Speaker: Dr. Harold J. Sala | Series: Guidelines For Living | [Love] beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.  1 Corinthians 13:7, KJV

Marriage, said an unknown pundit, is the art of two incompatible people learning to love compatibly together.  Anyone who has been married for more that 24 hours would agree that sustaining a marriage takes more than romantic feelings.  It takes a deep commitment of love which reaches beyond your emotions and feelings to meeting the needs of another.  It’s costly, too!  But its currency isn’t monetary.  We pay by repressing the desire to always be right, by giving up the desire to win every round.  Yes, love learns to compromise, to yield, but triumphs in the end.

In the magnificent prose found in 1 Corinthians 13, Paul describes the characteristics of love.  I would urge you to make an intense study of this chapter.  It can change your life as it did mine many years ago.

Paul says that real love—the kind that makes incompatible people compatible—is patient, kind, free of envy, not boastful or proud; it doesn’t insist on its own way; it is slow to believe wrong but quick to rejoice in good things.

Following these words Paul makes four statements about love as he writes, “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things.”

First, “Love bears all things.”  Another translation says, “Love protects.”  Another way of translating this expression is, “Love covers all things.”  At least three times in Scripture we are told that love covers a multitude of sins in relationship to each other.  L.L. Huffman received a letter from a foreign friend, and the letter was filled with expressions that were quaint because the friend’s knowledge of English grammar was quite poor; however, Huffman’s heart was deeply touched as he read the postscript:  “The mistakes you will cover with the coat of love.”

“The best of men are but men at their best,” we sometimes say—which means that everyone is prone to failure.  Nobody is perfect.  We will all make social blunders.  Eventually, the best of us will need the covering of love to hide his imperfections.  The Living Bible puts it like this: “If you love someone, you will be loyal to him no matter what the cost.”  That is the picture of a real friend.

Notice the second statement: “Love believes all things.”  This explains how a young man can stray and fall into a life of hideous crime, yet his mother will say, “He was always a good boy who could do no harm to anyone.”  The mother is sure that her boy is not the one who did it, but the district attorney sees it in a different light.  That is the great quality of agape love.

Paul’s fourth statement about love is that it “endures all things.”  Before you challenge that statement, read this press release I read years ago:

“Carmine Russel, 22, looks at the man who shot her a year ago as she is married to him during a Valentine’s Day ceremony at Southern Michigan Prison…The groom, Jerry Randall, 30, shot his bride-to-be in the face during a lover’s quarrel.  He was sentenced to 5 to 10 years for the shooting despite her refusal to testify against him…”  With almost unbelievable tenacity from a human vantage, love suffers long, is kind, and endures all things.  Nowhere in all of life’s gamut of relationships is love more important than in our homes where we live helping incompatible people to be compatible.

Resource Reading: Ephesians 4:17-32