Maturing in Motivation and Love
Twelfth century monk, Bernard of Clairvaux developed a helpful model for expressing how Christians (can) mature in their faith – the four degrees of love.
- Loving yourself for your own sake (Selfish Love)
- Loving God for your own sake (Dependence Love)
- Loving God for God’s sake (Intimacy Love)
- Loving Yourself for God’s Sake (Full of God’s Love)
A lot of trees have died over the last thousand years to help express, explain, and apply Bernard’s stages, but here is the idea in summary. We all start out with selfish love and so that needs little explanation. Plenty of people never move past Dependence Love in relation to God or to anyone else. Plenty of romantic relationships and even marriages are based on the “I love you because of what you do for me” formula. This is also the place that we all start out in our relationship with God – loving God because of what God has done or does for us.
The third degree or stage is what most people begin to consider a mature love – loving someone (God in this case) because of who they are. At this stage we have a love and loyalty for God independent of what God does for us, but based on our admiration, even worshipful admiration, of the nature and character of God.
The fourth degree or stage is a tricky one to describe because it goes beyond the kind of love one human being can have for another. At this stage you begin seeing yourself the way that God does and you love, value, and accept yourself, warts and all, the way that God does. This is not the same as, “I love and accept myself because God loves and accepts me.” It is beyond that. It is beyond loving yourself from your own perspective – even a God-informed self-perspective. It is when we become full of God’s love and we see ourselves, other people, and the world around us through that perspective – through a God’s eye view. It gives us the ability to put the Self and everything else in its proper place.
In the next post, I would like to share with you where I have seen God in this process and what it has meant in my life recently.
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