Self-love can produce a merely natural gratitude to God. This can happen through wrong ideas about God, as if He were all love and mercy, and no avenging justice, or as if God were bound to love a person because of the person’s worthiness. On these grounds men may love a God of their own imaginations, when they have no love at all for the true God.
Again, self-love can produce a love for God through a lack of conviction of sin. Some people have no sense of the vileness of sin, and no sense of God’s infinite and holy opposition to it. They think God has no higher standards than they have! So they get on well with him and feel a sort of love for him, but they are loving an imaginary God, not the real God. Then there are others whose self-love produces a sort of love for God simply because of the material blessings they have received from His providence. There is nothing spiritual in this either!
~Jonathan Edwards
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