2Peter 1:5-8 (d)Taking The "Scenic Route" to Real Love

2Peter1:5-8

5-8 For this very reason make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, 6 and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, 7 and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. 8 For if these things are yours and abound, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Faith...virtue...knowledge...self-control...steadfastness...godliness...

BROTHERLY AFFECTION and LOVE

Some translations have us adding brotherly affection "and" love, or "leading to" love - but both the AV and the NIV regard these as two separate additions. "Add to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness add love."

"Philadelphia" is the Greek word for brotherly kindness or affection. It is related to the world phileo - a word used for the sort of love that is moved by something in another person. Our phileo love is love that finds its motivator in something lovely in its object. It is love that responds emotionally to an attribute or characteristic of another. I love my friend because there are things in him that I find lovable. I looked upon him/her and I was moved, attracted or drawn by something in them. That is phileo.

It is distinguished here, and throughout the Bible, from the word translated as love in verse 7, which is agape. Agape love does not need to find anything in its source that moves it to love. Agape loves as an act of the will. Phileo love, for instance, will often characterize the beginning of a marriage relationship. But for the relationship to endure there must also be agape. There will be times when a spouse seems most unlovable, and it is then that the will to love must be found. And when it is, then it is the beginning of true godly love.

In the normal order, because God has ordained that we must grow in grace, the lesser thing necessarily comes before the greater. We learn to express brotherly love first because we are not ready to express the more complete form of love. God weans us from milk to meat. He allows us to love our brothers based on emotional preferences - personal likes and dislikes. In this we can go quite deep but we will not attain to the exhibition of agape. We can be civil, considerate and tolerant within the realm of brotherly affection. We can have sacrificial love within its bounds. We can die for a brother or sister. But the Apostle Paul put it best when he said...

For scarcely for a righteous man will one die: yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die. But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. {Romans 5:7-8}

The love of Christ for His people is agape love. It is love that finds no beauty or redeeming quality in its object, but that is an expression of the will. It is the expression of a will belonging to the Eternal and Almighty God Who is, Himself, love. God’s love, then, finds its impetus not in men, but in Himself - and is an expression of His nature through His will.

This sort of love loves the unlovely. It loves the enemy. It loves those that behave evilly towards us, and who speak ill of us. It does not need to find loveliness in the one being loved because agape love is expressed in a decision to love the utterly undeserving. Nothing recommends the object of agape love to the one loving. This divine attribute was shown towards us, His people, and it is an attribute that God will display through us as we yield to Him, and as we grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

Agape love is the last item on the list for a reason. That reason is that, for many of us, the sort of love described comes after a great rolling road along which we have been led and during which we have been traineded to put to death much of that self-centred and inward looking affection that would chafe at the idea of loving the undeserving. We can speak lofty words about love, but to actually abide in such a love, and to evidence it, we must be emptied as Christ was emptied. This is true experiential religion. It is growth in grace. It is graduating from breast to bottle, to pap, to meat. We want to get there now. God so often seems to have ordained that, though we strive as we must, we shall get there in His time. We must oft-times take the scenic route.