Love Believes All Things

The Greek verb here is pisteuei — from pisteuō, the ordinary New Testament word for to believe, to trust, to put faith in. It is the same verb used hundreds of times in the New Testament for believing the gospel, believing in Christ, putting one’s faith in God. Paul reaches for it now and puts it in an unexpected setting. Not believing in God. Believing the brother. Believing the person. Love, Paul says, believes.

That sentence needs careful handling before it can land properly, because read flatly it could mean love is gullible. It could mean the Christian is required to accept every claim every person makes about themselves and to ignore his discernment in favor of credulity. Paul did not mean that, and a believer who turns love believes all things into a doctrine of naive trust will get hurt — and will hurt the church around him — in ways the verse never intended.

What Paul means is something more careful and more demanding. Pisteuei panta — believes all things — describes the disposition of love toward the brother before evidence requires otherwise. Love does not begin by suspecting. Love does not assume the worst. Love does not interpret the ambiguous comment as the cutting one. Love, presented with a story that could be read several ways, reaches for the most charitable reading first, not the most cynical one. Love believes the brother is telling the truth until it has actual reason to believe he is not. Love gives the benefit of the doubt and gives it generously, because love has been given the benefit of the doubt by the One whose discernment is perfect and whose grace toward His people is the deepest grace any of us has ever received.

What was happening in Corinth

The Corinthians were not believers in this sense. They were suspecters.

The factions of chapters 1 through 4 ran on suspicion of the teachers the other factions followed. The lawsuits of chapter 6 ran on suspicion of the brother across the courtroom — on the assumption that he was, in fact, the cheater, the liar, the wrongdoer, the one whose word could not be trusted in a private conversation between believers. The conflicts over food sacrificed to idols in chapters 8 through 10 ran on suspicion in both directions — the strong suspected the weak of legalism, the weak suspected the strong of compromise, and neither side gave the other the charitable reading the situation could have borne.

Paul’s correction in chapter 6 had named the principle clearly:

…why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be defrauded? On the contrary, you yourselves wrong and defraud. You do this even to your brethren.

1 Corinthians 6:7–8 (NASB)

The Corinthians were so quick to assume they had been wronged that they were the ones doing the wronging. Their suspicion of one another had made them, in fact, untrustworthy themselves. The opposite of believing all things was not careful discernment. It was a daily, low-grade refusal to give the brother the credit a brother is owed, and the refusal had been corroding the whole congregation.

In the spiritual-gifts setting, the same disposition was at work. The believer whose prophecy was given was suspected of having invented it. The brother whose tongue was interpreted was suspected of having coordinated the interpretation. The teacher whose hard word landed uncomfortably was suspected of having a private grudge. Whatever was given in the worship service was being filtered through the suspicion of whoever received it, and the gifts that were supposed to build up the body were instead being parsed for hidden motives. Paul’s chapter on love is, among other things, a long correction of this whole posture. Love believes. You who have been suspecting each other since the day this church started have not yet been loving each other.

The God who is faithful, and the love that trusts

The verb Paul uses here is a vertical verb before it is ever a horizontal one. Pisteuō is what the believer does toward God. The man who has put his faith in Christ has believed the witness God has given about His Son (1 John 5:9–10). That kind of belief is not credulous. It is grounded. It is grounded in the trustworthiness of the One who has spoken. The believer trusts God because God is pistos — faithful, trustworthy, the One whose word does not fail.

God is faithful, through whom you were called into fellowship with His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

1 Corinthians 1:9 (NASB)

That sentence sits at the very beginning of the same letter. Paul opens his correction of the Corinthians by reminding them that the God who has called them is faithful — pistos. He is the kind of God you can put your trust in. And the believers He has called are being asked, by extension, to be a people who can also be trusted, and who can also trust.

The two halves of Christian community require both. The believer is asked to be the kind of person whose word holds, whose promises stand, whose conduct does not undermine the trust the brother is being asked to extend toward him. And the believer is asked, in turn, to extend that same trust toward the brother who is doing the same work in the opposite direction. Pisteuei panta describes the second half. The first half is the believer’s own faithfulness. The second half is the believer’s willingness to assume the brother is doing the same work, and to credit him for it until the evidence requires otherwise.

Christ Himself, who knew exactly what was in every man (John 2:24–25), still entrusted His ministry to twelve men whose failures He foresaw. He knew Peter would deny Him. He chose Peter anyway. He knew Judas would betray Him. He invited Judas anyway. He knew the eleven would scatter the night of His arrest. He spent three years pouring His life into them anyway. He was not naive. He was not surprised by the failures when they came. But He believed in His men with a kind of believing that the men themselves had not yet earned. The believing was the love. The believing was what made the eventual restoration of Peter, and the eventual reception of the Holy Spirit by the eleven, and the building of the church on their preaching, possible.

The believer is not Christ. The believer does not know what is in every man. But the believer has been given a Lord who modeled, in His own choosing of men, what loving belief looks like. The brother is to be believed until proven otherwise. The benefit of the doubt is to be extended generously. The first reading of the situation is to be the charitable one. The suspicious reading is to be resisted, even if it turns out, sometimes, to have been the right one. The cost of believing wrongly is real. The cost of suspecting wrongly is worse, because the suspicion is itself a wrong done to the brother, and is a wrong done thousands of times to brothers who never gave any actual cause for it.

From the bearing, the believing

The last chapter named love’s roof — its refusal to expose the brother’s failures, its willingness to bear the weight of what it knows. This chapter takes up what love does before it has anything to bear. Bearing covers what has happened. Believing refuses to invent what has not. The two work as a pair. The brother under the roof is not just being covered for his real failures. He is being given, by the love over him, the benefit of the doubt for the failures he was suspected of and never committed. Many a Christian has spent years being suspected of things he never did by a brother whose love had not yet learned to believe. The wounds of that suspicion are deep. The verse Paul writes here is the cure.

The two together — bears all things, believes all things — give the brother a place to live. Under the roof he is not being exposed for what he has done; under the believing he is not being framed for what he has not done. The Christian community in which both attributes are alive is a community in which a believer can finally come up for air, because he is no longer bracing for either the exposure or the invented charge. That is the church Paul is trying to build at Corinth. That is the church love is trying to build everywhere it goes.

What it looks like

Believing all things looks like a high-school girl whose friend has not texted her back in two days, and who, instead of jumping to she must be mad at me, she must be talking about me, she must be done with the friendship, reaches for the simpler reading first — she has had a hard week, her phone has been off, she will text when she texts. The first reading is usually the right one. The cynical reading is rarely needed.

It looks like a high-school boy whose girlfriend mentioned, in passing, that she had lunch with a male friend from her childhood, and who does not assume the worst. The childhood friend is the childhood friend. The lunch was lunch. He trusts her, because she has given him no actual reason not to.

It looks like a teenager whose parent has just been late picking him up from practice, and whose first thought is not they don’t care about me, they forgot, they always do this. His first thought is something must have come up. He waits without spiraling. The parent arrives. The parent had a real reason. The teenager has not spent the waiting time building a case against people who love him.

It looks like a student whose teacher has just given him a lower grade than he expected, and whose first move is not to assume the teacher has it in for him. The first move is to read the assignment again, look at the teacher’s comments, and consider that the grade might be the honest one. If, after careful looking, he still thinks there is an error, he goes to the teacher with a question, not an accusation.

It looks like a Christian in the congregation whose brother said something across the room last Sunday that could have been a slight and could have been an innocent comment, and who chooses the innocent reading. He does not work the comment over for days. He does not bring it up at the dinner table. He does not slowly construct, in his head, the case against the brother. He gives the brother the credit of being a brother. Most of the time the credit is deserved. When it is not deserved, the credit was still right to extend, because extending it cost the believer nothing and protected the body from another small wound.

It looks like a young person who has heard, secondhand, something unflattering about another believer — and who refuses to accept the unflattering report as the truth until he has heard it from a more reliable source than the chain that brought it to him. Believing all things requires a not — not believing every rumor, not extending credibility to gossip, not letting suspicion become certainty on the basis of nothing but a story from someone who heard it from someone. The believer who refuses to repeat the rumor and who refuses to file it as truth is doing the discerning work that love requires.

It looks like Christ. The One who, knowing Peter would deny Him within hours, looked at Peter and said, I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail; and you, when once you have turned again, strengthen your brothers (Luke 22:32, NASB). Christ believed Peter would turn again. Christ believed Peter would strengthen his brothers. Christ was not naive about the failure that was about to happen, and He was not paralyzed by it either. The believing went past the failure to the restoration on the other side. The believer who has been loved that way knows the verb.

The world’s suspicion, and ours

The world has been training the human heart in suspicion for a long time. The advertising assumes every salesman is lying. The news assumes every public figure is hiding something. The friend-group dynamic in many a school assumes every other friend is secretly competing. The comment threads assume every poster is acting in bad faith. The whole air of public discourse in this generation has been calibrated for suspicion — what is the angle, what is being hidden, what is the real motive. The young Christian who has been catechized into that air will read the brother across the room through the same lens, and the lens will distort every charitable reading the situation would otherwise have allowed.

The believer is called out of all of it. The cultivation of pisteuei panta in the believer is the deliberate refusal to lead with suspicion. The first reading of the friend’s silence is generous. The first reading of the parent’s lateness is generous. The first reading of the brother’s comment is generous. The cynical reading is held back. It may turn out, sometimes, to have been the right one. The believer can deal with that when it comes. He will not pre-emptively deal with it by assuming it.

The cost of the cultivation is small wounds the believer absorbs by being charitable when he could have been guarded. The reward is a Christian who is becoming, by that much, a believer the people around him can finally relax in front of. He is not running their motives through a suspicion filter. He is taking them at their word. They have come to expect this from him. They tell him things they would not tell anyone else, because they have learned that he will not turn the telling into a case against them.

A note for the reader who is not yet in Christ

If you have been raised in the world’s suspicion and have started to suspect that the suspicion is making you smaller, hear one thing.

The suspicion you have been carrying has had a cost you may not have seen. It has cost you trust. It has cost you closeness. It has cost you the ability to receive the love that has, in some cases, been right in front of you, because suspicion will not let love land. The cynic does not just refuse to give the benefit of the doubt to others. He refuses to receive the benefit of the doubt for himself. He has trained himself to assume that the love being offered him is not real, and the training has cost him every relationship that the love could have grown into.

The gospel offers something the suspicion of the world cannot offer. God is faithful (1 Corinthians 1:9). The Lord who has spoken about Himself in the Word does not lie. The promises He has made to those who come to His Son are promises He keeps. The believer who has come to Christ has been given a Lord he can trust without keeping his guard up — because there is nothing in this Lord to be guarded against. The One who knows your worst and has not used it against you, who has covered it at the cost of His own Son, is not the kind of God you need to suspect. He is the kind of God you can come to.

Hear it. Christ died for our sins, was buried, and was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures (1 Corinthians 15:3–4). Believe it. Repent of the long suspicion that has kept you out of reach of the love being offered. Confess Him as Lord. Be baptized into His death and raised to walk in newness of life (Romans 6:3–4). And learn, slowly, the new posture of a believer who has been given a Lord he can trust and a family he can extend that trust toward.

Where this leaves us

Two of the four positive verbs in Paul’s sentence have now been laid down. Bears all things. Believes all things. The brother under that kind of love is being covered for his real failures and credited for the failures he never committed. Half of what a Christian community needs to be a place where people can actually live is being described here.

The next attribute is the third of the four, and it turns from the brother to the situation. Love hopes all things. When the believing has been tested — when the brother has failed in a way the believing cannot deny — what does love do then? Does it give up on the brother? Does it conclude that the situation is hopeless? Paul has an answer, and it is not what the world would expect.

That is the work this attribute is calling you into. Watch your readings of the people around you this week. Notice where you have been leading with suspicion. Notice the cynical interpretation you have been reaching for first. Refuse it. Reach instead for the generous one. The first time you do it, your trained reflex will object. The fifth time, it will object less. By the time you have done it for a year, the brothers around you will have noticed, and the body of Christ will be the place it was always meant to be — a place a person can stand without bracing.