How Love Covers A Multitude Of Sins

This devotional episode is based on 1 Peter 4:7-11. We wanted to share how Love covers a multitude of sins and why it is so important that we love with this level of eagerness.

1 Peter 4:7-11 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.

Prayer

Dear Lord,

We lift up our hearts to you right now and ask that you would make us a people who love others earnestly. Holy Spirit direct our hearts and remind us of your word. We pray we would above all things love others. We pray we would love our spouse, our children, our friends, and those who are in our life. May your love pour out of us. May your love pouring out of us transform our marriages. We pray others would be impacted by the love we share. We pray we would be able to love so deeply that it covers a multitude of sin. We pray that instead of shame or guilt, people would feel undoubtedly loved by us and by you. We pray for your word to be fulfilled through our choices to walk in love and that your will would be done.

In Jesus’ name, amen!

READ TRANSCRIPT

- [Aaron] Hey, we're Aaron and Jennifer Smith, with "Marriage After God."

- [Jennifer] Helping you cultivate an extraordinary marriage.

- [Aaron] And today we're gonna talk about how love covers a multitude of sin. Welcome to the "Marriage After God" podcast where we believe that marriage was meant for more than just happily ever after.

- [Jennifer] I'm Jennifer, also known as Unveiled Wife.

- [Aaron] And I'm Aaron, also known as Husband Revolution.

- [Jennifer] We have been married over a decade.

- [Aaron] And so far, we have four young children.

- [Jennifer] We have been doing marriage ministry online for over seven years through blogging and social media.

- [Aaron] With a desire to inspire couples to keep God at the center of their marriage, encouraging them to walk in faith every day.

- [Jennifer] We believe that Christian marriage should be an extraordinary one, full of life,

- Love,

- And power,

- [Aaron] That can only be found by chasing after God,

- [Jennifer] Together.

- [Aaron] Thank you for joining us on this journey as we chase boldly after God's will for our life together.

- [Jennifer] This is "Marriage After God." Okay Aaron, so we, we survived kind of a hard week.

- [Aaron] We did survive.

- I mean,

- We're barely coming on

- Our kids survived.

- The other side of it, yes.

- [Jennifer] But we're not the only ones going through this, so we thought we would just give you guys a little update of our family and hopefully encourage some of you out there who it might be hitting as well.

- [Aaron] Yeah, our whole family got the flu. It was bad, but not bad. It was kind of a weird thing.

- [Jennifer] Well, I'll say this, the Lord spared me and gave me the grace to be able to help everyone. 'Cause I felt--

- And you didn't even really get sick, you got some of the, like you felt sick.

- Yeah you know the gut pain?

- [Aaron] But you didn't have any other symptoms, which was awesome.

- And the rosy cheeks. I felt like every once in a while, like I really don't feel good right now, I need to go lay down, but for the most part, I was able to be there to help everyone. Which made me really nervous, because people were, you and the kids were throwing up and I just thought, me, at this stage of the game in pregnancy, throwing up would not go over well with my body.

- No and so--

- That woulda been terrible.

- [Aaron] We're definitely thanking God, which we did a lot of, oddly. But not to be too graphic, but I'm pretty sure I put a rib out from how hard I was throwing up.

- [Jennifer] That sucks.

- [Aaron] Yeah, it still is really sore. But, what's awesome is, a couple of things, I just wanna praise you Jennifer, because I feel like you handled everyone being sick, and the inconvenience of it so well. I think I even told you, I was like, "I can tell you're walking in the spirit." Like your attitude was good, how much cleaning had to be done.

- [Jennifer] It was a lot of work.

- [Aaron] It's no fun when literally all the boys are throwing up and it's like, there's no clean blankets.

- [Jennifer] It's all at the same time.

- [Aaron] Yeah, so we, but we survived, we're coming on the other side of that. But one thing we practiced, I don't think we've ever done it before, not that we're not thankful to God.

- [Jennifer] Not in this kind of circumstance, it's not at the forefront of our minds.

- [Aaron] I did a post a couple weeks ago encouraging men to thank God for everything, if they get cut off in traffic, if something bad happens, even--

- [Jennifer] You didn't say if your whole family comes down with sickness, did you?

- [Aaron] I know, if something good happens, I just said, say, whatever it is that happens today, thank God for it. And I tried practicing that. And so I'm literally in the fetal position in the bathtub, and I'm trying to thank God. I'm like, "Okay God, thank you. "Thank you for being sick." And I was like, why am I thanking God for this? Well, thank you for reminding me that I'm human. Like I'm fragile. Thank you for reminding me that one day I'm not gonna have this sickness.

- [Jennifer] Or that we need to pray.

- [Aaron] Yeah thank you for reminding,

- Ask him.

- Humbling me, showing me that my weakness. So there was a lot of things to thank God for for being sick, and I directly thanked God for being sick. And then we of course have thanked God for healing us and sparing our family from being even worse, 'cause it probably could have been worse.

- [Jennifer] Something that really stood out to me is I didn't know you had this perspective kind of going into everyone being sick, and I wouldn't say I was there with you in those beginning moments, but you brought the family to the living room, and you said, "You know what, we're gonna pray, "and we're just gonna thank God today." And I think even one of the kids asked, "Why are we thanking God?"

- [Aaron] Doesn't make any sense.

- [Jennifer] But I was questioning it in my own heart too, like, okay, where's this going? But it was so beautiful to hear your prayer and you starting out saying, "God, thank you for this sickness." And it was humbling for me and for my heart to go, "oh yeah" you know? And to have that perspective before him. And then, I gotta share this other experience is just a friend of mine who, their family also got it really bad.

- [Aaron] Pretty much our whole church got sick.

- [Jennifer] But I met up with her for coffee when it was all past and she goes, "You know I just found, we found our whole family "just worshiping God through it." And it was so cool, kinda the same thing. And I said, "I didn't really worship him through it, "but at the end of all the laundry being done, "all the bathrooms being cleaned, "and having taken a shower, I came out singing "'Victory in Jesus' so, that was awesome."

- [Aaron] But it is worship. Thanking God is worship. So whatever he gives, I think Job says it, "Should we not thank God for the good and the evil?" Like the bad things that happen? We thank God for those too, because he's God and he deserves our thanksgiving. And at the end of the day, salvation is so much greater than anything that we can go through. So, at minimum you can be like, "God, thank you so much "that one day I'm gonna be with you." That is so good.

- [Jennifer] So if your family happens to get hit by whatever bug this is,

- [Aaron] It's going around, yeah.

- [Jennifer] Whatever's going around, we just wanted to encourage you guys to move forward with a thankful heart and to trust God and to be prayerful. And also just to be patient, because we know it's an inconvenience, we know it's hard, it takes away from your work schedule, it takes away from things on your to-do list that maybe you were hoping to do or whatever it is. We know it's hard, but if God's allowing it to happen, we can trust him and walk through it with him.

- [Aaron] Yeah, so that was just a little update on our flu campaign. But we wanna encourage you. We have a new challenge. We've been doing a lot of these lately, a lot of new downloads and challenges and free things that you guys can get from us. And our new one's called the parentingprayerchallenge.com. We launched it last week and this week you get to do it. We're still encouraging parents to sign up to pray for either their daughter or their son or both. So if you haven't signed up for the Parenting Prayer Challenge, it's completely free. We're gonna send you 31 prompts every day, encouraging you to pray for different things for your child.

- Over 31 days.

- Over 31 days.

- [Jennifer] Not 31 emails in one day.

- [Aaron] Yeah, that's happened one time. Yeah, one a day, and the whole idea is that at the end of the 31 days you've built a habit of praying for your children. I'm sure all you parents love to pray for your children, but we just wanted to give this resource to encourage you to pray more, to pray deeper, to pray more consistently and give you ideas on what other things to pray for for your kids.

- [Jennifer] Yeah, and I'll add this, it goes hand in hand with our books, "31 prayers for your son and for your daughter." And if you have those books, oh this'll be an incredible reminder. It's kinda like an alarm, right? Because your email comes through and then you're like, "Oh yeah." So you can get the book and go along with it that way too.

- [Aaron] Mm-hmm, so parentingprayerchallenge.com, all one word, spelled the way you would think it's spel