Assurance of Faith and Perfect Love (Rewritten)

Up to now we have explored how consecration relates to assurance of faith. But assurance itself doesn’t stand alone — it, too, has important relationships. One of the closest and most significant is its connection to perfect love. These two — assurance (or perfection) of faith and perfection of love — are deeply and inseparably linked. 

That raises a thoughtful and worthwhile question: what exactly is the relationship between them?

1. Faith Comes First, Love Follows

To begin, assurance of faith and perfect love relate to each other as cause and effect, or more precisely, as what comes first and what follows. Assurance of faith naturally and necessarily comes before perfect love.

Some theologians — capable thinkers, to be sure — have tried to reverse this order. They argue that love comes first, and that faith grows out of love, making perfect love the foundation of assurance. But it’s hard to see how this position holds up, either logically or biblically.

We Must Sacrifice Even the Gifts of God

All the Christian gifts and graces should be possessed in purity of spirit, uncontaminated by any unholy mixtures of an earthly nature. The mere suggestion, that they have merit of themselves and separate from the God who gives them, if it be received with the least complacency, necessarily inflicts a deep wound. They are, accordingly, held in purity of spirit and with the divine approbation, only when their tendency is to separate the soul from every thing inward and outward, considered as objects of complacency and of spiritual rest, and to unite it more and more closely to God.

In the language of Fenelon, "we must sacrifice even the gifts of God;" that is to say, we must cease to regard them and to take complacency in them, in themselves considered, that we may have God himself. We do not find the parent, who has that degree of affection for his child, which may be called entire or perfect love, making his love a distinct object of his thoughts, and rejoicing in it, as such a distinct object; that would not be the genuine operation of perfect love. If his love is perfect, he has no time and no disposition to think of any thing but the beloved object, towards which his affections are directed. His love is so deep, so pure, so fixed and centered upon one point, that the sight of self and of his own personal exercises, is lost.  It ought to be thus in the feelings, which we exercise towards God; and undoubtedly such will be the result, when the religious feeling has reached a certain degree of intensity. That is to say, when the feeling is perfect, the mind is not occupied with the feeling itself, but with the object of the feeling. The heart, if we may so express it, seems to recede from us; it certainly does so as an object of distinct contemplation; and the object of its affections comes in and takes its place. Oh the blessedness of the heart, that, free from self and its secret and pernicious influences, sees nothing but God; that recognizes, even in its highest gifts and graces, nothing but God; that would rather be infinitely miserable with God, if it were possible, than infinitely happy without him.