THE SPIRIT AND OUR AFFECTIONS.

“If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?” Luke 11:13

After forty five years of being a Christian I sadly mourn the continuance of some besetting sins in my life. For most of my life I have tried to combat these things by the power of my will. But even though my will was a sanctified will, it has never been able to defeat the great foe of sin. And even when it my will proved triumphant (which was often) the success was only apparent. That is, my will had driven those sinful desires down into the depth of my soul where they existed in a semi-stupefied state but very much alive. Then came the day of their arousal. As Covid hit and our schedules were changed and culture became increasingly challenging and my watchfulness ebbed, I found these old sins beginning to rise again to the surface. I was shocked. “How could this be,” I asked myself? “I have not struggled with these sins for years.” Right. I hadn’t struggled with them for years but that was simply because nothing had roused them from their ‘long winter’s nap.’ What I hadn’t realized was that these sins were dwelling comfortably in the dark, dismal, dungeons of my soul, waiting for the opportunity to rise again. This depressing conclusion put me on a quest of trying to figure out how we are to defeat these deeply ingrained sins in our lives. This led to another depressing question, “Could the Christian actually win in this battle against sin?” Well I answered this second query quite quickly as I remembered that God was working in all believers to present them faultless before the throne of God with exceeding joy. And if that was God’s goal in my life then there must be some kind of divine provision to fight sin. I dared not take the blindly optimistic view that believed this process would happen automatically. There was a war for me to fight and I must fight it. But I also knew that God had ordained for me to win it. So I yearned for the divine remedy in fighting sin. Being armed with a newfound biblical optimism I was able to address the real question, which was, “How, then, do I get there?” My thoughts turned to my inner life. I asked myself, “What really caused me to sin?” Well certainly my will was the visible perpetrator, the last runner in the relay race who carried the baton at the end. So in order to fight sin, do I simply train the will to have better discernment before it chooses to get caught with its pants down? I knew better. I had tried this approach many times and it had completely failed. As I probed into this issue I found myself actually defending the will. It was not the will’s fault that sin occurred. He was merely the servant carrying out the demands of the master. No, it was my affections that moved the will and caused me to sin. I remembered that Jonathan Edwards had done a lot of work on the role of affections. He had written a famous treatise On Religious Affections where he had argued that the affections were ultimately what governed the Christian’s behavior because it was the affections that defined one’s inner desires. The affections, said Edwards, were the deep inclinations of the inner man that governed and directed the will. In other words, to change one’s behavior one must change the affections. All along I had been attacking my unwanted behavior by pummeling my will. But all I was doing was putting a bandage on the open sore without dealing with the virus. The will was not the one causing me to sin. It was my heart, my affections. By attacking the will I was merely returning to the law to make me righteous. “After all,” I had thought, “what controls our actions better than law?” I looked around and saw that the law can accomplish much by moving our wills via threat or coercion. I saw that law had been used to chisel out highly effective armies, form juggernaut sports teams, and shape highly moral children. The law could boast in some success. In my life the law had squelched many sins. But one thing the law never did was to crucify sin. Yes, the law could send sin packing to Elba but it couldn’t get rid of it entirely. So I had fallen prey to the oldest heresy in Christianity. Salvation by law. The law could never change my behavior because the law could never change my affections. I additionally thought that the answer was to be found in the New Covenant itself. After all, did not the New Covenant promise in Jeremiah 31:31-34 that no man need to tell his neighbor “know the Lord for they would all know Him from the least to the greatest”? And didn’t the New Covenant put the law in my heart? And didn’t the New Covenant only give us one law to obey rather than the six hundred plus laws of the Old Covenant? But I was stopped cold in my tracks. I instantly realized the folly of this logic. The New Covenant still rested on law. Law was law. And whether it be New Covenant Law or Old Covenant law it was still powerless to change me. To say it another way, I realized I could no more keep the New Covenant Law than a Jew could keep the Old. In fact I realized I had a harder go of it. Was there anything harder to obey than the New Commandment to love God and love neighbor? Indeed this new law was broader, and more comprehensive than anything found in the Old Covenant. In fact some people like Saul of Tarsus had actually believed they could kept the outward form of the Old Covenant Law. But who could ever fool himself into believing that he could perfectly love God or neighbor? The New Covenant Paul never said anything like that. So I came to the frightening conclusion that just because I was under the New Covenant it could not help me stop sinning. On the contrary because the law was harder, sin abounded even more. Fighting sin, therefore, was not a matter of living under the New Covenant law. I did not need a new law. I needed a new heart. More specifically, I needed a power within that could enable my inner man to love righteousness and hate sin. Now at last I understood what was the great advantage of the New Covenant. Not its law, but its Spirit, the Holy Spirit. Unlike my Old Covenant counterparts the moment I believed the gospel the Spirit of God took control of my life. I now had the presence of God within me and as a result I now had the ability to conquer indwelling sin. Being saturated with God’s Spirit my inner man could now happily choose what was good instead of trying to obey externally. This was true freedom, as Paul said, “Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” He— the Spirit— was the answer to all my striving against sin. Nothing else could help me. Not my justification, not my faith, not my prayers and fastings and certainly not my New Covenant law. I even risked my orthodoxy by saying that not even Jesus sitting at the right hand of the Father could help me. While all these things were good none of them could directly touch the waywardness of my inner man. But the Spirit could. As a result of this ‘spiritual eureka’ my prayers changed drastically. I no longer appealed to my outward resolve to fight sin. And though am continually thankful for Christ’s death on the cross I dare not rest on that alone to mortify the sin that lurks in my old man. I need inside help and that alone comes from the Holy Spirit, the One who can work in me to “will and to do of God’s good pleasure.” All this is to say that if you desire to conquer the sin in your members you must seek the power of the Spirit in your life. The results will not be instantaneous. Movement in God’s kingdom rarely happens in the fast lane. But there will be results. As you seek the Spirit’s aid, you will find that the enticements of sin will grow weaker and the desires for righteousness will increase. Your affections will slowly begin to change, and that will translate into your will changing. For what we love we do and what don’t love we don’t do. Will this praying for the Holy Spirit augur the complete end of sin in your life? Hardly. The Old Man lives on until the day Christ puts him to death at the resurrection. But the indwelling Spirit can severely damage the workings of sin in your heart by weakening your desires for it. But alas, times will surely come when you are dull to the Spirit and it is in these times that sin will come charging back into your life. So welcome to the fight, Christian. Your goal is to put to death the deeds of the flesh but that will only come by yielding to the Holy Spirit. So ask for Him, Christian. Ask when you are tempted and ask when you are not tempted. Ask frequently. And above all be assured that when you ask for that greatest of all gifts it shall be given you. Then the real fight will begin. Amen.