Signs of Gracious Affections

Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves. 2 CORINTHIANS 13:5

Having shown that strong religious feeling proves nothing by itself, Edwards faced the obvious question. What, then, does prove something? The longest part of Religious Affections answers it with twelve signs. They are not a checklist to be scored, and Edwards said so explicitly — he warned that no set of marks can enable us to judge another person’s heart with certainty, and that some of them are visible only to the person himself. They are given for self-examination, and they are pointed. Five of them are particularly searching.

Loved for Himself, or for His usefulness

The second sign asks what the affections are actually fixed upon. Counterfeit religious joy, Edwards observed, characteristically begins with the self. A person becomes convinced that God loves him, that he is forgiven, that he is destined for heaven — and from this arises great gladness. Notice that every element of that joy is about his own good fortune. God appears in it only as the source of his benefit. Gracious affections begin at the other end. They are drawn first by what God is in Himself — His holiness, His truth, His beauty — and the personal benefit follows as a consequence rather than founding the whole structure. The test is uncomfortable and it is fair. Would God still be lovely to you if He gave you nothing further? Is your delight in Him, or in your standing with Him?

Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee. PSALM 73:25

Evangelical humiliation

The sixth sign is a particular kind of lowliness, and Edwards distinguished it sharply from a counterfeit. There is a natural humiliation — a sense of one’s own smallness, failure or inadequacy — which any person may feel and which produces mostly despair or self-pity. It is essentially a wounded self, still very much at the centre.

Evangelical humiliation is different. It is the sense of one’s own utter insufficiency arising from a sight of God’s holiness, and its effect is not despair but relief. The soul stops defending itself and is glad to. Edwards regarded this as one of the most reliable marks, and he noted its inversion: the more genuine grace a person has, the smaller he appears to himself. Growth in holiness is accompanied by a growing sense of remaining sin, which is why mature saints so often describe themselves in terms younger believers find excessive.

I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes. JOB 42:5–6

The temper of Christ

The eighth sign is the character of Jesus reproduced — what Edwards called the lamblike, dovelike spirit. Here he confronted the most damaging phenomenon of the awakening. A great many people had become extremely zealous and extremely harsh: quick to denounce, confident about others’ spiritual state, contemptuous of ministers they judged unconverted. They regarded their severity as evidence of their earnestness. Edwards’s judgment was blunt. A censorious, bitter, quarrelsome spirit is not a sign of grace no matter how orthodox its opinions, because it is not the temper of the Lamb.

Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart. MATTHEW 11:29

Symmetry, and an appetite that grows

The tenth sign is proportion. Grace produces a balanced character rather than a lopsided one. The counterfeit is recognisable: enormous zeal in one department and nothing in another — fierce about doctrine and careless about money, scrupulous in worship and cruel at home, generous in public and unkind in private. Real grace touches everything, unevenly perhaps, but everywhere. The eleventh sign is the most encouraging in the list. False affections tend to satisfy — the person feels he has arrived, and his hunger diminishes. Gracious affections do the opposite: the more a soul receives, the more it wants. Spiritual appetite increases with feeding.

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled. MATTHEW 5:6

A word of pastoral caution, which Edwards himself supplied. These signs can be used destructively. A tender believer already prone to introspection may work through such a list and conclude he has no grace at all, when in fact the very anxiety he feels is evidence of a heart that cares. Edwards was aware of this and warned against endless self-examination. The signs are for occasional honest review, not for daily audit. And the remedy when they trouble you is not more inspection but more looking away — to Christ, in whom the assurance is finally located.

A new nature, not a new mood

Two further signs from the list deserve attention, because together they set the frame for all the others. The first sign is that gracious affections arise from a spiritual and supernatural influence on the heart — something genuinely new, not a heightened version of what was already there. This distinction runs through everything Edwards wrote about conversion. A natural person may be moved by religion in entirely natural ways. He may be stirred by beautiful music, gripped by a powerful speaker, frightened by thoughts of death, comforted by a sense of belonging. None of these requires the Spirit of God, and all of them can produce tears and resolutions and a temporary change of life. What grace produces is different in kind. It is a new spiritual sense — the capacity treated in chapter four — and it perceives an excellence in divine things that natural faculties cannot detect at all.

Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. JOHN 3:3

The seventh sign follows from this: gracious affections are attended with a change of nature. Edwards insisted that grace does not merely add religious activities to an unchanged person. It alters the disposition itself, so that what a person fundamentally wants is different. The change may be gradual in its outworking and is often invisible at first, but it is a change in the person, not merely in his behaviour or his schedule.

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. 2 CORINTHIANS 5:17

He added a qualification that has comforted many. The old nature is not eradicated, and the change is not complete in this life. A true convert still finds sin in himself, sometimes to his dismay, and the presence of that struggle is not evidence against conversion. What would be evidence against it is the absence of the struggle — the person in whom nothing has been disturbed at all.

The test, then, is not have you had a powerful experience? but has something in you been permanently altered? Not: were you moved on that occasion. But: do you want different things than you did, and has it lasted?

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Ask the second sign’s question directly: is your joy chiefly that God is glorious, or chiefly that you are safe? 2. Watch how you speak of other Christians who differ from you. Zeal that turns harsh has failed the eighth sign. 3. Look for lopsidedness. Where is your religion strong in public and absent in private? 4. Test your appetite. Has receiving from God made you hungrier or more satisfied with your present state? 5. Do not audit yourself daily. Review honestly, then turn your eyes to Christ, where assurance actually rests.

A PRAYER

Lord, search me, but do not leave me examining myself for ever.

Show me whether I love You for what You are or only for what You give. Show me whether my zeal has turned bitter. Show me the corner of my life where I have allowed grace no entry.

Give me the lowliness that comes from seeing You rather than the self-pity that comes from seeing myself.

And make me hungrier. Whatever You have given me, let it leave me wanting more of You. Amen.