Sanctification Monday – Episode 8: Character – Affections

Welcome to the Two Journeys podcast. This is Sanctification Monday, and my name is Andy Davis. In this podcast, we seek to answer the question, what is spiritual maturity? We believe that spiritual maturity can be broken into four main sections: knowledge, faith, character, and action. Today, we’re beginning a new section focusing on character, and we’ll be zooming in or zeroing in on the affections of the heart, what you love and what you hate. But I want to begin by just talking about character as an important part of sanctification. 

Really, the biblical name for character would be the heart. Christianity is a matter of the heart. Many other religions focus on external behavior. As far as I understand Islam, it doesn’t really ask a lot of questions of what’s going on inside a Muslim’s heart, what’s going on inside their intentions. What matters is what they do. Islam is all about submission to a pattern of life. But Christianity does involve outward submission to a pattern of life, but it all begins in the heart. It begins inwardly. Christianity is vigorously opposed to hypocrisy, vigorously opposed to appearing righteous on the outside, but inside full of corruption and deception. And so, we know that the whole thing goes the other way around. As the heart is transformed, if the heart is made good, then the actions of the body will follow. 

A number of years ago I read a fascinating story told in the era of the czars and the czarinas in Russia. And the Empress Catherine II was deceived by her minister, Grigory Potemkin, during her visit to the Crimea in 1787. Potemkin had led the military campaign, and the Crimea had been victorious, but the spoils that he saw were hardly worth the cost of the war. The region was underdeveloped, would’ve been disappointing to the Empress, and according to the story, the shrewd Potemkin had hollow facades of villages erected along the Dnipro River in order to dazzle the eyes of the Empress and her court as they drifted past on royal barges. So, you could think almost like a Hollywood set from the 1940s and ’50s, two-dimensional buildings and actors dressed up in costumes and all that. And his purpose was to make the region look far more attractive than it really was, and as a result, enhance his reputation in the Empress’s eyes.

The heart is the true nature of the person, the inner self.

Now, I don’t really know if that story is true or not, Potemkin’s villages. But whether it’s true or not, it serves to illustrate the important aspects of fallen human nature. We are experts at erecting facades that appear on the outside as righteous and holy, but actually, it’s a sham, it’s a deception, it’s literally hypocrisy. And so, we believe that Christianity is fundamentally a matter of the heart. The heart is the true nature of the person, the inner self. God says in 1 Samuel 16:7, “Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.” And so, God seeks a man after his own heart, David, to rule over his people. And so therefore, we want our heart to be after God’s own heart, that is, in conformity with God and how he thinks and what his emotions are, et cetera. That’s the desire. 

Now Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, zeroes in on the heart. As a matter of fact, much of the Sermon on the Mount all has to do with the essence of the heart. “Blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God” (Matthew 5:8). It is vital for us not merely to not murder, we have to not be angry in our hearts, because there’s a direct connection between the heart’s state of anger and the action of murder. The same thing with adultery. It’s not enough to merely not commit adultery. Jesus went after lust. So, he’s looking at the matter of the heart. He’s zeroing in on it. 

But the problem with us is that all of us are naturally corrupted in our hearts. “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” Jeremiah 17:9. Beyond this, Jeremiah teaches us that we have no power to change our hearts. As Jeremiah 13:23 says, “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? Neither can you do good who are accustomed to doing evil.” So, God desires purity in the human heart and only the pure in heart will see him. But our hearts are naturally wicked and corrupt, and we can’t make any changes over our hearts. 

The saving work of Christ is absolutely therefore essential. We must be transformed from the inside out so that our holiness is no Potemkin’s village. It’s not a sham, it’s not a show. Jesus’ delight is in true godliness, worked by his own sovereign power, by the power of the Holy Spirit in the heart of a human being. As Psalm 51:6 says, “Behold, you delight in truth in the inward being. You teach me wisdom in the secret heart.” 

So, this new covenant is a radical transformation of the individual from the inside out. As Ezekiel 36:25-27 says, “I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean. I will cleanse you from all of your impurities and from all of your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.” 

That is the joy of the new Covenant. It’s a total transformation of the human being from the inside out, the sovereign activity of the Holy Spirit removing the heart of stone and putting in a heart of flesh. That means a yielded, submissive heart that obeys God’s law from the inside out, that yearns to please God from the inside out. He is wanting to conform our heart, to conform our character to that of his Son, Jesus Christ. As Romans 8:29 says, “Those whom God foreknew, he predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.” 

The love of the Father for the Son cannot be measured. It’s infinite. He said, “This is my Son whom I love. With him, I’m well pleased” (Matthew 3:17). What’s so amazing is, that God, in his saving work of his sons and daughters, his children, are conforming us to Christ so that he will delight in us in the same way that he delights in his only begotten Son. 

So, as we begin this new section of an Infinite Journey and as we try to understand the transformation of sanctification, we are going to be looking at the vital area of character or the area of the heart. Now, we’re going to look over the next number of weeks at five areas. We’re going to begin today with affection, namely what you love and what you hate. We’re going to talk after that about desire, namely what you seek. And then after that, about will, what you choose, what you reject. We’re going to talk about the thought life, what you think about, ponder in your mind. And then finally, we’re going to talk about the emotional life, what you feel. Now, all of these things, affection, desire, will, thought and emotion they all work together in various settings and situations to create virtues that are appropriate to that setting. And so, we’ll have a time to talk about virtues, what you are in any and every situation. 

So, let’s begin now as we talk about this first area of character, affection, what you love and what you hate. Now, of all the hundreds of commandments given by God, Jesus Christ chose this one as the first and greatest, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind,” Matthew 22:37. So according to Jesus then love is the greatest measure of a soul, its truest indicator. If you want to understand what you are, then we should find out what you love and what you hate. 

Now, the reason that God the Father loves the Son, loves Jesus so much, is that Jesus perfectly loves what God loves and hates what God hates. For example, Hebrews 1:9, it says, “You have loved righteousness and hated wickedness. Therefore God, your God, has set you above your companions by anointing you with the oil of joy,” Hebrews 1:9. Jesus loves righteousness every bit as much as the Father does, and he hates wickedness every bit as much as the Father does. Because Jesus loves righteousness and hates wickedness, for that reason, God sets Jesus Christ infinitely above all other human beings. 

Therefore, if we’re going to be conformed to Christ, we are going to be like Jesus in what we love and what we hate. We’re going to love what Christ loves, and we are going to hate what Christ hates. We’re going to not merely be righteous; we’re going to love righteousness. We’re not going to merely not be wicked; we are going to hate wickedness itself. I believe we’ll be that way for all eternity in heaven. We will perfectly love righteousness in heaven and perfectly hate wickedness. But that’s another discussion for another day. 

Now, I want to reach now for one of the greatest books that I’ve ever read. One of the greatest books of theology is written by the greatest American pastor that I think has ever lived in terms of thought, theology, the way that he led the first great awakening. I’m speaking of Jonathan Edwards who ministered in the first half of the 18th century. And he wrote a number of very deep theological works. One of the best was his Treatise on Religious Affections. And in his Treatise on Religious Affections, he basically said that the human heart has a dual capacity. It has the ability first to comprehend things, to understand their essential nature. It’s like a scientific side. We are able to analyze and understand things that are around us. And then secondly, to be attracted to or repulsed away from those things to a greater or lesser degree. Such as attracted, I think of this almost like a magnet, would be in liking something or even on into loving something and then conversely disliking on even to hating that thing. 

So, to sum up what Edwards says in Treatise on Religious Affections, the human heart is able to know something as it is and then be attracted to or repulsed from it to a greater or lesser degree. So, you think about a magnet. You could imagine two bar magnets. I remember when I was in elementary school, we used to play with magnets. And there would be an N for north and an S for south on each of these magnets. And if you took the like poles and put them together, they would repulse each other. They’d be pushing… You could feel this force. If you put the end to the end that, you almost couldn’t touch them together because there was this magnetic force forcing them apart. That’s repulsion. 

Conversely, if you turned it around and so you had opposite poles, they would attract. And so, they would pull together. Our hearts do that. We are attracted to things and conversely repulsed away from things. In my mathematical mind, I laid this whole thing out on a number line. You can imagine the number line of affection. With zero in the number line, you remember number lines from math. Some of you love math, and some of you are groaning and wanting me to go onto more of a liberal arts poetical kind of thing. And I understand that. I love all those things. But bear with me on the number line. I think you remember what a number line is. 

And so, you’ve got zero right in the middle, and it goes infinitely left and right, to the left and to the right. On the left-hand side, you’ve got the negative numbers, on the right-hand side, you got the positive numbers. And the numbers get bigger and bigger as they get further and further from zero. So, in the number line of affections, the negative side would be disliking on to hating. And the positive side would be liking on to loving, with zero being absolute perfect indifference. You don’t like or dislike at all. 

Now, I believe everything you know in the world, in the universe, anything that you could describe is somewhere on your number line of affection. You either like it or love it, or you dislike it or hate it, everything. Now you could say, “Well, there are some things that I don’t feel much about,” but what I find is, the more you learn about something, the more it starts to move on your number line. It’s going to start going on the plus side or the minus side. 

So, if I just said, “I’m thinking of a person, do you like the person or not?” 

Well, if you generally people, you’ll be like, “I like people,” he’s probably on the plus… I actually don’t even know if it’s a he or she, et cetera. But the more you find out, then you’re going to say, “Yeah, I don’t really like that person,” or “I love them,” et cetera. 

All right, so everything that there is, every vegetable, like some of you like eggplant, some of you don’t. Some of you like broccoli, some of you don’t. Some of you don’t like vegetables at all. Some of you like all vegetables. They’re all going to be somewhere on your number line of affection. The same thing with people. People from history, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Adolf Hitler, Genghis Khan, everybody that you know something about, they’re going to be on the plus side of the minus side to a greater or less degree. People you know personally, your own mother, your father, your spouse, a friend, a brother, a sister, your pastor, everybody’s going to be somewhere on that number line of affection. 

Now, as we understand that number line of affection, the thing that’s the furthest right is that what you love the most. Of anything that there is in the universe, that thing, that topic, that person is uppermost in your affections. Now, we’ve come to realize as Christians, that should be the Triune God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit. We don’t make distinctions between them. We wouldn’t say we love the Father more than we love the Son. Let’s just say Father, Son and Spirit should be the furthest right in your number line of affection. And everything should be left. 

Anything that is not God is a creature. And if there’s any creature that’s further right than God, that is by definition an idol. That’s what an idol is. It’s to love a created thing more than the Creator. That’s Romans 1, definition of idolatry. On the negative side then would be evil things and also just amoral things that you just don’t like. I don’t like seafood. So that’s definitely on the negative side of my number line. But we should hate evil. We should hate sin more than we hate anything else. 

Now what happens at conversion is a lot of things move on our number line. Let’s say you’re unconverted. You’re an adult unconverted. You don’t like Christians, you don’t like the Bible, you don’t like Jesus. There’s just a lot of things you don’t like. Then when you’re converted, all of that moves, but not everything moves. I didn’t like seafood as an unconverted person, and I don’t like seafood now. That didn’t move at all. Furthermore, the number line is dynamic. Things don’t stay the same. You can actually love Christ more than you do. Sadly, we can also love Christ less than we do. It says of the church at Ephesus, “You have forsaken your first love” (Revelation 2:1-7), meaning they love Jesus more before than they do now. So, it’s very dynamic. 

Furthermore, we can actually hate wickedness and sin more 10 years ago than we do now. We’ve gotten a little hard, a little more callous. We don’t care as much about things. Or conversely, we could actually hate sin more and more and more. So, on the number line of affection in the internal journey, we should be growing more and more toward godly affections, loving what God loves and growing more and more in godly disaffections, hating what God hates. The goal would be to love what God loves more 10 years from now than we do right now, and to hate what God hates more 10 years from now than we do right now. So that’s what we mean by affections, what you love and what you hate.

We should love God more and more as time goes on. This is the first and greatest commandment to love him with all of our heart.

So, as we grow in grace in the knowledge of Christ, we’re going to be more and more sanctified. We’re going to see ourselves developing a whole new set of loves. Some things that we didn’t use to love as unconverted people or that we do love, maybe we’ve been converted for many years, but we could love these more and more such as God himself. We should love God more and more as time goes on. This is the first and greatest commandment to love him with all of our heart. And we should cherish Christ. We should delight in Christ. We should realize that in Christ is the embodiment of all of God’s characters. He’s the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being. 

We should be loving all human beings in that they’re created in the image of God. We should love our neighbor as ourselves. We should especially love other Christians, because they have been re-created by the Spirit in the image of God and of Christ, and we delight to be with them. We should enjoy fellowship with other Christians. We should love the poor and needy. We should delight in God’s creation. There are scriptures that support each one of these things. We should be delighting in the creation that God has made. We should love the word of God, the Bible. We should enjoy reading the scriptures. We should love God’s promises, his plans, his will and his purposes for our lives. We should even love our own weaknesses and trials as they keep us humble. And we should actually love what God is doing and consider it pure joy even when we face trials of many kinds. And there are many other things that the Bible says we should love as Christians. 

Conversely, we should be developing a whole new set of hatreds as well. We should more and more hate evil. I remember when I was working as an engineer, I had a cubicle that was my office and I had a Scripture verse up, which was not John 3:16 or other verses, but I remember, Psalm 97:10, it said, “Let those who love the Lord hate evil.” 

And so, people would walk in my office and read that, and I could tell it would make the wheels turn in their minds, and we’d get in good conversations. But that’s true of me now, still. I need to hate evil. “To fear the Lord is to hate evil,” Proverbs 8:13. “Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil, cling to what is good,” Romans 12:9. So I should more and more have a passionate, even angry relationship with temptation and sin. 

So, should we go on sinning that grace may abound? May it never be! Like we want to scream it from the bottom of our being. Absolutely not, I will not yield to that temptation because that would be wicked. It would be a great sin for me. Like Joseph reacted to Potiphar’s wife, there’s an emotional reaction, a vigorous reaction. When Christ saw the money changers in the temple and he made the whip and he drove them out, “Get out of here. How dare you turn my Father’s house into a marketplace.” 

And it was written about him in John 2:17, “Zeal for your house will consume me.” God’s house will consume me. There’s that sense of passion. And so, we should hate what God hates such as idolatry, false worship, hypocritical worship, “haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, false witnesses who pour out lies and a man who stirs up dissension among brothers.” That’s Proverbs 6:16-19. We should hate all those things. 

We should hate pride, any form of pride or arrogance. We should hate specific patterns of sin, all sins, robbery, iniquity, anything. We should hate the evil world system that Satan has set up to lure people away from sincere and pure devotion to God. God expects his people not only to hate these sins, but to fight against them, to expose them and to purify the church from them. If his people tolerate sin, then God is going to judge them. America is a country that increasingly prides itself on being open-minded and tolerant. And we are taught to be very tolerant of things the Bible definitely calls sin. We are to hate what is wicked and evil. We ought to hate all sin as though it is spiritual poison. 

All right, so we have begun to look at the matter of character, the Christian character and the heart. And as we conclude today, I want you to go ahead into your week knowing that God has gone ahead of you and will be using everything that you experienced this week to sanctify you and bring you more and more into conformity to Christ.