Love Covers Loads of Sin

With these psalm prayers still resounding in our ears and echoing in our hearts let us come to the Lord now as we approach Him with reverence and godly fear as we open His Word let us pray to Him.

Our Father in heaven, indeed we know of no one like you.  And you know us as no one else will ever do.  We submit ourselves to you now whether in the pew or in the pulpit as we prepare to hear your voice.  Do you work in us by your mighty spirit as we read your holy Word as only you can.  We ask this in the name of your son and our Savior Jesus Christ, the one through whom you never cease to receive glory and honor for ages without end.  Amen.

I invite you to turn with me this morning to 1 Peter chapter 4.  We’ll read together verses 7-11.  In this letter Peter has been preparing Christians for a coming storm of suffering.  He has been battening down the hatches, urging Christians to throw old patterns of sin overboard and above all he has repeatedly steered Christians to Jesus Christ.  In the verses that we’re reading this morning Peter swivels from the challenges that come from people outside the church to the character of people inside the church and as we read you’ll see how the apostle turns from discussions of vices in verses 1 to 6, to graces in verse 7-11, from drunkenness to sobriety, from lust to love, from orgies to hospitality and since this is God’s Word and since we need Peter’s letter as much as did his first readers so many centuries ago.  Let us give our full attention to the reading of the Scripture as the Holy Spirit helps us this morning.  Let us read.

⁷ The end of all things is at hand; therefore be self-controlled and sober-minded for the sake of your prayers. ⁸ Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins. ⁹ Show hospitality to one another without grumbling. ¹⁰ As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace: ¹¹ whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God; whoever serves, as one who serves by the strength that God supplies—in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.

The end of all things is at hand.  What comes to your mind when you hear an announcement that the end is near, is it a scruffy preacher wearing a sandwich board with a doomsday message, is it a cult leader preparing his followers for an apocalypse.  Is it someone interrupting the morning service at Christ Covenant urging us all to go into the wilderness.  When skeptics read Peter’s declaration that the end of all things is near, they feel sorry for him and for everyone who takes him seriously because Jesus has not yet returned.  But Peter doesn’t need our pity for at least two reasons.  First, the world really will end and be brought to judgement.  This truth is taught obliquely in the Old Testament, directly in the New and not least by Jesus himself.  It’s basic to the Christian faith that history has a purpose and a direction and an end and if we give up these pledges about His return we must surrender all of the teaching of Jesus and his apostles because the New Testament everywhere calls Christians to live in light of an eternal life ushered in by our Lord’s first and second comings. 

Second, Peter’s not so foolish as to declare contrary to our Lord’s own instructions just when the world will be brought to judgement.  People who say when the world will end are to be pitied and ignored.  People who say that the world will end are to be thanked and believed.  It’s true that when Peter penned these words he didn’t know about all the events in world history that would yet come, the spread of Christianity, the fall of Rome, the rise of monasteries, coffee shops, the British Empire and baseball, but Peter was aware of the events in what we could call redemptive history that had come, the creation and the fall, and then the covenant of promise, the calling of God’s people.  Peter knew that this Savior had come, that the God man was born, that He went about doing good, that He suffered for sinners, that He died and as a sacrifice for our sins and God raised Him from the dead.  He knew that his Lord had ascended into heaven and reigns even now, and he knew that he would come again with glory and honor.  Really only one thing remained given everything he had seen, the return of His savior.  Peter can say by the Holy Spirit that the end is near not simply because to the Lord a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years is like a day.  He can say it not simply because the time that’s passed is no comparison with the eternity that is to come.  No for us the end is near because in the history of God’s great saving acts there is only one event left, and it can come at any time.  The end of all things is at hand.  If we could begin to understand the force of this reality we will begin to live life differently.  You and I will always be hearing at a distance the opening notes of the trumpet of the Lord.

It’s the truth of the Lord’s return that opens verse 7 and sets the stage for verses 7 to 11.  It’s in light of the fact that the Lord will return that saints are summoned to prayer, called to love and encouraged to use our gifts well.  The first thing we might expect Peter to mention is prayer, after all the one good that we can always do for ourselves and for others is to pray.  No matter how weak we are, old we are, young we are, we can pray.  There is no greater kindness that we can offer then to command other people to the grace and mercy of God.  This is especially true in light of the last day.  You have a friend or neighbor that you suspect is straying from the Lord or doesn’t know Him at all.  A loved one who professes to be a believer but doesn’t live life with Christian priorities.  Are you concerned that they’re not ready given that the end is at hand?  Well quite possibly you might need to speak with them, but certainly you must pray for them.  Perhaps you have a concern for yourself.  Maybe as you review the footage of your own life, you’re not sure you are ready for our Lord to return.  Well certainly you need to take this to the Lord in prayer, ask Him to show you the savior that he has provided, and that is revealed so fully in the Bible, and you will find in Him all that you will truly ever need.  And if that’s too intimidating to pick up a book this big and unfamiliar to you, ask around, come to me after the service and I can easily find you a Christian here who enjoys reading the Bible with others and will help you.

In the past year I’ve been convicted that for my own work to be more useful I need to spend more time in prayer and more time preparing to be ready for prayer.  For what it’s worth, I’ve found Matthew Henry’s Method for Prayer a helpful little book, it’s also free on a useful website and in terms of getting my heart ready for prayer I have found a little five minute daily podcast by Sinclair Ferguson entitled Things Unseen to be a wonderful guide to putting my mind into a prayerful posture when so often all that I see are the things right in front of me.  But here I am failing this morning to follow the flow of our text because Peter doesn’t rush to recommend prayer in verse 7 does he, just like I did now.  No, instead he commends prayer indirectly by calling us to overcome two obstacles, two things that keep us from bending our knees and bowing our heads.  I would expect that Peter would first warn, if he’s thinking about obstacles, about sleepiness when we come to prayer.  Afterall the only time Jesus told him to pray he fell asleep, but instead he calls for self-control and sobriety for the sake of our prayers.  What links self-control and sobriety to prayer.  I’m sure if I gave you a few moments this morning the connection would come into focus, but it seems to me that Peter has a few different angles in mind.  For example, self-control is important for prayer because without it we might not pray at all.  When things go swimmingly well, we might drown in self-congratulations before we ever think to remember the one who gave us our gifts and opportunities.  When we lack self-control our reflex and moments of irritation will be to whine to a friend about our situation instead of turning to the Lord in supplication.  It will be, “You irritate me”, instead of “Lord help me.”  And do I need to add that without self-control every difficulty will be cause for fresh anxiety because we will not remember to take our burdens to the Lord in prayer.  With self-control, on the other hand, we will remember that worry is the native tongue of this world, but that prayer is the auto-translate of the saints.  Self-control is also important for prayer because without it we might have only one kind of prayer.  Without self-discipline we will not set aside time for prayer.  We’ll pray on the go, we’ll pray while we multitask, our prayers will be brief.  Now it’s good to pray briefly, it’s good to pray at all times and about all sorts of things, but a mental posture of prayer each day, however important that is, is not a replacement for a time of prayer every day.  Prayer on the go works well for intersession, not so much for adoration.  And what about Peter’s call for us to be sober for prayer.  Well after having condemned real drunkenness in verse 3 we can be sure that the apostle Peter is at least commending real sobriety in verse 7.  If you drink too much, you’ll be groggy in the head to pray when you get into bed and to sore in the had when you get out of bed.  But the translation in our church Bible is no doubt right to extend literal sobriety to mental sobriety as well.  Prayers that are not sober-minded tend to be emptyheaded.  We repeat old phrases, we just follow familiar ruts, we move through our routine of prayer much like our route to work in the morning or the grocery store or school, arriving at the end hardly conscious of how we got there, but the end of all things is at hand, so we don’t want to be found praying like this when our Lord returns.  So let us seek self-control and sobriety for our prayers.

Peter commends prayer indirectly in verse 7.  He commands love to clearly in verse 8.  You’ll notice in verse 8 that Peter assumes that Christians are loving each other, we’re to keep up what is already happening.  You’ll also notice the kind of love Peter sees in Christians is a love that’s productive, it does things, and one of the things that love does is to cover over sin.  Lovelessness by the way does just the opposite.  You’ll know that hatred hunts down the bad habits of others, it documents faults so they can’t be forgotten.  It displays deficiencies in other people so no one will miss what they just might have missed.  A Christian love doesn’t live this away.  Love hides faults from prying eyes, love guards, love protects.  Though surely there is a time for authorities in society, in the home and in the church to deal with sin.  There’s times to talk to others about their sin, and there are passages of scripture that equip us to do that wisely and well, but that’s not the point here, the point here is that love has the instinct of covering.  Christians, Christian love ought to create what Jim Newheiser has called grace detectives, people who hunt for evidences of God’s work and causes for encouragement.  The fruit of such sin covering love will flourish when the weeds of self-absorbing love are being pulled up for we won’t want to put others down in order to puff ourselves up, we’ll want to cover over sin.  Peter’s teaching that true love for others moves us to forgive and to overlook, and so why do we want to grow in these graces, why will we want a love that covers not a few sins, but a love that covers loads of sins, and why does Peter tell us to pursue this above all else?  Well, it’s because that’s the kind of love that’s been given to us.  An old Puritan once wrote something like this, “To show evil for love is devilish, to show evil for evil is brutish, to show love for love is human, to show love for evil is divine because that is what the Lord has done for us.”

And old preacher named Edmund Clowney once wrote that it’s the reach of God’s love that stretches our love.  We love because He first loved us.  Our love kindled by God’s love is stretched by exercise.  If you are a Christian, you love God because He first loved you.  And it’s not healthy, actually the apostle John says it’s not even possible to have a love of God poured out upon us, but then just bottle it up for our own use only.  God has sent His son whose perfect righteousness covers over the sins of every person who sees that in Jesus Christ there is a way to escape the power and the penalty of our sin, and to find a hope for eternal life.  As we recognize that the end of all things is at hand, and that our God intends to cover over the sins of His people on the day of judgement.  Let us seek opportunities to do this ourselves. 

We’re to keep loving each other, one way in which we love is to cover over sin, a very different way in which we’re to love is to show hospitality and that’s the next thing that’s mentioned in our passage.  Peter has moved again from a general principle, love, to a specific working of that principle, forgiveness and hospitality.  Perhaps Peter stresses the importance of hospitality because inns at the time of the early church were unsafe and uncomfortable.  Perhaps he mentions the importance of hospitality because he remembers one who in His birth was laid in the manger.  There was not room even in such inns for Him who had to sleep on a boat and who often had no place to rest His head.  But whatever the reason hospitality is emphasized in scripture and as you can see in verse 9 Christians are especially called to show hospitality to one another.  We do this because people have needs, because people are lonely, and because people need encouragement.  Now sharing space and time can be hard and anything worth doing has a learning curve.  It won’t come easily.  If I were to just sort of pick a panel of people out of the pews and put them up here and ask them about their hospitality experiences, I’m guessing that someone would say, “Don’t make it too complicated”, and I’m guessing someone else would say at some point, “Don’t confuse entertainment which is really about you with hospitality which is really about others.”  It’s easy to spend so much time preparing for guests that we wear ourselves out and decide to stop.  We can spend so much time on our hospitality that our guests feel like an inconvenience rather than feeling like temporary members of our home. 

Back in the early 5^th century an Egyptian named Cyril once wrote, “If you receive a brother do not be distracted by too much serving and do not attempt what is beyond your strength.  Unnecessary effort is always tedious and such exertions will only embarrass your guests.”  He also encouraged Christians to know their limitations, in hard times be as generous as you can.  You know we are blessed in the greater Charlotte area in a way that many Christians elsewhere around this country and this world are not blessed, many would love to see new faces in church, new guests around their table.  Here we often have missionaries and volunteers to serve in this area are coming home on furlough who need a place to stay for a few nights or for a month.  We have people from out of town sometimes for a conference, there’s one coming up I hear in the spring, who need a place to stay.  There are strangers who need to come for a few nights or weeks while they’re getting treatment at one of the fine hospitals that we have in the city.  We have seminarians trying to pay tuition who could do with a room or an apartment.  We have singles who are lonely, couples looking for friends, people sitting near you in worship service or Sunday school who clearly don’t know anyone else and who need a friendly face and perhaps an invite to your home.  Maybe you’ll start a ministry of coordinating hospitality for all these sorts of things at Christ Covenant, and for what it’s worth, it will not be harder for us to welcome others into our home than it would be for Peter’s first readers to do the same. 

It doesn’t require a lot of imagination to picture Mr. 1^st century Christian entering his kitchen and noticing with dismay that the apostle Peter had once again beat him to the Galician Daily Gazette or the Pontus Morning Post, his daughter is pouting because the apostle Paul is sitting in her favorite chair, and Mrs. 1^st century Christian is giving her husband one of those looks that says, it’s an honor to host the missionaries, but when will the Lord call them to Macedonia?  Scripture calls us to hospitality without grumbling.  That’s particularly difficult for people like myself who have been finely honing the skills of grumbling and to be fair sometimes we create context for grumbling to grow.  We can set someone up for unhappiness when we surprise the cook with visitors rather than checking ahead of time to see if our good intentions are well timed.  And we can set ourselves up for success, thinking ahead by stocking up on some extra soup or hot dogs or something much better than that, to stretch a meal when we unexpectedly see someone who we might think could benefit from some time with other Christians.  As I see it, thinking ahead about hospitality is just the sort of thing that our God has already done for us.  If you’ll excuse the clumsiness of a phrase like thinking ahead applied to God.  My point is that he always had a plan for welcoming us to His home.  For when it came time for Jesus to leave his disciples on earth what did He promise them, that He would go but that there would be a place for them.  So can we find a place in our hearts and homes for those the Lord brings our way.  Can we pray for eyes to see them, not least those who cannot return the favor because they’re just passing through town or are new to town or don’t have a place of their own.  Let us show hospitality to one another, after all the end of all things is at hand, and it would be good for us to share our temporary homes for a short time as we look forward to our father sharing His home with us forever.

We pray because God is the one who can help us.  We love because God first loved us.  We show hospitality because God’s home is always open.  Do you see how Christian life commands or builds on Christian gospel realities?  This is a uniquely Christian dynamic by the way.  Any of the other religions or cults that try to ape the Christian faith always fail just here, they offer life commands without the life support that only the triune God can give, and it’s just this dynamic that we hear again in verse 10, “As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another as good stewards of God’s varied grace.”  It’s as if Peter says in verse 10, God has shipped boatloads of gifts to His church, we’ve received those gifts, and we are to use them for others.  We are merely stewards of what is really His.  Gifts are things received for a purpose, we’re not to hog them for ourselves.  What would you think about walking into a store, seeing the place packed with goods and a long line of customers and no one being served.  Now you might say that happens all the time but let me add some texture to this.  The staff are in a great mood, they’re enjoying their work, they happily discuss what they have for sale, they’re chatting about a new shipment to the store as if it was all birthday gifts for themselves, finally a customer is served, but the guy at the counter is grudging, he can’t wait to get back to his colleagues, it’s clear that the customers are not his priority.  Might we sometimes be a little bit like that in the church?  A professor or reform theological seminary now at home with the Lord once wrote that the church is supposed to be a storehouse of gifts that is never locked, but always open for service.  You see it’s okay to discuss gifts, to label gifts, to enjoy gifts, but they’re meant to be used for others.  And then referring to our gift in verse 11 Peter is not suggesting that each one of us has only in our lifetime been given one gift by God.  He is simply saying that whatever gifts we have received, that we’re to deploy them for others.  Are you wondering this morning what gift or gifts God has given you?  Well, you can pray that He will show you.  You can talk to your friends and family and ask what they see, but then just do something, to coin a phrase, because the end of all things is at hand, because we learn by doing and not just by thinking, and because it will be good for us to be using our gifts when the master returns.

And speaking of gifts, verse 11 puts everything that’s been said so far into two big buckets of gifting and you can see them here speaking and serving.  Whoever speaks in the church whether it be an elder or a member, he or she is to speak, Peter says, as one who speaks the oracles or sayings of God.  Now in keeping with the flow of thought in 1 Peter 4, we’re not to conclude that our words are so important that they’re like divine oracles.  Now the point is that our words are dependent on God’s Words.  When we speak with others our hope of encouraging them, our hope of success is that we’re reflecting upon, maybe even quoting scripture.  The words we speak are God’s gifts to us.  We’d have nothing useful to say if God had first not spoken to us.  And whoever serves in the church, whether it be a deacon or a member, he or she is to serve as one who serves by the strength that God provides.  Here too in keeping with the flow of thought in 1 Peter 4, we’re not to conclude that our service is so impressive that everyone is gonna just admire our God-like power.  Now the point is that our service is so dependent on God’s strength.  When we help one another, we will not be relying, or we should not be relying on ourselves.  In fact, we’ll seek to reach beyond our normal abilities and strengths because we will be relying on a power that comes from God.  We’ll have no useful way to serve if God has not first served us.  The Bible anchors our actions as Christians in the action of God.  And one reason for this is found at the end of verse 11, “We live in light of who God is and what God has done, why, in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ in everything we say and everything we do.” 

I’m not proud to admit this, but when I use God’s gifts, I sometimes forget this fundamental fact.  I conveniently ignore that I do what I do, share what I share, say what I say because God has first done and spoken and shared.  What about you, how do you think and talk about your service, about the good that God enables you to do.  One modern author has warned that anyone who has begun a ministry in Christ’s name finds it perilously easy to shift the ownership of the enterprise, it becomes his ministry, her organization, but as one ancient author has said, “God does not adorn us with His gifts that He may rob himself and make himself as it were an empty idol by transferring to us His own glory.”  Can you see that?  Can you see that that’s the direction in which all these verses have been heading, to that point, to that conclusion.  I’m sure you do.  So may it be evermore the motive of all that we do and say, perhaps beginning in a new way today, that in everything God will be glorified through Jesus Christ for to Him the long glory and dominion forever and ever.  Amen.  Let us pray.

Gracious Father, help us to pray with sober minds as we consider what you have taught us this morning, enable us to love each other as best as we can, knowing that your love in Christ will cover over the multitude of our sins.  Help us to share without grumbling by Christ’s grace because we have received so much.  Help us to speak and serve, ever remembering the spirit’s gifts because you deserve all the glory.  Will you do these things, we know that you will because we ask all this in Jesus’ name.  Amen.