A Long-Suffering Love

Love is patient. —1 Corinthians 13:4

Some Bible translations record 1 Corinthians 13:4 as “Love suffers long.” This is an accurate description because love does require suffering, sometimes for a long time.

A loving person is slow to anger. She refuses to pay back evil for evil. There’s no retaliation. It’s a kind of love that’s willing to be taken advantage of, that’s concerned more for the welfare of others than for one’s own self.

If you want to have God’s love and if you pray for God’s love, expect that God will probably put some people in your life who are really hard to love. However, true love—this long-suffering, long-tempered, slow-to-be angry love—doesn’t look out for how these people affect you. Instead, it’s concerned with how you can look out for that person’s best interests.

This kind of long-suffering love is not just gritting your teeth. It’s not just enduring, though there is endurance involved. It’s active, aggressive, long-suffering. It’s investing in the very lives of the ones who’ve hurt you the most.