Love Covers

I came across this article written by Aaron Linford and originally published in the old AOG Magazine Redemtion Tidings.

”Love covered all sins” – Proverbs 10:12

Hatred and love are both violent emotions – but they drive in opposite directions. Both are capable of supreme exertions, but hatred fosters evil, while love issues in nothing but good. Both are like a flame of fire, but while hatred burns with envy, bitterness and revenge, love burns with a passion to give. to serve and to benefit.

Hatred Stirs: Its jaundiced eyes see evil intention in innocent gestures, twist words of goodwill into subtle innuendoes, makes mountains out of mole hills, Hatred picks on the smallest fault, makes no allowance for human error, and nurses slight grievances until they grow into grave affronts. We cannot go through life without rubbing someone up the wrong way. But hatred lets the friction develop destructive heat, where love pours on the oil of mediation and peace. Hatred spawns a brood of serpents’ suspicion, envy, abuse, revenge – but like the asp that poisoned Cleopatra so these venomous emotions become self-destructive. Hate results in moral suicide.

Love covers: That is, enables one to absorb insult, overlook wrongs and turn a blind eye to faults. The great Hannibal had an unseemly scar on one cheek; his artist portrayed him in profile with the good side prominent. So love marks the good qualities of others, even of one’s enemies. This text is quoted twice in the New Testament in 1 Peter 4:8, where Weymouth aptly translates: “For love throws a veil over a multitude of faults”, and in James 5:20, where the restoration of a stumbling brother means a forgetting of his painful misdeeds. Paul states one of the marvels of Christian love as, ”thinketh no evil” – 1 Cor. 13:5. The word ”thinketh” has in it a picture of keeping an account-book, as one writer puts it ”love does not keep a tally of old scores” to be paid off with interest when opportunity affords. No, love does not nurse grudges, but stifles at birth thoughts of revenge. As long as we are in the flesh weeds will infest our temperament; but love uproots them that virtues may flourish.

PRAYER:

May my love for others ever seek to veil their weaknesses, O Lord.

HT: Barnabas Ministries