The Unbiblical Sacred / Secular Divide | Clips from Salvation in Full Color: Love to God

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Yeah, so we talked earlier before the podcast about a stream using a river illustration.

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Imagine there being a great river in your life that was never there before. The river is love to God. You never loved him before, but by the great work of God in your soul, there is a love to him.

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But then you have all these areas of life like, okay, so how do I keep them from being a competitor? What if the scripture teaches that all these areas now become a part, if they're valid areas, we're not talking about sin.

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These become a part of our loving God, just like you mentioned. So loving my wife is not a competitor to loving

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God, and I don't have to worry about degrees if I'm loving her correctly, because loving her is part of loving

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God now. I love God, therefore I love my wife. And loving my wife in the present moment is part of loving

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God. And so there's no division anymore. You know, these are all united in one great act of devotion.

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I want to live unto God. And that means I have to love these people around me.

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But I don't feel there's a division. I mean, I never wake up and think of my life in this way. Imagine that we think of our heart as something that has 100 % love available.

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Okay, so I have 100 % of my love. And I wake up in the morning and I say, I'm not allowed to love anything more than I love

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God or anyone more. So God immediately gets 51%, just base.

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All right, that's where we start. God is going to get more than anybody else. He gets 51%. And then

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I have all these people around me, and I think, okay, so what, my wife gets 25, the kids get 15, you know, friends at work get five,

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Christians get 10. I mean, is that how we do it? I mean, nobody lives that way. We don't have to divide up our loves.

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I can love my wife wholeheartedly, as long as it's in the way that God says to show love to her, because it's still a part of loving

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God. And so I think that that really is very freeing, rather than saying, wait, maybe

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I love my wife too much today. Or maybe I love my children too much today. Well, no, did you love them in the right way, biblically?

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Was it guided by scripture? Then even if you love them wholeheartedly, that was part of loving God, you know?

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And so there's a, you know, I find that very freeing. Yeah, those philosophical categories that you mentioned earlier, the chief end or chief love and subordinate loves, if you're being ruled by that chief love, then the subordinate love shouldn't, how much you love the subordinate love is not a detraction from the chief love, if that's the one that's guiding.

02:42

Yeah, yeah, yeah, really. And I think that it's good for us to know that God accepts that, you know, the sacred secular divide in life, which is unbiblical, is cured by this as well.

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Like Brother Lawrence, the monk who talked about, you know, whatever he did, whether it was fixing the shoes of people in the monastery or cleaning the dishes, which he hated the kitchen, he said, he did it as unto the

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Lord. He did it as an expression of love to God. So he found that cleaning dishes could be just as much an expression of love as saying his prayers.

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It's not equally important, but it was equally love. And he knew that God accepted his expression of love in his daily tasks.

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A lot of people come to us as pastors and will say, you know, if only I didn't have to do this secular job all day,

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I could love God better. I could focus on God. Well, why not love God in the midst of doing your work as unto

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Him and believe what he says, that he accepts that as an expression of, you know, childlike submission, love.