By: Steve Wilmot
Paul asserts love is the most excellent way to live. Hard to argue with that. Everyone wants to be loved. A wide range of negative emotions converge upon those who don’t experience the love God created them to receive and give to others.
Too often, love is defined as a feeling. Some emotion that makes you feel good. And that’s where many marriages go wrong.
The warm, cuddly, goosebumps present when you dated and in the early years of marriage fade away. When those feelings disappear, it’s easy to think you’ve fallen out of love, and there’s no reason to stay married.
But love isn’t a feeling. Feelings are the by-product of love. Feelings of happiness or unhappiness, closeness or distance arise in you depending on whether love is given or withheld.
Love is an action word. It does the loving thing when you feel warm and fuzzy toward another person and when you don’t. Love is a decision to act in loving ways regardless of how you feel.
Paul lists 15 ways love acts in 1 Corinthians 13. In the next few Pastor’s Ponderings, we’ll focus on four things love does ALL the time and in EVERY situation, regardless of how you’re feeling about another person at the moment.
“Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres” (verse 7).
Love always protects. This word is related to the Greek word for “roof.” Love covers like a roof protects a house from storms.
“Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins” (1 Peter 4.8).
If you love someone, you conceal their weaknesses, faults, and failures. You resist sharing dirt about someone you’re in conflict with to get more people on your side.
When you love someone, you never gossip about them to elevate your position in a group as someone who’s “in-the-know.” That’s not love.
Agape love — the unconditional love that chooses to do the loving thing no matter what — doesn’t expose or shame another. It always protects reputations. It keeps things others confide in you confidential — past failures, current weaknesses, and habitual sins they are struggling to overcome.
Wouldn’t you love to be loved like that?
Everyone in your circle of family and friends does too. Start to love them that way. “That’s impossible,” you say. “Even if I tried to love like this, I couldn’t do it.”
You’re right, you can’t despite your intentions and best efforts. But I know someone who can: God. A fact that makes this even more amazing is he sees everything you do, even the things you do in secret when no one is around.
“Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give an account” (Hebrews 4.13).
Even though God sees and knows, his love for you always protects. He doesn’t expose your weaknesses, faults, failures, or sins. He wants you to confess them to faithful friends who will help you with them, but he won’t do it for you.
Though he was privy to every shortcoming in Peter’s three short years with him, Jesus didn’t hold any of them against him. Even his worst and most glaring — denying he knew Jesus. He loved Peter, so he never brought it up or held it against him.
Thomas earned the nickname “Doubting Thomas” because he didn’t believe Jesus had risen from the dead at first. But Jesus never called him that on it. His love covered Thomas’ temporary breach of faith.
When the religious leaders threw a woman caught in the act of adultery at his feet to test him, Jesus did what he always does — he showed her he loved her. He didn’t encourage them to stone her to death, nor did he pick up a stone himself. He didn’t say a word until the crowd was gone.
Then he told her, “I do not condemn you. Go now and leave your life of sin” (John 8.11).
Jesus didn’t withhold his love from the Samaritan woman at the well. Recall how he treated her with kindness and offered her good news rather than treating her with contempt like the residents of her village did repeatedly.
God’s love “covers over all wrongs” (Proverbs 10.12). That’s how he loves you even with all your imperfections and failures. He doesn’t let everyone know about them because true love always protects and covers.
That’s how he wants us to love each other — even when we’re in conflict with someone who doesn’t hesitate to air our dirty laundry to everyone. Don’t retaliate. Love like Jesus loves you.
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Steve Wilmot is a former Edgerton, Ohio area pastor who now seeks “to still bear fruit in old age” through writing. He is the author of seven books designed to assist believers to make steady progress on their spiritual journey.