Tenacious Love - 1 Peter 4:8 Series

1 Peter 4:8 Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. 9 Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling. 10 Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms. 11 If anyone speaks, they should do so as one who speaks the very words of God. If anyone serves, they should do so with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ. To him be the glory and the power for ever and ever. Amen.

Introduction

If you go off-roading, one of the most vulnerable parts of your vehicle is the differential. That is that kind of round thing in the middle, between the axels. It is vulnerable because it hangs down lowest to the ground, so if a rock is going to hit something it will hit that. And so they make some really heavy duty covers for those things. I watched a video the other day of a guy testing one of those covers. It was one demonstration after another of the kind of force it could withstand, so he was dropping things on it, setting off explosives, he pressed down on it with a back hoe and lifted up the entire front loader off the ground - nothing would break it. But he was determined to find a breaking point, so he kept going until he finally ran over it with a massive, forty-ton piece of earth moving machinery and it broke. I think he was one of those guys who is more interested in breaking things than in actually discovering how durable a particular piece of equipment is.

Sometimes in the church our love is tested like that. Just one stress-test after another, greater and greater pressure until your love finally gives out. Love is patient and kind, it does not envy or boast, is not proud or rude or self-seeking, or easily angered, keeps no record of wrongs, does not rejoice in the other person's failure, bears all things, and always remains willing to trust the person. That is what love is, and so you know your love has collapsed when one of those gives way. You start keeping a record of wrongs, or you become irritable and easily angered, or you lose patience - any of those components give way, and love has failed. So when someone in the church is running bulldozers over your love, how much pressure does it take for something to give? How much abuse can your love withstand?

Persecution Strains Love

We have been studying verse by verse through the book of 1 Peter, and we come today to a passage designed to make our love more durable.

8 Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.

Ever since midway through chapter 3, Peter has been teaching about this issue of how to respond to abuse and mistreatment and persecution from the world - suffering for righteousness. At first glance it may seem like now we have finally moved to a new topic - love within the church. That is the subject starting in verse 8 and going through verse 11. But then as you keep reading you realize Peter has not left the topic of suffering for righteousness yet. He gets right back into that in verses 12 through the end of the chapter. So why this little interlude about loving one another and welcoming and serving one another in the church? Could it be that Peter has this section here because he knows that the more abuse we suffer from the outside, the more it strains the limits of our love inside the church? When people on the outside mistreat us, and life gets really hard and we cannot do anything about it, we have a tendency to take it out on our brothers and sisters in the church. In Matthew 24, Jesus warned us about the abuse and persecution we would suffer in the end times.

Matthew 24:12 Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold

When the world takes out its rebellion against God on us through persecution, that makes life hard for us. And the harder life gets for us, the easier it is to slip into selfishness and self-pity and self-focus instead of other-focus and love. When people are hurting you, the natural reaction is always to turn inward and to start focusing on how you are being treated, as if that were the most important thing. You start expecting a certain amount of sympathy and a certain amount of help and encouragement, and the next thing you know your attention is on all the ways people are failing to love you, rather than on you loving them. Love crumbles under the weight of suffering, we become selfish and irritable, and the next thing you know we turn on one another. So it is not out of place at all for Peter to pause in his discussion about persecution and remind us again that our highest priority is love. And that is Peter's first point - priority.