Good Monday morning and welcome back to the podcast. Thanks for making us a part of your weekly routines, maybe your commute to work, whatever it is you're doing right now. We don't take it for granted that you welcome us into your life, so thank you. Well, if you listened on Friday, we looked at 1 Peter 3.8.

There Peter calls Christians to strive towards a unity of mind, he says. But we also saw that this unity of mind is not uniformity. We don't all think identically, which means that Christian unity must hold together by love, not simply by uniform thinking. And without this critical heart of love, unity simply cannot happen.

And speaking of love and how love unifies, Peter goes on to say in the very same letter, just a little later, a chapter later, that love "covers a multitude of sins." Our love covers sins. Peter makes that point in 1 Peter 4.8. But what does it mean? Two listeners want to know.

Dustin in Atlanta asks Pastor John, "How does love cover over a multitude of sins? What sins? Whose sins does it cover? Mine or the person or people I'm loving?" In the same vein, Alan in Brisbane, Australia writes in to ask this. Pastor John, what is Peter driving at in this text?

Are we covering over our inclination to sin by loving or covering over their sins by not reacting to them, that is, forgiving them rather than taking revenge? Pastor John, what would you say to Austin and Alan? Here's 1 Peter 4.7-8. The end of all things is at hand. Therefore, be self-controlled and sober-minded for the sake of your prayers.

Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, and here comes that key phrase, since love covers a multitude of sins. So let's begin by mentioning, observing a few Old Testament texts that lie behind Peter's language of covering a multitude of sins. For example, here's the closest parallel, Proverbs 10.12. Hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all offenses.

That's really close to what Peter says. Love covers all offenses. So you can see how close the parallel is to love covers a multitude of sins. So what does this proverb mean? The contrast is between hatred and love. What hatred does is stir up strife, and what love does is cover offenses.

So the opposite of covering offenses is to stir up strife. So I take the strife, then, to be what happens when you don't cover offenses, but rather you try to uncover as many as you can. You're on the lookout for people's flaws and failures and imperfections, and you draw attention to them, and you stir up conflict by pointing out as many of a person's flaws as you can.

That's what hate does, according to the proverb. So the opposite of this would be you're not eager to draw attention to people's flaws or failures. You're not eager to create corporate blame and conflict. Instead, love seeks to deal with flaws and failures and sins another way, more quietly. Of course, you're not ignorant that some sins must be dealt with publicly, as in the case, say, of sexual abuse or some kind of violence.

But you also know that there are hundreds of things that people say and do that are offensive or selfish or prideful or off-color, and they need to be dealt with quietly and kindly. I think this is what Paul was getting at in Galatians 6, where he said, "Brothers, if anyone is caught in a trespass or a transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness.

Keep watch over yourself, lest you too be tempted." So you don't blow a trumpet and try to placard the person's transgression all over the community. You do your best to bring about repentance quietly, personally, or if there are reasons that it's not your place to confront the person, you simply give the person slack and you hope and you pray that the kindness that you show by overlooking would have a good effect in due time.

So cover offenses can have two meanings, can't it? One is to simply let it go, overlook it, as we say, and that's referred to in Proverbs 19.11, "Good sense makes one slow to anger, and it is the glory to overlook an offense." So that's one meaning of cover, overlook.

You see it, but love inclines you not to take offense or to be angered or hurt, but to hope that your endurance of the injury, perhaps, against you and your forgiveness and patience will bear fruit in change. The other meaning is that under that cover of patience, you may be quietly and actively dealing with the person in one-on-one ways that actively and quietly seek repentance.

We shouldn't jump to the conclusion that when love covers a multitude of sins, it's not in there talking to anybody. Love wants peace, not conflict. Love wants holiness, not sin. Love wants the good of the sinning person, not public vengeance. And in both of those meanings, the overlook one and the quietly deal with the sinner, in both of those meanings of cover, there is a forgiving spirit at work.

We see that in Psalm 32.1, "Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven," and then parallel, "whose sin is covered." So cover parallels forgive. To cover is to work toward forgiveness, where the sin doesn't break the relationship anymore. So now back to 1 Peter 4.8, "The end of all things is at hand.

Therefore be self-controlled, sober-minded for the sake of your prayers. Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins." So against the Old Testament background, as well as the New Testament parallels that we'll see in just a minute, the sins that are being covered here are the sins of fellow Christians, not your own sins and not those outside the church, but the failures of Christians to live up to the biblical path of righteousness.

And with that in mind, we start to see this work of love all over the New Testament. That covering idea is everywhere. For example, 1 Corinthians 13.5 says, "Love is patient and kind. It does not keep an account of wrongs." That's the old King James translation, and it's good.

Isn't that the same, not keeping account of wrongs? Isn't that the same as saying love covers wrongs? It doesn't keep an account of them. Or he goes on in 1 Corinthians 13 and says, "Love is not easily irritated." Huh. That's like overlook, right? It's like a covering. Isn't that the same as saying love covers irritations?

Or verse 7, same chapter, he goes on and says, "Love bears all things, endures all things." Well, bears and endures means that love doesn't throw your flaw and your failure back in your face. It bears it. It endures it. That's a covering rather than a flag waving over it and saying, "Hey, everybody, look.

What I found. Jim's a loser. He offended me. Mary's a hypocrite. She hurt me." That's not bearing and enduring. It's not covering. Or we see this covering work in Colossians 3 where Paul says to believers, "Bear with one another, and if one has a complaint, forgive one another as the Lord has forgiven you." So enduring, forgiving means that people have offended me, hurt me, irritated me, and I choose not to retaliate.

Instead, I cover the offense of the hurt or the irritation. Now, the closest parallel in the New Testament to 1 Peter 4.8, which sheds even more light on what's going on with this covering, is James 5.19. "My brothers, if anyone among you wanders from the truth," you've got a believer who's straying off, about to make shipwreck of faith.

"If any of you wanders off from the truth and someone brings him back," so you go after your brother, you quietly plead and deal and pray and share, and you win him. "Let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from his wandering will save his soul from death and cover a multitude of sins." In other words, when we mercifully pursue a wayward brother or sister and win them back to the path of faith and obedience, they are saved from making shipwreck of their faith, and when they take their place under the blood of Jesus, all their sins are not only covered by our own patience and endurance and forgiveness, but they're also covered by the blood of Jesus, which is why Peter says, "You will save their souls." So, I think it is fair to say as we cover the sins of those who offend us, rather than retaliating, we are offering them an expression of Christ's covering by his blood, so that if they rest their faith in Christ because of our kindness, our covering, they will experience the ultimate kindness and the ultimate covering of the forgiveness of the sins in Christ.

Amen. Thank you, Pastor John. And speaking of a straying believer or a wayward brother or sister who is on the path of shipwrecking their faith, that was a theme that we addressed just a couple of weeks back on the podcast, you might remember. Those proved to be very popular episodes, no surprise.

See APJ's 1849 and 1850 for more on what it means to shipwreck the faith. Thank you for joining us today. You can ask a Bible question of your own. You can search our growing archive or subscribe to the podcast, all at askpastorjohn.com. Speaking of covering sin, at the center of our faith, we celebrate the cross of Jesus Christ, his horrific suffering and death by crucifixion.

His blood truly covers our sin in the most profound way, and his death was no accident. It was not a fluke of history. It was not merely an end result of mob violence unstopped. His death was designed. It was intentional, divinely intended, intended from the beginning of time. This is a somber and significant point to grasp from Acts chapter 4, verses 27 and 28, the text we're going to look at next time.

I'm your host, Tony Reinke. We'll see you back here on Monday. Have a great weekend.