Affection 445
do so will bring damage to his spiritual life. Various spiritual
experiences are apportioned to different steps in one’s spiritual walk.
To encounter a certain experience in its corresponding stage of life is
both proper and profitable; but to hanker again for those early
experiences at a later stage in our walk constitutes retreat or
retardation. After the Lord has made a person feel His love, He
wishes Him to believe in His love. Hence when one has experienced
for a time the love of the Lord in his emotion, God will remove that
feeling (although not immediately) in order to create in him the
essential belief that the love of the Lord never changes.
Consequently, let that one not be surprised should he, following a
period of feeling the Lord’s love, lose that feeling. The time has now
arrived for him to believe in the Lord’s love.
Guard against One ThingWe have learned that in walking after the spirit we need to keep
our emotion calm and quiet; otherwise we cannot hear the voice of
intuition. Unless our affection is thoroughly quiet under the will of
God our heart will be intermittently disturbed and the guidance of the
spirit will hence be interrupted. A believer should always notice in
his spirit what person or thing easily activates his affection. Should
Satan be impotent to overcome a believer in any other respect, he
will tempt him through this particular point involving his affection.
Innumerable Christians have failed on just this issue. Great caution
must accordingly be exercised.
Nothing activates our affection more than friends, and among
friends the opposite sex stirs us the most. Due to differences in
natural endowment, the opposite sexes attract each other. Here is not
only a physical complement but a psychological one as well. Yet
such attraction belongs to the soul: it is natural: it ought to be denied.
It is an established fact that the opposite sex can easily stimulate
affection. The stimulation by the same sex is much less prevalent