Reflections on and Admirations of God 10

Hence we learn [see quote from Reflections on and Admirations of God 6] how all God’s love may be resolved into His love for and delight in Himself. His love to the creature is only His inclination to glorify Himself and communicate Himself, and His delight is in Himself glorified and in Himself communicated. There is His delight in the act and in the fruit. The act is the exercise of His own perfection, and the fruit is Himself expressed and communicated. Jonathan Edwards

When a person truly longs to see the glory of God, that person must begin to seek humility for Christ to dwell in him or her more and more. Christ will not dwell in a proud heart and He will not share the glory with another which is precisely what a proud heart will try to do. The person that longs to see the glory of God should then long to be an instrument of His glory which means to seek Him to be humbled and broken as clay in the hands of the Potter. God does not use vessels that are used for other purposes, but instead He uses vessels that He has made to be set apart from all other uses and then for His own purposes. Oh how so many have been deceived into thinking that as long as they use the words “for His glory” or think that what they are doing honors Him that they are living to His glory. But instead a vessel must be prepared to be full of His glory so that He may manifest and communicate His own glory by grace and His will and wisdom.           (From Reflections on and Admirations of God 9)

When we see from Scripture (and the writings of Edwards) that God does not desire men to work up from themselves things to glorify Him, but instead what He desires is to communicate Himself and delight in His own fruit, this changes everything (or how we should understand this). A good work, then, is not that which is good which men do in their own strength and power even if they think they want to honor God, but it is when God communicates Himself to and then through men and what they do is a manifestation of the glory of God. The beholder of that glory, however, is not primarily men but God Himself. This is to say that no matter what it is that a human being does, if that human being does it from the strength and love of self what is done is idolatry. God does not long to see what men can do of themselves as that is nothing but self and pride, but He created men to manifest His glory so that He could behold His glory in and through them.

Spiritual fruit is not what man can come up with from his own pride and self, but it is truly fruit that the Spirit works in and through the man (Galatians 5:22). When Jesus said that we can do nothing apart from Him, He did not mean that as long as He is with them in some way they can do something. Instead of that, and in the context of the branch and the vine, Jesus was teaching that no man can have any true fruit but what comes from Him. As the branch cannot bear fruit except what comes from the vine, so no one can bear spiritual fruit except that which comes from Christ the vine. This, of course, leaves man with nothing that he can do in his own strength and so leaves him no room for seeking honor for himself and his pride. Even though man has no real room for that, however, his proud heart will seek it anyway.

This whole picture that Scripture gives shows how utterly necessary it is for man to be stripped of his filthy pride and wicked heart that is full of self (the love of self and the honor of self). This shows us how horrible it is for men to have pride in spiritual things. Despite the warnings of Scripture men will take great pride in being winners of souls and in their great acts of evangelism. Not only does that display and amazing amount of pride, it displays a terrible theology as well. God alone can draw souls to Himself and God alone can make men to be instruments of His glory. Men are to preach the Gospel as instruments of His glory and they should be humbled that He may use their preaching as He is pleased to use it, but there is no room for pride at all.

The unhumbled and proud heart of man seeks self and the honor of self and it is appalling to that proud heart that man can do nothing good in and of himself but instead must do all for the glory of God from the strength that God provides and God works this in man so that God may see His own glory. Man does not exist for himself but for the pleasure and glory of God, but that is not acceptable to a proud heart. Man wants to live for himself and seek his own honor, though Scripture tells man that he cannot believe when he seeks the honor (glory) from men and not from God (John 5:44).

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