Love to God (Joseph Sewall) | The Whole Counsel

Love to God as the Great Commandment

Welcome to the Whole Council Podcast. I'm Jon Snyder and with me again is Chuck Baggett and we're looking at the book Salvation in Full Color. 20 sermons by Great Awakening preachers and all the sermons are on the same topic generally, the work of God in saving a soul.

But each sermon deals with a specific aspect and they're laid out in an order, theologically appropriate order. The sermon we're looking at today is a sermon entitled Love to God and we want to point out that this is about three-fourths the way through the book.

So it is not talking about God's love for the sinner. That was earlier on and that's foundational we would say, but it's discussing the impact of God's love toward the sinner and that is the sinner's love to God.

So we've had repentance and faith, adoption, conversion, and now the great reality in the Christian that we love God. Chuck, tell us about the preacher for this sermon. Joseph Sewell was born in Boston in 1688.

His father for a time was the Chief Justice of the Superior Court of Massachusetts. He became spiritually minded at a very early age and was converted, determined into the ministry, and was invited to share the ministry at Old South Church with Ebenezer Pemberton.

Pemberton and Increase Mather participated in his ordination service. And so he did that for some years. In 1724, he was invited to be the president of Harvard, but the church would not release him and so he declined that.

He lived into, I think until he was 80, and was of good health until suddenly he preached his last sermon and took ill and after several months of illness passed away in 1769. According to Sprague, Sprague was a historian, right?

Yeah. Yeah. According to Sprague, he was distinguished above almost any other man of his time for devotional fervor and simple and earnest engagedness in his work. So he writes this sermon, Love to God.

Sewall's Definition of Love to God

Do you want to review the sermon for us? Yeah, so he has just a couple of major points. It's not as complex as some of the other sermons that we've looked at and I think Chuck, you and I both felt that it was a particularly encouraging sermon and I think part of the encouragement is that truths are laid before us in a way that, you know, that are simple enough for us to kind of grab hold of and run with and live on.

So the first major point is the doctrinal statement and that is he deals with the question of what is this love to God from Matthew chapter 22 verse 37 and 38 where we read, Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind.

This is the first and great commandment. So the first major point is what is this love to God and he gives a definition there. What is this love to God and let me read you the definition because what he does in the definition basically is he gives you all the sub points that he's going to deal with under the first point.

So here it is. Love to God is a grace of the spirit whereby we esteem and desire God above all and cleave to him as to our chief good with holy delight from a spiritual sight of his most amiable perfections as manifested in his word and works and in the perfection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

So that's a pretty detailed definition of loving God. It is helpful because loving God is kind of a theme that we hear so often in religion. It is easy to assume that we know what it means. It is easy to assume that the kind of the cultural definition or kind of a vague idea.

I mean, you know, if you ask someone some theological questions, can you explain regeneration or can you explain, you know, the difference between justification and sanctification and you know, they may say well, I think I know but I'm not sure how to say it.

If you were to ask them, if you were to say to them, I have a theological question for you. Can you define love to God? They would think well, that's an easy one. But his very detailed definition is helpful because it keeps it from being kind of a vague sentiment.

We'll return to that first point in a minute because we really want to kind of stay there today. Secondly, he says we may further explain the command by showing what is intended by loving God with all the heart, with all the soul, and with all the mind.

That too has a lot there that really is helpful. His third major point is he wants to show why this is the first and the great commandment and then finally he concludes with a number of uses or applications.

God's Beauty, Moral Perfection, and Desire

Now before we jump into this, I want to say that being an 18th century preacher Sewell does represent kind of a philosophical emphasis of his day and what I mean is this, earlier generations and later generations might have talked about God's greatness and his goodness in the sense of like maybe purity.

So God's goodness is his moral perfection, his rightness. In the 18th century because of some philosophical trends of the day, and you can really see this in Jonathan Edwards, and this is neither good nor bad, but I do think it helps.

Edwards and those men tended to describe the goodness of God and moral goodness not merely as something that is right, but it's something that was beautiful. So there is something lovely about righteousness.

There is something attractive about a being who has no moral contamination. So again, you know with John Piper's re-emphasis of Jonathan Edwards' emphasis that God is desirable, a desiring God. It's not just that he is the most worthy of beings, he's also the most desirable and Edwards and those men in the 18th century connected that to moral perfection.

Moral goodness was also moral beauty. Well, let's look at some of the key points. He describes the nature of love and then he applies that to God. 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 spirit? He talks about love as an affection that unites the soul to what it finds attractive or desirable. And by nature, as sinners, we don't find God desirable.

And so we don't by nature love 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 Him. Yeah, and there's very practical application when we think of evangelism, 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 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. But there will be no delight in God in that person's heart until the Holy Spirit deals with them within. And then once that occurs, you can't make a 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 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.

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

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. 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.

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

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. 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.

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.

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

So it's not a useful good. It is an end in itself. Yeah, it is the goal. And yeah, and so the word useful is really good when we think about God. 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 Christian love views God as the ultimate goal, as the great treasure above which there is no better thing. So a good test for us, are we content? If God is useful, then every day we wake up, we kind of, 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, 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. And I'm always discontent because God isn't quite doing it.

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

I'm not waiting for God to give me something better. He has given me Himself. So a great test for our relationship with the Lord. Another question he answers in the early part of the sermon is, what is it about God exactly that draws the soul in love toward Him?

Loving God Through His Perfections, Word, Works, and Christ

Yeah, so really everything about God, but to break it into some kind of parts, we could think about God's attributes or His perfections, any one of them that you look at, you know, so you stop and consider His omniscience, His immutability, His holiness, all of those things are perfect, and as we look at those perfections, they should stir our hearts.

His works, His actions, the things that He's accomplished and done are things that we are to praise Him for and give Him glory for. We delight in His Word because it is His Word to us and His revelation of Himself to us, and we delight in His laws that express His, demonstrate His character and are ways that we're able to then express our love back to Him.

But we see Him most clearly in the person of His Son, and so we look there and we marvel and our hearts are drawn to love Him. The more we know Christ, the more we are drawn to love the Father. Yeah, and he follows that up in his next point with saying this, he says, this love to God is drawn forth by a believing view of God, and then, and he mentions those things.

So it's not merely that we are aware of the facts, even the specifics, but it is a very believing grasp of those things. So in a sense, faith lays hold of the perfections and the actions and the Word and the law of God most clearly displayed in our Redeemer, and faith laying hold of those things, the heart is, it's as if love is drawn out of us constantly toward Him.

He does mention that if we are ignorant of something, if we have no knowledge of something, we cannot have any real love of something. And, you know, we see this in negative ways with the issue of covetousness with the internet.

We can get on the internet and maybe we're searching for a book for somebody and we find some other thing on the internet that we didn't even know existed. And now that we see it, it appeals to us and we say, this is something I really need for happiness.

It would really benefit me. Yeah. But five minutes ago, I had no desire for it at all because of ignorance. Another way to illustrate this would be to say that sometimes you see something on the internet and it looks very bright and shiny and promises happiness and you suddenly find that you have a desire for it.

But when you read reviews about it, you find that other people who have bought it said, it's actually not what it looks like. It's a cheap product. Don't do it. It's a lemon. And so your desire for it ebbs away.

Or think of a friendship. You meet a person and you find their company really enjoyable. But the more you get to know the person, the less enjoyable you find their company. With God, an infinite goodness and only goodness means that the more the Christian knows the specifics of God's perfections and works and word and law and all of that portrayed in Christ, the more the Christian's heart will be drawn to love him.

Yeah, you really can't look too long or too deeply into the subject of God and ever, you don't have to ever fear coming away and being disappointed that you reached the end or there was there was this sour note in what was otherwise perfections.

Yeah. Yeah. Another question he tries to answer in his second major point is what does the Bible mean when it says we are to love him with all of our heart, soul and mind? So he he kind of divides this up over a number of sub points.

We're going to kind of throw them together. Basically says this is a sincere love. So not um, it's heartily that we're loving God. So we're not just wearing a mask. It comes from the heart. He says this is a love that is connected.

There's an integrity there. And that is it's a love that kind of unifies the heart. We don't have two masters and God gets a little more than second master gets. That obviously is impossible. Christ made that clear.

You cannot love two masters. It's not just that, you know, you can't do it very well. You just can't do it at all. You end up loving one master and hating the other. Would you include here also that you can't, you kind of divide the life and say, you know, God, I love you in these areas, but you know, I kind of have this area to myself.

Yeah. So like compartmentalizing the life into like sacred and secular. Okay. So I love God on Sunday mornings a lot. And I love God during my quiet times. But other parts of the day, I'm supposed to be loving other people.

So yeah, you kind of think of those as compartmentalized, which would be the opposite of what he says here with a united heart. He says we are to love God wholly. And that is in a way that rises above every other.

And he mentions this statement where Christ says that we're to love him more than father and mother and wife and children, even to the degree that it looks like we hate them. So having said all that, we want to ask this question.

When a Christian is commanded to love God with all of our heart and all of our soul and all of our mind, but we're also commanded to love a lot of other people, love our neighbor, love our wife as Christ, love the church, love our children, love our parents, you know, love the Christian.

I mean, John goes so far to say, if you can't love a Christian that you can see you, why do you think you love that Christian's heavenly father who you can't see? So how do we take all these commands?

Maybe we could say secondary commands to love. How do we mesh that with the primary command to love? Because I think sometimes that the Puritans and those that follow the Puritans, like the 18th century men, I think sometimes their answer isn't as biblical as I wish it would be.

And I love the Puritans, but here's what I mean. The Puritans often warn us not to love the creature, the created thing, the created person too much, because then we would be loving them more than we love the creator.

But I don't think the question really is one of degree, but of manner. So I don't ever wake up in the morning and worry that I'm going to love my wife too much. I mean, Christ loved the church. And if I'm to love my wife like I love the church, I just can't imagine that there's a place where, you know, there's a certain degree where God would stop you and say, actually, if you love a little more than what you're doing, you're actually loving her too much.

You've outpaced Christ in loving the church. So you've gone beyond. So I don't think it's a matter of degree. I love my wife too much. I love my kids too much. I love the Christian next to me too much.

And therefore I'm not loving God supremely. I think it is more how we do that. So, Chuck, what would you advise to someone that says, I'm supposed to love a lot of things or a lot of people in different categories, and yet I'm supposed to love God wholeheartedly.

So how do I keep there from being a competition? I think that you have to consider how you love all of those people or things that the love to them flows from the fact that you do love God. And so as you look at the various relationships that you have, you ask the question, what does love to God and love to them?

What does love to them, because I love God, demand in whatever given situation? So if it is, you know, rebuking sin, that's sometimes it's the loving thing to do. And to not do that may appear to others watching and even to the person being rebuked to be more loving, not to be rebuked.

But if you do that, then if you fail to do that, if you don't rebuke them, then you may be loving them more than you love God in that situation. And so in each situation, what does love to God and love to this person require in this moment?

Yeah. So we talked earlier before the podcast about a stream using a river illustration. 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, there is a love to him.

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, not, we're not talking about sin.

These become a part of our loving God, just like you mentioned. So loving my wife is not a competitor to loving God. And I don't have to worry about degrees if I'm loving her correctly, because loving her is part of loving God.

Now I love God. Therefore I love my wife and loving my wife in the present moment is part of loving God. And so there's no division anymore. You know, these are all united in one great act of devotion.

I want to live unto God. And that means I have to love these people around me, 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, we think of our heart as a, something that has 100 love available.

Okay. So I have a hundred percent of my love and I wake up in the morning and I say, I'm not allowed to love anything more than I love God or anyone more. So God immediately gets 51%, just base. All right.

That's where we start. God was, is going to get more than anybody else. He gets 51%. And then 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, Christians get 10.

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

Um, and so I think that that really is very freeing rather than saying, wait, maybe I loved my wife too much today, or maybe I loved my children too much today. Well, no. Did you love them in the right way?

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

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

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, I could love God better. I could focus on God. Well, why not love God in the midst of doing your work as unto him and believe what he says, that he accepts that as an expression of, you know, childlike submission and love?

Loving God with the Mind and with Truth

Well, the last thing we want to mention about how we love God with all of our heart and soul he also mentions the mind. So Chuck, if someone were to say to you, um, I'm not sure I love God with my mind.

How would you describe to that person? What, what would go into loving God with your mind? It would be to love God according to the truth. And so to make sure that your mind is filled with the truth about God, that you're not just loving, you know, sentimental notions or your own, uh, kind of composition of what you think God is like or how the world would describe God, how God describes himself.

And so to be careful to do that, you would want to come to scripture regularly and inform yourself about what God has said. And also to, um, um, you know, help correct notions that get introduced into your thought processes, uh, so that you're thinking the best thoughts about God, the thoughts that God himself has said about himself.

You have a right picture, a mental picture, if you will, of this is the God that I love. So really simple things could be expressions of that, studying, uh, reading good books on passages, you know, buying, spending some money on some commentaries, um, memorizing, meditating on, trying to fit together the great things that we're reading in scripture.

So we don't just have bits and pieces, you know, the hard work of thought, but done for love. I mean, there's a lot of reasons that we do thinking. Sometimes, you know, we, we're good students because we want to excel.

We want, we want to be able to go to the Bible class and have the right answer. It's a little embarrassing if someone, you know, asks you a question and you just stare at them. Um, but this is something that's done for love of God.

So we come to some practical applications and we want to use the time that we have left just to hit a few of these. And one of these that I think would be obvious is this really is the supreme test of the quality of our religion.

Or we could say it this way, is our religion just religion or is it true Christianity? And one of the tests that we can offer ourselves is this, are the things we are doing, duties and devotional, you know, tasks, acts of service, are these expressions of love to God?

Are they part of delighting in a person? Another application, um, what if you use this sermon to examine the degree of your guilt if you are still holding Christ at arm's length? Um, so, you know, Chuck, if they come to this sermon and they read about love to God, how would you point a lost person who's, you know, who's like maybe saying, well, look, I'm, I'm pretty good.

I mean, you know, I read this book. Okay. I get it. Um, how would you point a lost person to use this sermon, uh, in a way that would give them a, a more accurate measure of how serious their sin is? Well, one question you could ask is yes, but do you love God?

I mean, if, if your heart is drawn toward that, which is most attractive, has your heart been changed to see and love him and seeing him your great good? So you, you've, you know, say that I'm, I'm not that sinful.

Uh, I'm doing pretty good. Is it because you love God or is it because you love yourself? Is it because you love your reputation? Yeah. So there are a lot of lesser motives that cause a person to show up at church and keep their nose clean at work and not destroy their family.

Yeah. Those don't require love to God. Like you said, love to self, any person kind of thinking straightly would say, uh, these certain sins will destroy the happiness that I've sought. So I'm going to stay away from these, but then there are a hundred other ways of living for myself that I'm fine with.

One question I think we could ask from the sermon is this, if this is the great commandment, then what if we were to say, have we ever considered that the great sin might be breaking the great commandment?

So the great sin that calls upon us the greatest expressions of God's everlasting wrath would be we have refused to love him. We have found him unlovely when there was no reason, you know, it's a sin against truth.

It's a, it's a sin against everything that's right. You know, it's a preferring everything bent and perverted and twisted above a God who is perfect. So what if hell will be populated by people, many of them, who were very respectable and they only failed to do one thing.

They failed to treasure God. Well, uh, another application from the sermon, we, we would say is you could use this to stir your heart. So not just to test yourself. I mean, we read through this and it's, it's very stirring.

It's not just, you know, he does a good job not to condemn you and say, okay, so if you're a Christian and you do have real love to God, but it's weak, well, you stink, you know, you're so why are you, you know, I've been a Christian for 32 years and I can look at so many aspects of my love to God, my return of love to him.

And I think, have I even made any progress? So that could be very despair producing, but he doesn't let that happen. And I think reading that my heart stirred. One of the ways I would apply this to myself is taking his description, his very specific descriptions, and we only covered a few of them.

When he describes love to God, why not use that list as a prayer list? God, please don't let me be satisfied today without this expression of love to you. Like God helped me to love you like this. I didn't even think of it, but now that I'm aware of it, I want that to be a regular and growing part of my Christian life.

So using his sub points, when he describes love to God, using those, not just as a test, but as a list to plead with God, if people can love you this way, I want to love you that way. Yeah. And even to maybe, you know, to love the Lord, your God with your heart, soul, mind, strength.

I want to love him more in each of those categories. And God helped me to grow in my love in those ways. Yeah. I mean, those, those ways that are mentioned by God, those are not hoops to jump through to earn his love.

And then we shouldn't see them as like terrible heavy weights to carry. What if we see it as a kindness that he commands us to do what we now want to do. Now I do want to love the Lord. How can I do it, God?

How can I not waste my life? I want, I want it to matter. I want my efforts to love you to be pleasing because I do love you. And so he, he sweetly spells out the path and then gives us all we need each moment to walk it.

The Great Commandment and the Great Sin

Well, he ends the sermon with this statement. He says in a word, let the children of God abound more and more in their love to him. There is no danger of exceeding where the object is infinitely excellent and glorious to make the fire burn.

Oh, remember, God has loved you with an everlasting love and with loving kindness. He has drawn you to himself. Jeremiah chapter 31. It is this love of God to us. He explains that precedes any love we have for him that stirs us to love him back.

Well, we hope that you're able to locate the sermon. It should be in the notes where you can find it and to read it by Joseph Siwa, Love to God.