Subordinate Good and Chief Good | Salvation in Full Color: Love to God

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Well, let's look at some of the key points. He describes the nature of love, and then he applies that to God.

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So he opens his definition by saying, it is a grace of the Spirit. Chuck, why does he tell us it's a grace of the

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Spirit? He talks about love as an affection that unites the soul to what it finds attractive or desirable.

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And by nature, as sinners, we don't find God desirable. And so we don't by nature love

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God. We're at enmity with God. And so it has to be a work of the Spirit that changes us to see God as desirable so that we will love

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Him. Yeah, and there's very practical application when we think of evangelism.

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You know, when you're speaking to a person and you're laying before them the facts of the gospel, the facts about themselves, about a holy

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God, about the wonderful work of redemption, apart from the Holy Spirit altering the nature, you know, renewing the nature, regenerating, awakening, quickening the person, everything we say about God may seem on the surface like, well, okay, that's a nice thing.

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But there will be no delight in God in that person's heart until the

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Holy Spirit deals with them within. And then once that occurs, you can't make a

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Christian stop delighting in God. You know, I mean, our love is imperfect, but it's there. Yeah, so it is a work of the

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Spirit, and we have to start there. There are reasons that God is lovely, but none of them matter to us as long as we are blind.

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And he mentions, he says, you know, because of the effect of sin, our heart does go out, our soul does unite itself to quite a lot of other things.

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Basically, self, lovers of self and lovers of pleasure. And he mentions that none of these things, none of the creative things in this world can really satisfy the soul.

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That's why as lost people, we have to have many loves, many idols. Well, second, he says that God is our chief good.

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And this is a phrase that we don't often use. It was a philosophical category, and I think that it's a very good category.

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So it's good to stop and talk about it. When they were being very precise talking about the value of things, some of the older writers used the categories of, we can say, subordinate and chief.

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So a subordinate good is something that may be good in itself, but its real value is what it leads to.

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So, you know, let's say education. Getting an education is good, but if there was nothing at the end of an education, if there was never any hope of a job, if there's no way to apply the education, then you would look at the education as kind of drained of a lot of its value.

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Like, well, I was hoping it was leading to something better. You may get in a car and drive somewhere, and the drive may be a pretty drive, but the real value in the drive is the destination.

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So if someone turned to you and said, we will actually never arrive at a destination, you would think, that really changes my view of the value of the drive.

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So subordinate goods are things in life which may or may not have value in themselves, but whether they have value or not in themselves, their great value lies in what they're leading to, something better.

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A chief good is something that doesn't lead to anything greater because it is the ultimate.

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And so we don't value it for what it's going to bring us or where it's going to lead us, but we value it for itself.

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So it's not a useful good. It is an end in itself. Yeah, it is the goal. And so the word useful is really good when we think about God.

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So do we view God as useful, or do we view Him as the great treasure? And he talks about this in this chapter, and that real

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Christian love views God as the ultimate goal, as the great treasure above which there is no better thing.

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So a good test for us, are we content? If God is useful, then every day we wake up, we kind of,

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I mean, I kind of think of this statement going on in my heart, you know, before I was a Christian. Okay, I'm going to church now.

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I'm being a good person. And God, that means you're going to provide A, B, and C, you know, that will make me happy.

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And I'm always discontent because God isn't quite doing it. He's not doing it fast enough.

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He's not doing it big enough. But after coming to Christ, the heart is so altered that we understand, no, wait,

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God has given us Himself. And while there are many sweet things in the Christian life, they are far sweeter when we realize that they lead to Him.

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And I am content. I'm not waiting for God to give me something better.

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He has given me Himself. So a great test for our relationship with the