What exactly is love?

And why do we think it is "christian" to overlook issues that exist between ourselves and others in the name of love? 

We glibly quote: "love covers a multitude of sins" (1 Peter 4:8) when in truth, all we are doing is masking wrong rather than making it right. Under the delusion of being "loving" we think ourselves immune to the presence of those unresolved issues festering and growing within us. And they do fester and grow and eventually will poison the relationship that we are so certain we have covered.

Covered? Perhaps. Loved? I doubt it.

If we look at God's love, we can easily see the difference. God did not only cover our sins, He forced us to confront those sins as He had, and then He removed them. He excised them. The pain to Him was beyond anything we can imagine—after all, He died on that cross in the person of His Son, Jesus Christ. Not only did He bear the pain of such a torturous death, He carried with Him the guilt of every sin. Calculate the cost of His love. If you, or I, were to commit just one sin a day (and I'm being generous), how many sins would we commit in a lifetime? Now multiply that by every person who every lived and who will ever live, and you can still barely imagine how many sins Christ carried with Him to His death.

That's love. It covers up nothing. It sacrifices everything to remove the obstacles that stand in the way of relationship and restoration. There is a cost on the part of the sinner—he must face his sin. But the burden is carried by the one sinned against who, in love and with love, reaches out to expose the evil for what it is. Then he takes what is exposed and confessed, and carries it off to be forgotten forever. 

God's love, to which John refers in this verse, is that kind of love. It's a love that confronts, not out of a desire for revenge, or with a sense of superiority, or in the role of judge, jury and executioner. It's a love that confronts in order to heal and remove, once and for all, the evil that lies within us all. 

We do no one any favours by overlooking issues that create barriers between us and others. We allow others to go on in their sin, and become co-conspirators, passively helping them to accumulate yet more sin. If we really loved God-style, we would be incapable of turning a blind eye to evil in whatever form it appears.

One of the problems with ignoring the issues that divide us is the effect those issues have on us. No matter how strong we may feel spiritually, unresolved conflict is like a pebble in a shoe. Though the pebble itself never grows bigger, with time it begins to feel like a rock. With time, it begins to leave its mark on frail skin. With time, it draws blood. 

God's love confronts and makes all the sacrifices necessary to remove sin. That this kind of love is rare in christian circles is obvious, given the tendency among those who call themselves believers, to snarl and bite at each other (Galatians 5:15) preferring to fight rather than to fix.

But that is the kind of love God calls us to, the kind of love that should distinguish us from the rest of the world.