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Love That Breaks the Chains of Selfishness | Jonathan Edwards · Reformed Thinking

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  What if I told you that the cure for selfishness isn't, you know,
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  loving yourself less, but actually loving yourself more?
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  Oh man, that just sounds like a recipe for disaster in today's
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  culture. Right, It sounds like terrible
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  advice, but welcome to reformed thinking.
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  Today's deep dive is going to completely flip a lot of modern
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  psychological assumptions. Upside.
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  Down, fully upside down we're. Looking at a text from the 18th
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  century theologian Jonathan Edwards, it's from a manuscript
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  called Charity and Its Fruits, and we are specifically zeroing
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  in on a section that analyzes First Corinthians 13, verse 5,
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  the part where the apostle Paul writes charity seeketh not her
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  own. Yeah, and that specific phrase
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  is like universally recognized. You hear it read at almost every
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  wedding. Oh, constantly.
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  But it is almost entirely misunderstood when it comes to
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  its theological context. Right, because we tend to read
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  that text through the lens of, I don't know, modern therapy or
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  just basic moralism. Like just be a nicer person.
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  Yeah, try harder. Wear your toys.
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  Yeah, exactly. Well, actually, no.
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  Edwards isn't writing a self help manual on how to be a
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  slightly nicer neighbor. He's building an entire
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  architectural model of human nature.
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  He really is. Yeah.
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  He's doing surgery on the soul. So our mission for this deep
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  dive is to pull apart Edwards's argument about how the fall of
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  man physically and structurally altered the dimensions of the
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  human soul. We're going to look at how sin
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  causes the soul to like, literally collapse inward.
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  And how true Christian charity, which he defines as this
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  supernatural infused grace, how that actually reduces the
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  condition? And in doing so, we have to
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  clarify a massive misconception that honestly, even seasoned
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  theologians get tangled up in. Oh absolutely.
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  It's the difference between self love and selfishness, right?
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  Edwards argues they are not the same thing at all.
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  In fact, he argues that trying to destroy self love is an
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  attack on humanity itself. Which again, sounds completely
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  counterintuitive when you first hear it.
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  So let's establish the baseline. Edwards uses some highly
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  physical spatial imagery to describe the condition of the
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  human soul before and after after the fall.
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  Yeah, he really leans into these spatial metaphors.
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  We all know the shorthand, right?
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  Total depravity, loss of original righteousness.
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  But Edwards gets under the hood and describes this as an actual
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  dimensional change. He does.
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  He presents this stark contrast between the original state of
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  humanity and Eden and its current fallen state.
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  OK, lay it out for us. Well, he writes that before the
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  Fall, as God created him, man was exalted, noble and generous.
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  The human soul was large. Large.
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  I like that. Right.
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  It was structurally expansive enough to comprehend the welfare
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  of all fellow creatures, and more than that, it extended
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  outward to the Creator. Wow.
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  Edward says the soul went abroad upon the infinite ocean of good
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  and was swallowed up by it, becoming one with it.
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  Let's just pause on that image for a second.
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  An infinite ocean of good. It's a beautiful picture.
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  The soul wasn't this isolated container.
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  It was permeable, you know, expansive, constantly flowing
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  outward into God and into the well-being of others.
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  The borders of the self were wide open.
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  Expansive is the right way to think about it.
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  The soul was functioning as designed, finding its highest
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  joy outside of its own private interests.
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  OK, but then the fall happens. Right.
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  And then he describes the mechanics of the fall.
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  He doesn't just say humanity broke a rule or, you know,
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  crossed a legal boundary. Right, it's not just a parking
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  ticket. No, not at all.
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  He says that immediately upon the fall the mind of man shrank.
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  It lost its primitive greatness and expandedness, reducing down
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  to an exceeding smallness and contractedness.
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  And he uses a very specific visceral phrase here, doesn't
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  he? He calls Sin a powerful
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  astringent. Yes, a powerful astringent that
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  contracts the soul to the very small dimensions of selfishness.
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  God was forsaken, fellow creatures were forsaken, and man
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  retired within himself. The soul became closely shut up
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  within itself, to the exclusion of all things else.
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  You know anyone who has ever accidentally tasted A lump or
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  use a really harsh facial toner? Oh, you're the toner.
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  They know the exact physical sensation of an astringent.
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  It makes your tissues instantly contract.
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  It just draws all the moisture out.
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  It shrinks things down, making them tight and rigid.
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  Exactly. Edwards is arguing that the fall
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  was a structural collapse of human capacity.
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  The soul didn't just get a little dirty, it literally
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  retreated inward. And that structural collapse
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  contradicts almost every modern notion of human nature we hear
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  today. How so?
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  Well, we constantly hear human flaws described as mere
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  mistakes, right? Blind spots or environmental
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  conditioning? Just a product of my upbringing.
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  Right. But Edwards, standing firmly in
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  the Reformed tradition, argues the actual architecture of the
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  soul was crushed. The noble spiritual principles
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  that supreme love for God took wings and flew away.
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  They just vacated the premises. And without those expansive
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  principles, self love became the absolute master of this tiny
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  contracted space. You are left with a soul that is
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  circumscribed entirely around the self.
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  I keep picturing a piece of fabric shrunk in the wok.
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  Oh, that's a great way to look at it.
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  Like you take a beautiful large wool sweater, intricate,
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  designed to cover and warm you, and you accidentally throw it in
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  boiling hot water. We've all done it.
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  And the fiber sees up. It comes out tight, inflexible,
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  tiny. I mean, you can still recognize
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  it as a sweater, barely, right? But it has the sleeves, the
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  collar. The faculties of the human mind
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  are still there. Reason will affections.
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  But it has completely lost its intended dimensions.
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  Yeah, they can't cover what it was meant to cover.
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  It's useless for its original purpose.
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  That analogy holds up perfectly because the basic material is
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  still there, but the capacity is ruined.
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  So what's the cure? Edwards presents the cross of
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  Christ and the subsequent work of the Holy Spirit as the cure
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  that pulls the soul out of this confinement.
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  Union with Christ grants the believer a share in his divine
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  nature, which begins the process of restoring that original
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  enlargement and liberality to the soul.
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  It stretches the fabric back out.
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  Yes, it stretches it back out and.
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  Hold on. Stretching out shrunken wool is
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  an agonizing process. It requires a lot of force.
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  You have to break the tight matted bonds that have formed
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  between the fight. It's.
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  Not comfortable. No, and this brings us to a
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  massive theological hurdle. When we read texts about
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  Christian self denial, you know, taking up your cross, dying to
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  self denial, it often sounds like we are supposed to
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  completely obliterate our sense of self.
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  I see where you're going with this.
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  Right, like if sin made us focus on ourselves, is the cure to
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  literally destroy any desire for our own happiness?
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  Do I need to hate myself to be holy?
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  That is the natural logical leap people make, yeah, but Edwards
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  forcefully rejects it. He does.
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  Yes, he makes a shocking negative assertion here.
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  To prevent that exact misunderstanding, he states
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  plainly that Christian charity is not contrary to all self
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  love. Wait, say that again, Because in
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  a culture that associates the word self love with either toxic
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  narcissism or like shallow self-care spa days hearing
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  appeared in Theologian defendant.
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  Sounds wild. It does, but he says charity is
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  not contrary to all self love, Edwards writes that is not a
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  thing contrary to Christianity, that a man should love himself,
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  or which is the exact same thing in his philosophical framework,
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  that he should love his own happiness.
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  OK, I need you to unpack the mechanics of that.
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  We just established that sin acted as an astringent,
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  shrinking the soul down to the tiny dimensions of selfishness.
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  Right? But now he's saying loving
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  yourself isn't the problem. How does he reconcile that?
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  He reconciles it by looking at the fundamental nature of the
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  human will. OK, how so?
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  Edwards argues that if Christianity actually tended to
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  destroy a man's love to himself and his own happiness, it would
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  destroy the very spirit of humanity.
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  Wow. Loving one's own happiness is as
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  necessary to human nature as the faculty of the will itself, he
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  states. It's physically and
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  philosophically impossible that such a love should be destroyed
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  in any other way than by destroying the being itself.
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  So he's tying self love directly to the mechanics of volition.
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  Absolutely. To have a will at all, you must
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  desire things, you must make choices, and you only choose
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  things because you perceive them as good for you.
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  Right as contributing to your happiness or relieving your
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  pain. If you had zero desire for
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  happiness, you would never make a single choice.
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  You'd just be an inert block of wood.
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  That's the core of his argument, and he takes it all the way to
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  heaven to prove his point. Wait to heaven, yeah.
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  Edwards points to the glorified Saints and the angels.
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  They are completely sinless, right?
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  They are perfect in holiness, yet they possess a massive,
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  burning love for their own happiness.
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  If they didn't love their own happiness, the immense joys of
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  heaven would mean absolutely nothing to them.
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  Because you can't find joy in something you don't love.
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  Spot on if God gifts them a glorious eternity, communion
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  with Christ and the beauty of the new creation, but they have
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  no internal capacity to desire or appreciate their own joy.
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  Then that gift is totally meaningless.
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  Yes, aversion to happiness isn't holy, it's a defect.
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  Man, I see the logic. It's built right into the
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  biblical commands too, if you think about.
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  It how so? Well, think about the second
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  greatest commandment. Love your neighbor as yourself.
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  Oh yes. That phrasing assumes a natural,
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  built in, unalterable love for one's own well-being.
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  God uses our inherent self love as the baseline metric, the
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  standard for how we should treat the people around us.
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  And Edwards highlights that the Scriptures from Genesis to
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  Revelation are full of motives set forth for the very purpose
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  of working on the principle of self love.
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  Oh, like rewards and punishments?
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  Yes. The severe warnings of hell, the
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  glorious promises of heaven, the council's to seek wisdom and
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  avoid misery, all of these appeal directly to our personal
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  hopes and our personal fears. That makes total.
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  Sense Why would God promise eternal happiness to a creature
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  that possesses no inherent desire for it?
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  Let me throw out an analogy here.
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  Think of a vehicle's engine. OK, I'm with you.
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  The desire for happiness, the self love Edwards is talking
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  about is the engine of the human being.
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  The engine itself is completely morally neutral, right?
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  It's neither good nor bad, it's simply what provides the thrust.
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  It makes the car move forward. Without the engine, the car sits
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  dead in the driveway doing absolutely nothing.
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  Just rusting away. Right, so the issue isn't that
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  the engine exists or even that it's running hot.
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  The issue is the steering. That captures his philosophical
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  framework beautifully. The drive for happiness is the
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  engine God installed in humanity at creation.
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  The moral error, the sin occurs entirely and how that drive is
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  directed and regulated. OK, so if the engine is good, if
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  loving happiness is perfectly fine, and even the angels do it,
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  what makes selfishness so destructive?
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  Now we get to the core of it. If self love isn't the enemy,
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  what is the actual definition of the selfishness that Paul is
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  condemning in First Corinthians 13?
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  Edwards defines selfishness strictly as inordinate self
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  love. Inordinate.
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  Yes, it's when the steering wheel locks onto the wrong
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  destination, or when the engine overwhelms the brakes.
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  He outlines 2 very distinct ways this inordinateness happens.
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  OK, what are they? First, self love becomes
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  comparatively too great. Second, happiness is placed in
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  confined private goods. Let's break those down, starting
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  with the first one. What does he mean by
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  comparatively too great? I mean, if the engine doesn't
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  change size, how does its force become too great?
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  This is where Edwards's psychological insight gets
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  really fascinating, especially regarding the doctrine of
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  original sin. I love this part.
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  He says the inordinate Ness of self love does not consist in
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  our love of our own happiness being absolutely too great in a
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  mathematical sense. God made Saints and sinners
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  alike with the same unalterable inclination to desire happiness.
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  The issue is entirely about proportion.
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  Proportion, right? To explain this, Edwards uses
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  the analogy of a household. Walk us through the household
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  dynamic. Imagine a grand estate.
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  There is a master of the house and there is a servant.
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  Under normal healthy conditions, the Master is strong, wise and
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  directs all the affairs of the estate.
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  And the servant. The servant obeys the master's
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  directives. The servants influence in the
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  family affairs is appropriate. He manages the kitchen, tends
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  the grounds. His influence isn't inordinate
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  because the master's strength and authority are greater,
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  keeping the servant in his proper lane.
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  So the hierarchy is intact, the master commands, the servant
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  executes, everyone flourishes. Right.
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  But suppose a disease sweeps through the estate, and the
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  master grows incredibly weak. He loses his vitality, his mind
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  clouds over, and he loses all his authority.
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  Oh man, what naturally happens? The servant takes over the
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  house. Naturally.
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  No. Pay close attention to the
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  mechanics here. The Servant didn't undergo some
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  radical transformation. The Servant didn't hit the gym.
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  He didn't gain new muscles or grow an absolute strength.
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  He didn't get bigger. No, but servant strength
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  remained exactly the same as before the disease hit, but
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  because the master failed, the proportion of the servant's
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  strength increased relative to the whole house.
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  From being in subjection, he becomes the absolute dictator.
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  That is a brilliant way to conceptualize the fall.
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  It maps perfectly onto his view of the human soul.
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  Before the fall, Adam loved his own happiness just as much as we
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  do after the fall. But before the Fall, a superior
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  principal sat on the throne of his heart, the supreme love of
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  God. The master of the House.
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  Right. That divine love, along with the
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  love for fellow creatures, had such massive strength that it
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  wholly regulated and directed Adam's self love.
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  Self love was the servant. It did its job.
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  It did its job of preserving the body and seeking good, but
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  always in subjection to God's glory.
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  But when sin entered, that superior principle of divine
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  love died. The Master vanished from the
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  estate. So self love, continuing in its
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  former strength, having no superior principle left to
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  regulate or guide it, it just takes over the empty house.
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  It completely takes over. It governs the soul when it was
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  only ever designed to be a subject.
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  Without those higher principles to regulate it, self love
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  becomes an absolute tyrant. It's an issue of ratio.
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  That reframes the whole struggle with sin, doesn't it?
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  Yeah. We don't have too much desire
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  for happiness. We have too little love for God
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  and others to balance it out. The servant is running rampant
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  because the master is dead. That's spot on.
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  So that covers the first way self love becomes inordinate.
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  The ratio is completely off. What about the second way?
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  How does the actual direction of this love factor in?
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  Edwards points to the channel in which this love flows.
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  Selfishness is placing our happiness and things that are
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  confined entirely to ourselves, explicitly excluding all others.
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  OK, excluding others. You know it's a pulse phrase.
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  Seeketh, not her own. Uses a pronoun of appropriation.
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  Her own implies A strict limitation to the self.
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  It means placing your joy in private goods, hoarding wealth,
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  chasing personal status, demanding your own convenience,
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  gratifying bodily appetites. You are finding your highest
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  happiness in a good that you have single handedly
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  circumscribed to yourself. We're back to the strunken
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  sweater. The joy is restricted to a tiny
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  isolated dot. Yes, but here is the theological
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  twist. I love A twist.
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  Edwards points out that a person might long for happiness and
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  long for it intensely, but place that happiness in the glory of
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  God and the good of their neighbor.
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  If a person finds their highest, most visceral joy and beholding
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  God's glory, they are acting out of a deep desire for their own
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  happiness. They want that joy, but in the
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  exact same act, they're exercising profound love for
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  God. Let me make sure I'm tracking
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  this because this feels like threading A microscopic needle.
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  It is a complex, yeah. You're saying that when I feel
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  thrilled because my friends succeeded at something, I am
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  technically satisfying my own desire for happiness because
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  their success brought me joy, but it's the total opposite of
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  selfishness because the channel of my joy has been enlarged.
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  You. Hit the nail on the head.
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  Finding joy in a neighbor's success is still a form of
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  loving happiness. The engine is still running.
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  But the borders of the self have been radically expanded.
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  Yes, Edward says the individual self love flows out in such a
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  channel as to take in others with themselves.
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  The self that he loves is literally multiplied.
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  Multiplied. And the very acts in which he
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  loves himself and seeks his own joy, he loves others also.
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  This is the noble, expansive spirit of the Gospel.
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  True Christian charity doesn't isolate the self.
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  It expands the borders of the self to include the welfare of
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  others. The borders of the self are
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  expanded. I love the sheer scale of that
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  concept. It's massive.
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  It completely removes the claustrophobia from the idea of
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  Christian self denial. You aren't erasing your identity
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  into a blank void, you are absorbing the well-being of
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  others into your own definition of well-being.
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  That's a beautiful way to say it.
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  Their victory becomes your victory.
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  Their sorrow becomes your sorrow.
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  So what does this enlarged, unshrunk soul look like when it
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  walks out the front door? How does it act?
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  Yeah, how does this deep theological concept translate to
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  a Tuesday morning at the office or navigating a conflict in your
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  local church? Well, Edwards.
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  Doesn't leave this in the abstract.
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  He outlines very specific behaviors, the tangible fruits
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  of charity in action. Let's hear them.
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  An enlarged soul naturally seeks to please God and actively seeks
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  the spiritual and temporal welfare of others.
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  It acts with deep sympathy. Sympathy.
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  OK. He draws a sharp contrast here.
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  A selfish person, he knows, is always ready to make much of
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  their own afflictions. Oh, we all know people like
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  that. They magnify their complaints,
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  convinced their sufferings are uniquely terrible and greater
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  than anyone else's. And conversely, if they happen
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  to be comfortable, they completely lose the ability to
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  discern the wants of others. They just overlook them
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  entirely. They are blind to the room.
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  They only see the mirror. Right.
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  But a person possessing A charitable spirit notices the
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  burdens of others. They are apartment to see
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  afflictions and take notice of them.
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  They exhibit a liberal, merciful disposition.
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  They actually rejoice to supply necessities.
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  It brings them joy to open their hands.
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  Yes, exactly. The text spends a massive amount
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  of time talking about public spiritedness and I feel like in
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  our highly individualized, hyper consumerist culture, the idea of
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  acting for the public good almost sounds, I don't know,
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  quaint, or at least highly politicized.
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  It's definitely countercultural, but it's a cornerstone of
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  Edwards's application. He brings up a remarkable
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  biblical examples to illustrate what true public spiritedness
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  looks like. Like who?
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  He points to the Jewish exiles in Babylon.
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  Think about the historical context there.
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  They had been violently conquered, dragged from their
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  homeland, and enslaved. Yet God commanded them through
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  the prophet Jeremiah to seek the peace of Babylon.
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  To pray for the city that enslaved them.
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  Yes, they were supposed to build houses, plant gardens, and
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  actively pray for the prosperity of the city holding them
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  captive. That is the ultimate stress test
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  of an enlarged soul. Praying for the economic and
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  social flourishing of your captors.
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  It's staggering. It's completely antithetical to
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  the natural instinct which would be to plot a rebellion or at
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  least hope for an economic collapse in Babylon so they
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  could escape. Absolutely.
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  He also points to Queen Esther. She was safe in the palace.
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  Her private goods were entirely secure.
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  She had it made. But she fasted, risked execution
• 19:37
  by approaching the king uninvited, and put her own life
• 19:40
  on the line for the welfare of her people.
• 19:42
  Wow. He brings up the Apostle Paul in
• 19:44
  Romans 9, who expressed such agonizing concern for his fellow
• 19:48
  Israelites that he famously wrote he could wish himself a
• 19:51
  cursed and cut off from Christ for their sake.
• 19:53
  Which is a terrifying statement, honestly.
• 19:55
  And he points to Moses in Exodus 32.
• 19:59
  After the Israelites commit idolatry with the golden calf,
• 20:02
  God offers to wipe them out and make Moses into a great nation.
• 20:06
  God offers Moses the ultimate private good, massive historical
• 20:10
  glory. Yes, and Moses rejects it.
• 20:14
  He intercedes for his stiff necked people who have done
• 20:16
  nothing but complain since they left Egypt.
• 20:19
  He tells God to forgive their sin or else blot His own name
• 20:22
  out of the book. Those are staggering examples of
• 20:25
  individuals whose boundaries of self had expanded so far they
• 20:28
  absorbed the fate of entire nations.
• 20:31
  Yeah, the scope of it is wild. Edwards also directs this
• 20:34
  concept towards specific vocations and stations in life,
• 20:36
  doesn't he? He addresses them directly.
• 20:39
  He speaks to magistrates, which in our context translates to
• 20:42
  politicians, judges, civil servants, anyone with civic
• 20:45
  authority. What does he say to them?
• 20:47
  He says they should act as fathers to the Commonwealth.
• 20:49
  They should not be governed by selfish motives, seeking to
• 20:52
  enrich themselves, secure their own legacy or advance themselves
• 20:55
  on the spoils of others. Their entire function is to use
• 20:58
  their authority for the public benefit.
• 21:01
  They are supposed to function as caregivers to the society, not
• 21:04
  parasites extracting wealth from it.
• 21:07
  And similarly, he issues a severe warning to ministers.
• 21:10
  They're not to seek their own wealth or manage their churches,
• 21:13
  trying to extract all they can out of their congregations to
• 21:16
  enrich their own families or build their own empires.
• 21:20
  That's a timely warning. They're called to.
• 21:22
  Feed the flock, lead them to good pastures and defend them
• 21:25
  from wolves. Whatever post of influence we
• 21:28
  hold, the governing standard is that the world, or at least our
• 21:31
  small corner of it, may be better for our living in it.
• 21:34
  I'm thinking of. The human circulatory system.
• 21:37
  OK, let's hear it. A healthy human body relies
• 21:39
  entirely on blood flowing outward.
• 21:41
  The heart pumps oxygen rich blood into the lungs, but it
• 21:44
  doesn't just hoard it there. If the heart hoards the blood,
• 21:47
  we call that cardiac arrest. The body dies.
• 21:50
  Right the. Health of the entire Organism
• 21:52
  depends on resources constantly flowing outward to the
• 21:55
  extremities, to the fingertips, the toes, the brain.
• 21:59
  When a society or a local church has magistrates, ministers and
• 22:02
  citizens operating with an enlarged soul, resources,
• 22:05
  whether that's wealth, justice, compassion or simply time, flow
• 22:09
  to the extremities, the whole body.
• 22:11
  Thrives. That biological metaphor
• 22:14
  captures the Reformed vision of a Christian society perfectly.
• 22:17
  We are members of 1 body. But let's be honest.
• 22:20
  Looking around at the world and even inside our own hearts, this
• 22:23
  kind of radical, outward flowing, sacrificial love is
• 22:27
  incredibly rare. Oh, it's almost non existent.
• 22:29
  Naturally, right we see brief. Flashes of altruism, sure, but
• 22:33
  this consistent, structural public spiritedness, It makes
• 22:36
  you question where such Love Actually comes from, because it
• 22:39
  doesn't seem natural. And Edwards?
• 22:40
  Agrees. He draws a very sharp,
• 22:42
  unapologetic line between ordinary human affection and
• 22:46
  this kind of divine charity. How sharp are we?
• 22:48
  Definitive. This is where his theology gets
• 22:50
  highly diagnostic. Edwards argues that most of what
• 22:53
  the world confidently calls love is actually rooted entirely in
• 22:56
  self love. Hold on, let me.
• 22:57
  Push back on that. Go for it.
• 22:59
  When you say most of what the world calls love, are you
• 23:02
  including things like a mother's love for her newborn?
• 23:05
  Because that feels incredibly cynical, even for an 18th
• 23:09
  century Calvinist leaning hard into total depravity.
• 23:12
  Calling maternal love selfish sounds like a massive stretch.
• 23:15
  How does Edwards defend that? It sounds cynical.
• 23:18
  Until you look at the underlying mechanics of it.
• 23:20
  Edwards meticulously examines natural affection.
• 23:23
  Take the love for our children. Why do we love them so fiercely?
• 23:26
  Because they're our. Kids.
• 23:27
  Exactly. Edwards argues we love them
• 23:29
  because they are ours. They're an extension of our own
• 23:31
  identity. Their honor is linked to our
• 23:34
  honor. Their success reflects on us.
• 23:38
  It is a. Powerful God-given biological
• 23:40
  instinct driven by self preservation and genetic
• 23:43
  continuation. It is natural.
• 23:45
  It's a profound common grace that keeps society from
• 23:48
  collapsing and it's necessary for survival.
• 23:51
  But it's absolute root system is still self love.
• 23:54
  So it's still. The shrunken sweater just
• 23:57
  stretched out just enough to include our immediate DNA, our
• 24:00
  offspring. It's a larger circle than just
• 24:03
  the individual ego, but it's still a closed circle.
• 24:06
  That's right. What about?
• 24:07
  Friendship. He.
• 24:08
  Applies the same diagnostic tool to friendship.
• 24:11
  Why do we love our friends? We love them because we enjoy
• 24:15
  their company. We find agreement with our own
• 24:17
  disposition and manners. They like the same.
• 24:20
  Movies we like, right? They validate.
• 24:21
  Our political opinions, they share our theological views or
• 24:24
  our hobbies or we love people out of gratitude because they
• 24:29
  promoted our self-interest in the past.
• 24:30
  They helped us get a job or supported us during a crisis.
• 24:34
  OK. So it's a trade?
• 24:35
  This love. Edwards argues never rises above
• 24:39
  the soil of nature. It is inherently transactional.
• 24:42
  It does not go beyond nature, and nature in its fallen state
• 24:45
  cannot go beyond self love. That is a.
• 24:47
  Brutal audit of human relationships I want to
• 24:50
  challenge everyone listening to audit your own relationships
• 24:52
  right now it's a tough. Exercise.
• 24:54
  Look at your text. Threads.
• 24:55
  Look at your social circle. Are your friendships
• 24:58
  fundamentally transactional? Are they based entirely on
• 25:01
  mutual benefits, shared hobbies, reciprocal favors, and
• 25:03
  validation of your own worldview?
• 25:05
  And ask yourself what? Happens when that stops, right?
• 25:08
  If the benefit stops if that person suddenly disagrees with
• 25:12
  you or stops validating you, or requires more energy than they
• 25:15
  return, does the friendship evaporate?
• 25:18
  If the answer. Is yes.
• 25:21
  Then according to Edwards framework, that affection is
• 25:24
  springing entirely out of the root of self love.
• 25:27
  It's a natural plant growing in natural fallen soil.
• 25:30
  It has no eternal substance. So where does?
• 25:32
  Divine charity come from If we can't grow it in the soil of our
• 25:36
  own nature, if even our best attempts at altruism are tainted
• 25:39
  by this reciprocal mechanic, how do we actually get it?
• 25:43
  Divine Charity. Is completely supernatural.
• 25:45
  Edwards uses a beautiful botanical image here to explain
• 25:47
  the infusion of grace. Oh, what is?
• 25:49
  It he describes. Divine Love as a plant taken
• 25:52
  from the garden of Heaven and placed into the human soul by
• 25:54
  the Holy Spirit. Yes, it is transplanted.
• 25:57
  It is not native to the human heart.
• 25:59
  It has its life in God, not in the self.
• 26:02
  A plant. From the garden of Heaven.
• 26:05
  That implies it requires a completely different kind of
• 26:08
  sustenance. Exactly.
• 26:10
  Because it's supernatural, it enables a person to do things
• 26:14
  natural love is completely incapable of doing.
• 26:17
  Like what? It enables a person to love God
• 26:19
  for his own glorious sake, not just for the benefits of the
• 26:22
  fire insurance he can provide. And crucially for our
• 26:25
  relationships, it enables a person to love other people
• 26:29
  merely because they are God's creatures bearing His image, not
• 26:33
  because of any relation or benefit to the self.
• 26:36
  That's the dividing. Line right there.
• 26:37
  Loving someone who offers absolutely 0 reciprocal benefit
• 26:41
  to your own ego, your survival, or your comfort.
• 26:43
  That's the test. To demonstrate.
• 26:45
  What the supernatural love looks like in its purest, most
• 26:47
  concentrated form. Edwards points to the ultimate
• 26:50
  model. He points to a massive shift in
• 26:53
  the biblical commands. Yes, he notes the.
• 26:55
  Difference between the old commandment given by Moses and
• 26:58
  the new commandment given by Christ.
• 27:00
  The shift is. Monumental under Moses the
• 27:03
  command was love thy neighbor as thyself.
• 27:06
  We discussed that earlier. It uses our self love as the
• 27:09
  baseline. But Christ introduces A
• 27:11
  radically new standard on the night before his crucifixion in
• 27:15
  John 13, Jesus says a new commandment.
• 27:18
  I give unto you that you love one another as I have loved you.
• 27:22
  The duty loving. Others remains the same, but the
• 27:25
  rule, the measure and the motive are entirely new, as I have
• 27:30
  loved. You.
• 27:31
  That raises the bar to an impossible height.
• 27:34
  It removes human nature from the equation entirely.
• 27:37
  How does Edwards unpack the specific features of Christ's
• 27:40
  love? What makes it so radically
• 27:42
  different from the natural transactional love?
• 27:44
  We were just auditing Edwards. Outlines 4 distinct features of
• 27:47
  Christ's love that completely obliterate the selfish
• 27:50
  principle. OK, let's hear the first one.
• 27:52
  First, Christ. Had his love on his enemies.
• 27:54
  There was no natural affinity. The people he loved were full of
• 27:57
  actual venomous hatred toward him.
• 28:00
  They weren't validating his manners or promoting his
• 28:02
  interests. They were actively plotting his
• 28:04
  execution that immediately. Eliminates the We are friends
• 28:08
  because we agree on things baseline.
• 28:11
  You can't claim natural affinity with people driving nails into
• 28:14
  your wrists. You really can't.
• 28:16
  Yeah, the second feature is where we get into the deep
• 28:19
  mechanics of reformed theology. Oh, I'm ready.
• 28:21
  Christ looked. On us as himself, he united his
• 28:25
  heart to humanity and the doctrine of imputation and
• 28:28
  federal headship. He actually made our guilt his
• 28:31
  own. He stood in our.
• 28:32
  Place legally, yes. Furthermore, he treats kindness
• 28:36
  shown to the least of his followers as kindness shown
• 28:39
  directly to him. He completely erased the
• 28:41
  boundary between his interest and our interest.
• 28:43
  It's the concept. Of assuming the debt in legal
• 28:46
  and financial terms. Assuming a massive debt is a
• 28:49
  staggering undertaking. It ruins people.
• 28:51
  Yeah, if I have a. Friend who goes completely
• 28:53
  bankrupt. Natural love might compel me to
• 28:55
  feel sympathy. I might buy him a meal.
• 28:57
  I might offer some financial advice or let him sleep on my
• 28:59
  couch. But you're not paying his.
• 29:01
  Mortgage. Exactly.
• 29:03
  But Christ didn't just feel bad for the debtor.
• 29:06
  He legally assumed the debt. He transferred the total
• 29:09
  liability of our sin to his own accounts and paid it out of his
• 29:13
  own infinite resources, knowing full well the debtor was
• 29:16
  entirely bankrupt and incapable of contributing a single cent to
• 29:20
  the payment that leads perfectly.
• 29:21
  To the third feature, Edwards highlights, which deals with how
• 29:24
  that debt was paid. How was it?
• 29:26
  Paid price spent himself. His love didn't rest in mere
• 29:29
  feeling, pity or small convenient sacrifices.
• 29:32
  He gave up. The absolute comfort and honor
• 29:35
  of heaven. He gave up.
• 29:36
  Everything he subjected. Himself to poverty, mock trials
• 29:39
  and physical torture. He literally shed his blood.
• 29:42
  He offered himself as a penal substitutionary sacrifice to
• 29:46
  satisfy divine justice. He exhausted his own life to
• 29:49
  secure ours and the 4th. Feature He did all of this.
• 29:52
  Without any expectation of being requited, he knew we were empty
• 29:55
  handed outcasts. We had nothing.
• 29:57
  To give back nothing we. Had no capacity to pay him back.
• 30:00
  He didn't stand in need of anything we could do for him.
• 30:02
  The Triune God lacks nothing, so there was no deficit in Christ
• 30:05
  that our service needed to fill. Think about how.
• 30:07
  That obliterates the what's in it for me mentality in our daily
• 30:12
  interactions. It destroys it.
• 30:14
  If. That heavenly plant of divine
• 30:16
  charity is actually growing in your soul.
• 30:19
  Your love for others cannot depend on their love for you.
• 30:22
  You have to love them, even if they are antagonistic, even if
• 30:24
  they actively. Hate you, You have to spend
• 30:26
  your. Resources, your time and your
• 30:28
  emotional energy on people who have zero capacity to pay you
• 30:31
  back either financially or emotionally.
• 30:34
  It completely destroys the transactional nature of modern
• 30:38
  relationships. That is the.
• 30:39
  Defining supernatural quality of the heavenly plant, it operates
• 30:43
  contrary to gravity. Edwards calls it less man like
• 30:47
  than God like having laid. Out this massive theological
• 30:50
  framework and looking at the perfect model of Christ's
• 30:53
  atonement, Edwards doesn't just leave us staring at the abstract
• 30:56
  concepts. He's very practical.
• 30:57
  He provides. Final, highly practical
• 31:00
  motivations for abandoning the cramped, tiny space of
• 31:03
  selfishness. He offers 3 logical arguments
• 31:06
  for why a Christian must reject a selfish spirit.
• 31:09
  Let's unpack these one by one. What is the first argument?
• 31:11
  The 1st. Argument is a stark reminder of
• 31:14
  Christian identity. You are not your own, not your
• 31:17
  own, right? Edwards points out that you did
• 31:19
  not make yourself, nor do you sustain yourself for a single
• 31:22
  second. You are neither the author of
• 31:24
  your existence nor the final end of your being, which flies in
• 31:28
  the. Face of our entire cultural
• 31:29
  narrative, we are trained from birth to view ourselves as
• 31:33
  self-made, self-sustaining, autonomous units we own our
• 31:36
  bodies, we own our time, we own our truth, but.
• 31:39
  Edwards reminds Christians of First Corinthians 6.
• 31:43
  They were bought with a price, the infinite price of Christ's
• 31:47
  blood. OK, so if.
• 31:48
  I'm bought with a price. The living for yourself is.
• 31:50
  Therefore, an act of cosmic theft.
• 31:53
  It is treating yourself as your own property when you actually
• 31:56
  belong entirely to another best. Wow.
• 31:58
  Robbing Christ. Of his purchased properties is a
• 32:01
  severe indictment of a selfish life.
• 32:03
  Your time, your talents, your influence, your bank account,
• 32:06
  your comforts, none of them are yours to hoard.
• 32:08
  You are a steward, not an owner that reframes.
• 32:12
  Every single decision, it reframes how I look at my
• 32:15
  calendar, my energy levels, my retirement accounts.
• 32:18
  If I'm not my own, I can't act like a sovereign nation closing
• 32:22
  its borders whenever I feel inconvenienced.
• 32:25
  What is the second motivation? The second motivation.
• 32:28
  Is that you are united to fellow Christians as one body we touch
• 32:33
  on the biological metaphor again drawing from first Corinthians
• 32:36
  12, the anatomy of. The Church.
• 32:38
  Edwards. Details The anatomy, the eye,
• 32:41
  the teeth, the feet do not labor for themselves.
• 32:44
  If a foot is injured, the eyes immediately look for a remedy.
• 32:48
  The hands apply the bandage. The members act instinctively
• 32:51
  for the common good of the whole Organism, I'm thinking.
• 32:53
  About the sympathetic nervous system.
• 32:56
  When you stub your toe on a doorframe, your brain doesn't
• 32:59
  say, well, that's a lower extremity problem.
• 33:01
  Let the toe deal with it. I'm busy thinking up here.
• 33:03
  You'd be in serious. Trouble if it did right your
• 33:05
  heart. Rate spikes.
• 33:06
  Your vocal cords shout. Your hands reach down to hold
• 33:09
  the foot. The entire Organism rallies to
• 33:12
  address the crisis. In one small member, Edwards is
• 33:15
  arguing that refusing to help a fellow human in need, especially
• 33:18
  a fellow believer, is as absurd and contrary to nature as a hand
• 33:22
  refusing to bandage a bleeding foot on the same body.
• 33:25
  It is a denial of biological and spiritual reality.
• 33:28
  It's completely. Unnatural to the new nature
• 33:30
  given by Christ. And that brings us to the third
• 33:33
  argument, which is perhaps the most striking paradox in the
• 33:36
  entire text. A paradox?
• 33:38
  Let's hear it. Giving up your own.
• 33:39
  Private interest to God is the single most reliable way to
• 33:43
  actually secure your true happiness.
• 33:46
  The great paradox of the Gospel. Whoever would save his life will
• 33:49
  lose it. Explain how Edwards frames this
• 33:52
  mechanic. Edwards argues.
• 33:54
  That if you aggressively idolize your own private interests, if
• 33:57
  you decide you are the best manager of your own joy and
• 34:00
  hoard everything to yourself, God will simply leave you to
• 34:03
  your own limited resources to secure that joy.
• 34:06
  He just hands you over. To yourself.
• 34:07
  He will step back. And let you promote your own
• 34:09
  interests as well as you can and human.
• 34:11
  Resources are pitifully small. We can't control the economy, we
• 34:14
  can't control disease. We can't even control our own
• 34:16
  brain chemistry. But if you.
• 34:18
  Willingly give your interests up for His glory.
• 34:22
  Abandoning that tiny contracted space, He makes your happiness
• 34:26
  His own charge. God takes over.
• 34:28
  The management God assumes. Direct responsibility for your
• 34:31
  welfare, and he commands the infinite resources of the
• 34:35
  universe. He can easily command all of
• 34:37
  history to subserve your ultimate welfare.
• 34:40
  That's a much better. Manager, he promises a.
• 34:42
  Hundredfold return in this life, in peace, in the communion of
• 34:46
  Saints, and everlasting expanded joy hereafter.
• 34:49
  The irony is. Astounding.
• 34:50
  The tighter you grip your own life, the faster it slips
• 34:53
  through your fingers. It's great trying to hold sand.
• 34:55
  Yeah. You try to build a tiny
• 34:57
  impenetrable fortress of self protection, hoarding your time
• 35:01
  and money, and you end up dying of starvation inside it.
• 35:05
  But opening your hands to God means the creator of the
• 35:08
  universe fills them. That's a beautiful.
• 35:10
  Picture not to seek. Your own in the narrow, selfish
• 35:13
  sense is actually the absolute best way of seeking your own in
• 35:16
  an eternal, expanded sense. Edwards says that.
• 35:18
  If you place your highest happiness in God and in doing
• 35:22
  good to others, you take the directest course to secure your
• 35:25
  highest happiness, you avoid being driven out of the world,
• 35:29
  at last naked and forlorn to everlasting poverty.
• 35:32
  Instead, God himself will be your inheritance, and all things
• 35:37
  will be yours. Let's pull all.
• 35:39
  These threads together we have traveled from the astringent
• 35:42
  shrinking of the fallen soul to the supernatural expansion of
• 35:45
  the soul transplanted by the Holy Spirit.
• 35:48
  It's quite a wide-ranging. Text it is, we have seen.
• 35:50
  How the engine of happiness must be steered away from the tiny
• 35:53
  cul-de-sac of the self and out onto the broad avenues of loving
• 35:57
  God and loving our neighbor. As we wrap up this deep dive, I
• 36:01
  want to ask you for a final thought to leave with the
• 36:03
  listener. Something that builds on
• 36:04
  Edwards's source material but pushes it directly into the
• 36:08
  water we are swimming in today. Well, I keep.
• 36:10
  Thinking about a brief detail from Edwards's text where he
• 36:13
  talks about how natural men form friendships.
• 36:15
  OK, Yeah. He points out that.
• 36:17
  They look for people whose disposition and manners agree
• 36:20
  with their own because it validates their own ways.
• 36:23
  It's a comfortable mirror, right?
• 36:24
  The. Transactional nature of natural
• 36:26
  affection we audited earlier take that psychological.
• 36:29
  Insight and map it onto our modern digital landscape we live
• 36:33
  in an era where algorithms are explicitly designed by thousands
• 36:37
  of brilliant engineers to feed us content, news and social
• 36:41
  connections that perfectly mirror our existing opinions the
• 36:45
  entire architecture of the Internet is built to find people
• 36:49
  whose disposition and manners agree with ours and to
• 36:52
  systematically block out everyone else that's a
• 36:54
  terrifying. Application.
• 36:56
  It raises a vital. Question Are we being trained
• 36:59
  day by day scroll by scroll into a highly sophisticated,
• 37:03
  technologically enabled form of contracted self love?
• 37:06
  Just tightening the. Sweater more and more are our.
• 37:09
  Curated digital lives just an infinite echo Chamber of the
• 37:12
  self. If we never encounter
• 37:14
  restriction, if we never have to extend grace to someone whose
• 37:16
  manners irritate us, whose politics offend us, or whose
• 37:19
  disposition is entirely foreign to us, we are starving the soul.
• 37:23
  Yeah, we really. Are we?
• 37:25
  Might be. Systematically preventing
• 37:27
  ourselves from ever developing the supernatural charity
• 37:30
  required to love those outside our immediate, agreeable circle.
• 37:35
  In many ways, the algorithm is the new powerful astringent
• 37:39
  shrinking our souls back down the microscopic dimensions of
• 37:42
  our own preferences. That is a.
• 37:44
  Haunting thought, an infinite echo Chamber of the self
• 37:47
  preventing the growth of that heavenly plant.
• 37:50
  It makes that tiny, contracted space feel very real and very
• 37:54
  present in our pockets. It really does.
• 37:56
  I want to leave you. The listener with that question
• 37:58
  to chew on today. Look at your life, look at your
• 38:00
  inputs. Are you letting the world shrink
• 38:02
  your soul down to the size of a screen?
• 38:04
  Or are you desperately seeking the supernatural enlargement
• 38:07
  that only comes from divine charity?
• 38:09
  Thank you for joining this deep dive into Edwards insights.
• 38:12
  Stay curious, keep your hands open, and we'll catch you next
• 38:15
  time.