For every offense that genuinely has to be addressed, there are a hundred that should simply be covered. And most of us, if we are honest, have that exactly upside down.

A greeting goes unreturned in the hallway. A reply comes back a single word long. A name is left off an invitation. In the half-second before you have consciously thought about it at all, your heart has already supplied a reason it happened—and if you are honest, that instant, automatic reason is almost never a generous one.

In the first article in this series we saw the first answer to being easily offended: the glory of overlooking an offense—seeing the slight and deciding not to pick it up. But covering deals with an offense after the fact. There is an earlier habit that keeps us from ever even being offended, because most of what we take as a slight was never a slight; it was a perfectly neutral act to which our own suspicious heart supplied a motive. This is the second answer: we have to learn to think the best of everyone.

Consider what Paul says in the famous love chapter:

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
(1 Corinthians 13:4–7)

Look first at that phrase, “it is not irritable or resentful.” The old King James puts the second word memorably: love “thinketh no evil.” The Greek word underneath is an accounting term. It means to reckon, to tally, to enter into a ledger—the very same word Paul uses elsewhere for how God does not “count” our trespasses against us in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:19).

So Paul is saying that love does not keep a ledger of wrongs—which is exactly how the NIV renders it: “love keeps no record of wrongs.” Picture the person who can produce on demand a fully itemized account of every offense going back fifteen years: the date, the place, the exact words that were said. That memory is a kind of genius, but it is the opposite of love. Love is a terrible bookkeeper. Love loses the records, and loses them on purpose, because it has decided the relationship matters more than the case it could build against the other person.

Then look at the phrase in verse 7: love “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” Now, this is not telling us to be gullible. Paul is not saying that love believes every claim, trusts every smooth talker, falls for every con artist who walks through the door. He is describing a disposition, a default setting of the heart, the direction the needle points when the facts are genuinely unclear. Where a brother’s words or actions could honestly be taken two different ways, love leans toward the gracious reading. Love says, “There is probably an explanation here that I don’t know about,” before it ever says, “He did that to hurt me.”

Think of how differently a single comment can be interpreted depending on which assumption you bring to it. If you hear it assuming hostility, then every comment sounds clipped and cold. But if you hear it assuming the speaker was simply rushed, then the very same words sound entirely different. The words themselves never changed. What changed was the disposition you brought to them—a choice, made before you ever had the conversation.

This is what the older theologians called charitable judgment, and it is not merely a nice idea or an optional sweetness for the naturally easygoing. It is commanded. It is, in fact, simply the ninth commandment applied to the heart. “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” We tend to think of that as a rule about explicitly lying.

But the Reformed tradition has always understood it to reach much further—all the way into the private thoughts of our own minds, where, all day long, we are putting our neighbors on trial and handing down verdicts about their motives.

The Westminster Larger Catechism, summarizing this commandment, says that among the duties God requires of us are “a charitable esteem of our neighbours” and “a ready receiving of a good report, and unwillingness to admit of an evil report, concerning them.” That is not the posture of a person keeping their guard up. It is the posture of a person who has decided in advance which way they will lean when the evidence is mixed. And among the sins the Catechism names under this same commandment are “rash, harsh, and partial censuring.” In other words, when you assume the worst about why someone did what they did; when a rumor reaches your ear and your heart leans, almost eagerly, toward believing it; when you read the darkest possible motive into an act that had three innocent explanations sitting in plain view—you are, in the courtroom of your own heart, bearing false witness against your brother. Thinking the best of everyone is not naïve sweetness. It is obedience to the ninth commandment.

And the Lord Jesus himself presses this on us, in an often cited but often thoroughly abused verse on the subject.

Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you.
(Matthew 7:1–2)

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