Our Predominant Affection

The heart is constituted such that the only way to dispossess it of an old affection is by the expulsive power of a new one…and when God stands revealed as an object of confidence to sinners—and where our desire after Him is not chilled into apathy by that barrier of human guilt which intercepts every approach that is not made to Him through the appointed Mediator… it is when released from the spirit of bondage… and admitted into the number of God’s children, through the faith that is in Christ Jesus, the Spirit of adoption is poured upon us—it is then that the heart, brought under the mastery of one great and predominant affection, is delivered from the tyranny of its former desires and the only way in which deliverance is possible. ~Scottish pastor Thomas Chalmers, 1780-1847