Question
What does reordering our loves actually look like?
Summary:
Augustine’s ordo amoris is right: we are what we love, and our lives reflect the arrangement of our affections. Reordering our loves rarely feels dramatic. It is a series of small recalibrations produced not by willpower but by sustained exposure to who God is.
The language of loves is Augustine’s. In The City of God, Augustine argues that the character of a community is determined by what it loves and in what order it loves them. The same is true of individuals. We are what we love, and our lives reflect the arrangement of our affections.
We are called to love the Lord with all we are and have (Deut 6:4-5; Matt 22:37). This isn’t one love among several. It is the love that orders all other loves. To reorder our loves means to let our love for God reshape every other attachment, affection, and priority. Our love for spouses, children, work, country, reputation, comfort, and possessions isn’t eliminated by our love for God. It is reordered by it.
Reordering our loves rarely feels dramatic in practice. It feels, if anything, like a series of small recalibrations that accumulate over time. A parent who loves God rightly still loves their children, perhaps more faithfully than before, but without the idolatrous intensity that would treat the child as an ultimate good. A worker who loves God rightly still pursues excellence, perhaps with more care than before, but without the career-as-identity grip that many jobs invite. The shift isn’t the loss of lower loves. It is their repositioning.
A diagnostic is useful. Ask what we would be unable to surrender if God asked. The answer isn’t always sin. Sometimes the answer is a legitimate good that has quietly taken ultimate weight in our lives. Our disordered loves are often disordered not because we love bad things but because we love good things too much. A legitimate good elevated to ultimacy becomes an idol, not through any change in the object, but through the position it occupies in our hearts.
Reordering our loves, then, is less about adding love for God to an otherwise unchanged life than about letting love for God reshape the internal hierarchy of everything else. The reshaping doesn’t happen through willpower. We can’t decide to love God more by gritting our teeth. The reshaping happens through exposure: sustained attention to who God is and what he has done, which over time produces the corresponding affection.
Worship is central to this insofar as worship is the practice of directing our attention toward God’s worthiness in a way that, over time, reorients our affections. A congregation that worships well is, among other things, training its members’ loves. The singing, the reading of Scripture, the hearing of the Word, the confession of sin, and the sharing of the Lord’s Supper all participate in this reordering. None of these practices forces a change of affection. All of them create the conditions under which the Spirit’s work on our affections becomes possible.
Scripture reading functions similarly. Slow, regular exposure to the biblical text reshapes what we find compelling. It teaches us to want what God wants and to grieve what God grieves. This isn’t automatic. We can read Scripture in ways that confirm our existing loves rather than challenge them. Sustained reading under the Spirit’s guidance, though, read in community where others can perceive what we can’t, tends over time to shift our affections in directions we didn’t choose and couldn’t have produced on our own.
The practical steps aren’t dramatic. Worship regularly. Read Scripture patiently. Confess our misplaced affections honestly. Watch for the ways we grieve over things God doesn’t and fail to grieve over things he does. Welcome the slow work of the Spirit in rearranging the hierarchy of our affections. Over time, this produces the kind of person whose love for God actually does shape everything else, not because we have tried hard enough but because we have submitted to the practices that form love.
Key Takeaways: Reordering Our Loves
• Augustine’s Insight: Our character reflects what we love and in what order. We are what we love.
• Diagnostic Question: Ask what we would be unable to surrender if God asked. The answer often reveals a legitimate good that has taken ultimate weight.
• Exposure, Not Willpower: Affections aren’t reordered by gritted teeth. They are reordered by sustained exposure to who God is and what he has done.
• The “So What”: Worship and Scripture reading aren’t devotional add-ons. They are the conditions under which the Spirit’s work on our affections becomes possible.
About the Author
James Spencer, PhD, is a theologian, author, and host of the Thinking Christian podcast, where he writes and speaks on Christian formation, political theology, and technology. He holds a PhD in Theological Studies from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and completed the Institute for Educational Management at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He serves as President of the D.L. Moody Center in Northfield, Massachusetts, as adjunct faculty in Wheaton College’s MA in Leadership program, and as an Associate Research Fellow at the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, Christianity.com, and Sojourners; he has been quoted in The Telegraph; and he is a regular guest on Stand in the Gap Today with the American Pastors Network. His forthcoming book is Digital Discernment (InterVarsity Press, Fall 2026). Learn more at jamesgspencer.com.