Saving the Affections

“Though you have not seen him, you love him. Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory, obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls.”

1 Peter 1:8-9

It was from this passage that Jonathan Edwards grounded his classic work on The Religious Affections in 1746. In some ways, he was defending the practices of the season of revival that history knows as the First Great Awakening. But Edwards was not only being defensive. He wanted to explore for himself whether we could know from Scripture what are defining marks, or characteristics, of a true work of the Spirit. And he said that, “True religion, in great part, consists in holy affections.”1

Doctrine. A love for Christ, trust in God, and joy in the Spirit are characteristic of true Christians.   

(i.) True Christians love Jesus.

(ii.) True Christians trust God.

(iii.) True Christians have joy in the Spirit.

True Christians love Jesus.

Peter starts out, ‘Though you have not seen him, you love him’ (v. 8a). This is typical of the Apostles when they write to their beloved churches that they’ve started or had a hand in planting. When they want to comfort them in their affliction, they identify certain evidences of grace in their lives. So Paul said to the Thessalonians in a similar way,

For we know, brothers loved by God, that he has chosen you, because our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction … and how you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God (1 Thess. 1:5-6, 9).

Peter does something like this here. These Christians were under enormous pressure and discouragement. So he looks at them and says, in effect: I know that you love Jesus! It is evident!

Love for Christ is one of the chief evidences of grace. There’s a little booklet that R. C. Sproul wrote called Can I Be Sure I’m Saved? in which he asks his reader, “Do you love Jesus at all?” In other words, not perfectly or as much as you ought—but do you have any love for Him at all? Now, why is this useful in our quest for assurance? Sproul says,

Consider this question: “Is it possible for an unregenerate person to have any true affection for Christ?” My answer is no; affection for Christ is a result of the Spirit’s work … Before regeneration, we are cold, hostile, or indifferent (which is the worst kind of hostility) to the things of God, having no honest affection for Him, because we are in the flesh, and the flesh does not love the things of God. Love for God is kindled by the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit, who pours the love of God into our hearts (Rom. 5:5). So if a person can answer “Yes” when I ask whether he has an affection for Christ, even though he may not love Jesus as much as he ought to (i.e., perfectly), that assures me the Spirit has done this transforming work in his soul.2

And this love is in spite of not seeing Him. What kind of a love loves one that remains unseen? You’ve got a couple of options, because someone could say that it is wish-fulfillment. Plenty of people do that with celebrities, so for what seem like superficial reasons. But unlike some projected good that cares nothing for us, such a love is only explained by One who has been good to us, and is seen to be the source of good. And only the Christian can know a love who is the source of goodness and has shared that goodness with us: “We love because he first loved us” (1 Jn. 4:19). Peter is saying: That’s true about you.

True Christians trust God.

Peter continues that, ‘Though you do not now see him, you believe in him’ (v. 8b). This is not just mental noticing. This is a personal trust. That is why it is an intersection of intellect and affection. Some get nervous here because they might hear that something besides belief is justifying the believer. But the personal trust dimension isn’t some accessory. If you are in a burning building and a fireman shows up with his ladder and extends his hand, he is not asking you to nod your head and say, “Yes, I see you there.” The appropriate response is to take his hand. Trust is not alien to belief. It is belief that fits our weakness.

For all that, there can be no personal trust without a truth worthy of the name true. About these two things that Peter has set down so far, Calvin comments that,

the first arises from the second; for the cause of love is faith, not only because the knowledge of those blessings which Christ bestows on us, moves us to love him, but because he offers us perfect felicity, and thus draws us up to himself.3

Here is the dilemma. You have to see something of a thing before you believe it. But here Peter calls Him the One “you do not now see.” What then? The answer is simple, to channel Calvin again, “Faith, indeed, has also its eyes, but they are such as penetrate into the invisible kingdom of God.” For the author of Hebrews to call faith “the substance of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1) means not that nothing is seen by our minds, but that the thing you now need help in, or think you need an answer in your own way about.

Sometimes Abraham is said to have believed God against all understanding, especially in his act of faith that was ready to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Against all reason! Not quite. Not all. Later on in that Hebrews 11 chapter, we read,

He considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead, from which, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back (v. 19)

He did what? He reasoned. Abraham believed God where he couldn’t see, on that basis of what he already knew of God. The Psalmist says, “And those who know your name put their trust in you, for you, O Lord, have not forsaken those who seek you” (Ps. 9:10). It’s what we have seen of God so far that enables us to trust in Him for that next step that we can’t.

What did Jesus say to Thomas? “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (Jn. 20:29). What did Thomas do? He put his hands in the wounds, and Jesus encouraged him to do so. You may say, “But we are blessed for not having done so!” Not quite. We are blessed in spite of not having that opportunity, but where Thomas placed his hands into the flesh of the Word, we are constantly called to place the eyes out faith into the clear light of the Word. Paul says, “We walk by faith, not by sight” (2 For 5:7). He does not say, “We walk by faith, not by thinking.” Faith looks. Faith keeps looking. If faith doesn’t see yet or far enough, it isn’t because it closes its eyes or checks its brain at the door. Just the opposite. It is because it is just rubbing those eyes in the morning light and can’t wait to get a better view. This sense of faith is an active, whole-person looking.

Now, right up there with love of Christ is personal trust in God. That proves out you are born again? Why? Well, what’s a believer most fundamentally? A believing one. What other evidence would we expect? True believers believe! And if you believe, that’s not natural.

The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned (1 Cor. 2:14).

If you believe, God has visited you in grace. Be assured believer—because you believe.

True Christians have joy in the Spirit.

Peter completes the same thought with the words, ‘and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory’ (v. 8c). The reason I say “joy in the Spirit” is because here Peter is talking more about the subjective aspect, not only Christ as the object, but the fullness of what we feel in the depth of our being. The Holy Spirit is God dwelling in us, and joy in one of the fruit He produces in us (cf. Gal. 5:22). At any rate, those two parts of this clause—joy and glory—must be related to each other to understand. It is the glory that causes the joy. The expectation is for something that nothing in this life can satisfy and yet it is expected. Joy is a glory-expecting thing.

We have foretastes, or shadows, of this experience in other areas of our lives. An obvious example in the experience of children leading up to Christmas Day. We know what that is like. The analogy breaks down the moment the wrapping paper flies, or, for the parents, the moment you have to clean up the wrapping paper. But there is an anticipation, as ill-informed as it may be. The cynical person who thinks they’ve grown out of all that got on a track of asking the wrong questions. A better first one would have been: Why are we the kind of beings who can have that at all?

Joy is a knowing thing. Joy is on to something. We don’t cease that when we get older. We transfer anticipation to other things—usually lesser things, incidentally. But how did Peter describe what they were looking forward to just above? “an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you.”

Yet it is inexpressible. The essence of joy—its ultimate source—would be an inexpressible thing if we think about it.

It is because we are separated from what our souls long for by sin and death, we have two strikes against our ability to express it. Absence from our chief end obscures our view and assaults our heart.

Someone who is blind from birth and someone who goes blind later on may both long to see; but the man who has seen the sunrise, or the faces of his loved ones, knows more of what he is missing. Now imagine if the the second blind man tried to EXPRESS those experiences to the first blind man.

There is a sense in which we who have the Holy Spirit are more like the second man with a memory. How so? How can we “have” such a joy? Paul gives us a clue where he says,

But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him”—these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit (1 Cor. 2:9-10).

Wait a minute—which is it Paul? Has no eye seen, or has God revealed it? Has no heart imagined, or has God revealed it? It’s the ultimate case of having something that we’ve not yet had, but our conviction that it’s the goal cannot be shaken. That is joy inexpressible. You have tasted, but in the way C. S. Lewis described once, as,

the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it … The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.4

You can see why this would be Peter’s focus to Christians who are having all of their physical comforts taken away. God has been with them, sanctifying them with the pressure of this world’s worst, but leading them on with that tune or that news from the far greater country.

Practical Use of the Doctrine

Use 1. Instruction (or Correction). There is a truth in verse 9 that wraps up into one package those three dimensions of our souls—that loving, trusting, and rejoicing in verse 8—and that is that this completion of the salvation is precisely of OUR SOULS. God is not saving heartless, lifeless, machines, but whole souls. He is saving the affections, not only the mind and the will, but those things that Edwards called “the more vigorous and sensible exercises of the inclination.”5 For some Christians, the struggle about the afterlife is: Why bodies? For others, the struggle is about emotions and personal experiences. Christ is redeeming the whole you.

Use 2. Exhortation. Verse 9 is still instructing us, but, as we have already seen, there is a future-tense to salvation, as well as a past-tense and present-tense. We are looking ahead to ‘obtaining the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls’ (v. 9). The Bible speaks in the imperative to “obtain” or “strive,”6 as in: “Let us therefore strive to enter that rest” (Heb. 4:11).

What does “striving” mean practically? It means laying hold of God’s ordinary means of grace, which exercise your soul like running and weights exercise your body. Paul talks like this: “Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable” (1 Cor. 9:25). So do your daily spiritual disciplines and weekly participation in the means of grace with the saints resemble anything like an athlete training for a prize? If not, get in the gym of the Spirit.

Use 3. Consolation. Another commentator, Robert Leighton, offers a principle that shows us the gospel packed into this passage:

That which gives full joy to the soul, must be something that is higher and better than [the soul] itself. In a word, He who made it, can alone make it glad after this manner, with unspeakable and glorious joy.7

The Giver of love, faith, and joy is its Object and Gift. He would not give the path and light its way to Himself if He did not ensure your journey home. He has given you such an affection for its fulfillment.

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1. Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume One (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 2009), 236.

2. Sproul, Can I Be Sure I’m Saved? (Sanford, FL: Ligonier Ministries, 2010)

3. Calvin, Commentaries, XXII.2.34.

4. C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 29.

5. Edwards, Religious Affections, in Works, I:237.

6. Edwards says of this, “The business of religion is, from time to time, compared to those exercises, wherein men are wont to have their hearts and strength greatly exercised and engaged; such as running, wrestling, or agonizing for a great prize or crown, and fighting with strong enemies that seek our lives, and warring as those that by violence take a city or kingdom.” Religious Affections, in Works, I:238.

7. Robert Leighton, An Obedient and Patient Faith: An Exposition of 1st Peter (Amityville, NY: Calvary Press, 1995), 51.