John Stewartposted toSIGNS AND SEASONS CHRISTIAN JOY II I will mention the lovingkindnesses of the LORD, and the praises of the LORD, according to all that the LORD hath bestowed on us, and the great goodness according to his mercies (Isaiah 63:7). All true virtue must have in it a certain gladness of heart. Therefore the pursuit of virtue must be, in some measure, a pursuit of happiness. Its not enough to say that happiness will be the eventual result of virtuous choices. Rather, since a certain gladness of heart belongs to the nature of true virtue, that gladness must be pursued, if virtue is going to be pursued. And it follows that if we try to deny or mortify or abandon that pursuit of happiness, we set ourselves against virtue. And that would mean we set ourselves against the good of man and the glory of God. But what sort of happiness is essential in all virtuous acts? The answer of Christian Joy: its the happiness of experiencing the glory of God. In all virtuous acts we pursue the enjoyment of the glory of God, and more specifically, the enjoyment of the presence and the promotion of Gods glory. When I say that a Christian, in all his virtuous behavior, pursues the enjoyment of the presence of Gods glory, I have in mind mainly the experience of being the target of Gods grace, which is the pinnacle of his glory (Ephesians 1:6). To be targeted by Gods grace is to be in the presence of his glory. And the effect of that presence in the life of us sinners is to purify us from sin and empower us for holiness. And the enjoyment of this experience is the joy of knowing ourselves conquered by God, taken over by God, filled with God. A Christian knows that he is the target of Gods grace and that he is conquered by Gods grace. And so Christs grace gets the credit for his work. And what I am saying is that the enjoyment of this experience is an essential part of all true virtue. A person becomes addicted to that joy. He makes all his choices with a view to maximizing his enjoyment of the presence of the glory of Gods sovereign grace. So in all acts that are truly virtuous we must pursue the enjoyment of the presence of the glory of Gods grace. True virtue includes the enjoyment of the promotion of Gods glory not just the presence of his glory. What I have in mind here is the pleasure of seeing the perfections of God put on display for the universe. This is the experience Paul commanded us to pursue in 1 Corinthians 10:31, Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. The enjoyment of this promotion of Gods glory is really just an extension of our enjoyment of his presence. If you want to maximize your enjoyment of someones greatness, then you seek for other hearts where your joy will find an echo. And so the delight in seeing Gods glory promoted is simply an extension and completion of the delight we already have in his presence. All true virtue must have in it a certain gladness of heart. Therefore the pursuit of virtue must be in some measure a pursuit of happiness. And the happiness, which makes up an essential part of all virtue, is the enjoyment of the presence and the promotion of the glory of God. Therefore, if we try to deny or mortify or abandon the impulse to pursue this happiness, we set ourselves against the good of man and the glory of God. Rather we should seek to stir up our desire for this delight until it is white hot and insatiable on the earth. The ruin that the fall brought upon the soul of man consist very much in his losing the nobler and more benevolent principles of his nature, and falling wholly under the power and government of self-love. . . Sin like some powerful astringent, contracted his soul to the very small dimensions of selfishness; and God was forsaken, and fellow creatures forsaken, and man retired within himself, and became totally governed by narrow and selfish principles and feelings. Self-love became absolute master of his soul. All true virtue must have in it a certain gladness of heart in the glory of God. And therefore is no true virtue unless God is included. People dont see the connection between love for happiness and the centrality of God and the way that Christian Joy envisions it. It is not contrary to Christianity that a man should love himself, or, which is the same thing, should love his own happiness. If Christianity did indeed tend to destroy a mans love to himself, and to his own happiness, it would therein tend to destroy the very spirit of humanity. . . That a man should love his own happiness, is as necessary to his nature as the faculty of the will is and it is impossible that such a love should be destroyed in any other way than by destroying his being. The saints love their own happiness. Yea, those that are perfect in happiness, the saints and angels in heaven, love their own happiness; otherwise that happiness which God hath given them would be no happiness to them. That to love ourselves is not unlawful, is evident also from the fact, that the law of God makes self-love a rule and measure by which our love to others should be regulated. Thus Christ commands (Matthew 19:19), Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself, which certainly supposes that we may, and must love ourselves. . . And the same appears also from the fact, that the Scriptures, from one end of the Bible to the other, are full of motives that are set forth for the very purpose of working on the principle of self-love. Such are all the promises and threatenings of the word of God, its calls and invitations, its counsels to seek our own good, and its warnings to beware of misery. Self-love, taken in the most extensive sense, and love to God are not things properly capable of being compared one with another; for they are not opposites or things entirely distinct, but one enters into the nature of the other. . . Self-love is only a capacity of enjoying or taking delight in anything. Now surely tis improper to say that our love to God is superior to our general capacity of delighting in anything. In other words you can never play off self-love against love to God when self-love is treated as our love for happiness. Rather love to God is the form that self-love takes when God is discovered as the all satisfying focus of our happiness. Disinterested love to God is impossible because the desire for happiness is intrinsic to all willing or loving whatsoever, and God is the necessary end of the search for happiness. Logically one cannot be disinterested about the source or basis of all interest. We must seek our joy in God himself. It is a word designed to safeguard the God-centeredness of Christian Joy, not to oppose Christian Joy. As it is with the love of the saints, so it is with their joy, and spiritual delight and pleasure: the first foundation of it, is not any consideration or conception of their interest in (understand: natural benefit from) divine things; but it primarily consists in the sweet entertainment their minds have in the view or contemplation of the divine and holy beauty of these things, as they are in themselves. And this is indeed the very main difference between the joy of the hypocrite, and the joy of the true saint. The former rejoices in himself; self is the first foundation of his joy: the latter rejoices in God. . . True saints have their minds, in the first place, inexpressibly pleased and delighted with the sweet ideas of the glorious and amiable nature of the things of God. And this is the spring of all their delights, and the cream of all their pleasures. . . But the dependence of the affections of hypocrites is in a contrary order: they first rejoice. . . that they are made so much of by God; and then on that ground, he seems in a sort, lovely to them. Tis impossible for any person to be willing to be perfectly and finally miserable for Gods sake, for this supposes love to God is superior to self-love in the most general and extensive sense of self-love, which enters into the nature of love to God. . . If a man is willing to be perfectly miserable for Gods sake. . . then he must be willing to be deprived [not only of his own natural benefits, but also] of that which is indirectly his own, viz., Gods good, which supposition is inconsistent with itself; for to be willing to be deprived of this latter sort of good is opposite to that principle of love to God itself, from whence such a willingness is supposed to arise. Love to God, if it be superior to any other principle, will make a man forever unwilling, utterly and finally, to be deprived of that part of his happiness which he has in Gods being blessed and glorified, and the more he loves Him, the more unwilling he will be. So that this supposition, that a man can be willing to be perfectly and utterly miserable out of love to God, is inconsistent with itself. This love of complacence is a placing of his happiness . . . in a particular object. This sort of love, which is always in proportion to a love of benevolence, is also inconsistent with a willingness to be utterly miserable for Gods sake; for if a man is utterly miserable, he is utterly excluded [from] the enjoyment of God. . . The more a man loves God, the more unwilling will he be to be deprived of this happiness. Self-love is rejected only when it is conceived of in a narrow sense that excludes God as the object of all-satisfying joy. The type of self-love that is overcome in finding union with God is specifically selfishness, not the self-love that seeks the consummation of happiness. A love to God that arises solely from self-love cannot be a truly gracious and spiritual love . . . for self-love is a principle entirely natural, and as much in the hearts of devils; and therefore surely nothing that is the mere result of it can be supernatural and divine. Those who say that all love to God arises solely from self-love ought to consider a little further, and inquire how the man came to place his happiness in Gods being glorified, and in contemplating and enjoying Gods perfections. . . How came these things to be so agreeable to him, that he esteems it his highest happiness to glorify God? . . . If after a man loves God, and has his heart so united to him, as to look upon God as his chief good . . . it will be a consequence and fruit of this, that even self-love, or love to his own happiness, will cause him to desire the glorifying and enjoying of God; it will not thence follow, that this very exercise of self-love, went before his love to God, and that his love to God was a consequence and fruit of that. Something else, entirely distinct from self-love might be the cause of this, viz. a change made in the views of his mind, and relish of his heart whereby he apprehends a beauty, glory, and supreme good, in Gods nature, as it is in itself. Self-love alone cant account for the existence of spiritual love to God because prior to the souls going after happiness in God the soul has to perceive the excellency of God and be given a relish for it. This is what happens in regeneration. Divine love . . . may be thus described. Tis the souls relish of the supreme excellency of the Divine nature, inclining the heart to God as the chief good. The first thing in Divine love, and that from which everything that appertains to it arises, is a relish of the excellency of the Divine nature; which the soul of man by nature has nothing of. . . When once the soul is brought to relish the excellency of the Divine nature, then it will naturally, and of course, incline to God every way. It will incline to be with Him and to enjoy Him. It will have benevolence to God. It will be glad that He is happy. It will incline that He should be glorified, and that His will should be done in all things. So that the first effect of the power of God in the heart in REGENERATION, is to give the heart a Divine taste or sense; to cause it to have a relish of the loveliness and sweetness of the supreme excellency of the Divine nature; and indeed this is all the immediate effect of the Divine power that there is; this is all the Spirit of God needs to do, in order to a production of all good effects in the soul. The change that takes place in a man, when he is converted and sanctified, is not that his love for happiness is diminished, but only that it is regulated with respect to its exercises and influence, and the courses and objects it leads to. . . When God brings a soul out of a miserable state and condition into a happy state, by conversion, he gives him happiness that before he had not [namely, in God], but he does not at the same time take away any of his love of happiness. So the problem with our love for happiness is never that its intensity is too great. The main problem is that it flows in the wrong channels toward the wrong objects, because our nature is corrupt and in desperate need of renovation by the Holy Spirit. God is glorified within Himself these two ways: 1. By appearing . . . to Himself in His own perfect idea [of Himself], or in His Son who is the brightness of His glory. 2. By enjoying and delighting in Himself, by flowing forth in infinite love and delight towards Himself, or in his Holy Spirit. So God glorifies Himself toward the creatures also in two ways: 1. By appearing to . . . their understanding. 2. In communicating Himself to their hearts, and in their rejoicing and delighting in, and enjoying, the manifestations which He makes of Himself. . . God is glorified not only by His glorys being seen, but by its being rejoiced in. When those that see it delight in it, God is more glorified than if they only see it. His glory is then received by the whole soul, both by the understanding and by the heart. God made the world that He might communicate, and the creature receive, His glory; and that it might [be] received both by the mind and heart. He that testifies his idea of Gods glory [doesnt] glorify God so much as he that testifies also his approbation of it and his delight in it. Because [God] infinitely values his own glory, consisting in the knowledge of himself, love to himself, and complacence and joy in himself; he therefore valued the image, communication or participation of these, in the creature. And it is because he values himself, that he delights in the knowledge, and love, and joy of the creature; as being himself the object of this knowledge, love and complacence. . . [Thus] Gods respect to the creatures good, and his respect to himself, is not a divided respect; but both are united in one, as the happiness of the creature aimed at, is happiness in union with himself. It follows from all this that it is impossible that anyone can pursue happiness with too much passion and zeal and intensity. Virtue is what we do with all our might in pursuit of the enjoyment of the presence and promotion of the glory of God. And therefore the cultivation of spiritual appetite is a great duty for all the saints. Men . . . ought to indulge those appetites. To obtain as much of those spiritual satisfactions as lies in their power. That persons need not and ought not to set any bounds to their spiritual and gracious appetites. For God giveth to a man that is good in his sight wisdom, and knowledge, and joy (Ecclesiastes 2:26).
Posted on: Sun, 17 Nov 2013 23:16:38 +0000
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