8 Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. 9 Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling. ~ 1 Peter 4:8-9
Today, we continue our study of 1 Peter 4 where the Apostle Peter is giving us principles about how to relate to one another while we are suffering severely. The wisdom needed from God is a must in order to navigate the frustrations and disappointments that we face in this life.
In v.8 of today's passage we read, "Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins."
This letter was written to a group of believers who were suffering intensely. It is when we are struggling that we find it most difficult to love others; it is also the most difficult time to be grateful. One of the major roles of our suffering and our pain, though, is to help us to recognize and to know the contrast between what is true and what is not. Being able to recognize the difference between good and evil is wisdom and it is wisdom that enables us to receive God's culture into our existence. This is where our trials serve us; they serve to drive us to the place where we increasingly are depending upon God and we are being defined by Him. The key is that we run to Him through our pain, that we run to Him for His definition of us.
In this verse we are admonished to love deeply those who are believers in the Lord Jesus. A careful study of the word "love" in this verse and a careful study of the word "hospitality" in the following verse reveals that unless we experience God's unconditional love and practice it among our brothers in the Lord, we will not be known for practicing brotherly love or hospitality to those believers we have never met. The word the Apostle chose to use in this verse for "love" is "agape" or commitment type of love. Then, in the verse to follow Peter used "phileo" with is brotherly love. As you will see, the usage of these two different words fro love is quite instructive to us. Both of these two types of love enable us to realize God's culture among us, all the while fighting back sin and grumbling.
God, by nature, is love, and it is only His kind of love that "covers a multitude of sins." In fact, it was His love that caused Him to send His Son to earth to shed His blood on the cross so that we could be made acceptable into heaven. The Greek word translated "deeply" means "stretched" or "strained." The Greeks originally used this word to describe the way a horse stretched forward to reach its top speed.
In order to love this way we must be defined by God and to be energized to strain forward with those who are feeling the weight of the pressures of this world. It is this kind of love that enables us to strain forward with our commitment to those who are not easy to love. Human love can help sinners face sins and repent from those sins, but it has no power to blot out sin. True love cannot enjoy fellowship with the works of darkness. True love loves the truth and judges according to that truth. The role of true love is to choose truth and to resist its opponent, sin and self. In today's passage Peter describes two aspects of this kind of love, it is a love that covers sin and it is a love that recovers the fallen.
In v.9 of today's passage we read, "Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling."
The word translated "hospitality" here is the word from which we get our English word "hospital." This is the practical display of love. The word Peter used here for love means "to love a stranger who is a member of God's family." Peter tells us to love like brothers other believers whom we do not know well. This Greek word translated "hospitality" is a compound word, joining the word that means brotherly love with the word that means stranger or foreigner. In Peter's day the public hotels were immoral places, and both Christians and non-Christians tried to bypass them if they could. So it was necessary for people to open their homes to travelers who were also believers in the Lord. Peter says one of our paramount characteristics of the believer in Christ ought to be that we love strangers.
It is our gratitude that gives birth to this desire to be of help to a brother in need. When we complain, gratitude is not allowed to give the platform needed to these two very important choices. Gratitude provides the hands and feet that enable us to love in this very practical way. And, the biggest disease today is not cancer nor AIDS nor tuberculosis; the biggest disease today is lovelessness. Strangely, I am finding that my gratitude grows in spite of the hardships that I encounter in this life. In fact, I am discovering that as I go through hardships and He embraces me as I embrace Him through those hardships, it is then that I really experience His heart for me. This is not possible without our trials. We would want to avoid the trials but in so doing, we would avoid intimacy with God. This is what causes our hearts to swell with gratitude because we recognize that God is truly involved in our lives.
