Response to Piper “To define saving faith apart from feelings… is futile.”

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Because I think every redeemed person through history would acknowledge that because I am born again,

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I am a new creation in Christ, yet at the same time, I'm still battling the corruption that I inherited from Adam.

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Those things are true of me. And so, in my inner man, I'm thinking about Romans 7, of course,

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I'm thinking about Galatians 5, 17. In my inner man, I delight in the law of God. There's a feeling word.

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I delight in, I love God's truth. And I want to do all these good things. So I think every

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Christian ever would say, I want to love

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God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength. I want to love my neighbor as myself. I want to be filled with gratitude toward God, love toward God, affection toward God.

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I want to be humble before the Lord. I mean, we could keep saying, I want to feel all of these things toward God.

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The problem is, we battle the flesh and we battle our inherent corruption.

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And so, to use the language of the Apostle Paul, we do not always do what we want to do.

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We do not always feel what we want to feel. The flesh waging war against our spirit keeps us from doing what we want to do, is what

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Galatians 5, 17 says explicitly. And that reality is so critical for us to hold here, that intention with what we're talking about with respect to affections.

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So if Piper, for example, were to say that any Christian wants to, da -da -da -da -da, but yet we often struggle to,

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I would be like, brother, absolutely, I completely agree with you. The problem is, we don't feel, yeah, the problem is, we don't feel what we want to feel and we don't feel what we should feel.

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And so then the question is, as we've already alluded to, where in the world is our hope and our confidence and our assurance?

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Because if you're pointing me to my feelings, the authenticity of them, the realness of them, the level of them, how much is enough?

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How could I ever know that I'm feeling a sufficient amount of these things? Because again, it's gonna change, it's gonna be different tomorrow than it is today.

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And I can't even explain that to you as to why that's the case. Because I wake up some days and I'm thinking,

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I am just not feeling it today, like I even was yesterday. And I think that's the normal experience for the believer.

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Yeah, absolutely. So if you look at the Apostle Paul when he writes to the Corinthian church, who, historically speaking, all three of us would agree that they were very confused in their affections.

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They were - No doubt. They were running after the wrong gifts, they were running after the wrong sexual pleasures, they were running after money.

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I mean, it was all kinds of - They had misunderstood Christian freedom. They think that celebrating, they're celebrating sin, all that.

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But yet Paul does not write to them in such a way where he's trying to shake them in their assurance.

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He actually uses the gospel and says, it's the gospel that I want to preach to you, and then uses the love of God for them as the way to correct the issue.

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Is that, listen, God's affections towards you, God's consistent emotional affection, whatever, we can get into the emotions of God at another time.

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But we'll say the affections of God towards you, which are constant, ever flowing. And according to John 17, it is the same affection that he has for the son.

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He says that he loves us the way that he has loved the son. It is there, excuse me, it is there that we, as the believer, find the true sense of our foundation.

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Let me just read to you, Justin, I know you have something here in a minute, but I'm gonna read to you the LBC Confession, 1689.

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It's 18 .4, and these confessions are important because we have, when it comes down to, if we were to take all of the

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Reformed confessions, and when it comes to assurance, and when it comes to proper understanding of justification, we're going to agree here.

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And point four, it says this, true believers may, in various ways, have the assurance of their salvation shaken, decreased, or temporarily lost.

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This may happen because they neglect to preserve it or fall into some specific sin that wounds their conscience and grieves the spirit.

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What they are making room for is the frailty of the believer. We are frail creatures.

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This is why we reference things like Galatians 6, because we as believers, our affections and our emotions can absolutely be captured by the temptations of sin and pulled away at a point to where faithful, loving

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Christians have to come and rebuke us and pull us out. So the question, so we could say

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Mr. Piper is correct in that if the spirit lives within you, you will have these newfound affections, but they aren't a constant flow that is ever unmoving.