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An Act of Will
1Peter, chapter 4, verse 8: Love covers a multitude of sins.
How does love cover sin? Hatred, for example, damages the object of our hatred but it also damages us. Love isn’t an emotional, touchy-feely thing (except on Valentine’s Day); it’s an act of the will. Our will. God’s will.
Anger is a secondary result; hurt is the event that causes the anger. Search your memory for anger you’ve felt against others or the anger someone may have felt toward you. Under that anger, we’ll find the core of the matter – someone has been hurt, in whatever manifestation (physically, emotionally, psychologically, to name a few).
Sometimes the Bible’s teachings get presented to us in the most unlikely places. When it happens, we’re often surprised, if not shocked – television, in this particular instance, is very ‘worldly’, very secular, very topical – and yet, because we are spiritually attuned, we recognize the teaching.
Case in point – The Walking Dead. My husband, because he has no interest and can’t see beyond the zombies, tries to ‘guilt’ me into not watching the program. He says, “That’s a fine thing for a Christian lady to watch!”, meaning it’s anything but ‘fine’. But he can’t see what I see. There is a very moving – and instructive – scene wherein a man, Tyrese, who has been insanely angry about the murder of his girlfriend, comes face to face with the person who killed her, the character Carol. After Carol explains to Tyrese why she killed the girlfriend, Tyrese has a moment in which he is ready to kill to Carol for what she has done. And then, his heart breaks away from the anger and hatred. He looks at Carol and says, “I forgive you”. It’s a breath-taking moment and one I’ve thought about often. Tyrese ‘wills’ himself to forgo retaliation; he wills himself to not hate Carol; he wills himself to not be damaged by his hatred nor to damage Carol in his hatred for her. He forgives her.
That’s how love covers sins. It’s wrong to hate people – it damages them and it damages us. But by love, which is the spring of all good things, whatever sins Tyrese carries, and whatever sins Carol carries – and by extension, whatever sins we carry – are covered when we love first and then forgive.
This is not easy. It’s hard work to correct ourselves when we see our faults. It’s a massive work to love. It’s an act of will.
All Along the Watchtower 
Indeed, the hardest thing you’ll ever do, even with God’s help; and the most necessary.
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If one cannot will to love, will to forgive, can one still refer to oneself as a Christian?
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To my mind, the answer is “No”.
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I like what Hannah Arendt said in “The Human Condition”:
“Forgiveness,” she says, “is the exact opposite of vengeance.” Why? Because forgiving:
is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven. The freedom contained in Jesus’ teachings of forgiveness is the freedom from vengeance, which incloses both doer and sufferer in the relentless automatism of the action process, which by itself need never come to an end.”
If you would have a macro example, at the end of the American Civil War, Lincoln told his generals to “let ’em up easy”. And so the war ended without proscription lists and hangings and such carryings on that are the normal end of civil wars. Yes, reconstruction and the southern die hards reacting to it sullied the vision somewhat, even to this day, but the result was that by the turn of the century was pretty much of a united country, perhaps more than it had ever been before.
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Love/forgiveness is an act of will which follows an act of grace. There are always at least three parties in a gift of forgiveness: God who desires it and makes Himself present through the Spirit, the person who forgives and wills to cooperate with that presence, and the person forgiven.
Also I think anger is sometimes caused not by hurt but by envy. For example, the labourers in the vineyard were not hurt because the owner was generous to latecomers, nonetheless they felt great anger at that generosity.
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As John tells us, he who does not love does not know God. If we love, God will help provide the grace needed to forgive.
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