John 21:15-17

There is an interesting distinction here in John 21 in the term "feed my sheep." The first and third—the one in verse 15 and the one in verse 17—mean only to take the sheep to pasture; that is, to make sure they have food to eat. In most Bibles they have translated the word "feed" to "tend." What the word "tend" means is the total guardianship of the sheep. It's not merely feeding them, but the responsibility is expanded to include everything that might occur in the care of the sheep. So that admonition is sandwiched in between merely feeding.

The "love" that Jesus used in His message to the church in Ephesus is agape. The love He begins His three questions with in John 21 is agape. "Peter, do you agapao Me?" The love that He uses in the third question is phileo. We're going to compare these two. The agape love is broader in application than the phileo love. Agape embraces judgment and the deliberate offense of the will as a manner of principle or duty with or without an affectionate feeling.

Now get this distinction. The agape love involves judgment. That is, it involves evaluating a situation as to whether or not you want to do it, whether or not it is right to do it. It embraces judgment and the deliberate offense of the will. You evaluate a situation and how you are going to handle it, and then you decide it would be love to do such and such and so and so, and then you set your will to do it, like loving your enemy, which requires a lot of judgment. It requires a great deal of the deliberate setting of the will to carry it out. That's the agape love. The agape love doesn't necessarily have to have an affectionate feeling attached to it. Hopefully it does. This can be the kind of love when one is performing a duty, an obligation, but it can, and most frequently does, include the feeling of affection as well.

However, phileo expresses family affection. It has nothing to do with the will at all. Phileo love comes without you asking for it, because you love your family members. It is present there simply because you are members of a certain family. It expresses family affection. It is a personal attachment as a matter of sentiment or feeling.

I want you to notice: Christ made sure when He asked Peter these questions that He used both of them! He used both the love that involves duty, obligation, and response, because one has evaluated and deliberately set one's will to show this love even though the good feeling is not there, and also the family affection feeling. What we find from this is that both the love that God has for us, and the love that He wants us to have for Him, is a beautiful combination of both of them.