DL 13, 17 - Loving the Lord & the Neighbor and Uses

DL 13 [1, 3]

To love the Lord
means to do uses from Him and for His sake.
To love the neighbor
means to do uses to the church, to one's country,
to human society, and to the fellow-citizen.
To be in the Lord
means to be a use.
And to be a man
means to perform uses to the neighbor
from the Lord for the Lord's sake.
To love the Lord
means to do uses from Him and for His sake,
for the reason that all the good uses
that man does are from the Lord;
good uses are goods,
and it is well known that these are from the Lord.
Loving these is doing them,
for what a man loves he does.
No one can love the Lord in any other way;
for uses, which are goods,
are from the Lord,
and consequently are Divine;
yea they are the Lord Himself with man.

That every least thing in man
from its use
is a man,
does not fall into the natural idea
as it does into the spiritual;
in the spiritual idea
man is not a person, but a use;
for the spiritual idea is apart from an idea of person,
as it is apart from an idea of matter, space, and time;
therefore when one sees another in heaven,
he sees him indeed as a man,
but he thinks of him as a use.

DL 17 [5]

But the spiritual affection of use
is both internal and external,
and it is external or natural
to the same extent that it is spiritual;
for what is spiritual flows into what is natural,
and arranges it in correspondence,
thus into an image of itself.
But as there is in the world at the present day
no knowledge of what the spiritual affection of use is,
and what distinguishes it from the natural affection,
since in outward appearance they are alike,
it shall be told how spiritual affection is acquired.
It is not acquired by faith alone,
which is faith separated from charity,
for such faith is merely a thought-faith,
with nothing actual in it;
and as it is separated from charity
it is also separated from affection,
which is the man himself;
and for this reason it is dissipated after death
like something aerial.
But spiritual affection is acquired
by shunning evils because they are sins;
which is done by means of combat against them.
The evils that man must shun
are all set forth written in the Decalogue.
So far as man fights against them because they are sins
he becomes a spiritual affection,
and thus he performs uses from spiritual life.
By means of combat against evils
those things that possess one's interiors are dispersed;
and these, as has been said above,
with some appear fiery, with some dusky, and with some livid.
In this way one's spiritual mind is opened,
through which the Lord enters into his natural mind
and arranges it for performing spiritual uses
which appear like natural uses.
To these and to no others
is it granted by the Lord
to love Him above all things 
and the neighbor as oneself.
If a man by means of combat against evils as sins
has acquired anything spiritual in the world,
be it ever so small,
he is saved,
and afterwards his uses grow
like a grain of mustard seed into a tree
(according to the Lord's words,
Matt. 13:31, 32; Mark 4:30-32; Luke 13:18, 19).