Forgetfulness, Idolatry, and the Great Love of God

"There can be only two basic loves, the love of God unto the forgetfulness of self, or the love of self unto the forgetfulness of God"

-Saint Augustine

This baby dagger of a quote appeared as a reflection on my church bulletin last night. If you know me, you know that I am quite forgetful, especially unto God. I sometimes like to flippantly dismiss this as the result of spacey-ness or extrovertedness or some other innocuous and even whimisical character trait. But, as Tim Keller pointedly reminds, this is not a quirk or a foible. It is the very presence of idolatry. My thoughts and daydreams drift towards the things of this world, the things that I esteem, and away from my Creator and Savior. Forgetfulness indicates a sickening love of self and a brazen ignorance of the One "who is before all things" and in whom "all things hold together." (Colossians 1: 17).

I've been thinking more lately about my forgetfulness as sin lately. Patty Griffin EmmyLou Harris sing a song called "Little Fire" in which they delicately croon, "My friend, you know me and my family; you've seen us wandering through these times. You've seen us in weakness and in power, you've seen us forgetful and unkind."

Forgetful and unkind. Have mercy, Oh Lord.

Later in the evening, as I held the church bulletin with Augustine's words printed on it, I sang with my brothers and sisters a hymn:

"Hast thou not heard Him, seen Him, known Him?

Is not thine a captured heart?

Chief among then thousand own him;

Joyful choose the better part

Captivated by His beauty

Worthy tribute haste to bring

Let His peerless worth constrain thee

Crown Him now unrivaled King.

What can strip the seeming beauty

From the idols of the earth?

Not a sense of right or duty

But the sight of peerless worth

'Tis the look that melted Peter

'Tis the face that Stephen saw

'Tis the heart that wept with Mary

Can alone from idols draw."

(Ora Rowan, Kevin Twit)

Certainly it is only the great love of God, the perfect beauty of the risen Savior, the hope of forgiveness that can draw my ravished eyes from the trinkets of this wasting world to the eternal God. It is, as Thomas Chalmers said and Craig often reminds, "the expulsive power of a new affection." May the Lord reveal himself to us all, in all His irresistible grace and dazzling splendor. And may we become so enraptured with Him that we forget all else.