Rightly Ordered Love (Ordo Amoris)

One of the biggest misconceptions of our time is that you can't go wrong if you do what you love. As if love is an end in itself, "it does not matter what you love as far as you love something," or the thinking that the "goal in life is to find what you love."

The Bible teaches us that virtue is not just about loving something but about loving the right things. And love them in the correct order. 

This is very clear in 2 Timothy 3:1-5: "But understand this, that in the last days, there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people."

Paul teaches us that the "problem" with the last days will be that people will be lovers of themselves, money, and pleasure. And they will fail to love "good" and to love God. For this reason, the question before us is not if we have love "in our hearts" but what our hearts love and in which order.

 In John 3:19, we learn that the judgment from God in the sending of Jesus is that: "This is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the Light, for their deeds were evil." Our sentence is very clear because God sent the Light (Jesus) into the world, and people loved darkness instead, proving our deeds and hearts to be evil.

Now, you might be wondering why I mentioned that we should not just love the right things but in the proper order as well. For example, in Matthew 10:37, Jesus teaches us the following: "Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me." Loving your family is not bad, but it can become evil if you love them more than you love God (Jesus). Our love for Jesus trumps our love for our family and becomes the source of our love for our families. 

I love Augustine's explanation of this concept: "But living a just and holy life requires one to be capable of an objective and impartial evaluation of things: to love things, that is to say, in the right order, so that you do not love what is not to be loved, or fail to love what is to be loved or have a greater love for what should be loved less, or an equal love for things that should be loved less or more, or a lesser or greater love for things that should be loved equally. (On Christian Doctrine, I.27-28)"

The biggest challenge we face as we pursue to live a just and holy life is then how we can change "what" and "how" we love. The biblical answer is: "You can't change that," we can't change our own hearts because the heart is the source of our desires, and we can't desire what we don't desire, and we can't love what we don't love. It's not a matter of receiving a higher revelation from God and absorbing more knowledge. Light came into the world, and we hated light. We desperately need a new heart that loves the light - a heart that loves the truth.

And that is the promise we have in the Gospel. In the Gospel, we find not a new set of rules to follow but a promise that because of the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross on our behalf, we can now receive - through the power of the Holy Spirit operating in us - a new heart to love and obey God and His law. The first symptom of salvation in our lives is a new disposition of the heart. 

Thank be to God, who overcomes the evil desires of our heart of stone and gives a new heart of flesh to love what is good and in the proper order.

Nino Marques