Paul has been providing some inspired insights to the true nature of love in action in his first epistle to the Corinthians. We arrive at “love…bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (I Corinthians 13:7). To truly comprehend his teaching here we must remind ourselves that love is always viewed in the context of relationship to others. Consequently, each one of these behavioral patterns that Paul commends is understood best in how it operates toward others. (I use “patterns” to emphasize that this love is not some isolated occurrence but a deliberate practice that we choose to follow consistently in our relationships.)
Love bears all things for the sake of others. To bear simply means to carry. One thing that love does is that it helps carry burdens. Paul wrote “Bear ye one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2). While we are called upon to carry our own burdens as a general rule, some burdens in life are too great to bear alone. (These kind of burdens cross each of our paths.) A financial crisis, the care of aging parents, the loss of a loved one are all burdens that each of us will likely be required to bear in our lives. Love helps carry those burdens. Sometimes with a card, sometimes with a meal, sometimes a gift of cash, caring for children to provide relief, and even mowing the grass or some other job that just needs done. (After back surgery years ago I was bedridden as you might imagine. A friend called me and “out of the blue” told me he was on his way over to mow my grass. I literally wept.) And while all these are tangible ways of helping bear a burden, we must never forget praying for one another.
Life is hard and full of hard things. Love cares and helps carry the load. Love as it shows itself in this context has one indispensable quality. It is willing to endure inconvenience. Helping to bear the burdens of another will require investment on my part. Human nature being what it is does not readily invite being inconvenienced. To love someone in this way requires an interruption to my schedule, the surrendering of my time, the yielding of my resources. That is what makes true love so necessarily divine. Many can make a one-time excursion in this arena, but to make it a pattern of life requires the grace of God!
At the very heart of this kind of love is an unselfishness that actually enters into the other person’s hardship or difficulty. It is the kind of love that Christ showed when he left heaven and inconvenienced himself to come to earth as a man that he might suffer for our sins on the cross. He saw us each in our lost estate, helpless and hell-bound, and in love died in our place at Calvary. He bore the burden of our sins, each and every one of them, before the judgment bar of heaven and redeemed us with his blood. Love bears all things!
We do not need to bear our own sin burden. Christ has borne it all. Give it to him and know the blessing and joy of his love.
From the Chaplain 