Natural Affection

“I searched for a man among them who would build up the wall and stand in the gap before Me for the land, so that I would not destroy it; but I found no one.” -Eze 22:30

I have said before that this with Exodus 32:32 are two of the most convicting verses in the Bible.  Last week I wanted to exhort you about cleaning your own heart before approaching the Lord.  This week I want to challenge you on a particular sin, which I believe to be absolutely pressing in the current time.  It is a failure to “build up the wall and stand in the gap” mentioned above.  If you have not allowed God to tenderize your heart and search out your own darling sins, it will be meaningless both for me to challenge you to intercede for those around you and for you to attempt to do it, so I must stress the importance of first responding to God and purifying your own life.  Please, if you have not spent time recently asking God to take out all selfishness and hardness of heart resulting from giving in to sin–do so before reading on.

In his Revival Lectures, Charles Finney enumerates many sins to be repented of by Christians seeking to promote a revival.  This failure to stand in the gap he calls “Want of love for the souls of your fellow-men.”

“Look round upon your friends and relatives, and remember how little compassion you have felt for them.  You have stood by and seen them going right to hell, and it seems as though you did not care if they did go.  How many days have there been, in which you did not make their condition the subject of a single fervent prayer, or evince an ardent desire for their salvation?”

He continues by challenging on a care for unsaved, un evangelized people groups and concludes thus:

“If you are not doing these things, and if your soul is not agonized for the poor benighted heathen, why are you such a hypocrite as to pretend to be a Christian?  Why, your profession is an insult to Jesus Christ!”

Consider for a moment the King of Heaven, who the Bible declares did not grasp onto His position as the Ruler of eternity, but rather concerned Himself with those of us who were at war with Him.  Indeed, He who was pure and just died for us “while we were yet sinners” because He loved us.  Is Finney not right to compare the Christly heart of compassion with those of us who are happy to simply be “saved” and yet not troubled in the slightest that His wrath is being stirred moment by moment and hour by hour by our own nation, by our own friends and relatives, and even by our own actions?  Is he wrong in the conclusion that we are sorely lacking in any genuine care for the souls of people we profess to love who are bound for an eternity in anguish?

I think too often we have heard the words of second Timothy chapter three about sinfulness in the last days and been to pleased to point at others with the words “Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof.”  Let’s read a bit earlier.  “For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud…without natural affection…”  This morning I was struck by the words “without natural affection.”  In this country, three thousand babies will be murdered today under government sanction.  Where is natural affection?  Where are the fathers of these children?!  Where are the rivers of tears poured out by Christians for these slain in the name of convenience?

There is an equal atrocity occurring all around us right now.  Everyday in our own sphere of influence, people are turning their hearts away from God’s Son.  Christians and non-Christians alike are lining up together to drink their fill from the cup of iniquity.  Our own mothers, brothers, friends and acquaintances are choosing spiritual death day after day, and are we concerned?  Does our natural affection for our fellow man (or even our friends and family) break our hearts that they are in sin?  Or are we, more often than not, insulated by a Christian subculture totally oblivious to the hurt and dying world around it.  Or, perhaps even more painfully, is it possible that we have become too caught up in our own affairs to be affected?

I suppose my point is to turn again to the message of Hosea.  Come, let us return to the Lord.  Let us Christians return to the place of absolute surrender to Christ.  Let us allow ourselves to be consumed by His purposes and transformed by His Spirit, and let us take on the heart of Christ for the world around us.  Then, let us turn to them and implore them on behalf of Christ to be reconciled to God (II Corinthians 5:20).

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One of the possibly similar posts generated by wordpress was an excellent post on Psalm 119:36, which can be found here.  I am including an excerpt from it below:

“My eyes shed streams of water, because they do not keep Your law.” -Psalm 119:136

…Robert Leighton has remarked concerning this passage, “We find not here a desire of fire to come down from heaven upon the breakers of the law, but such a grief as would rather bring water to quench it, if it were falling on them.”

Do I and my fellow Christians mourn for our sins and the great weight of sin in the world in such a way that it becomes much easier for our hearts to avoid succumbing to temptations? In the words of J.C. Ryle, “I doubt it.” Sin has become a laughing matter, an occasion for caustic or sarcastic derision. Sin, I fear, is no longer serious to us. Why not? Perhaps because our hearts are not like the heart of David as it is expressed in verse 161 of the same psalm: “My heart stands in awe of Your words.” We, in our hearts, have replaced the tenderness of the fear of God in large measure with the cynicism and cavalier attitude of the modern world. I think we unconsciously live with a worldview not based in the Bible. Our words and actions demonstrate a propensity toward humoring sin (especially notable in our attitude toward others, or sin “in the third person”) rather than mourning for sin. This should not be!

My prayer this morning is that God would guide my heart and mind into the path of David, and out of the common casual path which seems not so unlike the “broad road leading to destruction” (Matthew 7:13). Toward mourning for sin, away from snickering at it. Toward shedding streams of water from my eyes. Toward running to my neighbor’s burning house with a bucket of water instead of a book of matches.