—especially in this age of social media, where being provocative and inflammatory is rewarded with larger audiences and more fame—is also going to continue to get worse.

And so we ought to try, by the grace of God and with the constant help of others, to stay on that log, to walk that tightrope. When we fall off (and we will), to get back on, and quickly, holding love with one hand, and truth with the other. Maybe, just maybe, someone’s life will depend on it. Our fellow human beings need us to speak the truth in love. And that is precisely what God calls us to do and which, by His grace, He will help us to do.