TLP 472: Reciprocal Family Love | Family Love, Part 4

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Reciprocal love speaks of affection, fondness, or liking between two or more people. In fact, this love actually requires at least two people, because it's a love that's fed by others.

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Parenting isn't about us. In fact, parenting isn't even about our kids. Parenting is just one way

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Christian dads and moms are to worship God. So welcome to the Truth Love Parent Podcast, where we train dads and moms to give

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God the preeminence in their parenting. I'm your host, A .M. Brewster, and last time we learned about the natural family love.

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The time before that, we studied the unfortunate fake family love that Satan has convinced the world is the real and only love.

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Now, if you missed either of those episodes, please go back and listen to them before proceeding today. However, if you and your family are back to continue learning about God's plan for love and how your family can grow closer together, then please stay with us.

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And if you haven't yet gathered your family and listened to this study, I want to encourage you to do so. There is nothing better for family bonding than coming together to study

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God's word. Even if everyone in your family were diligent and sincere in their personal devotions, so much more could be accomplished by at least sharing together the lessons you've been learning.

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So that's encouragement number one. Encouragement number two. Did you know that if you do your Amazon shopping using our affiliate links, you can purchase all the same stuff for all the same prices, but Truth Love Parent will receive a commission from Amazon?

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You see, it's so simple. Just go to truthloveparent .com, click on any Amazon link, and then shop as usual. You can also go to truthloveparent .com

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forward slash Amazon, and then TLP will be paid by Amazon for sending you their way. It's a win -win.

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And by the way, while you're at truthloveparent .com, you can access today's episode notes, transcript, and related sources.

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And with that, let's celebrate love by recapping our study so far and looking at the reciprocal family love.

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Today, we've discussed the fake love, Eros, that only takes out of selfish motivation. Now, please remember that Eros cannot truly give anything.

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It's never commanded in Scripture or even implied. It's an inappropriate lust. Then we learned about storge.

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This is the natural affection with which we're all born, but which we can lose if we selfishly pursue our own pleasure.

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This natural love has the ability to give, but it does so in an unconscious, instinctual kind of way.

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That's not bad. But it's just not intentional. And it's important to note that both of these loves can be experienced by both believers and unbelievers.

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And now to further understand family love, we need to add another Greek word to our collection, and that word is phileo.

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There are a bunch of people from a little place called Philadelphia that know more about this word than perhaps they realize.

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The name Philadelphia means the city of brotherly love, and brotherly love is how most people understand phileo.

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Although brotherly love definitely speaks to the familial nature of this love, phileo is not restricted to families and close friends like storge often is.

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Anybody can have this love for anyone else, saved or unsaved, related or not related, stranger or someone you've known for a long time.

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So regardless of the people involved in the relationship, phileo is known to be a companionable love.

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This reciprocal love speaks of affection, fondness, or liking between two or more people.

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In fact, phileo actually requires at least two people because it's a love that feeds the love in others. That's the reciprocal nature of it.

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You see, phileo responds to kindness, appreciation, and love when it's offered by another, and then it gives it back.

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Let me put it this way. When I pour water from one cup into another, it naturally fills the other cup.

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The water level rises in the second cup because the first cup took the time to pour into it, and then the second cup can pour that water back into the first, and they keep feeding each other.

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Phileo works much the same way. As love is poured from one person into another, the amount of love in the second person rises and pours back into the first.

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Of course, unlike cups, when we pour love into others, our own store of love does not diminish. This is an important point we'll discuss later.

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Now it's imperative that we don't misunderstand how all this works. Humans are so instinctively filled with eros, like all the time, that the concept of unselfish love for others with absolutely no ulterior motives is a thing of fairy tales.

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Yet we should never phileo others simply because of the future love that we hope that we're going to get from them in a reciprocal fashion.

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If that's our goal, well, that's actually just eros. We also shouldn't phileo others simply because they showed us love and we want more of that love.

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That too is no better than eros. So you may be wondering, is it possible to have sinful phileo?

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And the unfortunate answer is yes. Storge can't really be sinful.

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It's instinctual and natural. The sinful thing would be to not have storge at all. But phileo can be sinfully used.

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Jesus points this out to us in Matthew 6 .5. In that passage, he was teaching about prayer and he said that when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites, for they love, they phileo, to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners that they may be seen by others.

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Truly I say to you, they have received their reward. Now first of all, I want you to notice two things.

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They are phileoing something that is bad. And second of all, that reciprocal nature is there.

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They're loving what they love because of what they get. Jesus, by the way, shared a similar sentiment in Matthew 23 .6.

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In that passage, he condemned the same group of people by saying that they phileo the place of honor at feasts.

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And Revelation 22 .15 takes it even further when it refers to people who phileo and practice falsehood.

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And it's very interesting to note that in Matthew 26 .48, Judas said that the guards would know who

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Jesus was because Judas would phileo him. Yeah, that's right. Phileo can mean simply kiss, and I don't believe a kiss was ever used in a more diabolical way than it was the night

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Judas betrayed God. Now, like we noticed earlier, phileo has a natural give and take about it.

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Unlike eros, which only takes, phileo is cyclical. It requires input and output, and that means that it can be fed by any number of things.

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The Pharisees' love for praying in public was fed by the praise they received. They also liked the best seats at the feast because of the popularity and honor and prestige that was poured into them when they sat there.

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In the same way, there are many that love falsehood because of the perceived benefit that flows into their lives when they lie.

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Okay, so what does all this mean for us? Well, like everything else in life, God's perfect creation has been twisted.

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What was created to be holy and unselfish can be tainted. Phileo can start to look and act just like eros in many ways.

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However, we're supposed to phileo the right way because that's how God created it. He wants us to use our love to call phileo out of those whom we love.

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And as the person we love pours phileo back into us, it should strengthen the phileo we have for them.

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This is why this love is often called brotherly love. It's companionable love. It works with the love in others to bond and intertwine.

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That's how it's meant to work, at least in a perfect world. Yet, we obviously live in anything but a perfect world, and everyone in your family is imperfect.

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So we're going to look at six warnings and then discuss how we can live out this reciprocal love at home.

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As was already observed, number one, we must not show others love simply so we can benefit from it.

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That's fake love. That's eros. Number two, our reciprocal love needs to be fed by the right kind of love.

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Phileo grows when another person invests in us. That means that phileo can grow even if storge or eros is being poured into us.

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Storge is pure and beautiful, and it should call phileo from us, but phileo that grows from eros alone, well, that's tricky.

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Eros may do and say on the outside all the same things that phileo may do and say, and we may be none the wiser because we can't see the other person's motivation unless they expose it to us.

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So it's possible that our reciprocal love may grow toward the other person even if they are pouring eros into us.

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Now that may not sound too bad, but there are two unfortunate consequences that may arise if we're not careful.

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The first of those is that we may believe we're truly in a brotherly or sisterly or companionable relationship with them when in actuality we're not, it's all one -sided.

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This can even happen when storge is poured into us. Storge is wonderful and beautiful, but it's not a conscious or deliberate love, therefore it's not as strong and dynamic as phileo, and such relationships tend to be mostly one -sided.

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So the warning for all of us and all of you and your family is this, be careful that you keep high biblical expectations in your life and in others' lives so that you won't be tempted to eros and so that you can keep, excuse me, you can help others be honest about their love.

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You don't want to unwisely expect a reciprocal response when the other person has no interest or is too immature to give it.

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Unfortunately this happens in romantic relationships and between parents and children all the time. In romantic relationships a young lady may pour the true phileo into a boy who she believes is pouring true phileo into her life, but then once married she finds that this love was only ever eros.

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And like I said, this also happens between parents and children. We foolishly expect our immature children to reciprocate our love and when they don't invest phileo in equal proportions to our own, we're surprised and sometimes heartbroken.

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And in the worst case scenario, we're in danger of this third warning. Number three, just because you love someone doesn't mean they'll love you back.

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This has a significant implication. Don't be so certain that your love will right all wrongs.

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People are still free moral agents to do as they please. First Corinthians 16 .22 says, if anyone has no phileo for the

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Lord, let him be accursed. Well the obvious understanding is that God has so abundantly poured love into us, anyone who would not reciprocate that love is not his child and will be accursed.

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But you'd think that if God himself is pouring phileo into someone's life, they would have to reciprocate.

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Hmm, it's still their choice. Moving on. Number four, if our love is merely phileo and nothing else, it can gradually become strained and weakened when the other person stops reciprocating.

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Again, in a worst case scenario, this reciprocal love can collapse in a crisis. How might this happen?

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Well immature phileo that is newly sown because another's love has called it out may not be strong enough to stand on its own when the other stops loving and then it quickly reverts to eros or selfish phileo, or it disappears entirely.

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In the parent -child example I gave before, a parent may have maturely poured phileo into his child, but when the child immaturely responds with eros, the parent may foolishly counter -respond selfishly because their expectation was wrong.

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Instead of having a high biblical expectation that holds people to God's biblical standards and yet compassionately forbears and upholds them when they sin, the parent may be more of a dictator in that they expect holy responses without proportional biblical mercy.

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In those situations, the parent's love may become eros or fleshly phileo that dries up because it's no longer being fed.

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Basically, when one cup stops pouring into the other, the second cup frequently stops pouring into the first.

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Well that sounds very conditional you say, and you're right. This reciprocal love is cyclical in nature, it is conditional to a certain degree.

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This is one of the key distinctions between this kind of love and true family love that we hope to talk about next time.

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And the fifth warning is based off of what we learned last time. Number five, God commands us to have natural reciprocal love for other believers.

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Do you remember this point? In Romans 12, we were commanded to have philostorgos. Remember, this is that hybrid love that should exist naturally in all believers, but that is not merely an instinctual response, it's purposeful, it can be commanded.

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This natural reciprocal love is designed to accomplish a purpose, it's designed to deepen and broaden the love in others.

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But if we don't choose to love the way God commands, we're not only sinning against God, we're also sinning against all those people

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He wanted us to encourage in their love. Of course, we will never derail

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God's sovereign plan for anyone's lives but our own, but that doesn't remove the consequences we earn for sinning against others.

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And number six, don't think that the love that phileo pours into others is only ever hearts and rainbows and flowers.

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In Revelation 3 .19, Jesus says, Those whom I phileo, I reprove and discipline.

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So be zealous and repent. We see two important truths here. One is that phileo is prepared to do the uncomfortable thing.

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It's willing to reprove and discipline. And two, when the love of Jesus is being poured into us, that should draw out of us a phileo response, specifically zeal for right and repentance for wrong.

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All right, so those were the warnings. Now let's talk about how we can increase the phileo in your family. First, let me remind everyone that eros is not love.

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Storge is an instinctual love and phileo is a conditional love. Each of these can be experienced by an unsaved person as well as a believer.

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Now, why do I keep mentioning this? Why do I keep kind of harping on this point? Well, next time we're going to discuss the love that overshadows all loves.

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We're going to talk about a love that unbelievers cannot truly experience the way God commands it. We're going to talk about the love of God in us.

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That doesn't make storge or phileo inherently sinful, but it does mean that they're not quite everything we need in our families.

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If your homes had thriving storge and phileo, you'd still be missing something very important without the true family love.

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So there is another love, a deeper love, a grander love than storge or phileo can ever hope to be. So with that said,

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I want to share with you how phileo can be cultivated in your family just like storge can, but I just want us to be clear that there is still one more love to discuss and that love takes the cake.

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All right, here are five practical ways to increase phileo in your home. Number one, make sure you phileo

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God first. Earlier we looked at 1 Corinthians 16 .22, if anyone has no love for the

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Lord, let him be accursed. That's very straightforward and I don't think any of you will be tempted to misunderstand it. But consider

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Matthew 10 .37, whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.

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The 1 Corinthians passage told us that we need to phileo God, but the Matthew passage tells us that we need to phileo

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God more than anyone else. If the individual members of your family aren't phileoing

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God more than anyone else in the family, there will be problems. So make the love of God your first priority.

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Number two, don't phileo what doesn't matter. John 12 .25, whoever phileos his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.

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And remember how Revelation 22 .15b talks about everyone who phileos and practices falsehood? If we shouldn't be loving our family more than we love

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God, then obviously there should be no place in our lives for loving things that God hates. If you want to cultivate phileo in your family, be sure to stop loving unkindness, disrespect, laziness, impatience, lust, and the countless other sins that we have going on in our family.

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Number three, don't accept the phileo of the world. John 15 .19, if you were of the world, the world would phileo you as its own, but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.

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Listen, if the world is pouring this reciprocal love into you, there is a problem. If we phileo

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God, then we have the promise that the world will hate us, and if the world loves us, then the world views us as being one of them, and that should never be if we're followers of Christ.

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So if you want your family to grow in the bonds of love, be sure not to reciprocate the phileo the world uses to tie you to themselves.

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Now please understand, this is not to say that we don't love the world, of course we do. I'm not saying that we don't love unbelievers, that's not true at all.

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But we definitely must be careful that we're pouring the right love into them. 4.

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Accept every aspect of the phileo of God. Revelation 3 .19,

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those whom I love I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent. Sometimes a love

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God will pour into us will be delightful and comfortable. It will consist of joy and fulfilled promises and blessings, but sometimes that phileo will be uncomfortable.

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Don't reject it. God's using that correction to make us who we need to be. I listened to a true story recently about a group of men who in the 1800s sailed over 800 miles in a lifeboat.

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To make matters worse, and you know, I say they sailed, actually they rowed, right? To make matters worse though, they were all starving to death, so they were all very weak, and the sun peeked out from behind the clouds only four times over the course of the entire journey.

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But the navigator was so good that he made it right where they were going. My point is, the navigator had to make many corrections over the course of that trip.

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Every opportunity he had to change course, he made it because if he were off by one degree right now, he would have missed his mark by hundreds or potentially thousands of miles.

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So he had to course correct left and then right repeatedly over the weeks they sailed. If you've ever watched people who've never canoed before, you know what

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I mean. They will zigzag all across the lake as they try to get back, get from one bank to another in a straight line.

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And listen, that zigging and zagging is not bad. It's actually good, because if they didn't swerve back and forth, they would never reach their destination.

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In the same way, correction in a person's life is a good thing. When my life gets off track and someone lovingly steps in and corrects me with God's word,

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I should be overjoyed, but we're so often not overjoyed for a couple of reasons. First, we often don't want to go in the direction

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God wants us to go, so a correction that gets us back on God's track takes us away from our own. Second, sometimes we don't like correction just because we're prideful and we don't like to be told we're wrong, even when we know we're wrong.

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And this can happen even when we're happy to be on the right track. That's why we get angry when we're corrected.

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And since neither of those reasons are any good, we should take this admonishment and realize that correction from God and our other authorities and our friends is a sign of love.

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It's good. It should make us happy that we get to get back to following Christ after drifting towards sin and destruction.

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And lastly, number five, don't settle for filet -o. John 21, 15, when they had finished breakfast,

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Jesus said to Simon Peter, Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these? He said to him, that is

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Peter said to Jesus, yes, Lord, you know that I filet -o you. Like I already pointed out, storge is an unconscious affection, filet -o is called out of us by the love of others and feeds that love into return.

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But there is a love that far outshines filet -o. The passage I just read was part of a longer conversation

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Jesus had with Peter after his resurrection. Jesus asked Peter two times if he loved the

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Lord, but Peter did not use the same word Jesus did. Jesus was calling Peter to a deeper, unconditional, true love, but Peter knew he wasn't ready for that.

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And Peter was right. At that time in his life, he wasn't quite ready for something better than reciprocal love.

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Now, presumably, it was shortly after this conversation that Peter truly submitted his life to Christ and became a true follower of God, and for the first time in his life was able to truly love

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God. My point is this, though, filet -o may be a good start, and it's a wonderful blessing when it's used the right way, but it can't compare to the love we're commanded to have over 300 times in the

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New Testament, the love we're going to discuss next time. Okay, so I'm very excited about sharing that episode with you, and I hope you'll share this episode on social media with your friends, but your family has a lot to talk about before we discuss the true family love next time.

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You guys need to consider the reciprocal love in your family. You need to make sure you understand our discussion today, and you need to talk practically about the changes your family needs to make.

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By the way, tomorrow on the Wisdom app at 11 a .m. Eastern Standard Time, I'm going to be talking about this topic in more detail.

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If you and your family have questions and comments, I invite you to download the app, follow me at ambruster, and join me for the live talk.

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You'll be able to talk directly with me, and that should make it easier for me to be a blessing to you guys. And don't forget to check out today's episode notes as you and your family strive to understand

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God's expectations for your family love, and I hope you'll join us next time as we once again open God's Word to discover how to thrive in life and godliness.

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To that end, we'll be discussing the true family love. Truth Love Parent is part of the

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Evermind Ministries family and is dedicated to helping you worship God through your parenting. So join us next time as we study

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God's Word to learn how to parent our children for life and godliness. And remember that TLP is a listener -supported ministry.