Love Covers All Wrongs

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Love covers all wrongs. That is the message of Proverbs 10:12,

Hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all offenses.

Love covers offenses. Love is not immune from being offended, but love seeks to cover over them when possible.

To cover an offense is not to forget it or to pretend that it was somehow OK. To cover an offense is to acknowledge that the offender is a fallen person in need of grace just as you are. To cover an offense is to live out the characteristics of 1 Corinthians 13:

4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

There is a place for church discipline and the Bible makes that very clear, but if you are the only person who has been offended and there has not been blatant sin involved, every effort should be made to respond in covering love.

Remember, just because you have been offended does not mean that you have been sinned against. To cover over the offense of another is a way of living with humility and grace. Maybe they weren’t wrong, maybe you are.

Just because you have been offended does not mean that you have been sinned against. Click To Tweet

Covering over an offense is not the same thing as submitting to abuse. Here are few characteristics of covering love:

  1. It does not respond with passive aggressiveness. If you have chosen to cover it up and move on.
  2. It keeps no record of wrong. You do not get to bring this back up next year.
  3. It does not envy or boast. You do not need to tweet about it.
  4. It bears, believes, and hopes. If you choose to love your sister despite their moment of carelessness, you do so not because you want to see them fail, but because you believe that they did not intend to hurt you and you hope that through your act of kindness and love they will be benefitted more than by a loving critique.

One caution: do not use the excuse of covering an offense to avoid church discipline. There are times that covering over an offense can do more harm to the offenders sanctification and holiness than confronting them. But how do you decide? A quick rule of thumb is to do the thing that is the most difficult. This rule doesn’t bear out every time, but most of the time doing the hardest thing is the right thing in relationships.

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