Reordering Loves

So we shouldn't think of obedience as sort of this rote obligation. You know, God gave me a list and I'm checking things off a list. It's not that. It's about living according to God's instruction. It's about exhibiting wisdom, learning wisdom, learning discernment, and then living that out on a day-to-day basis.

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Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of Prepped. Today we are going to be talking about reordering our loves. This concept in my mind, or where I've come across this concept, I think most often is from two sources, obviously the Bible. And I would say particularly Deuteronomy 6:5. We talked about Deuteronomy 6:5 last time, but I was really introduced to Deuteronomy 6:5 in a deep way during my Master of Biblical Exegesis at Wheaton College. And we were asked to memorize Deuteronomy 6:5 as part of our introductory Hebrew class. And so I actually got to memorize this verse in Hebrew. And so it's got a, there's fondness for me. I think I can actually still do it. I'm not going to do it on the podcast here, but I think I could actually still do it. And it's one of those passages that as I meditated on it, as I thought about it, as I memorized it, as I looked at the context for it and the various ways that it sort of makes its way out of Deuteronomy into things like Jesus' statements in the Gospels, I really started to understand why it was so crucial to an understanding of what it means to be a Christian, how to live under God's authority. You know, we see this passage, Deuteronomy 6:5, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might. We see Jesus repeat that when he's asked about what the greatest commandment is. And he says the greatest commandment is love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength. And the second is like it, love your neighbor as yourself. And so that ordering of the commandments that Jesus says is the summary of all the law and the prophets really has played a role in thinkers who go about trying to understand what it means to love God and love other things. And I would say particularly Augustine is one of those folks who really looks at these issues and tries to understand what's going on with them. Augustine says this in The City of God. He says, for avarice or greed is not a fault inherent in gold, but in the man who inordinately loves gold to the detriment of justice, which ought to be held in incomparably higher regard than gold. And so what Augustine's point here is, is that the problem isn't the objects of our love, but the way that we love them. Misdirected love tends to twist something good into something destructive. And so while rightly ordered love transforms us and aligns us with God's purposes, disordered loves tend to do the opposite. They tend to make us, we might say, less human, as opposed to having rightly ordered loves making us more human. They tend to distort our understanding of reality and our view of reality, as opposed to correcting it. And so in today's episode, we're going to explore several topics: why reordering our loves is actually necessary, what rightly what disordered love looks like, some practical steps to reorder our loves, and then how reordering loves impacts our daily lives. So to begin with, why is it that reordering our loves is necessary? Why do our loves need to be reordered in the first place? And I think the answer lies in the human condition. Since the fall, our loves have been misdirected. We often love creation more than the Creator. We see that in Romans 1:25. And so we prioritize temporary pleasures over eternal joy. I think we even see this in Genesis 3:1-7 itself. You can go back and listen to the episode I did on Genesis 3:1-7. But one of the key parts of that text is when the serpent sort of responds to the woman, the woman looks at the tree and she sees that the tree is good for food and pleasurable for making one wise, and she takes of its fruit and she eats it. And so in that moment, what she's done is she said, I am going to use my own independent judgment apart from God. I'm going to step out from under God's authority, and I'm going to trust my own senses, and I'm going to decide what's good for me and what's bad for me. And that speaks to this misordering of loves. All of a sudden, what she wants, what her vision for humanity, her desire to be like God, knowing good and evil, is now what she's going to pursue. This is what she's become loyal to. And so at the beginning of that text, Genesis 3:1-7, what we see is the woman defending God. She is loyal to him. She's saying, no, God didn't say these things. He's protecting us. This is a good thing. Look at this paradise that he's put us in. This is amazing. By the end of that passage, she's decided that the paradise God created was a prison. The serpent convinced her that instead of God being sovereign, good, and wise, that God is vulnerable, that he is malevolent, and that his wisdom is achievable by humans. And so what we find in this passage is really this necessity of having our life— once we follow the way of Adam and Eve, once we follow the way of sin in the flesh, now we are off-kilter. Our loves are disordered. And so we see some of these examples of disordered loves even in our own lives today. We could talk about success. You know, success is about working tirelessly to achieve whatever it is that we're trying to achieve and sacrificing relationships for that. We're, we're ordering our lives based on something that we're chasing out here. I want that big career. I want that big paycheck. I want the reputation that comes with it, and I'm willing to do anything to get it. We can understand how that, that shape Being loyal to the idea of success, some, some, you know, ideal version of what it means to be successful would shape the rest of our lives. We can have, you know, relationships can do the same thing. You know, we see a parent and might make their child's happiness their ultimate priority, right? They're going to be completely loyal to this child and, and having this child grow up and become a certain thing or have certain things. This becomes the, the ordering principle principle of that parent's life? Well, we see in scriptures that we— there are a lot of advice given to parents and to children, but when we're thinking about parents, the parents are to exercise this authority over their children in a particular way, and it's supposed to be exercised under the authority of God. And so the ordering of that relationship needs to be just that. It needs to be God is the final authority. We're living under his authority, and as we live under his authority, we're also parents. And so our parenting is shaped by our loyalty to God. It's not that the child becomes the most important thing, and then when we can serve God, we'll do that too. So our success, our relationships, these can become ways that we disordered love. And then I think just ourselves, you know, there's a, there's a real practical way in which we can put ourselves first in most of these instances. And it's easy to center our lives around our own personal comfort rather than God's purposes. God's often going to call us into areas where we are uncomfortable, where our needs aren't necessarily— they don't look like they're going to be served, at least. And so we can privilege a certain perspective of what we mean when we say, you know, this is my life, this is why I want to be this ideal perception. I think the idea of ideal perceptions is really crucial. I see this when I'm doing some research on biblical manhood and biblical masculinity, and I think that there's a lot of what I'm seeing as I'm doing my literature review on some of these things where Christian manhood is unfortunately being measured against an ideal type of masculinity that's often a little bit more muscular and macho than I think the Bible requires. And so what I think we're doing to a large part in Christian circles and what many people are doing when they speak about manhood is they are redirecting, they're misordering loves, they're advocating for misordered loves. They're not shaping this underneath the authority of God. They're shaping it according to a cultural picture of what an ideal man looks like. And so all that to say, there's a lot of different ways that we can disorder our loves. Disordered loves, when we have disordered loves, they're going to affect every aspect of our lives. And they tend to lead us away from God and distort the way that we treat others. So what does rightly ordered love look like? Well, I think to reorder our loves, we need to understand what rightly ordered love actually is. And Augustine gives us some key insights. He uses this analogy of sort of a river. I live near the Mississippi River, and so I have a decent enough sense of what that river looks like. But if you, you know, if you think about a sort of a raging river, if you've ever gone whitewater rafting,, right? Uh, and you see these rafts going down the, the water. You have to fight to get them to go a different direction, right? Because that water is powerful. It's going to push you in one way. And so if we think about our love for God being that whitewater, this huge current that's just carrying us along, right? And we've, we've immersed ourselves in this current. There's nothing now that we do that is not influenced by that current. And it's going to be very difficult if we're really and truly devoted to being loyal to God in an unqualified way. There's very little from that current that we can— we can't deviate from that current very much. So everything we throw in the boat with us, right, is going to flow along with that current. It's going to go in that same direction. It has that same trajectory. That's what I mean when I say these things are shaped by. Our unqualified devotion to God. Being a, you know, it's not that these things are bad, but if left to my own devices and I say, what does it mean to be a husband? I don't know what it means to be a husband apart from what God has told me being a husband is. That instruction is crucial for me to order and understand and shape the way that I'm a husband. Same with fathering, same with being a child, same with, you know, working, same with You name it. This is why we say that the Bible is the final authority for life and faith. It's because as we devote ourselves to it, it offers us instruction to understand how these things work. I think a related picture is this idea of nesting. Talked about this a little bit in the last episode, but that picture of the Russian nesting dolls where the largest doll is our love for God and all the other loves fit within that and are shaped in the same way as that biggest nesting doll. I think that's a crucial picture of what that looks like. And then what I would also just throw out there is that we have a connection between love and obedience. Again, in the last episode, we talked about love in terms of loyalty. And so we express our allegiance to God by obeying his word. We see this in something like John 14:15, various other places. But I think obedience sometimes gets a bad reputation. You know, we tend to think of it as sort of Old Covenant as opposed to New Covenant. But the reality is that if we look at something like Ezekiel. Ezekiel talks about the new covenant in terms of obeying the law. God is going to give us a heart of flesh instead of a heart of stone. He's going to put his spirit within us and cause us to keep his commandments and his statutes. And so this obedience is a manifestation of our deep love for God. It's about our covenantal faithfulness to the Lord. And so that is that unqualified love, that loyalty to God is going to manifest itself in obedience. And so we shouldn't think of obedience as sort of this rote obligation. You know, God gave me a list and I'm checking things off a list. It's not that. It's about living according to God's instruction. It's about exhibiting wisdom, learning wisdom, learning discernment, and then living that out on a day-to-day basis. And that's done as we continually put our loyalty to God as this unqualified loyalty. Where there's no remainder, no reserve left. So what are the dynamics of misdirected love look like? You know, go back to Augustine and he has this quote. He says, those who inordinately love the good which any nature possesses, even though he obtain it himself, becomes evil in the good and wretched because deprived of a greater good. So let me just read that again. He who inordinately loves the good. So this expanded love of the good, this, this, uh, maybe we could say an obsession with it, which any nature possesses. So what Augustine believes is that because all of creation was created by God, there's good in everything. Everything that God created has some good in it. And oftentimes what we view as evil is actually a distortion of the good that God has put into these things. Even though he obtain it, so even though he gets that good, himself becomes evil in the good. In other words, because he's pursuing the good as opposed to pursuing God, obtaining the good actually has this detrimental effect on the person. And wretched because deprived of a greater good. So because he's missed out on God, this person is now misordered and deformed, we might say, because he's been chasing after some good. But he's been missing God. So that's, that's sort of Augustine's thesis. And what I'd say is it's really crucial to understand this. So, um, I'll explain it like this. If you've ever seen, uh, I, I talked about on the podcast that I do a lot of weight training, and so I, I don't go in for— I would be what they call, uh, you know, sort of a natty, a natural. I don't use steroids, I don't use, uh, you know, testosterone treatments or anything like that. Um, there are other folks who do do that, and they're shaped very differently than I am. These are, you know, professional bodybuilders who are open about the sort of, quote, gear that they're using, and their shape is very different than mine. But then if you look at someone who just maybe does yoga or Pilates or, you know, runs marathons, generally their shape is going to look different than the shape that I'm in. Sometimes, you know, it is just a different sort of exercise. And so as they pursue the goal of running a marathon, let's say, their training regimen has to look different than mine, which is more oriented to, you know, lifting big heavy weights off the floor. And so there just has to be a difference that's going to change the way we look, you know, in many ways. And so I think this is what Augustine is saying here, is that when we choose a goal other than God, We are not going to be God-shaped. We're going to be goal-shaped. And that goal shape may seem good to us. It may not even be the worst thing in the world, right? It may not be, you know, us falling into evil and being, you know, completely depraved or something like that. We may not think of it as a bad thing. But Augustine says that we are wretched because we've deprived ourselves of a greater good. Because we've been goal-oriented as opposed to God-oriented, we are going to be shaped differently. And we may— the danger of it, I think the biggest danger is we don't recognize that being goal-shaped is actually really bad for us. And so this is one way to think about how Augustine describes, I think, the ordering of loves, that it has a shape that it gives to the person who orders their lives around a good as opposed to ordering their lives around a God. And so when we love things, when we love even good things more than we love God, they're going to become what shape us. We often refer to these as idols. I'm hesitating to use the word idols, not because I don't think that that's right, but I don't want to give the wrong connotation here. So I do think that when we order, when we give our loyalty to something other than God, we are essentially, you know, our complete allegiance to that. We are going to become what we worship. We're going to become what we're loyal to, that that is going to shape us and change us. And so in that sense, it is idolatry. What I, what I would say is that, you know, idolatry, when we think about it, tends to have a really negative connotation. And so sometimes when we use that term, we're really looking for something that's super bad. And so that's why I'm sort of staying away from it, because I don't want you to walk away from this conversation thinking that having disordered loves, um, has to look really, really bad. It doesn't have to look really, really bad. It can look like pursuing goodness. It can look like pursuing justice, for instance. Uh, but if we consume ourselves with justice, if justice achieving justice becomes the end-all be-all of our existence, I would argue that we are not actually pursuing God anymore. We're pursuing justice. And while that may appear okay, doesn't look like we're doing something, you know, idolatrous, it actually is idolatry. And so we have to recognize that, that even if our lives end up looking generally moral or wholesome, As I like to say, we can't settle for wholesomeness because only holiness will do. Okay, so let me just address one other question because we've been talking about love in terms of loyalty, and I do think this opens up sort of an aside question of what are we saying about non-Christian love? So can non-Christians love? And I think the short answer to that is yes, of course they can., but their love is always going to be incomplete because it's not rooted in God. They're always going to be shaped and formed by some other sort of loyalty that they've decided is their penultimate loyalty. Let's say it's patriotism. Let's say it's, um, love of family. Let's say it's, um, you know, a different, uh, a different god from a different religion., right? Uh, it's always going to skew. So if you think of two lines, um, and, and you start from, you know, they're starting from the same point and one is perfectly straight. And this, let's say this is the way, the truth, and the life. This is Jesus. The way of Jesus is a perfectly straight line to God. Anything that is slightly off about this other line is ultimately going to go off course, even if it's just like half a percent of a degree. Right? Over time, that divergence is going to grow. And so it's no longer the way. It's some other way. It's no longer Christ. It's something else. And that something else is always going to skew both us and the direction that we're headed. And so over time, the divergence is just going to grow. And I think non-Christians, they can love, they can be loving. I know many non-Christians who have helped me in tremendous ways. They've been fantastic human beings to me. But there is a sense in which this ordering of love is not simply Christian. It's universal. Christians understand it because we've been given God's revelation. We know Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior, but non-Christians are subject to it as well. Non-Christian love needs to be ordered to the triune God just in the way that Christian loves do. The problem with non-Christians is they're rejecting that ordering. They're seeking for some other sort of ordering. They're ignorant of that ordering, and so they don't know to order their lives in relation to the triune God because they don't know him. And so, can non-Christians love? Of course. But I think it's going to lack that sort of eternal orientation that rightly ordered love provides, and thus the way that they love is always going to be conditioned by something else.. And having been conditioned by something else, I would argue that they're incapable of loving their neighbor in the same way Christians are. They're incapable of loving their enemies in the same way Christians are. They're incapable, certainly, of obeying God in the same way Christians are. And so that's part of why we want to look at our non-Christian neighbors and show them the love of Christ so that they can rightly order their loves as well and learn, as we have, to and are to walk in a newness of life, as we see in Romans 6:4. All right, so practical steps to reorder our loves. Here are some, here are some that I've thought of. I think number one is sort of self-examination. We have to ask ourselves, what do I really care about? What in this moment am I really caring about? Am I allowing God to shape my desires in this moment, or am I deciding that my loyalty to God stops here and I'm going to decide on my own, apart from his authority, apart from his instruction, exactly what I want to go do and exactly where I want to go. And so I think we just have to recognize that Matthew 6:21 is actually really important. Where our treasure is, there our heart will be also. We are going to follow our hearts. We're going to follow our thoughts, our will, our decision-making. And if those things haven't been fully given over to God in an unqualified sense, we're going to end up going in the wrong direction. So self-examination is actually a pretty crucial part of this. Then I'd say confession and repentance. You know, confession is an interesting one for me. When I look at 1 John 1:9, I love that passage because it makes confession a mark of the Christian community. And so what I see is the Christian community isn't called to be You know, we should not assume that the Christian community is going to be perfect, that we're never going to sin again once we have Christ. My experience certainly negates that assumption. But I think what shows the marks and why confession is a mark of Christianity is that we are so devoted to following Christ. We are so devoted to conforming to his image that confessing our sins becomes something that we do even when it is to our detriment. When we are able to sit back and say, yeah, I did this wrong, and I don't know that there are any negative consequences that I could accrue that are worse than not following Christ. That's essentially what confession is. And so as part of what we do as our practice, we are confessing our sins because we recognize that our will has to be submitted to God's will, and that even if that brings negative connotations for a time, It's absolutely worth it. Number 3, I think we need to refocus our attention. We're going to talk a little bit about this in the next episode, but I would say that identifying what distracts us from God and establishing habits that direct our focus back to him is really crucial. You know, I always think of the narrative of Martha and Mary. Martha is not distracted by something that's bad. She's distracted with much serving. And so she misses out on sitting at Jesus's feet. She misses the good portion. But that distraction isn't— that distraction, or what she's distracted by, isn't bad. It's the distraction itself that's the problem. And so what we want to try to do is learn to orient our attention to God. We want to pay attention to him. And then I think the last thing is just practice obedience. We've got to let our love for God be expressed in obedience. And that may require some hard choices. It may require us to do things that don't make sense at certain times. But at the end of the day, the more we practice obedience, I think the easier it's going to to be, to be obedient going forward. As we are loyal to God, the way I see this happening, we're loyal to God and God shows up. We start to have this new participatory experience of God. And so we reinforce not only God's active presence among us, but his benevolence to us. And we recognize that he's doing something that we may not understand. And the way we participate that is not by trying to understanding it., you know, trying to get God to tell us exactly the way this is all going to turn out. We participate simply by being obedient and trusting that he is going to work all things together for the good of those who love him. So I think reordering love can transform us because it does give us a peace that we can't have otherwise. When we are completely and totally loyal to God, we have a level of stability that no one else has. Because we know that God is not going to move. We know that God is going to be faithful. We know that God is unassailable. He is not subject to the problems that we face in this life. They don't bother him. He cares for them, but they don't affect him in the same way that they affect us. They don't stop him. They don't create obstacles for him. God is not hindered by any of that. So he's in the fray and above the fray all at the same time. It's going to give us— re-earning love is going to give us a different sort of understanding of our purpose. So when we aim our lives at being completely loyal to God with no qualification and no remainder, we actually are going to move and breathe in a different way in our lives. We're going to ask different questions. It's going to give us a particular aim, and that aim is living in the presence of God. That's where we're headed, that beatific vision. Again, if you go back in the earlier podcast episodes, I talk about the beatific vision with regard to creation and this progression that we're going through to stand in the presence of God. And then I think we're going to have fulfillment. We're going to find joy in God rather than in fleeting pleasures. And when we have this sort of deep, ongoing, loyal relationship with God, we throw around the word relationship an awful lot. And what I would say is this relationship with God is expressed through loyalty. It is expressed through obedience. And in that, we come to love the Lord in a more intimate way. And so we're going to find this fulfillment. We're going to realize, sort of as Paul does, that he doesn't need a whole lot, that he's learned to be content with a lot or with a little. And it's because he's gone through the wringer with God and come out the other side. And so ultimately, those three things—peace, purpose, and fulfillment—I think is what we're going to have as we seek to reorder our loves. So just to conclude here, reordering our loves, it's a long and I think a lifelong journey. Journey, but I think it's a journey worth taking. And Augustine really does remind us that love shapes who we are and where we're headed. So I just encourage you to take some time this week to reflect on your loves. Ask God to show you where they are misaligned and help you reorder them for his glory. Let's bring all of this underneath the authority of God, and particularly, you know, understanding that God is what we are ordering all our lives toward. Because as we do that, we're going to be transformed in ways that are beyond anything we could ever ask or think. Hey, thanks for joining me on this episode of Prepped. If you like this episode, if it resonated with you, please share it with a friend and leave a review. Don't forget to subscribe to our podcast on wherever you listen to your podcast, Apple or Spotify or wherever. Subscribe to our YouTube channel. And in our next episode, we'll explore how reorienting attention plays a role in living an unbalanced life. Until then, let's commit to loving God with all we are and have, and letting that love reshape every part of our lives.

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