Psalm 37:4 tells us to
Delight yourself in the Lord and he will grant you the desires of your heart”.
Such positive encouragement should caution us to a wholely negative view of desire as automatically and only sin. We can have good desires. We may also think of those things as affections, the people, things, priorities we give our affection to, that we love.
The Law says that we are to love God with our whole hearts. In other words, when we “enjoy God and glorify him forever”, we delight in him, we worship him. God granting our desires presumes that our affections are for him.
So we have to pay attention to the other side of the story. The heart is deceitful. dan and Eve were tempted by a different desire. They wanted to be like God, to rival him. They desired autonomy and power.
One thing we see in Scripture is that God offers us identity, we are made in his image to fill and subdue the earth, security, he protects us and comfort, he provides for us just as he gave food for Adam and Eve in the Garden and for the Israelites in the desert.
These are the foundational desires that are met in God. Adam and Eve can be seen to be seeking the same things but trust the serpent’s lie that they will best meet their desires by delighting in themselves.
The result of their fall is that sin and death have entered the world. This affects every aspect of creation including every aspect of who we are. Reformed doctrine refers to this as Total Depravity. One aspect of this is that our affections become disordered. We still want those good things, identify, security and comfort but our view of what they look like becomes distorted. We seek the wrong things in the wrong way and at the wrong time, outside of God.
One of the consequences of the Gospel is that God gives us new hearts. We have hearts that love, desire and delight in the Lord. We find our identity, security and comfort in Christ. However, there is a now and not yet to this “new Creation”. We still face a fight with indwelling sin. We are to put to death sin in us. We are to grow in godliness. Part of the holy Spirit is to renew our hearts and minds. True, ordered affections may be described in the language of the fruit if the Spirit: love, joy, peace etc.
One of my concerns when engaging with the concupiscence debate is to start to get us focusing on what I’ve been describing above. This is what we might call an anatomy of the affections, or at least a start at it. We want to properly know ourselves, to understand how our desires work. This will help us to cultivate good and godly affections.
Cultivating godly affections will mean that we stop cultivating ungodly affections. Part of discipleship and pastoring is about helping believers to say no to temptation. We learn to say no to temptation when we begin to tell ourselves the truth about our disordered affections. We recognise that what they take us to are idols. We begin to see the futility of what they offer, the ugliness and destructiveness of sin. That’s one reason for regularly confessing sin.
Cultivating good and godly affections must also include saying yes to righteousness. There are practical steps we can take to do this. For example, it means prioritising our time for good and healthy pursuits.
However, the best way to cultivate our affections is by learning to worship. It’s only when we are enjoying and delighting in God, when we see him for who he is in all his beauty and glory that we begin to know that Christ is enough for us.
Faithroots 