What Jesus Did to a Man He Loved (That We Almost Never Do)
What the people closest to you need most is the truth you keep swallowing.
Find the most recent update on my upcoming book, Leading Lazarus, below today’s article.
We’re starting this one off with a pretty harsh truth, but here it goes. The people you love most are the people you tend to lie to the most.
I am not talking about big lies. I mean the quiet kind. The unsaid thing. The correction you swallow because the closeness feels too valuable to put at risk.
You tell yourself that silence is love. Trust me, if you sit with enough leaders, married couples, and teams in crisis, you learn what that silence usually is. It is self-protection being called something else.
We have made peace with a soft version of love. The version that keeps things pleasant and calls it care. But the people in your life do not always need you to be pleasant with them. They need you to be honest when it counts.
That is a harder assignment than it sounds. And it starts with naming what we are really guarding when we go quiet.
What We Keep Calling Love
Almost every relationship that breaks has a long runway of unsaid things behind it.
Somebody saw the problem early. Somebody cared enough to notice. And somebody decided the comfort of the moment counted for more than the health of the person sitting across from them.
The book of Proverbs will not let us hide from this.
Wounds from a friend can be trusted, but an enemy multiplies kisses.
Proverbs 27:6 (NIV)
Read that again. Wounds from a friend can be trusted. The writer is telling us that a real friend will risk hurting your feelings because your growth matters to them more than your applause. The person who never corrects you is not automatically the safe one. Sometimes they are only committed to keeping the peace, and that is different from being committed to you.
An enemy multiplies kisses.
Flattery is cheap. It costs the flatterer nothing and leaves you exactly where it found you.
I see this in leadership a lot. A manager avoids a hard conversation with a struggling team member for a year and a half, then wonders how the whole department drifted. The silence felt kind in the moment. The silence was expensive by the end.
Which raises a question worth answering honestly. If honest correction is such a gift, why is it so hard to hand it to the people we love the most?
What Jesus Did with a Man He Loved
There is a moment in Mark’s gospel that reframed this whole thing for me.
A rich young man runs up to Jesus and asks how to inherit eternal life. He is sincere. He has kept the commandments since he was a boy. And then Mark writes something you could read a hundred times and still miss.
Jesus looked at him and loved him. “One thing you lack,” he said. “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.”
Mark 10:21 (NIV)
Jesus looked at him and loved him. In the very same breath, He told the man the one thing he did not want to hear.
Sell everything. Let go of the exact thing standing between you and freedom.
Love did not soften the truth here. Love is the reason Jesus said it at all.
The man walked away sad, and Jesus let him go. He did not chase him down the road and lower the price to keep him close. He said the hard sentence and trusted the man to carry it.
Sit with that, because it pressed back against everything natural in us. We think the loving move is to keep people comfortable and keep them near. Jesus shows us something different. Sometimes the most loving thing you will ever do is tell the truth plainly and let someone walk away to think about it.
Notice what Jesus does not do. He does not water down the ask. He does not soften “everything” into “a reasonable portion once you are ready.” He named the real thing, once, and stopped.
That is the model. And it runs straight back into Proverbs. The wound Jesus gave that young man could be trusted, because it came from the only One who loved him enough to name what he could not see in himself.
Why the People Closest to Us Are the Hardest to Tell
Our reluctance to correct someone we love rarely comes from kindness. It comes from the fear of losing the relationship.
I have done this. With friends, with staff, with family. Every time I look honestly at my own silence, I find the same thing underneath it. The silence protected me from the hard truth that was needed.
Love that refuses to risk a hard word has quietly settled for comfort. And comfort left unchecked has a way of curdling into complacency, in your home, on your team, and in your organization.
So the question is not whether you will ever need to say a hard sentence to someone you love. You will. The question is whether you will know how to say it in a way that builds the relationship instead of breaking it.
How to Correct Someone You Love Without Breaking What You Built
Let me get practical, because this is where most of us freeze. What follows holds up in a marriage, a friendship, a staff meeting, and a boardroom. I have walked leaders through it more times than I can count.
1. Lead with the relationship
Start with why you are saying it before you get anywhere near the critique.
Something as plain as, “I am telling you this because I am for you, and I would want you to tell me.”
When the other person knows you are fighting for them, the hard part lands as care. Miss that step and the same words land as an attack. The content does not change. The frame changes everything.
2. Name the behavior, and leave the person out of it
“This decision is not working” gives someone something they can fix. “You are the problem” hands them a verdict on who they are.
Correct the thing in front of you. A behavior can change. A judgment about someone’s character only wounds and leaves them nowhere to go.
3. Say it once, and say it clearly
This one gets missed constantly. Circling the same point ten times to soften it is its own kind of cruelty. It makes the other person brace longer and trust you less every lap.
Clarity is a kindness. Say the real thing, plainly, one time. Remember how Jesus handled the young man. One sentence, no hedging.
4. Stop talking
Give them room to sit with it. Fight the urge to fill the silence with reassurance that quietly takes the whole thing back.
Let it land. Trust them to carry it. Jesus let the rich young ruler walk away sad, and the sadness was part of the work God was doing in him.
Tip For Leaders
Set the follow-up before the hard conversation ends. “Let us talk again Thursday” tells the person that the relationship survived the truth. It gives the correction somewhere to go instead of leaving it to sit and fester.
Put Truth and Love in the Same Breath
Paul hands us the phrase that holds all of this together.
Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ.
Ephesians 4:15 (NIV)
Speaking the truth in love. Both at the same time, in the same breath.
Truth with no love wounds for no reason. Love with no truth is just avoidance wearing nicer clothes.
The people you lead at home and at work need someone mature enough to carry both at once. That maturity is the very thing Paul says grows us up.
Honest correction is one of the few tools that reaches every part of your life at once. A family that can tell each other the truth grows stronger under pressure. A team that names problems early builds better work. A home and a workplace where people speak plainly become the rare places others actually trust.
And notice, Paul does not frame honest correction as the thing that damages the body. He frames it as the thing that matures it. The wound in Proverbs, the sentence from Jesus, and the growth Paul describes are all the same movement. Love that tells the truth is love that helps people grow up.
All of it starts with you being willing to say one hard sentence to one person you love.
The Sentence You Have Been Swallowing
One assignment this week.
Think of one person you love and one truth you have been holding back to keep the peace.
Then go do the four things. Lead with the relationship. Name the behavior. Say it once, clearly. And stop talking.
They may walk away to think about it, the way the young man walked away from Jesus. Let them. That silence is part of the process, the same way it was for him.
The people who love you enough to wound you faithfully are rare. Guard the ones you have. And become one for somebody else.
The friend who tells you the truth is the friend Proverbs said you could trust all along.
— Jared
LEADING LAZARUS NOTE:
If you’re on the fence about this book, it’s probably one of two reasons. I hear both all the time, and both are fair.
“Nothing I try ever sticks.”
You’ve done the retreats. The surveys. The big talks. They spike for a couple weeks, then everything drifts back. Here’s why: those are events. Events fade. Leading Lazarus isn’t an event. It’s a system, a repeatable practice you run, not a high you chase. That’s the whole difference, and it’s why it holds.
And the research backs it up. When I was writing the book, I commissioned the Culture Resurrection Index, a field survey of 1,000 leaders. One finding stood out: teams whose leaders use a named, repeatable feedback framework are 230% more likely to describe their culture as healthy. Not inspiration. A named practice.
“I don’t have time.”
Also fair. Which is exactly why the companion platform is 15 minutes OR LESS a day for 5 days a week. Small enough to actually do on your busiest week. Repeated enough to actually change how you lead. People who have never finished a book in their lives are finishing this.
Leaders are already seeing it work. One VP of operations told me her team had been stuck in the “burned out” zone for two years. Once they could name it, they could change it. Six months later, a genuinely different place.
Your last attempt didn’t fail because you’re a bad leader. It failed because you were handed inspiration when you needed a system.
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