Who Is Your Brother, Where Is Your Brother? What Is Brotherly Love?

The word Peter uses here means I have to care for you and you have to care for me and it has to be a hand on doing. It means I have to put up with your strangeness, difference, crankiness, shortcomings, faults and odd behavior. Philadelphia makes us have to get involved. JAM 2:15-16 “Suppose you see a brother or sister who needs food or clothing, and you say, "Well, good-bye and God bless you; stay warm and eat well," but then you don’t give that person any food or clothing. What good does that do?”

The last virtue which we will get to is not the same word because this one is kindness. Agape is the word used for love in the last virtue. Peter knows we need both kinds of love. Being a Christina is being complete which to me is like the word that says we are to be perfect like our Father in heaven is perfect. This means we become complete in being perfect like Him. Philadelphia means to love what God love. Agape means to love as God loves.

We need to find out what God loves if we are going to add this to our faith. Brotherly love we can understand without the Bible for we know what it is to love one another in our family. Here in the Bible it goes beyond family by blood line to a bigger family that is a bloodline that comes through the blood of Jesus Christ. Are you getting blessed? When I enter the church I am surrounded by people who love me and I love them even though I am not related to them by my family I was born into. Where is my brother or sister? We pray, “Our Father who art in heaven.” It is not as PS 23 says, “The Lord is MY Shepherd.” If my Father is God and your Father is God that makes us family. Are you feeling blessed yet? Realistically not every one of us are loveable every day we see each other. Some are a killjoy, mind-numbing, obnoxious, boring, and we want to avoid them. I have come to church on certain occasions and met a sister and brother who is having a bad day or maybe has had a bad week and blurt out some unkind thing. 1 JN 4:20 “If someone says, "I love God," but hates a Christian brother or sister, that person is a liar; for if we don’t love people we can see, how can we love God, whom we have not seen?” To love God is to love what God loves. Think about that!

Let us look at four expressions of brotherly kindness;

1. The 1st expressions should be lack of prejudice or being equal. Who can exalt himself above another? God has no favorites but all are His children who confess they belong to him. JAM 2:1 “My dear brothers and sisters, how can you claim that you have faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ if you favor some people more than others?” We are not to prefer one above the other. That means we do not give approval or benefit or favor or acceptance or backing to one over another. We are not to show celebrated standing of one over another. If God is our Father we are equals here. Are we doing OK with this?

2. The 2nd expression should be that of harmony, of unity, of bringing together, of friendship. In John 17 Jesus prays six times He calls God our Father and stresses with intensity our being one in Him. John 17:21 “My prayer for all of them is that they will be one, just as you and I are one, Father, that just as you are in me and I am in you, so they will be in us, and the world will believe you sent me.” It is Jesus Christ in you and me that mark us in the clearest way we are one in Him. We have been joined together by the blood of Jesus and the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives that makes us one. Whatever it is that might be trying to divide us is weak in comparison to what makes us