Loving the family you've chosen
Feeling safe with another person supersedes DNA. Being able to trust another person goes beyond your genetics.
Love each other with genuine affection, and take delight in honoring each other. (Romans 12:10)
Nobody loves you like your family.
Now, I said love not like. You may have many people in your life who you love but don’t particularly like being around. That’s entirely valid, believe it or not. You don’t have to like someone to love them.
Family relationships are among some of the most complex and complicated in life. No matter how much family members hurt each other, there is something in us that doesn’t want to sever those emotional bonds. That’s what I consider natural affection.
We are wired to care about our family, almost on a genetic level. I’m not sure if you can realistically say that it’s in your DNA, but I can tell you from my own personal experience that characteristics of relatives I barely even met have showed up in my facial expressions and body language. Not trying to turn this a nature vs. nurture discussion, but I do believe family members are often connected by more than just our genetics.
That doesn’t mean you must maintain relationships with family members who are toxic. Because of the state of the world, many of those family relationships have been corrupted and destroyed. In fact, there are two verses that use the word we’re focusing on today that talk about the loss of natural affection, 2 Timothy 3:3 and Romans 1:31.
Storge is the Greek word for family love, but that word alone never actually appears in Scripture. Instead, we see a variation of it in 2 Timothy 3:3 and Romans 1:21, astorgos. Those are the only two times it shows up in the whole Bible, and it’s talking about how the world has fallen away from God’s original design. Sin has caused us to be without natural affection. Without family love.
God designed families to be foundational. They were to be the place where children learned what mattered—how to love each other, how to love those outside the home, how to serve each other, how to serve God. Families were to be a model. And over the many generations, our world has forgotten what a family is supposed to be. More than that, our world is trying to redefine what family even is, along with marriage and gender and all sorts of other things God set in stone.
But how is family love supposed to function? If we have lost sight of it, how do we find it again? Well, we find it in Scripture. The verse we’re looking at today, Romans 12:10, includes a very special word for love. In fact this is the only place in all of Scripture where this word is used. Love in this verse is the word philostorgos, a word that combines both phileo love and storge love.
We will talk more about phileo next week, but basically it is talking about the relationship between friends. Philostorgos is the love that friends and family have for each other. Perhaps you might even say it is the love you have for people who fill both roles, who are both family and friend to you.
If you’ve ever seen a friend after a long separation and melted into their welcoming embrace, you know what philostorgos is. It’s found family. It’s the family you choose, even if they are blood or not (because, yes, even if you are related, you still have to choose to love them). But feeling safe with another person supersedes DNA. Being able to trust another person goes beyond your genetics.
Be real in your affection. Be honest in your feelings. And don’t treat it like drudgery; get excited about the opportunity to love others. That’s the attitude we need to have. Be a safe place for the people in your life.
For some people, that’s the greatest gift you could ever give them.
Questions for Reflection
When was a time that a friend or family member provided a safe place for you?
How would you describe the concept of a safe place?
What are some ways you have seen the loss of natural affection in our world?
Weekly Memory Verse
