Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Love Covers All Transgressions...

God can use your marriage to teach you how to love.  If you don’t run from the challenges that marriage presents, your marriage will make you a more unselfish, stronger, and wiser person.  Proverbs 9.10 tells us Hatred stirs up contentions, but love covers all transgressions (Amp). This means that when you are hateful (objectionable, abhorrent, obnoxious, unpalatable, unpleasant, disagreeable, distasteful), strife and discord will invariably follow.  Conversely, when you choose to love (be devoted to, admire, be benevolent towards), it covers, or literally from the Hebrew word kacah, fills up what is lacking in others’ lives where they are falling short. 

Interestingly enough, I have been seeing this Scripture from another vantage point as well:  when we choose to love instead of hate, we will wipe out sin in our own lives as well.  Not only with the way we choose to feel towards our spouses, but literally with every relationship we have.  When you truly love someone you will not sin by judging them, criticizing them, being jealous or envious, looking down at them, holding them captive to perfectionism or even to a standard you have for your own life but they don’t have for theirs, and a multitude of other sins that enter your heart when you are not loving.  Choose love:  without ceasing, fervent, extended and stretched out love.  As the Message Bible puts it in 1 Peter 4.8: Most of all, love each other as if your life depended on it.  Love makes up for practically anything.


Challenge:  Love, truly love, others.  You will know you have God's love abiding in you when:  (1) that love covers (fills up what is lacking in others' lives where they are falling short); and (2) that love stops you from sinning because you can't speak against, about or unkind words about those you truly love.

Everyone will know that you are my disciples because of your love for each other. John 13.35