Stirring Our Affections: Substitution (Daily Encouragement Series)
Little children, keep yourselves from idols – 1 John 5:21
When I had just become a follower of Christ, I heard our pastor refer to a sermon that was nearly two hundred years old called the “Expulsive Power of a New Affection” by Thomas Chalmbers. I attempted to read the sermon but it was in Old English so I gave up…but the title alone gave me a great understanding of how to grow in holiness and stir ones affection for Jesus.
You see, if you want to say, lose weight you know you need to eat healthy and exercise. What is not very effective is to focus on not eating junk food: don’t eat cake, don’t eat cake, don’t eat cake (we all end up eating cake). It is more effective to have a greater desire to be physically healthy and have the freedom it brings. You then focus on exercising and eating better. When you start seeing a slight change, it compels you to want to feel even better. As you focus on being healthy, you don’t focus (as much) on cake. Your “new, greater affection” expulses your old, lesser affection.
John Piper put it this way: the most effective way to kill our own sin is by the power of a superior pleasure. No one sins out of duty. We sin because it is more pleasant or less painful than the way of righteousness. So bondage to sin is broken by a stronger attraction — a more compelling joy.”
John Lynch drives at the same idea in Truth for Today (9.3):
“You may be tempted to identify your idols and then, one by one, with watchful diligence and slavish intention, eradicate, be freed, or released from them.
Jesus might kindly say to you, “In truth, you just created another idol—your confidence in your ability to vanquish your idols. Your idols will not be eradicated by good intention and rigorous self-examination but by substitution. You created them because you could not yet believe that I am who I say I am IN YOU. When you see me well, when you see the beauty of my delight, the freedom of this life in the light, the idols will begin to lose their shape, form and pull. There are many who want you to focus on naming and destroying your idols. I wish you wouldn’t bother. These idols exist only because you are still too frightened to risk substituting the old life with the one I want us to enjoy together. I’ll never stop inviting you to join me.”
What are the things that draw you away from Christ (idols)? How can a superior view of Christ draw you away from them and toward Him?
Prayer for a superior view of Christ from Ephesians 3:14-21:
For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that according to the riches of his glory he may grant you to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith—that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen.