Category Archives: Human nature

Our thoughts follow our affections

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If you delight in something, you give yourself to it with greater joy, and greater duration. When you don’t, it becomes a drudgery to deal with it.

Puritan pastor Thomas Manton reflects on Psalm 1:2 (below), and the connection between delighting in the Word of God, and where that will lead…!

Mark first, that the Word was his delight, and then his meditation. Delight causeth meditation, and meditation increaseth delight: BUT HIS DELIGHT IS IN THE LAW OF THE LORD, AND IN HIS LAW DOTH HE MEDITATE DAY AND NIGHT (Psalm 1:2). A man that delights in the law of God, will exercise his mind therein. Our thoughts follow our affections. It is tedious and irksome to the flesh to meditate, but delight will carry us out. The smallest actions when we have no delight in them, seem tedious and burdensome. … The difficulty we find in holy duties lieth not in the duties themselves, but in the awkwardness of our affections. … He that finds a heart to this work, will find a head. Delight will set the mind a work, for we are apt to muse and pause upon that which is pleasing to us.
[sermons on Psalm 119, vol. 1, p. 126]

Sloth – real name for tolerance?

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In our adult Sunday school class we’re doing a mini-series on Pluralism. Yesterday, in unmasking the false tolerance so prevalent in today’s culture, I quoted the wise educator/author Dorothy Sayers. Read it and learn; read it and weep for those caught in the clutches of “tolerance.” — pdb

The sixth Deadly Sin is named by the Church Acedia or Sloth. In the world it calls itself Tolerance; but in hell it is called Despair. It is the accomplice of the other sins and their worst punishment. It is the sin which believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and only remains alive because there is nothing it would die for. We have known it far too well for many years. The only thing perhaps that we have not known about it is that it is mortal sin…
— Dorothy Sayers

[quote taken from online sources; originally from her essay: The Other Six Deadly Sins: An address given to the Public Morality Council at Caxton Hall, Westminster, on October 23rd, 1941 (long out of print)]