Love Covers a Multitude of Sins [Part 1]

Pastor, author, and Bible teacher, Alan Wright. Messages that are full of religious shame actually arouse or incite, Paul said, sin, the law, he said.

It makes us sin more. That's Pastor Alan Wright. Welcome to another message of good news that will help you see your life in a whole new light. I'm Daniel Britt, excited for you to hear the teaching today in the series, The Elect Exiles, as presented at Reynolda Church in North Carolina. Now, if you're not able to stay with us throughout the entire program, I want to make sure you know how to get our special resource right now. It could be yours for your donation this month to Alan Wright Ministries.

So as you listen to today's message, go deeper as we send you today's special offer. Contact us at PastorAlan.org. That's PastorAlan.org. Or call 877-544-4860.

That's 877-544-4860. More on this later in the program, but right now, let's get started with today's teaching. Here is Alan Wright. Okay, beloved, are you ready for some good news? In some ways, the Beatles were right. All you need is love. Maybe not exactly the way they meant it, but today we come to a verse in 1 Peter.

We're in a series called Elect Exiles. It's a walk through 1 Peter. We come to a verse, just one verse is all we need for today, that is not just one of the most beautiful and powerful verses in 1 Peter, but is such in the whole of the New Testament indeed the Bible. And if you see the depths of its meaning, you would probably conclude it is one of the most true, powerful, and wonderful statements that has ever been made.

It is 1 Peter, chapter 4, verse 8. Above all, keep loving one another earnestly. As the English Standard Version renders it here, it is about continuous and fervent love that doesn't stop. And then this statement, since love covers a multitude of sins. Love covers a multitude of sins. Will you just say it with me?

Love covers a multitude of sins. That's all we're going to deal with today. The man was on the beach, found a bottle, imagine a genie popped out. And the genie says, you get three wishes. The man said, great.

But the genie said, hold on, I got to warn you. He said, whatever you wish for, your worst enemy will receive double. Without giving it much thought, the man said, I wish for $100 million. And in just a moment, text came up on his phone. It was his bank said, we received your deposit of $100 million. The man's like, whoa. And then a minute later, he got another text. It was from his ex-wife's lover. And he said, I thought you just like to know I just won the lottery, $200 million.

Genie said, you got a second wish. The man said, I'd like to have a sculpted physical body, a physique of a world-class athlete. And poof, there on the beach, he looked like an Olympic athlete. And he was celebrating how good he felt, and good he looked. And all of a sudden, he gets a text.

It's from that same ex-wife's lover. He said, thought you'd want to know. I'm out here at Santa Monica Beach, and something just suddenly happened in my body. He said, it's unbelievable. He said, I just, I couldn't tell myself I took off running down towards the pier. And it so happens there was an NFL scout here who timed me and said, I just ran the fastest 100-yard dash in human history. And I've been offered a $50 million contract to play for the Los Angeles Rams. Genie said, you got a third wish. You thought about it a long time.

And he said, Genie, I'd like to be scared half to death. If you love someone, you feel less like sinning against them. The less you love them, the more you feel like sinning against them.

True? But it is also true to say that when we do not receive love, it not only makes us feel less loving towards other people and therefore more inclined to sin, but it does something inside of us that leads us into sin. Our new Canaan Society Men's Fellowship, part of a national movement that meets several different locations during the week and has been for many years meeting on Friday mornings at River Birch Lodge, 7 a.m. And it is one of the best and least shaming and least religious type gatherings for men. Fantastic place for men who are exploring Christianity to come and Christian men from all over that come. And we've had a great fellowship for many, many years there. And what we do most Friday mornings is we just invite a guy to get up and share his testimony. And it's always wonderful.

Most of the time it's unpolished, sometimes raw, but it's real, it's wonderful, and it's full of grace. And every now and then we'll have a preacher, and that's always good too. There's only been about two or three times where I just would have to say we just had a bad speaker. And I remember some years ago when it was one of those mornings, and it was some preacher who was traveling in that we had somehow invited to come. And y'all, he got up and just shamed the men for about 30 minutes, just yelled at them, just a classic shaming preacher for about 30 minutes.

It was just awful. We're all sitting there squirming. We're all just like, can we stop him?

Can we get him off? Not only does he not get the DNA of who we are at this men's fellowship, but he's just not even getting the DNA of the gospel that we have. So we're just kind of like sweating it out until finally he stopped, and we're like, okay, that's over.

It doesn't happen very often. And at the end of it, I turned over to a good friend who is a recovered alcoholic. And he's funny, and he said, he said, man, that's the kind of message that makes me want to get drunk before 9 a.m., which went far in his humor to reveal a great truth. The messages that are full of religious shame actually arouse or incite, Paul said, sin, the law, he said. It makes us sin more. Grace makes us sin less. So love covers a multitude of sins. Let's first talk about what it doesn't mean. It doesn't mean that by loving others, you become so much more tolerant that you just overlook sin, and therefore loving people just accept sin.

That's not what this means. If sin is something that can just be overlooked, why did Jesus come and die for us? Sin is costly, and forgiveness is costly. And Jesus came to pay the ultimate cost to become our sin, to take the penalty that justice would demand against sin so that God would look on us as though we had never sinned.

That's the gospel. So to cover a multitude of sin does not mean, well, I love you, and therefore it doesn't bother me if there's sin in your life or sin in the world. It doesn't mean that you're not going to afford sin in the world. It doesn't mean that, can't mean that. It also cannot mean that you cover your own sin by loving people more. As we'll see plainly today, that message of transactional type religion, where if I do this, then God will do this, has complete antithesis of the gospel, and there is not a shred in the New Testament that would ever lead you to believe that you could just by enough loving deeds towards other somehow counterbalance all of the sin in your life and make up for it.

It doesn't mean that. That's Alan Wright, and we'll have more teaching in a moment from today's important series. With so much worry about yesterday's failures, and so much hurry getting ready for tomorrow's tasks, sometimes it's hard to focus on the moment that matters most right now. In a hurried, worried season, God invites you into the present.

Modern day life coaches call it mindfulness, but it isn't a new psychological program, and it isn't rooted in Eastern religion. Mindfulness, living in the present is God's idea, and the Bible unveils the way. Pastor Alan Wright invites you to savor life each day. When you make your gift today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's eight messages and an attractive CD album or through digital download as our way of saying thanks for your partnership. Make your gift today and learn how to savor the textures and flavors of God's grace each moment in the moment, every day of your life. The gospel is shared when you give to Alan Wright Ministries. This broadcast is only possible because of listener financial support. Now these are the final days this offer is being made available to you this month. When you give today, we will send you today's special offer. We are happy to send this to you as our thanks from Alan Wright Ministries. Call us at 877-544-4860. That's 877-544-4860. Or come to our website, PastorAlan.org. Today's teaching now continues.

Here once again is Alan Wright. It also does not and cannot mean that love, our love, absolves or atones for the sin. Only the gift of God in Jesus Christ, only his shed blood can cleanse us from sin. No amount of our love actually washes away sin. That's not what it means.

It can't mean those three things. Can't mean you overlook sin. Can't mean that you make up for your own sin by loving so much. And it can't mean that you become the atonement for somebody's sin. Can't mean those things or else the rest of the Bible's wrong. So what does it mean?

The word cover is the same word that appears at least once in the New Testament of the waves that were nearly capsizing their boat on the Sea of Galilee. It is a love that does something so immersive that the sin loses its grip. What it means is not the overlooking of sin, not that we atone for sin, not that we make up for our sin, but that when the love of God is present, sin and the temptation towards it and the grip of sin loses its hold. In other words, more love, less sin.

That's what it means. So if you would like to have less sin beset you, if you'd like to have more victory over temptation, temptation, if you'd like to live more and more in conformity with what you know and want to be pure and wonderful, disciplined life and all of that, the answer is more love of God. And if you have someone in your life who you would like to help, you'd like to help them escape besetting sin, what they need ultimately is more of the love of God.

It makes our mission simple. The love of God, agape is the Greek word, is a covenantal love that comes without conditions or strings and carries the weight of covenantal commitment. And it means that the more that I experience that love perfectly, the less I'll be tempted to sin.

And so I want to talk to you about first the wrong ways that in history people have tried to deal with sin. And then I want to talk to you about how it is that love actually works to diminish sin. And so first, we must understand that love by definition is relational. Love only makes sense in relationship which means that love doesn't make sense if it is a transaction.

If it's a transaction where if I do A, then you'll do B, that is not love. That is something else. And so trying to interact with God in that way, if I'm a good person, then you'll get me into heaven, is not only not the gospel, but it conveys to the people who don't understand the gospel something that is completely antithetical to the gospel and to the invitation of Jesus to be in relationship with God.

So we tend to, in our flesh, and by that I mean with our sin nature and the way that our minds think until we have revelation from God, until we've grown up in grace in our flesh, we tend to deal with sin either by this transactional brand of religion or where we try to be good enough to outweigh all the sin, or at least feel prideful enough that we think we're not sinners, or we try through rebellion to pretend as though sin is not really sin. It all makes me think of Jesus's most famous story, a story that is recorded in Luke 15, about a father that had two sons. And the younger of those sons did the unthinkable in a Middle Eastern culture. He told his father, I'd like my share of the inheritance now.

It was like saying, Dad, I would prefer you were dead. It is hard to even describe the amount of shame, dishonor, and scandal that would bring upon the father and upon that home. But in a breathtaking expression of freedom, the father gave the younger his share of the inheritance, and it was a very wealthy father. The younger went off and wasted it all, lived in riotous living, spent it on big parties and prostitutes, and squandered it all.

What was the younger doing? He was essentially saying that the primary and most important thing that could lead to my fulfillment and happiness is that I'm going to be a father. I'm going to be a and happiness is for me to be able to break out from under all of these expectations to conform. I need to break away from all the rules that are at home, and I will only find happiness through self-expression, deep individualism that says what I feel like doing is the most important thing, and that's the only way that I'll be fulfilled. It is a way of saying that it's only until I assert myself for what I want and all that I want to do and all I feel like doing, and then I'll be self-actualized, and I'll be happy, and I'll be fulfilled, and it didn't work.

That is, by the way, much of the spirit of the age, isn't it, where the primary value has shifted in our culture to individualistic self-expression, and there is a tremendous vitriol against anything that would call that back. The older brother stayed at home, a typical first born conformist who kept all the rules and worked really hard, but his heart got revealed because when the younger brother came home after squandering the inheritance, the father saw him in the distance and ran to meet him, put a robe around him, put a ring on his finger, put sandals on his feet, and did everything he could to show that he was still an heir, and invited him back in and had a huge celebration and killed the fatted calf. The older brother's heart was revealed when he refused to go into the party. When the father sent for him, the son refused, and he said to his father, I've been here slaving for you for all these years, and that revealed his heart. I've been in a transaction with you for all these years. I've been doing what I'm supposed to do, doing what you expected me to do, doing what society expects me to do, keeping all the rules, and working my tail off right here this whole time.

And you've never seen this before. And now this son of yours, disgraced, squandered everything, he comes home, and you kill the fatted calf for him? No, I'm not coming into that party.

No, nothing. And the father is pleading with him, my son. He's not saying, you're my slave. He's saying, my son, my heir, all of you, is pleading with him, my son. He's not saying, you're my slave. He's saying, my son, my heir, all I have is yours, always has been.

Please come in. Your brother was lost. He's been found. He was dead.

He's alive again. How can we not celebrate that? Please come into the party. Please come in and celebrate. Please have joy.

But there is no joy. And Jesus ends the parable with the older brother on the outside. Alan Wright, our good news message today, love covers a multitude of sins. It's from the series, The Elect Exiles, and I encourage you to stick with us. Pastor Alan is back sharing a parting good news thought for the day. Unlock the power of blessing your life. Discover God's grace-filled vision for your life by signing up for Alan Wright's free daily blessing. If you want to fill your heart with grace and encouragement, get Alan Wright's daily blessing.

It's free and just a click away at PastorAlan.org. With so much worry about yesterday's failures and so much hurry getting ready for tomorrow's tasks, sometimes it's hard to focus on the moment that matters most, right now. In a hurried, worried season, God invites you into the present.

Modern day life coaches call it mindfulness, but it isn't a new psychological program and it isn't rooted in Eastern religion. Mindfulness, living in the present is God's idea and the Bible unveils the way. Pastor Alan Wright invites you to savor life each day. When you make your gift today, we'll send you Pastor Alan's eight messages in an attractive CD album or through digital download as our way of saying thanks for your partnership. Make your gift today and learn how to savor the textures and flavors of God's grace each moment in the moment, every day of your life. The gospel is shared when you give to Alan Wright Ministries. This broadcast is only possible because of listener financial support. Now these are the final days this offer is being made available to you this month. When you give today, we will send you today's special offer. We are happy to send this to you as our thanks from Alan Wright Ministries.

Call us at 877-544-4860. That's 877-544-4860 or come to our website, PastorAlan.org. Back now with Pastor Alan in the studio and for the person who's listening and right here where we place the bookmark, what would you say to that one who is really searching for hope on a day like today? The love of God is endless and perfect and beyond description and so my prayer for you is that you will be able to apprehend what the mind can't comprehend and that God interacts with you in covenantal love in relationship with you so that all of your fears will melt away. All of this is wrapped up in the beautiful words through Peter's pen that love covers a multitude of sins.

This is one of the deepest statements ever uttered. The inspired word of God tells us love is the answer. If you only caught part of today's teaching, not only can you listen again online, but also get a daily email devotional that matches today's teaching delivered right to your email inbox free. Find out more about these and other resources at PastorAlan.org. That's PastorAlan.org. Today's good news message is a listener supported production of Alan Wright Ministries.