Charity and its fruits - Edwards - VIII - Lecture VII

Required reading
Charity and its fruits by Jonathan Edwards (Available from Amazon or free here) - Read Lecture VII (The spirit of charity is an humble spirit).

My summary
This week we see that the spirit of love is a humble spirit.

Firstly Edwards explains what is humility.  It is:
(i) a sense of our own comparative meanness;
(ii) a disposition to a corresponding behaviour and conduct.

Secondly Edwards teaches us how a Christian spirit is a humble spirit.  He does this by showing
(i) how the spirit of love implies and tends to humility;
(ii) how such exercises of this charity as the gospel tends to draw forth do especially imply and tend to it.

Then Edwards exhorts us to:
(i) see the excellency of a Christian spirit;
(ii) examine ourselves and see if we are indeed of an humble spirit;
(iii) seek grace that you may attain the spirit of humility;
(iv) seek much of an humble spirit, and to endeavour to be humble in all your behaviour toward God and men.

What grabbed me
I liked the point that we should be humble as created beings, but even more so as sinful created beings: 'All this would apply to men considered as unfallen beings, and would have been true of our race if our first parents had not fallen, and thus involved their posterity in sin. But humility in fallen men, implies a sense of a ten-fold meanness, both before God and men. Man's natural meanness consists in his being infinitely below God in natural perfection, and in God's being infinitely above him in greatness, power, wisdom, majesty, &c. And a truly humble man is sensible of the small extent of his own knowledge, and the great extent of his ignorance, and of the small extent of his understanding as compared with the understanding of God. He is sensible of his weakness ; how little his strength is, and how little he is able to do. He is sensible of his natural distance from God ; of his dependence on him ; of the insufficiency of his own power and wisdom, and that it is by God's power that he is upheld and provided for, and that he needs God's wisdom to lead and guide him, and his might to enable him to do what he ought to do for him. He is sensible of his subjection to God, and that God's greatness does properly consist in his authority, whereby he is the sovereign Lord and king over all ; and he is willing to be subject to that authority, as feeling that it becomes him to submit to the divine will, and yield in all things to God's authority. Man had this sort of comparative littleness before the fall. He was then infinitely little and mean in comparison with God ; but his natural meanness is become much greater since the fall, for the moral ruin of his nature has greatly impaired his natural faculties, though it has not extinguished them. '

How humble we should be!

Next week's reading
Read Lecture VIII (The spirit of charity the opposite of a selfish spirit).

Now it's your turn
Please post your own notes and thoughts in the comments section below.