Love does not announce another person’s personal problems to other people, when doing so will be of no benefit to the other person or to anyone else. Bearing or concealing has nothing to do with keeping silent about criminal activity - love will expose a person’s wrongdoing if the other person’s actions have a detrimental effect on other people. If it is a private matter, then love will be more inclined to keeping silent about it.
The Biblical concept of longsuffering, on the other hand, has more to do with the subduing of a sinful, passionate reaction to other people’s sins and wrong behaviour; this passionate reaction is along the lines of anger and resentment.
Although the Greek word for bearing or concealing used in 1 Corinthians 13:7, also appears in 1 Thessalonians 3:1 in the context of forbearance or endurance - these two attributes of love, longsuffering and bearing, are not the same. Longsuffering and bearing both have a vital part to play in the establishment of Christ-like character.
When a person has a nature of love, they will hardly notice the faults of other people, unless it is important for that person to know about it. If you were consciously aware of what some people were up to, it might change the way that you behave towards them.
We can sometimes feel offended and frustrated that we did not know what a person was doing when we had relations with them. But it is often the will of God that we are not made aware of such things because it would be of no benefit to either party. You could argue that you could have warned the other person of their sin and its potential consequences; but bear in mind that if that was the case, then God would be the first to let you know about it.
We have to face facts that we are not meant to know everything. Some things are just none of our business. As the saying goes, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” It is dangerous because you might not know enough or be in a position in order for you to effectively act upon the little knowledge that you have. This is why gossiping and heresy is so dangerous, because it can change the way you perceive certain people and the way that you act towards them.
Just because someone you know is doing something wrong, that does not give you the right to treat them unfairly, be rude to them or to reject them.
When two people form a relationship, they have to come as they are, under the proviso that they will stay just the way they are throughout the duration of the relationship - not that you can transform them into something else, given a bit of encouragement and persuasion, if they do end up changing for the better, then that is a bonus.
None of us are perfect, that is why we need the love of God to cover up and hide our imperfections, so that the other person hardly notices them, or at least, has the endurance to put up with it.
We usually develop this confidence in the love of God, to cover up and mask our imperfections. When God wants to make us favourable in someone’s sight, He will throw a veil over our imperfections, so that the other person does not see them. God can gauge just how much of His glory and how much of our flesh, our imperfection, the other person sees. The love of God not only covers the way we look, but also what we do and what we say.
This covering works both ways: we have to be willing to accept the love of God so that we do not become overly sensitive to the imperfections of other people. When we accept fear over love, it is so that we can protect ourselves from harm and loss. Fear rejects love and ensures that we are sensitive to the imperfections of other people. The result is that without a covering of love, we will only see the worst in someone who will cause us to criticize and reject them.
Whilst we may think that this is a suitable course of action to adopt in life, it can keep us out of the will of God and can cause us to become very resentful and rather lonely. It is the classic nobody-is-like-me and nobody-is-good-enough-for-me syndrome. We do not become more holy, despite what some people think, by taking the moral high ground and pointing out other people’s sins and imperfections.
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