Love - Phileo

Good morning, Five Minute Families. Have you ever taken a moment to evaluate the depth and commitment of your friendships? What about the people you are around each week? Examining your relationships to those around you and ultimately how you relate to Jesus is what we encourage at Clear View Retreat as we minister to families going through the norms and storms of life. As we step into week 2 of our love series, please realize that we are not encouraging folks to collect more friends on social media. We need community and we need friends, but we need quality over quantity any day. Last week we discussed God’s unconditional love called agape, and this week we are chatting about a second Greek word for love used in the Bible in a variety of word forms - phileo. Phileo is generally characterized as friendship love or brotherly love. Now, with brotherly love, we are not talking about the typical ways brothers are known to interact, such as two teenage brothers fighting it out and calling their disagreement settled at the end of the physical fight, nor are we talking about brotherly challenges of random competition. We are not even talking about misplaced brotherly protection when you know your brother was wrong and needs to be called out but you won’t let someone outside the family do the calling out. In brotherly love, we are talking about the fondness and enjoyment of having a close relationship. A deep, abiding love is not only found in families. When two people who are not in each other’s family delight in each other but not in a romantic, attraction-sort of way, then that love is best described with the Greek word for love which is phileo, sometimes written or described with the words philia or philadelphia. Philadelphia’s exact translation is brotherly love. And, here at CVR, Phileo is the action that we are referring to when we talk about building biblical community and one-anothering. Think about Jesus’s relationship with Lazarus. Both Mary and Martha as well as the Jews who saw Jesus weep upon hearing o