A Greater Affection

Read this first

If You Are Tired of Losing

You may have fought this sin for years. You may be ashamed to make God the same promise one more time. This page is for you, and it does not begin with a new promise.

If you write to me about your sin, know first that I cannot keep a secret that leaves someone in danger. If your sin is hurting a child or anyone else, go to your pastor and the authorities before you write to me.

Most of us tell God we are done with a sin, and for a while the promise holds. Then a bad night comes, and the old sin walks back in as if it still had a key.

A sin keeps its hold because the heart still loves it. So this page begins with what you love, and with the King you are coming to, who will not break a bruised reed (Isaiah 42:3).

If you are not sure you have ever come to Christ, read Where the Fight Begins first. If you are near despair, go straight to The Ground Under Your Feet. If there is a sin you love and mean to keep, there is an honest word for you too.

If what troubles you is a thought you hate and never chose, read Doubts and Unwanted Thoughts first, because a page like this can feed that fear. For you, the searching should be short and the looking to Christ long.

The root

The Heart Is Never Empty

Sin breaks God’s law, and at its root it is love turned from God to something else. That is why a promise to stop so seldom holds.

The Westminster Shorter Catechism, part of the standard this site holds, begins with what you were made for.

Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him for ever.

Westminster Shorter Catechism Q&A 1

So your heart was built to want, and it never stops wanting. The wanting itself is God’s gift, and sin has bent it. God named what we do instead through Jeremiah.

For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.

Jeremiah 2:13 (KJV)

A cistern was a pit cut in rock to catch the rain, and a broken one leaks. The sin you keep going back to is a cistern you dug. It promised rest after a hard day, or the feeling of being wanted, and it never held. Paul calls covetousness idolatry, love given to something that should never have had it, and in the same verse he names the bent desires that must be put to death (Colossians 3:5).

So proving to a man that his sin is empty seldom sets him free. He has known it every morning after.

Thomas Chalmers, a Scottish minister, preached on this two hundred years ago in a sermon called The Expulsive Power of a New Affection. An affection is what the heart loves and leans toward, and expulsive means driving out. The heart must have something to cling to, he said, and the only way to dispossess it of an old affection is by the expulsive power of a new one. Jesus told of a house swept clean and left empty, and of what came back to fill it (Matthew 12:43-45).

Nobody blows out his candle because someone proves it is small. He sets it down when the sun is up.

Chalmers did not mean that any new interest will do. The love that drives out the love of the world, he said, arises only when by faith a man sees God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ and hears him call all who will to a full pardon.

Willpower can sweep the house. It cannot fill it.

A greater affection

Beholding Christ

The one love strong enough to drive out the others is love for Christ, and it grows from seeing his love for sinners. God does not ask you to work it up. He shows you his Son.

But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord.

2 Corinthians 3:18 (KJV)

A glass is a mirror, and the mirror is the gospel, which shows the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 4:6). We become like what we behold, slowly, and the Spirit does it. Paul says this of everyone whose heart has turned to the Lord (3:16), and it can begin for you the day you turn.

Beholding him does not mean picturing his face (Larger Catechism Q&A 109). It means looking by faith at who Scripture shows him to be and what he does. Read the Gospels slowly, and watch him touch a leper (Mark 1:41) and eat with sinners (Luke 15:2). Sit under preaching that holds him out, and if you are a communing member of a faithful church, come to his Table. God grows a new love by these ordinary means.

He offered the woman at the well living water before she had changed anything, though her life was a row of broken cisterns (John 4:13-18). He offers the same water to you. And where his pardon is known, love follows. Of the woman who wept at his feet he said, Her sins, which are many, are forgiven (Luke 7:47). Her love was the fruit of that pardon, and it was her faith that saved her (7:50). We love him, because he first loved us (1 John 4:19).

John Owen, an English Puritan pastor, gave the same counsel in his book Indwelling Sin, to fill your affections with the cross of Christ, that there may be no room for sin. This is no technique, and no feeling you must produce before you may fight.

If you are not his yet

Where the Fight Begins

Only those who belong to Christ can put sin to death. If you are not his yet, your fight begins with him.

Mortify means to put to death. Before Owen gave a single direction for doing it, he said that unless a man is truly joined to Christ, he can never mortify any one sin. Paul says that if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his (Romans 8:9).

So conversion comes first, and Owen said that is no unkindness. If a man is patching a hole in his wall while the whole house burns, the friend who calls him to the fire is not his enemy.

Sin is a master, and only the Son can make you free indeed (John 8:34-36). He lived the life you have not lived. He bore the curse in the place of all who trust him, and he rose again. He is freely offered to you, and he turns away no one who comes.

If your sin is harming someone, stop today and get help (My sin is hurting someone else). Stopping is right, and it still cannot make you his. The promises further down this page belong to those who belong to Christ. They can be yours. Come to Him tells you how.

Mortification

Putting Sin to Death

Once the heart has seen Christ, it turns against the old love that still pulls at it, and the Spirit gives it strength to put that sin to death.

Paul joins what you love to what you do, and the hinge is one word.

If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God. Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory. Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry:

Colossians 3:1-5 (KJV)

Mortify means put to death. The therefore in verse 5 hangs on verses 1 to 4. If you are his, you died with Christ and your life is hid with him in God, and so your heart is set on things above. Only then does Paul say, Mortify. Inordinate affection is love out of order, and concupiscence is evil desire. The members to mortify are the sins in Paul’s list, not the limbs of the body.

Jesus spoke the same way when he said to pluck out a right eye, or cut off a right hand, that offends, which means one that makes you stumble (Matthew 5:29-30). He had just put lust in the heart (5:28), and a man with one eye can still lust. It is a picture of cutting off whatever feeds the sin, even what you value most. God never asks you to harm your body (Larger Catechism Q&A 135-136), and if you are his, your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost (1 Corinthians 6:19). If you have hurt yourself, or feel driven to, call 988 or text 988 now. If you are badly hurt, call 911.

In 1656 Owen wrote Of the Mortification of Sin in Believers, a book Christians have leaned on ever since, and he built it on one verse.

For if ye live after the flesh, ye shall die: but if ye through the Spirit do mortify the deeds of the body, ye shall live.

Romans 8:13 (KJV)

Ye means believers, who are under no condemnation (Romans 8:1). The flesh is the old sinful nature, not skin and bone. Ye do mortify means the work is yours, and through the Spirit means the strength is his. The if shows the path the believer walks. It does not set a price on life, for Christ has already paid that for all who are his.

Owen said that even the best believers must make this their business all their days. As he put it, be killing sin or it will be killing you.

They who are effectually called and regenerated, having a new heart and a new spirit created in them, are further sanctified, really and personally, through the virtue of Christ’s death and resurrection, by his Word and Spirit dwelling in them; the dominion of the whole body of sin is destroyed, and the several lusts thereof are more and more weakened and mortified, and they more and more quickened and strengthened, in all saving graces, to the practice of true holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord.

Westminster Confession of Faith 13.1

Quickened means made alive, virtue means power, and a lust is any strong sinful desire. Saving graces are the holy habits the Spirit grows in God’s people, such as faith and humility. Notice the words more and more. The change is real and slow, and never finished in this life (Westminster Confession 13.2).

Owen warned that a calm temper, a hidden sin, or a burst of zeal after a scare kills nothing, and that the man who trades one sin for another hath changed his master, but is a servant still.

The real thing is slower. Owen pictured a man nailed to a cross, who cries out loudly at first and more faintly as his blood drains away. He took the picture from Paul, who says, They that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with the affections and lusts (Galatians 5:24). Sin in a believer dies that way, slowly, more and more as the Confession says, and never all the way in this life. All that while, a new grace grows in its place. Owen also asked why you fight. True mortification, he said, rests on hating sin because it is sin, and not only because it shames you, and on a sense of Christ’s love shown at the cross.

The daily work

How the Fight Is Fought

The Spirit does not do this in your place, and you cannot do it without him. The Confession holds both together.

Their ability to do good works is not at all of themselves, but wholly from the Spirit of Christ. And that they may be enabled thereunto, besides the graces they have already received, there is required an actual influence of the same Holy Spirit to work in them to will and to do of his good pleasure; yet are they not hereupon to grow negligent, as if they were not bound to perform any duty unless upon a special motion of the Spirit; but they ought to be diligent in stirring up the grace of God that is in them.

Westminster Confession of Faith 16.3

A special motion means a special stirring. Some teach that a Christian should stop trying and let God do it, and the Confession will not have it. Owen said of the Spirit that he works in us and with us, not against us or without us. God works in, so you work out (Philippians 2:12-13), and work out never means work for.

If you are his, do these things, and begin each day with the first.

1. Look to Christ before you look at the sin. Owen’s chief direction for killing sin was to set faith at work on Christ, and he called Christ’s blood the great sovereign remedy for sin-sick souls. Come to the throne of grace for mercy for the last fall and grace for the next hour (Hebrews 4:16).
2. Strike at the first stirring. A man is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed, before the desire ever conceives and brings forth sin (James 1:14-15). Strike before it conceives.
3. Cut off what feeds it. Make not provision for the flesh (Romans 13:14). With each sin God forbids all the causes, means, occasions, and appearances thereof (Larger Catechism Q&A 99). Put the phone out of the bedroom at night, take a different road home, and end the friendship that keeps leading you back. When you must, run. Joseph left his garment in her hand, and fled, and got him out (Genesis 39:12).
4. Bring it into the light. The Confession asks you to repent of your particular sins particularly (15.5). That means naming this sin to God plainly, and then being done. It does not mean listing every passing thought. Then tell a believer you trust, a man if you are a man and a woman if you are a woman, or tell your elders, because sin deceives and God’s remedy is to exhort one another daily (Hebrews 3:13). If you are young, tell a parent, or if you cannot, another adult you trust, such as a teacher or your pastor. If you are the pastor, tell an elder or a minister you trust.
5. Keep to the means. Watch and pray (Matthew 26:41). Put your baptism to use by drawing strength from the death and resurrection of Christ, into whom we are baptized, for the mortifying of sin (Larger Catechism Q&A 167). Sit under the Word in a church, and not only on a screen, and if you are a communing member, come to the Table (The Life That Comes After).

Particular sins

When the Sin Has a Name

Some sins bring danger with them, to you or to someone near you. They are fought the same way at the root, with your eyes on Christ, and they need more help than a page can give.

If none of these is yours, go on to The Ground Under Your Feet.

Two things first. If you cut or starve or purge yourself, see a doctor this week, and if you feel driven to hurt yourself, call 988 or text 988 now. And what was done to you by force, or by an adult when you were a child, is not your sin to put to death (If You Are Not Safe).

I cannot stop looking at what I should not

If these are thoughts you hate and never chose, this section is not for you. Go to Doubts and Unwanted Thoughts.

If it is pornography, name it to yourself and to God. Christ was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin (Hebrews 4:15), and there is grace to help at his throne (4:16). Put the screen out of reach at the hours you fall, and tell someone. If you are young, tell a parent, or if you cannot, another adult you trust. If you are married, ask your pastor or an elder to help you bring it into the light at home.

If you are an adult and what you look at shows anyone under eighteen, a real child was abused to make it, and looking at it is a crime. Stop today, and read My sin is hurting someone else.

If you are young and an adult showed you these things or asked you for pictures, or if anyone at any age threatens to share pictures of you, it is being done to you. Do not pay, and do not send more. Stop answering, and do not delete the messages. If you are young, tell a parent or another adult you trust today. If you are grown, tell the police. If it feels like more than you can live through, call 988 or text 988.

I have been unfaithful

If it is still going on, end it today, with no contact, as Joseph fled (Genesis 39:12). If the affair was physical, see a doctor and be tested, for your husband’s or wife’s sake as well as your own. For confessing to your husband or wife, read If you are the one who broke faith. If you catch yourself thinking your family would be better off without you, that is a lie. Call 988 or text 988.

My anger frightens my family

A harsh husband or wife, father or mother, is the opposite of the gentle King, and tears after an outburst are not yet repentance. If you have hit, choked, forced, or threatened anyone at home, or broken things to frighten them, that is abuse and a crime. Give them the distance they ask for. Do not press them to forgive you, to take back what they told anyone, or to sit in counseling with you. Tell your elders, and accept that the police may be involved. If you are afraid you will hurt someone, leave the house and call 911. Give any guns in the house to someone to keep. If you are the one who is afraid, read If You Are Not Safe.

Drink or drugs have hold of me

Paul sets a better filling against drink, Be filled with the Spirit (Ephesians 5:18). God works through means (Westminster Confession 5.3), and a doctor and treatment are among them. If you drink heavily every day, or take a pill like Xanax or Valium every day, do not stop all at once on your own, since that can bring seizures and can kill. See a doctor this week, tell the whole truth about how much you use, and let someone go with you. Tell your pastor or an elder too. After even a few days off opioids, your old dose can kill you. If someone has taken too much, call 911, and give naloxone (Narcan) if you have it. Do not stop a prescribed medicine without asking your doctor.

My sin is hurting someone else

If these are thoughts you hate and never chose, this section is not for you. Go to Doubts and Unwanted Thoughts.

If you have not acted, but you fear a desire toward a child, do not be alone with children, and tell a doctor and your pastor this week. A doctor can tell a fear you hate from a desire you must fight, and there is help for both.

If you have harmed someone, the harm stops first. If it touches a child, stay away from children today, your own included. If the child lives with you, you are the one who leaves the house, today. Do not ask the child or anyone in the family to keep it quiet. Tell your pastor, and know that harm to a child must be reported to the police or to child protective services. A faithful church will not keep it secret (For pastors and elders).

Accept what the law does (Romans 13:4), for pardon with God does not cancel earthly justice. Christ turns away no one who comes to him, and coming to him means coming into the light, for he that doeth truth cometh to the light (John 3:21). This hour is dangerous for your own life too. If you are thinking of ending it, call 988 or text 988 now.

Assurance

The Ground Under Your Feet

If you are his, you do not fight for your place with God. You fight from it.

Justification is God’s verdict that pardons a sinner and counts him righteous for Christ’s sake. Sanctification is his lifelong work of making that sinner holy. The Larger Catechism sets them side by side.

Although sanctification be inseparably joined with justification, yet they differ, in that God in justification imputeth the righteousness of Christ; in sanctification his Spirit infuseth grace, and enableth to the exercise thereof; in the former, sin is pardoned; in the other, it is subdued: the one doth equally free all believers from the revenging wrath of God, and that perfectly in this life, that they never fall into condemnation; the other is neither equal in all, nor in this life perfect in any, but growing up to perfection.

Westminster Larger Catechism Q&A 77

Imputeth means credits to your account, and infuseth means pours in. The pardon is the same in every believer and perfect today, whatever your week was like. The subduing of sin is uneven in all and finished in none. Your standing rests on the first, and the second is the evidence that you have it (Justification by Faith Alone). A boy who breaks a window is in trouble with his father, but he is not an orphan again.

The Confession gives assurance three grounds, God’s promises first, then the graces he works in his children, then his Spirit’s witness (Am I Really His). In Grace Abounding, John Bunyan tells how he saw that his good frame of heart did not make his righteousness before God better, nor his bad frame make it worse. He wrote, my righteousness was Jesus Christ Himself.

It can seem wiser to keep a struggling Christian unsure, as if fear would keep him careful. The Confession says the opposite. God settles his children’s place in his house before he sends them out to fight, and he wants them sure of it. A true believer may wait long and fight hard before he has that assurance, so if you lack it, that does not prove you are not his. Seek it all the same, for the Confession calls that seeking a duty, and assurance makes a Christian stronger in the fight and never looser.

This infallible assurance doth not so belong to the essence of faith, but that a true believer may wait long, and conflict with many difficulties before he be partaker of it: yet, being enabled by the Spirit to know the things which are freely given him of God, he may, without extraordinary revelation, in the right use of ordinary means, attain thereunto. And therefore it is the duty of everyone to give all diligence to make his calling and election sure; that thereby his heart may be enlarged in peace and joy in the Holy Ghost, in love and thankfulness to God, and in strength and cheerfulness in the duties of obedience, the proper fruits of this assurance: so far is it from inclining men to looseness.

Westminster Confession of Faith 18.3

Looseness means careless living.

So Paul promises all who are under grace, For sin shall not have dominion over you, and he gives the reason, for ye are not under the law, but under grace (Romans 6:14). A hired hand works in dread of losing his place, and that slavish fear, as the Confession calls it (20.1), never taught a heart to love. A son works his father’s field because it is his father’s. His fear is a son’s fear of grieving the father who loves him, and in that fear believers go on perfecting holiness (2 Corinthians 7:1).

I fell again today

Then go back to Christ tonight, with the sin still on your hands. Micah spoke for God’s people when they were brought low for their sin. When I fall, I shall arise, he says, and in the next breath, I have sinned against him (Micah 7:8-9). After Peter denied him, the Lord turned, and looked upon Peter (Luke 22:61), and Peter wept and was restored. Judas was sorry too (Matthew 27:3), but he carried his sorrow away from Christ, and Paul calls that the sorrow of the world (2 Corinthians 7:10). Whatever your sorrow tells you, carry it to him.

One grave sin can shake your assurance for a while, yet the seed of God remains in his children (Westminster Confession 18.4, and see When God Feels Far). Confess it, for he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins (1 John 1:9). If you fear he must be tired of forgiving you, read When Sin Will Not Leave. If the shame tells you that you would be better off dead, or that others would be better off without you, it is lying. Call 988 or text 988 now, and tell someone near you.

I do not feel that I love him

If you cannot feel your love for him, but you long to be free of your sin and to love him more, look at the longing itself. Owen said that longing, breathing, and panting after deliverance is a grace in itself. Peter wrote to believers, Whom having not seen, ye love (1 Peter 1:8), and the Larger Catechism (Q&A 172) asks what you want, not whether you have won yet.

You must truly be Christ’s to put sin to death, Owen said, but you need not first be sure that you are. Your hope rests on Christ and his promise, not on how the fight is going, though the fight itself is one of the marks of his Spirit in you. So look to Christ, and fight. Richard Sibbes wrote in The Bruised Reed that there is more mercy in Christ than sin in us.

An honest word

If You Have Made Peace With It

This part is not for the one who hates his sin and keeps losing. It is for the one who has stopped fighting and made a home for it.

If you hate your sin, even as you fall, go on to the last section. If reading this frightens you and makes you want to fight, it is not describing you. Go on too.

The first half of Romans 8:13 is a real warning to the church. If ye live after the flesh, ye shall die. Owen said that a man who finds no fight in himself against his sin, and does not set himself against it, is at peace with it, not dying to it.

Although hypocrites and other unregenerate men may vainly deceive themselves with false hopes and carnal presumptions of being in the favour of God and estate of salvation, which hope of theirs shall perish: yet such as truly believe in the Lord Jesus, and love him in sincerity, endeavoring to walk in all good conscience before him, may in this life be certainly assured that they are in a state of grace, and may rejoice in the hope of the glory of God, which hope shall never make them ashamed.

Westminster Confession of Faith 18.1

Carnal presumptions are hopes the sinful heart takes for granted. One hope shall perish and the other shall never make them ashamed. What divides them is a true faith in the Lord Jesus, with the sincere love for him and the honest effort to walk with him that always come with it.

If you love a sin and mean to keep it, you have no ground to call yourself safe, whatever you once prayed or professed. God’s foundation carries two sayings on one seal, The Lord knoweth them that are his, and, Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity (2 Timothy 2:19). That is hard to hear. It is said plainly because the door is still open.

Go to your elders and tell them the truth. Paul says, Let a man examine himself, and so let him eat (1 Corinthians 11:28), and a man who means to keep his sin should not come to the Table until he has turned from it (Westminster Confession 29.8). Christ has given his church the power to keep such a man from the Table until he turns (Larger Catechism Q&A 173). That discipline is care that aims to bring you back (Where Christ Feeds His People). Owen’s rule, that only a believer can put sin to death, reaches you too. If you will not fight, you may need to come to Christ as if for the first time, and you may come today. The goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance (Romans 2:4).

The end of the fight

Until You See Him

For all who are his, this fight has an end. The last look at Christ will finish what the first look began.

Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is. And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure.

1 John 3:2-3 (KJV)

Beholding him by faith changes us slowly now, and seeing him will finish it. At death the souls of believers are made perfect in holiness (When Death Comes Near), and the sin you have fought will not come with you.

If you are his, take the same road again tomorrow. The King you fight under will not break a bruised reed (Matthew 12:20). Of faith set on Christ, Owen wrote, live in this, and thou wilt die a conqueror.

If you are not his yet, all of this can be yours. Christ died for sinners and rose again, and he is freely offered to you. He is gentle with those who come. Turn from your sin and trust him. Come as you are, today, and he will do the cleaning.

Let your elders know you, and if you have no church, find a faithful one. If you would like someone to pray for you, write to me. I am not a pastor, so in an emergency do not wait on me.