Jonathan Edwards on “the nature of the true Christian”

                                                                                                                                     Vol. XVII, No. 7, June/July 2004

... Edwards argued that authentic affections cause a person to love God for his intrinsic excellence, beauty, and perfections. Loving God merely for what he can do for a person is ungodly self-love. The genuine Christian loves God because He is the sovereign Creator. This runs counter to contemporary evangelism methodologies that begin – and often end – with God's love for man. This thinking is backward, according to Edwards.

The exercises of true and holy love in the saints arise in another way. They do not first see that God loves them, and then see that He is lovely, but they first see that God is lovely and that Christ is excellent and glorious, ... The saint's affections begin with God; and self-love has a hand in these affections consequentially and secondarily only. On the contrary, false affections begin with self, and an acknowledgment of an excellency in God, and an affectedness with it, is only consequential and dependent. In the love of the true saint God is the lowest foundation ... but the hypocrite lays himself at the bottom of all, as the first foundation, and lays God as the superstructure; and even his acknowledgment of God's glory itself depends on his regard to his private interest.

[Excerpted from The Founders Journal, Summer 2003, p. 28, www.founders.org]