Here's why David Powlison wrote the book, Speaking the Truth with Love

This is why we also pray continually for you, so that our God […] may accomplish by his power all the benevolent designs of his goodness and the work of your faith (2 Thess. 1.11)

It's hard enough to think right, but it's even harder to live right. The book, Speaking the Truth with Love is about how we should live together. What should be the quality and dynamics of our relationships with others? What is right and true, good and kind, caring and desirable? This is what we are looking for.

This book also examines how we can live. Of course, our realizations are imperfect, vacillating and inconstant, but, by the grace of God, we can achieve this to some extent. We can move forward in this direction and grow in this area. The slightest progress produces pure joy, lasting treasure, and radiant wisdom. This is what we want.

This book also examines how we are going to live. When everything we can hardly imagine becomes reality, we can fully savor what we have already tasted to a lesser extent. No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no heart has imagined what God has prepared for those who love him; yet God lets us glimpse these things.

This book also examines how we treat each other, how we help each other and work together. He talks about constructive relationships: how to advise and encourage each other. He explains what the Church really is: how to grow together. Paul's request mentioned earlier in 2 Thessalonians recognizes that even our desire for what is right matters. It is better to want what is right rather than what is wrong, than to ignore what is right and not care. We may fail in trying to translate our good intentions into action, but intentions are important nonetheless. Even our "will to please him" or to desire what is right is something that God produces in us. Indeed, we can ask, "Heavenly Father allow our good intentions to be fulfilled for your glory. "

This book is about good intentions. Singer James Ward puts it: "Faith takes hold of a vision, and a dream turns into a mission." This work presents a vision that seeks its fulfillment in mission. I will describe a direction and take a few steps in that direction. Orientation is important. Indeed, we can ask, "Lord, for the glory of your name, make the work imagined by faith a reality. "

ADVICE AND COUNSELING

Telling the Truth with Love builds on another book called Towards a Renewed Helping Relationship . This previous book was about getting everyone to think righteously. I had sought to present a concrete application of the Scriptures and to reinterpret the struggles of daily life through the eyes of God. This book was about "advice," that is, what are the truths that we should share with others. This second book is about "counseling," which is how to share these truths with love. The first part will seek to show how to speak the truth with love in order to be excellent in the ministry of counseling. The second part will hammer out ways to shape and reshape communities of faith so that the Church becomes what it should be.In other words, this book describes how to live well in our relationships with others. We will glimpse the primordial dynamics of a relationship and sketch the shape of the communities that seek to develop such relationships.

It is difficult to do the counseling ministry well. How to converse with others in order to have a positive impact? How to understand the problems of life in order to offer effective help? We all know that wise, mutual, life-changing counseling involves "[professing] the truth in love ... some good word which serves for upliftment and communicates grace to those who hear it." and to exhort] one another daily ”(as Ephesians 4 and Hebrews 3 indicate). But how do you do something that is both so easy to say and so difficult to do? A counseling model designs relationships and methods to facilitate the transformation process.

Managing the Church well is difficult. The Church becomes so easily ... (fill in the blanks with what is familiar to you). However, Jesus being full of grace and truth, it must be possible to form communities full of grace and truth. Developing wise, mutual, life-changing counseling is proof that everything else in the Church is doing what it's supposed to be doing. Each counseling model involves a “delivery system,” a social structure. Ideas and practices populate institutions. The most wonderful institutional structure we can imagine is a community that lives in a relationship of reciprocity as described in Ephesians 4 between pastoral leadership and each of the members.

This book is not a textual sermon on Ephesians 4, or more accurately on words that we now identify as those of Ephesians 3.14 and 5.2. Nonetheless, they are the central idea that shapes these pages. Take a handful of verses one way or the other in Ephesians 4 (let's call it "Ephesians 4+") and you will perfectly understand half a dozen questions that fill library books. These questions reflect on the balance between the immediate power of God and our important decisions, between our dependent faith and our active love, between our individual experience and the dynamics of a social group, between leadership and reciprocity within a social group, between the destructive dynamics of sin in relationships and the positive dynamics of benevolent love, between the remnants of sin and emerging love. These are six questions that continually leave us perplexed. Paul does not answer these questions so much; rather, it illustrates how the answers manifest in everyday reality. The words that Christ transmits through his messenger will sometimes be quoted, but more importantly they will determine the living and invisible structure at the origin of this work. We could say that the Ephesians are the cardiovascular and neuroelectric and musculoskeletal systems of everything on the following pages. In this spectacular revelation, we see the essential elements of a functioning church as a community characterized by the dynamics of mutual and fruitful counseling.

We could also say it differently. Speaking the Truth with Love seeks to show how the dynamic of mutual and fruitful counseling characterizes a Church that functions as a community.

- David Powlison

Preface to the book, Speaking the Truth with Love , by David Powlison.