“Love God… and Do Whatever You Please”
By Michael Kelley
Augustine, the great North African theologian of the fourth century, once wrote this:
“Love God, and do whatever you please.”
Was he right? Maybe there’s part of you, like me, that bristles at that statement. And maybe that bristling comes from the fact that we know ourselves a little too well to fully endorse what the great theologian is saying. We know, for example, that there are many times throughout the day when we want the wrong thing - we want to be angry. Or lustful. Or greedy.
Or the opposite side of the coin - there are many other times when we DON’T want what we should. We don’t want to be compassionate. To care deeply. To weep with those who are weeping and rejoice with those who are rejoicing.
The problem we have with Augustine’s quote is that “whatever we please” doesn’t seem to be aligned with what the Bible tells us to do.
But to understand Augustine’s point, we have to look below the surface a bit and try and see how Augustine understood the gospel. Yes, he saw the gospel as God’s grace to us in Christ. Yes, he saw the gospel as the great expression of God’s love toward sinful people. Yes, he saw the gospel as the only way we can be brought into right relationship with God. But he also saw the gospel as transformational.
In other words, the gospel is the means by which we become something brand new.
Consider this passage from Paul’s letter to the Corinthian church:
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor. 5:17-21).
Do you see the transformational nature of the gospel here? The old has gone and something new has come in its place. And what is that new thing? It’s us, for we have become the righteousness of God.
When we come into Christ, we are given a new heart which comes with new desires. New tastes. New ambitions. Yes, it takes time for that newness to take hold, but over the course of our lives, we actually begin to not only do the right thing, we start to want to do the right thing. Indeed, the very fact that we feel a tension inside us between doing what we know to be good and right and true and that which, though we might desire it, we know to be sinful, shows we are being transformed. Here again from Paul:
And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit (2 Cor. 3:18).
Back to Augustine’s quote. When we truly love God, which we are able to do when we are born as new creatures in Christ, that love transforms our desires and aligns them with His will. When we love God with all our heart, soul, and mind, our actions will naturally flow from that love, and our will will become conformed to His.
Friends, we are on the road to this. True enough, right now we choose holiness and goodness by faith because we don’t always feel it. Or want it. But someday we will. Someday we will be whole people in which we not only do the right thing, but feel the right thing. Until then, we stay in faith trusting that the Holy Spirit is making us into the new creation that we have already become.
Michael Kelley is a husband, father of three, author, and speaker from Nashville, TN. His latest book is a year-long family devotional guide called The Whole Story for the Whole Family. Find his personal blog at michaelkelley.co.
