EVERY SO OFTEN, as I lead a bride and groom through their wedding vows, I wonder: will this couple endure? Will the marriage last? I especially wonder this when I’ve seen how they struggled through the premarital conversations we had. Even when I have my doubts, though, I will never tell a couple not to marry. After all, I’m not omniscient. Some couples that people predicted would be divorced in a year figure out a workable relationship and stay together, more or less happily — while others who seem at first to be the perfect pair are the ones to split.

So I won’t play God and pretend to know what I can’t possibly know about their future together. But I will warn them about what I predict the problem areas will be if they decide to go through with the wedding. My job as the officiant is not to decide who does and doesn’t marry; it’s to make sure the couple understands the depth and seriousness of what they’re promising when they make their vows before God and their friends and family. Can they really promise to love each other for the rest of their lives?

I doubt it. Not if “love” only means romantic love, a feeling that comes and goes — and in the face of the frustrations of dealing with their differences, mostly goes. But a faithful Christian couple has an advantage, if they choose to recognize it: they can love each other with the love of God, a love which by its nature endures.

AS WE’VE SEEN, Paul finishes his description of what love does with these words, using four verbs in rapid succession:

It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. (1 Cor 13:7, NIV)

That’s the New International Version. I take the middle two verbs, “trusts” and “hopes,” to be references to the virtues of faith and hope that he mentions at the end of the chapter. What about the other two?

Most translations agree on the general meaning of the last one. The NIV translates the phrase as “always perseveres,” but the Common English Bible, New Revised Standard, and New American Standard all have “endures all things.” Literally, the verb could be translated as “remain under,” an intensified version of the verb Paul uses when he says, “Now these three remain: faith, hope and love” (1 Cor 13:13). It can have the sense of bearing up under a burden, a picture of perseverance or endurance in the face of difficulties.

The first of the four verbs, however, presents a bit of a challenge. At root, it suggests putting a roof over something, which is why the NIV translates it as “protects.” But as in any language, the meaning of a word can stray over time, as people extend it into a variety of figurative uses. And frankly, to me, for Paul to say that love “protects” feels a bit out of the blue, given the context of everything else he’s said about love.

This is why I tell people to mix it up and read more than one translation of the Bible. Even if you have no clue about biblical Greek or Hebrew, it can be helpful to see how different English translators render the same verse, and that’s very much the case here. Where the NIV has “always protects,” the Common English Bible has “puts up with all things,” and both the New Revised Standard and New American Standard have “bears all things.”

Note too that it’s not as if the NIV is unaware of that meaning. The verb is only used four times in the New Testament, and in each of the other three instances, the NIV goes with the other meaning. Thus, in First Corinthians 9:12, Paul says, “we put up with anything rather than hinder the gospel of Christ.” And in First Thessalonians 3, Paul uses the verb twice in verses 1 and 5 to say, “when we could stand it no longer.”

Thus, I prefer the translation “bears all things” or “puts up with all things,” which makes a nice matching bookend to “endures” or “perseveres,” with faith and hope between them. A godly love endures because it is willing for the sake of that love to put up with many things that might make someone else call it quits on the relationship. Because love isn’t easily provoked to anger, it has the patient endurance to put a roof of silence over an offense and not retaliate.

I think here of what the apostle Peter taught about love:

Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins. Offer hospitality to one another without grumbling. (1 Pet 4:8-9)

His word for “cover” isn’t the same verb that Paul uses, but the imagery is similar. We might be tempted to grumble at someone who’s offended us in some way. But Peter encourages his readers to dig deeper to find a hospitality that covers the offense with love.

COMMITTED RELATIONSHIPS, WHETHER in marriage or between believers, are challenging. When someone says or does something offensive — as we can easily imagine the Corinthians doing to each other! — we’re tempted to either retaliate or walk away, attack or avoid. We live in the midst of a cancel culture that shames and ostracizes people on social media. We’d rather spread gossip or complain to others than do the hard work of trying to understand our differences.

But this is not love. Love puts up with a lot of things, because the God of patience and kindness has done the same for us. That’s not to say that anything goes, that loves sees all behavior as acceptable, any more than God allows us to do whatever we want, no matter how unjust or abusive. But the question is whether we’re willing to make the commitment to love in a godly way. It takes faith to love that way; it takes hope. That’s the kind of love that perseveres, that endures.

And as we’ll see next, if there’s anything that two Christians in a relationship need and have always needed, it’s a love that never fails.