Charity and its fruits - Edwards - IX - Lecture VII

Required reading
Charity and its fruits by Jonathan Edwards (Available from Amazon or free here) - Read Lecture VIII (The spirit of charity the opposite of a selfish spirit).

My summary
Now we are taught that the spirit of Christian love is the opposite of a selfish spirit.

Firstly Edwards shows us that this is the case by observing that:
(i) love is not contrary to all self-love;
(ii) selfishness which love is contrary to, is only an inordinate self-love.

Secondly Edwards demonstrates how love is contrary to selfish love by showing that:
(i) love leads those who possess it to seek not only their own things, but the things of others;
(ii) love disposes us in many cases to forego and part with our own things for the sake of others.

Thirdly Edwards notices some of the evidences sustaining the doctrine that love is the opposite of a selfish spirit.  These evidences are seen when we consider:
(i) the nature of love in general;
(ii) the peculiar nature of Christian or divine love;
(iii) the nature of Christian love to God and to man in particular.

Then to conclude Edwards makes some applications of the subject to try and dissuade all from a selfish spirit and to exhort all to seek that spirit of love and live that life which shall be contrary to it.  To do this, he tells us to consider that:
(i) you are not your own;
(ii) you are united to Christ;
(iii) in seeking the glory of God and the good of your fellow-creatures you take the surest way to have God seek your interests and promote your welfare.

What grabbed me
I liked Edwards affirmation of self-love at the beginning of the chapter. 

And particularly his illustration of how love of self can become sinful: 'To illustrate this, we may suppose the case of a servant in a family, who was formerly kept in the place of a servant, and whose influence in family affairs was not inordinate while his master's strength was greater than his ; and yet if afterward the master grows weaker and loses his strength, and the rest of the family lose their former power, though the servant's strength be not at all increased, yet the proportion of his strength being increased, his influence may become inordinate; and from being in subjection and a servant, he may become master in that house. And so self-love becomes inordinate. Before the fall, man loved himself, or his own happiness, as much as after the fall ; but then a superior principle of divine love had the throne, and was of such strength that it wholly regulated and directed self-love. But since the fall, the principle of divine love has lost its strength, or rather is dead, so that self-love continuing in its former strength, and having no superior principle to regulate it, becomes inordinate in its influence, and governs where it should be subject, and only a servant. Self-love, then, may become inordinate in its influence by being comparatively too great ; either by love to God and to fellow-creatures being too small, as it is in the saints, who in this world have great remaining corruption ; or by its being none at all, as is the case with those who have no divine love in their hearts. Thus the inordinateness of self-love, with respect to the degree of it, is not as it is considered absolutely, but comparatively or with respect to the degree of its influence. In some respects wicked men do not love themselves enough — not so much as the godly do ; for they do not love the way of their own welfare and happiness, and in this sense it is sometimes said of the wicked, that they hate themselves, though in another sense, they love self too much. '

Without God's love to govern our love of self, we are lost.

Next week's reading
Read Lecture IX (The spirit of charity the opposite of an angry wrathful spirit).

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