It’s mutual: I do for you; you do for me.  I don’t have to look out for myself because you will look out for me.  Whatever I do for you—the balance is automatic—you’re doing for me.  And we go through life trying to find relationships like that.  I don’t mind doing for somebody if I can count on them doing for me.  The paradox put in it by our Creator—He made us—you can seek phileo, that mutual balance, all of your life; the very seeking of it precludes the finding of it.  This is something you’re gonna have to gestalt with intuition but you’ll know its truth when it’s said: the very act of seeking phileo denies the getting of it.  The minute I think you’re doing for me to get something in return, I can’t help it, it’s the way we’re made, I start looking out for me.  You calculate in what you do for me, the balance sheet of return, and I’m gonna calculate the balance sheet on my side—and I ain’t the only sinner here!

If on that rare moment that life gives you, someone does for me where there can be no possible reason that they’re seeking anything in return, also part of my nature is the incapacity not to respond in kind.  If I’m drowning in a river and know it, you risk your life and pull me to the bank, I don’t have to talk myself into liking you on the shore.  The law of love is such, you ever give sacrificially to me without calculation, I can’t help it, like a magnet, I’m responding.  That’s agapao.  This is the only kind of love that God commands.  Nowhere in Scripture does He command phileo.  Nowhere does he command eros.  Agapao is a love that flows to the object being loved because of the intrinsic value seen in the object being loved.  You pour on it devotion or sacrifice because of a sense of worth in the object being loved.  And, paradoxically, there’s nothing selfish in that.  Paradoxically, when that kind of love flows it triggers the response that produces phileo.

Like all deep Christian truths, you get this way by going that way.  You live by dying.  You become first by being last.  You get phileo not because you seek it, but because an object of love so claims you that for its value you flow to it—without thought of anything in return you get phileo.  That’s the same meaning here.   Now that’s why there may be people with all kinds of felt responses to God, which is the call of God, that makes you the soil waiting the seed or the eyes waiting the light.  But there needs to be content to adequate Christian expression.  That’s why I can’t stomach these stomp-on-you, dump-on-you condemnation preachers that try to beat people into hell.

If you can ever understand that at our best we were hopeless and lost, and as we are God gave the best that He had and His Son gave His life because He saw some intrinsic value in me and you—those in whom He placed the response or the capacity to respond to the Light when it shines….  Whatever you may think of me I know God saw something in Gene Scott, and you may not see much progress in what He’s doing with it but God saw something, and if no one else had responded throughout eternity He would have done it for me.

And when you come to know the basic truth.…  That’s why I preach Grace and Peace and not this condemnation junk.  God’s got perfection all around Him and the Scripture in Hebrews says He did not give Himself to rescue fallen angels, but the mystery throughout eternity that made prophets struggle to see it and that Peter’s Epistle says the angels bent down low to examine this mystery that God who would not go after fallen angels for some reason saw something in the men and women that He would redeem that He gave His Son for it.  And whether I’m likeable or not, God as the song says “looked beyond my faults” and gave Himself to remove the barrier that He might tug on those heart strings and lead me into the Light.