Love and Duty

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Hey guys, John here. Just wanted to share with you a little bit from my book Against the Waves, Christian Order in a

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Liberal Age, againstthewavesbook .com. There's a chapter called A Rightly Ordered Love in which

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I talk about the way that love and duty actually complement each other and go together and how different thinkers throughout history have tried to separate these things.

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One of the interesting things though to me was to ponder the Pharisees and how the Pharisees, Josephus talks about them being fastidious in their attempts to keep the law.

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And yet Jesus says in Luke 11 that their problem is, and I'll quote it, he says that they pay tithes of mint, rue, and every kind of garden herb while ignoring justice and the love of God.

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So they didn't even love God. And you can see it in examples like, you know, they would say that their money was korban, meaning it was given to God, so they couldn't take care of the people that God had charged them with, that were within their responsibility to take care of in their family, their parents for example.

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And this is one of the things that can easily, well

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I shouldn't say easily, but it's common enough that it seems like it could easily happen, where the love for keeping the rules and the law and the duties can overshadow the sense of love.

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And, you know, I've heard a lot of sermons like this where agape is just broken down into strictly duty, but agape also carries a sense of affectionate regard or benevolence towards someone.

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And this is something that if you've never heard this, you probably should get my book and start exploring some of these things.

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There really should be a sense of affection and a sense of duty and obligation to those to whom you have this affection.

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And there are times that you're going to maybe not have the affection initially.

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You know, in history you could think of like arranged marriages that people engaged in for the purpose of duty, for their family survival even, and they have to learn to develop that affection even when initially they're operating out of duty.

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But that's not really ideal. Loving God especially is a privilege.

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We have every reason to be affectionate towards God and every reason to also obey

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Him and fulfill the duty that we have to Him. So there's a lot more I talk about along these lines in my chapter called

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A Rightly Ordered but it's really about the Ordo Amoris, and you can go to againstthewavesbook .com