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

by Kyle Strobel

Consent is Edwards’s way to talk about beauty. God’s life is a fountain of love because God exists as three persons in one essence—persons infinitely consenting and delighting in love.

The Spirit’s presence creates beauty. Whereas sin brings in chaos and unrest, the Spirit heals the brokenness of the soul so that true rest and devotion can be known. The Spirit illumines the beauty of God such that everything else slowly begins to dim and darken in the wake of his radiance.

While our sight is limited, so is our formation. While salvation entails many things (forgiveness, imputation of righteousness and so on), ultimately, it entails a new relationship. The sinner, cut off from the Father by his wrath now stands before him as child. She who was once rejected before God is now the beloved before him. By standing in a negative relation to God she was not beautiful—she was like a discordant note in a song. In salvation, she is united to the Son by the Holy Spirit and is now in harmony with God and his life of love, delight and glory. Therefore, as God gives himself to his people in redemption, so he opens up his own beauty: “as God delights in his own beauty, he must necessarily delight in the creature’s holiness; which is a conformity to, and participation of it, as truly as the brightness of a jewel, held in the sun’s beams, is a participation, or derivation of the sun’s brightness.”[24] God shines forth to his creatures. Those who receive this light receive the Son and the Spirit. By receiving this light, they are made beautiful—they shine with the beauty and glory of God.

We consent to Christ by believing in him and loving him. As we grow in faith and love we grow in beauty, acting as witnesses for Christ in the world (Is 62:1-3).

Images of glory and beauty can, at times, feel mechanical or feel like they are simply aspects of power—like the sun giving its rays. But these images serve a higher end. Talking about God is talking about God’s personal nature. To know God as glorious, one must know and love God personally. To know God as beautiful, one must know God and love him personally. This kind of knowledge is not knowledge of an object, but is knowledge of a subject. Therefore, being confronted by God is being confronted by the personal God personally. This is particularly important as we move into a discussion of why our knowledge of God must be affectionate knowledge.

Along these lines, it is noteworthy that Edwards is perhaps best known in Christian circles for his work Religious Affections. It is, in fact, one of the most beloved spiritual classics of the Protestant tradition. In this work, Edwards provides a model of spiritual discernment. The question we need to ask is, What is religious affection? Religious affection is a way to talk about religion from the heart—“true religion” as Edwards would have called it (that or experiential religion). Religious affection is the movement of the soul in affection to God. It is having your heart inclined to him as beautiful. Religious affection is the human counterpart to God’s life of love and delight. To “be holy as I am holy” is to mirror God’s life of beauty, glory and affection in your own life. God’s goal in redemption is not simply teaching people facts about him (that he is eternal perhaps). God offers his life of love, glory and beauty to people in salvation. Therefore, the path to God must take on those very attributes. God’s life is infinite happiness, and therefore God opens his life so that people can truly delight in him. Salvation is a way of the heart and not simply a way of the mind. Salvation entails the whole person, and humans are primarily lovers, not simply thinkers. As God creates for his own glory and portrays his own beauty, he pulls us into this movement of self-glorification so that we come to partake in his glory and beauty. By being united to Christ, God seeks us a...

Edwards’s image of light helps to explain what religious affections are. God communicates himself by his Son and his Spirit. In the Son, we come to see and know God. In the Spirit, we have illumination to see and are given the love to respond to God in affection. The Son is the light of God and the Spirit is the heat of that light. Since the whole person must respond to God, there must be a response of understanding and of will, or, as Edwards puts it, there must be light and heat: “where there is heat without light, there can be nothing divine or heavenly in that heart; so on the other hand, where there is a kind of light without heat, a head stored with notions and speculations, with a cold and unaffected heart, there can be nothing divine in that light, that knowledge is no true spiritual knowledge of divine things.”[4] Knowledge of God is knowledge of a subject, not an object. Equally, knowledge of God is of the beautiful, glorious God. To know God is to love him, and to love him truly is to know him. This is why light demands heat and heat, light. One cannot have true knowledge of God without loving him. Likewise, one cannot have true love without knowing God. Unfortunately, more often than not, fallen people try to have one without the other. To receive both light and heat is to understand and will God—to turn your face to him in affection.

At the beginning of the chapter we noted that people are not primarily thinkers, but lovers. Being a lover, according to Edwards, includes being a thinker. But being a thinker is not enough. Thinking is not the bedrock of the human person. We are most fundamentally lovers. Importantly, Edwards holds these two aspects of the person in unity without them being in tension. Both understanding and will are necessary to truly love God and be faithful to him. But knowledge, without love and affection, ultimately leads nowhere. As we continue to live in affection for God, our souls are conformed to the object of our love—God. Much of Edwards’s spirituality entails keeping our eyes on Christ in all things, so that our vision of the world is colored by an affectionate knowledge of Christ.

As lovers, we are governed, in many ways, by our desires. Sin, for instance, is not often an issue of wrong knowledge; it is not acted on because people did not realize it was wrong. Rather, at the very core of a person lies a will that inclines toward the beautiful, and because of the flesh, what one finds “beautiful” is often ugliness.

While we journey to glory we should learn to trust the path laid before us. Sometimes, no doubt, we find that the path is of our own making. Our natural affections have turned us off course onto other things we find beautiful. But, broadly speaking, grasping the path of glory is really just grasping onto Jesus. By focusing our attention on Jesus and the “Jesus Way,” we come to gain a “taste” for this way over others. Some of the fleshliness that used to taste so good is now bitter. We are walking a path of putting to death our sin by slowly conforming to God’s glory and beauty. In doing so, the sin that still wages war within us begins to die. In Christ, our sight, hearing and taste are now sensitized to a different world, and therefore they help us trust in the way of the Lord.

For true religious affections, the object, God, is primary, and I am secondary. With false affections, the focus reverts to me. The one who seeks Christ alone will know the delight that only he can give. One who goes looking for self-fulfillment will never find it. In other words, having a taste of divine things is what allows the heavenly destination to captivate your heart. Without that taste it is impossible to will God, and therefore it is impossible to actually walk the path to glory. This taste is the taste of heaven and is the taste that calibrates our souls to glory and beauty. This taste creates a hunger for divine things. This taste is not given in its perfection, but is a seed of grace in the soul. Cultivating this taste should lead to a deeper and deeper hunger for God and his glory. The ways of God, the calling of the church, the Word of God and the ordinances of God should all be tasty aspects of life. Ultimately, our taste should be oriented by God and his life of love, and therefore the hunger of our flesh should begin to be killed off. In this sense, our taste is similar to the compass whose needle seeks north. We can say that the needle has a taste for north. Around that taste all our other affections should fall into place—the west, east and south of our soul should be oriented by the true north of heaven—God and his life of love.

The grace given in conversion is the “dawn of glory” to the soul, but, as dawn, it is still dark. We wait for the day when glory will be seen and known in full, but that day is not today. Therefore, instead of focusing solely on intellectual achievement or charismatic excitement, Edwards calls us to focus on religious affection as the Christian way in the world. As quoted above, God fits his people for heaven by conforming them to it.[13]

The term spiritual discipline is a well-meaning term put in a very unfortunate way. If we simply play out the natural meaning of the terms spiritual and discipline, we would come to the popular conclusion that doing spiritual disciplines is how we discipline our spiritual lives. In other words, the term discipline makes people think they have the power to form their spiritual life. Rather than being an extension of salvation, we end up with an advanced form of self-help. Just do such-and-such discipline and your life will be better. If you do X, you will stop struggling with Y. There is no doubt why this phrase has become so popular: it addresses our greatest temptation as North American evangelicals. We love believing that we control our fate, and we want the same for our spiritual lives. We want to be self-made people. “Just tell me what to do and I’ll make it happen.” This is the idolatry of a pragmatic people desiring independence at every turn. The call to be holy, however, is not the same as a call to do the right thing. Holiness is a term that describes God’s own life, and therefore the call to be holy is a call to participate in God’s life of love.

self-help project built away from the cross. Put another way, it is helpful to talk about the goal of spiritual disciplines versus means of grace. The goal of spiritual disciplines is often explained as a transformation of character. If you struggle with lust you can find a discipline that will help you stop lusting (possibly fasting, for example). Notice the problem with this. God is totally superfluous to this discussion. You have a problem, and so you come up with ways to fix this problem. Rather than abiding in the vine to bear good fruit, you are figuring it out on your own. Let me suggest that the focus of the Christian life is not about character but about holiness.[2] Holiness is not something you can develop an action plan for. Holiness is not in your power. The means of grace are actions that help us focus more fully on God, recognizing that God is the fountain from which all grace flows.

By focusing on practices alone and their possible efficacy in holiness, we very quickly stop talking about Christ’s work to sanctify us and start talking about our own work to grow ourselves.

As I have emphasized, everything flows forth from our understanding of salvation and the God who saves. The gospel message entails God’s self-giving to bring us into his own life. Therefore, the Christian life becomes oriented around the idea of communion with God. When forgiveness becomes the central defining feature of salvation, the Christian life tends to become little more than pretending to act like you know you are forgiven. Rather, when communion becomes the centerpiece of salvation, the Christian life becomes oriented by, around and to the God who communes with us. Our goal is not pretending, but the opposite (as we will see in the next chapter). The “direction” of the Christian life is communion, abiding and resting in God, so that we can live according to his way in the world. This understanding of the Christian life has Christ at its center, and his people are held in orbit around him as they live in the Spirit of grace and love. Edwards, in a depth we rarely experience, understood that grace is God’s giving of himself to us in communion. Grace, in this sense, is a counterpart to love. God’s eternal life is love, and love will ultimately bind us to that life. But because of our state as fallen creatures, love can only be given as grace. By the Spirit of God we know communion and holiness, and therefore the Spirit of God is the grace of God given to his people. The Spirit of God unites himself to the person and two things take place: the person is united to God ...

One of the movements of the Christian life is to learn the grammar of grace, to come to know and understand how God reveals himself in the souls of his people. Grace is more than God’s niceness; it is God’s movement of love to reveal himself and draw his people back to him in love. Grace helps us become dependent upon God so that we can live out the way of holiness. Grace is not ours to have, but resides within us as a person of God—the Holy Spirit. Grace is not some kind of stuff that God gives us so that we can become better people. Grace is not like an energy drink we can use to boost our potential. Rather, grace is a relational aspect of our life with God; it is a part of the overall message of communion and union with God the Father, in Christ Jesus, through the indwelling Spirit. Therefore, the life of grace will be equally relational. Edwards’s point in the quote above narrates this well. Why does the Spirit continue to act in the soul? Not because of anything we do, but only by God’s grace and God’s covenant with us. In short, we can grow in grace because God has given himself to his people in love and has covenanted with us. We never lay claim on grace. Grace is always a gift. Therefore, in the same way, the life of grace will always be a life of receiving grace from the God who freely gives.

The “means of grace,” accordingly, are God’s gifts to receive life from the God who gives in abundance.

When Edwards explains the means of grace, he uses several biblical images to illustrate his emphases. To help those of us who may not be familiar with the means of grace, I will focus our attention on three of these images. One of his more frequent illustrations comes from John 5, where Jesus heals the disabled man at the pool of Bethesda. If you remember the story, the man remains by the pool because angels stir the water. The first person in the pool after an angel stirs the water will be healed. He tells Jesus he has no one to lower him into the pool, so someone always gets in before him. Most of us, I assume, find this story a bit odd and focus our attention on Jesus’ healing of the man rather than the pool itself. Edwards focused on the reality of this pool as a God-given gift of healing. It’s important to note that there was nothing about the pool itself that was healing. There was nothing about the act of going into the water that was healing. But God had established this way as the way of healing, and therefore people were called to enter the pool with faith that God would heal.[8] The means given to the church are not efficacious in their own right. God has, in his mercy, given us established means to come to him that we may receive this grace, even though our coming does not bind God to be gracious. Our task is to enter the pool with faith. Another image illustrating the means of grace is from the wedding where Jesus turns water into wine (Jn 2:1-11). Our role in...

These images narrate two specific realities Edwards hopes to convey: First, we are called to certain actions—“means”—to receive grace. These actions are powerless in themselves to change our lives or make us holy. If we think they can, the Christian life will inevitably become a self-help project. Rather, we are called to enact them and put our faith in God to do with them what he will. Second, if God chooses, he will endow the means we do in faith with his grace. God does this by his will and grace alone, and it has no direct correlation to the acts we do. Our call, in other words, is not to grow ourselves, but to present ourselves to God through the means he has provided (Rom 6:13). Means of grace are spiritual postures to receive God’s grace. To use biblical imagery, our call is not to bear fruit, but to abide in the vine (Jn 15). This does not mean, of course, that these practices are not hard work. Many of them are deeply trying. They are designed to put you into circumstances that run contrary to your brokenness, fleshliness and worldliness. But they do not grow you. If anything, they break open your fleshliness in full so that you are able to hold that before the Lord and seek his grace.

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...

One way to outline the means of grace is through three broad categories: (1) public means, (2) private means and (3) extraordinary helps.[15] In the first category, “public means,” there were three offered: preaching, sacraments, and prayer with thanksgiving and psalms. In the second category, “private means,” were listed watchfulness, meditation, the armor of the Christian (Eph 6:11-18), experience, company and family exercise, prayer, and reading. In the third delineation, “extraordinary help,” solemn thanksgiving and fasting were suggested. Within each of these means of grace, furthermore, were often several different kinds of practices (for example, under the private practice of prayer there were several different kinds of prayer). While Edwards never used this threefold way of categorizing the means of grace, it does serve as a helpful framework. He would have, most certainly, accepted each of these categories, and, at times, he did divide the means by public, family and personal.[16] This is helpful because it highlights how a Puritan like Edwards understood his life. The public means of grace is another way to talk about the life of the church, and the family life was, for the Puritans, the church in miniature. These two kinds of “churches” fed and nourished the personal life of each believer, holding them before God and providing a context (a means of grace) for faithful living. Personal life flows back into communal life so there is a mutual enlivening.