Formed for the Glory of God: Learning from the Spiritual Practices of Jonathan Edwards

by Kyle Strobel

Edwards outlines three ways God uses the means of grace in spiritual transformation. First, the means supply one’s mind with correct notions of God and his way. Second, they harness our natural thinking to function in parallel with right notions of God. Third, they move our hearts in parallel with a true knowledge of God.[11] These are ambiguous, so I will walk us through them point by point. First, the means of grace orient the mind properly to God. To have a saving and growing relationship with God in Christ, you have to know something about God and Christ. Admittedly, our knowledge will never be perfect here, nor does it need to be, but it must have some degree of truth. This explains why so much of Edwards’s preaching is theologically heavy. Edwards believed that right knowledge was integral to true growth because it was directly tied up with knowing God. Bare knowledge is never enough. When our knowledge is touched by grace we see God as beautiful, true and glorious. At that moment, we know that the gospel is not only true, but is true for me. Take the cross, for instance. When we think about the cross we have all sorts of notions in our minds about what crucifixion is and what it entails. We might be horrified at the notion of crucifixion and yet not be Christians. It does not take grace to be horrified at the notion of crucifixion. But if we recognize the crucifixion as, in a very real sense, beautiful, then we have been given grace. It takes a means of grace (preac...