Synching Our Affections

As the teaching team nearly closed its reading of Sam Storms' Convergence: Spiritual Journeys of a Charismatic Calvinist on Monday, we had one of our most intensive discussions ever--and this from a couple of chapters that everyone hemmed and hawed about at first!

We were led to inquire of one another about "affections," the word used by Jonathan Edwards and other older church leaders to describe the deep stirrings of our soul, what the Catholics might call unction. Affections come when we are richly moved by God toward God. Storms wrote: "Edwards argues that virtually all external expressions of worship 'can be of no further use, than as they have some tendency to affect our hearts, or the hearts of others.'"

Here's where our discussion led:

While we cannot inspire these affections--they are caused by the Holy Spirit--we can certainly do the work of preparing the soil of our souls so that the germination of affections is made easier. This hard work includes (but is probably not limited to) repentance, study and meditation from Scripture, obedience to Scripture, prayer, exposure to God-fired teaching and preaching, and service among the needy.

Because different people in a fellowship are engaged in various degrees of hard work, and because other factors such as physical health and earthly distractions come in to play, the normal scenario week in and week out is that some are greatly "affected" by the worship and/or teaching and sharing in a gathering and others are not. Some go through sustained periods of affection; others catch it only for a night.

We might then say that revival could be defined as the simultaneous affectedness of a group of believers. And the teaching team was much agreed on this definition. And I might add here that there is a connection as well to the last sentence of the preceding paragraph: some "revivals" are short-lived and others long lasting (and we have no great control over this).

With this in mind, we agreed as well that if we truly desire an increase in the affections God works among us, perhaps unto revival, we would do well to grow more concerted in our actions leading up to our gatherings. Therefore, as we send the Door-to-Door weekly email newsletter in the weeks to come, we will be including reading, meditation, prayer and activity points that we would like to see many engage in during the 24-48 hours that precede our Saturday night gatherings. There is reason to believe that this sort of all-together-now preparation really will leave room for the Spirit of God to meet our readied hearts with special gifts of His presence and power.

For those who might comment, I suppose I am looking to make this more of a "suggestion box" this time around. Any ideas for worshipful preparation are welcome.