Rightly ordered love
17th September 2023
Jesus replied, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” This is the first and greatest commandment’ (Matthew 22:37-38, NIV)
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
Rightly ordered love
You may be familiar with the idea that idolatry is not only loving the wrong thing (in particular, false gods), but it is also loving good things too much. In effect, I am making such things ‘gods’ and making sacrifices in order to serve them. For example, someone may love their job (and the riches and status it gives them) so much that they sacrifice their family or their health. Tim Keller, perhaps more than anyone, has popularised this concept of idolatry in recent decades, and it also features strongly in the biblical counselling teaching of people like David Powlinson.
So, for example, it is not wrong to love my family, but it is wrong to love my family more than I love God (and it will not in the end be good for my family either). And it is not wrong to love comfort – comfort is a good thing in itself – but if I love comfort so much that I neglect other things I should be doing, or if I fight to protect my comfort, there is something wrong. It has become a disordered love.
I have been stumbling my way through Augustine’s great work City of God, and every so often I come across a passage that strikes a chord. In one such passage he is speaking of exactly these different ‘goods’ (that is, good things) which are to be loved the right way:
“Now physical beauty, to be sure, is a good created by God, but it is a temporal, carnal good, very low in the scale of goods, and if it is loved in preference to God … that love is as wrong as the miser’s love of gold … This is true of everything created; though it is good, it can be loved in the right way or in the wrong way … Hence, as it seems to me, a brief and true definition of virtue is ‘rightly ordered love’.” So Augustine got there first!
When we love God first of all, rather than something in his creation (and if we are not loving our Creator, then we will instead be loving something he created), then we will be loving rightly. As Augustine puts it, “But if the Creator is truly loved, that is, if he himself is loved, and not something else in his stead, then he cannot be wrongly loved.”
If this all seems somewhat abstract, then we have a concrete example of how to love like this in God’s own Son Jesus, who really did love his Father more than anything or anyone. He believed every word he spoke. He obeyed every command he gave, even to the point of giving his life. He cared more what his Father thought of him than what anybody else thought of him. He prized his Father’s favour more than his own comfort.
Loving Father, you are my greatest good; teach me to love you as my greatest good, and to love all other goods as lesser goods. Teach me to love as Jesus loved. Amen.
Yours warmly, in Christ,
Chris Hobbs (Senior Minister)