Jesus said to the apostle Paul on the Damascus road, "I am sending you, [to the gentiles, the nations] to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the dominion of Satan to God" (Acts 26:17-18). Edwards knew that this was the only way transforming light would come to the peoples of the world - namely, by missionaries being sent with a message of truth about the triumph of Jesus over sin and Satan and death.

If Edwards were alive today, he would probably be on the internet this week, following what is happening this very moment (June 30-July 5, 1997) in Pretoria, South Africa, namely, GCOWE '97, the Global Congress on World Evangelization, with 4,000 pastors and mission executives and business people and leaders in theological education working toward strategic partnerships for the sake of completing the task of world evangelization.

These are the evangelicals who have a really "public life." If there is a problem today with privatistic religion, the worst form of it is not with pietistic evangelicals who don't care about block clubs and social justice and structural sin. The worst form is with evangelicals who think they are publicly- and socially-minded when they have no passion for millions of perishing people in cultures which can't begin to enjoy transformation because they have never experienced penetration with the gospel of Christ.

So the first message of Jonathan Edwards to modern evangelicals about our public lives is: Don't limit your passion for justice and peace to such a narrow concern as the church-saturated landscape of American culture. Lift up your eyes to the real crisis or our day: namely, several thousand cultures virtually unpenetrated by the gospel, who can't even dream of the blessings we want to restore and enhance for ourselves. That is his first message.

Embracing God for the Wrong Reasons

But even that is not the main thing Jonathan Edwards would want to say to us. Because the real narrowness of our souls is not signified by our failure to embrace the city and the nations, but by our failure to embrace God as God in all of our other embracing. Edwards' diagnosis of the narrow and confined and selfish interests of human nature is that we are all idolaters of the self and are only interested in ourselves, or - as an extension of ourselves - our own family or our own city or our world or even our God - to the degree that we see even God as a reflection of our own value. In other words, even embracing God can be narrow and limited and confined and merely selfish, if we embrace him only because he makes much of us.

In 1738, Edwards preached a series of messages on 1 Corinthians 13, later published under the title, Charity and its Fruits. His sermon on verse 5, "Charity . . . seeketh not her own," is entitled, "The Spirit of Charity, the Opposite of a Selfish Spirit." In it he gives his diagnosis of the human heart. It all began with the fall of man into sin in the Garden of Eden:

The ruin that the fall brought upon the soul of man consists very much in his losing the nobler and more benevolent principles of his nature, and falling wholly under the power and government of self-love. . . . Sin, like some powerful astringent, contracted his soul to the very small dimensions of selfishness; and God was forsaken, and fellow creatures forsaken, and man retired within himself, and became totally governed by narrow and selfish principles and feelings. Self-love became absolute master of his soul, and the more noble and spiritual principles of his being took wings and flew away.

What's important for our purposes here is that in the fall - that is, in original sin - the human heart shrank; it contracted to "the small dimensions of selfishness;" it forsook God and became the slave of private, narrow, limited self-love. This is the main problem of the Christian and his public life - whether modern or ancient. We love ourselves in a narrow, confined way, and are indifferent to others and society and the nations and God, except perhaps as they enhance our esteem or our private pleasures.