Affections

Today I'm reflecting on different things I've read and heard recently, and how much they relate to my present difficulties. It's all seeming to fit together to teach me quite a lesson.

I'm thinking a lot about the feelings and affections of my heart.
Certainly many of the objects and affections of my heart can be fleeting, and even idolatrous. Everyone on earth has an idol factory in them.

"The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?"
-Jeremiah 17:9 ESV

Our hearts are the seat of all our affections, and the driving force of certain sins we commit...but also the seat of our affections for God. I believe this why David asked for a clean heart,

"Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me."
-Psalm 51:10 ESV

And only by the cleansing of our hearts by God are we able to produce fruit. I am also reminded of the famous quote of C.S. Lewis:

“If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is not part of the Christian faith.

Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak.

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."

- C. S. Lewis in “The Weight of Glory”


How true this rings to me, yet so often I forget it.

Whenever our hearts go astray from the affections of God to the affections of the world, we need to remind ourselves that we are settling for lesser things. No matter how attractive it may look to us, or how intoxicating our feelings towards those things may be, they separate us from fellowship with our Creator.

Ultimately, what's going to bring us the sweetest, satisfying joy is our fellowship with Him. The things we get caught up in this world may seem to be so attractive and worthy of the affections of our hearts...but they will never satisfy. It reminds me of what Jesus told the woman at the well,

"Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life." The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.”

-John 4:13-15 ESV

My dear friends, I ask you today...What is ultimately capturing the affections of your heart today? Are you drinking of the water of the world that keeps you thirsty, or are you drinking of the Living Water that satisfies?