Good morning. I've been asked to lead a Sunday school class, and I hope to consider with you the next several weeks or months a book study on Jonathan Edwards' Religious Affections. The full name of the book is called A Treatise Concerning the Religious Affections, but it's often called Religious Affections and it was written by Jonathan Edwards, and along the way in discussing this book, I will probably reference some of Jonathan Edwards' other writings, especially the Miscellanies. The Miscellanies were just kind of excerpts from Jonathan Edwards' diary, which he wrote, and each week I hope to have an excerpt from those on our outline. I chose the book as I thought there was a lot that we could learn from it. There was a lot that Jonathan Edwards could teach us even though it was written over 300 years ago. I think there's some issues that are relevant today and some of the issues that he addresses and some of the questions that we hope to answer. I'm going to just write these down. The first one is, what is the nature of genuine faith? And the second question that he asks and attempts to answer is really related to the first one. What criteria, or what are the criteria by which we may determine if we have been recipients of His grace, of God's grace? And the third question that he attempts to answer are what features or characteristics of, I'll use the word spirituality. It's kind of hard, you don't have a spell checker up here. are acceptable to God. Before we actually jump into the book, I was thinking we could talk, give a little background on Jonathan Edwards, who he was, when he lived, what he wrote, and talk a little bit how I'd like to conduct the class. I'd like to ask questions and make it a little interactive so I don't do all the talking. I've been told before my voice can be a bit monotonous, so hopefully I won't put any of you to sleep. And by asking questions, we can keep people awake. And from time to time, I may even give a little bit of homework, which obviously there's no way to enforce that. So I guess you'll get out of it what you put into it. Does anyone have any questions so far? Okay. For the rest of the morning, I'd like to talk about Jonathan Edwards himself. Can anyone tell me what Edwards is most famous for today? Any thoughts on that? When you hear his name, what do you think of? Right. There was a sermon that he gave called, Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God. And even today, a lot of college classes, high school classes will read that sermon. How many people here have read that sermon? So a fair amount. Here's a brief excerpt from it. The bow of God's wrath is bent and the arrow made ready on the string. And justice bends the arrow at your heart and strains the bow. It is nothing but the mere pleasure of God and that of an angry God without any promise or obligation at all. that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood." Those are pretty shaking words and that's really grabbed the attention of his hearers at that time and still does today. But if that sermon is all that you really know of Jonathan Edwards or think that he was only hellfire and damnation, there's really much more to him than that. So some basic facts about his life. He was born on October 5, 1703. And very little is known about his childhood. We do know that he went to college from 1716 to 1720. And if you take 1716 minus 1703, yeah, I heard somebody say that's very young to be in college. But at that time, there was 13, 14, 15-year-olds would go to college. He went on to study to get his master's at Yale from 1720 to 1722. And it was during this time, in about 1721, that Edwards was, according to his own accounts, convinced of his salvation and converted. The conversion he places at 1721. After receiving his masters, he was a minister to a Presbyterian church in New York City. And it was during this time that he began keeping notebooks which became divided up into different books. One was called Resolutions, another one was called The Diary, another one was called The Mind, and then Miscellanies. You actually, on your note sheet, have a quote from one of the Miscellanies. And he continued writing these the rest of his life. And just as an aside, It's interesting to read some of these resolutions. I'll just read you an excerpt from one of his resolutions. Being sensible that I am unable to do anything without God's help, I do humbly entreat him by his grace to enable me to keep these resolutions so far as they are agreeable to his will for Christ's sake. And he went down and wrote 70 resolutions. I'll read you just a couple to get you a flavor of the way he wrote. Number 5, resolve never to lose one moment of time, but to improve it in the most profitable way I possibly can. Number 11, resolve whenever I think of any theorem and divinity to be solved, immediately to do what I can towards solving it if circumstances do not hinder. And number 15, resolve never to suffer the least motions of anger towards irrational beings, which I thought was kind of interesting that someone would write that down. But you can see just he directed his life according to those resolutions. Even this book and other books was him trying to work out different problems and issues that he came across. One other interesting thing, in the book called The Mind, he wrote a definition of truth. Anyone want to take a stab at how you would define truth? Yeah, Larry? Yeah, it's basically on that same tone. He says, truth is the consistency and agreement of our ideas with the ideas of God. Yep, is the consistency and agreement of our ideas with the ideas of God, which we would know from his word. In 1724, Edwards began a two-year tutorship at Yale College, and this association with Yale is why Yale University today is the sponsor and publisher of the works of Jonathan Edwards. They just completed publishing all of his works. It was 25 volumes. I think each volume cost somewhere around $100, so it would be quite an investment if you wanted to buy those. They began publishing them in 1957 and just finished the last volume, I believe it was several years ago. In 1726, Edwards moved to Northampton, Massachusetts and pastored a Congregationalist church there. About a year after moving there, he married Sarah Pierpont with whom he eventually had 11 children. So he was busy as a pastor and as a father. In 1729, he became full pastor of Northampton and remained there until 1750. So 1729 to 1750, pastor. Now, it was during that time the Great Awakening took place, which I think has been talked about before here, so I won't go into detail about that. But during this time, he wrote many works, Divine and Supernatural Light, A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God, and the list goes on. He also wrote the diary of David Brainerd, which I know some of you have read. Unfortunately, in 1750, some of the churches voted to dismiss him as pastor of Northampton, and he preached his farewell sermon on July 1, 1750. Does anyone know why he was dismissed from his church? It was because it was over the issue of who should be admitted to the Lord's table. The practice at the time when Edwards came into the church was basically that anyone who had orthodox belief and didn't live in gross sin should be admitted to the Lord's table. And Edwards continued that practice for a while, but eventually he became convinced that the applicants give a credible profession or account of their conversion and that created some friction. There was a couple of other incidents with the youth. I don't recall the specifics, but unrest started and he was ejected from his church. So in 1751, he became pastor in Stockbridge and started missionary ministry to the Indians. So he still felt called to preach. So even though his first church removed him, he moved on and he stayed in Stockbridge until 1758. And during this time, he wrote another one of his more famous works called Freedom of the Will. And given the Tradition at the time, its title is actually much longer. Its full title is A Careful and Strict Inquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notions of that Freedom of Will, which is Supposed to be Essential to Moral Agency, Virtue and Vice, Reward and Punishment, Praise and Blame. So you can see why people just call it the Freedom of the Will. Has anyone read that book? Also during the Stockbridge years, he wrote several other books. one on why God created the world and the nature of true virtue. In 1758, let's see, let's go over here. He left Stockbridge and became president of the College of New Jersey. Does anyone know what the College of New Jersey is called today? Yeah, we're good. It's now called Princeton. During that same year, in March of 1758, he decided that it would be good to show that vaccines were safe. So he decided to get a smallpox vaccination and he didn't meet his goal of showing it was safe because he died of it. So, 1758, he dies of the smallpox vaccination. Going through the chronology, I mentioned several of Edward's works. Of those, the three most widely known are Freedom of the Will, Original Sin, and then Religious Affections. The Religious Affections isn't easy to read, so it may be difficult at times to understand what he is saying. Some of the sentences you have to read and re-read and break down by word at times. One book I did find helpful is called Signs of the Spirit, and it's actually a modern adaptation of Religious Affections. I usually am a bit skeptical of re-wording or reworking the author's original book, but I believe in this version, he's still faithful to the original text and it's a bit more readable in modern English. So if any of you want to follow along or buy a book, there's the original Religious Affections, I think, from Banner of Truth, or there's this interpretation, which is pretty readable. It's by Sam. storms, and at times he quotes directly from the original, other times he paraphrases. A couple of different people have made different comments about this work. I'll read you one quote, which is a bit wordy, but someone said, the work on the religious affections is one of the most valuable works on practical and experimental piety ever published. It is more defective in point of style. This renders its perusal tedious and is perhaps detracted from its value by deterring many from its pages altogether. To those, however, whose robustness of mind or whose strength of piety is not to be repelled by such defects, there is no work of the same kind in the English language which better repay a care for perusal." What does that mean? Well, the book's difficult to read, but if you're interested in truth and what it has to say, There's really nothing that addresses the subject as well as it does, so I guess you'll be the judge of that in the coming weeks. There's a couple other people generally who wrote about Jonathan Edwards I thought may be edifying. Daniel Webster, the famous politician, wrote that this book was the greatest achievement of the human intellect. A former president of Princeton said that Edwards was the greatest thinker that America has produced. Of course, in the modern era, people haven't been as receptive to him. This is a quote from Richard Niebuhr, who may still be alive, and his opinion was the, he said, quote, the issues on which he was then tried and found wanting seem to have been so universally decided against him by the court of American and Christian opinion that they scarcely remain issues today. What hearing could he gain if he stood in this pulpit today, or in any pulpit in America, and spoke to us now about our depravity and corruption, about our unfreedom and the determination of our lives, about the ineffable gloriousness of God, and about the awfulness of his wrath, and about the necessity of reconstituting ourselves a holy community. So much of modern scholarship has dismissed him, has caricatured him as simply an angry preacher who was part of the Puritan movement, and we've moved on to better and happier times. And like I mentioned, there's different versions of the Religious Affections. There's also the Yale University Press Edition, but like I said, that's about $100 per volume, so this one would probably be the most inexpensive. It's not necessary that you read each week, but It may be helpful. And attached to your outline, you'll see kind of a word cloud there on the second page. And it's something I discovered yesterday. It's called a Wordle. And if you go online to Wordle.com, you can cut and paste any book or any sentence for that matter. And it will form a cloud of words with the largest word being used the most and the smaller word being used less. So if you ever wanted to get a quick summary of any book, you can just copy and paste it in there and it'll spit that out. So you can see, to give you a quick summary of where things are headed, you can see the words that Edwards uses, and I actually passed out my coffee, but you can see here, God, Christ, things, and another word that he uses a lot It's called Affections. Just as a trivia, I took a look at a wordle done of the Bible. Any thought as to the three most common words in the Bible? It was actually Lord God said were the three most common words and there's different ones you can do for books of the Bible too. But a word that Edwards uses throughout the book that we don't usually use a lot is a word called affections. Any thoughts as to what affections are or how you would define them? Any other thoughts as to that? Feelings? Motivation? Yeah, I think that's... Do you have something, Judy? Yeah, I think all of those words, we'll see as we work through the book that affections for Jonathan Edwards are something a little more powerful than emotions or feelings. I think a closer word, and while those go along with it, it's more closely tied to motivations and to discipline. Some person has defined it as longings of the soul. And throughout the book, he'll describe it in different ways, but as you can see from that definition, it's something that's more solid or more long-term. It's almost a trajectory of one's life. something as fluid or that may change as often as an emotion or is more transitory. It's more stable, more long-term, more solid. Let me just give a brief introduction here. Edwards himself says, the word affection may be unfamiliar to many, except when used of romantic feelings between a man and a woman. That is not the sense in which I use it here. And his, a little bit more longer version is, vigorous and sensible exercises of the inclination and will of the soul. So that's how he defines them himself. So it's more than necessarily just thoughts and emotions, although I think it would comprise both of those. And here he says, we should distinguish affections from emotions or feelings. Certainly there are what may rightly be called an emotional dimension to them, There are sensible and intense longings or aversions of the will, where he would say the affections are not less than that, but they're more than that. And they're always the fruit or effect of what the mind knows. So, it's not... And I think that's helpful because often we can tend to one extreme or the other, or we can try to divide things between our head But for Edwards, I think he tries to balance both of those. It's not just an emotion that comes to us apart from God's Word, but it's really based on God's Word, what our mind knows. And like he says, it's a fruit from that. And the overall sentence, and I guess you'll decide whether you agree or disagree with this, is that This is if you want his thesis sentence here. True religion, he says, equals vigorous and lively actings of the will of the soul, or fervent exercises of the heart. So, as we go throughout the book, keep that in the back of your mind. That's really what he's trying to prove. That's what he's trying to get at. Is that true religion for Edwards? And I think that's a biblical view as well. are vigorous and lively actings or fervent exercises of the heart. Any questions so far? I don't know. I don't know. It's a good question. I'm not sure where that word came from, but I think he used it because he wanted something stronger. or maybe more broad than just emotions or just knowledge. Any other questions? Okay. And during this time, let me just briefly here give a little context for the book. As I mentioned, the Great Awakening was going on at this time, so there was a lot of revival, there was a lot of emotionalism, there was people collapsing in church, there was people wailing, some people thought that they visibly saw God, and of course such a thing generated criticism. There was a pastor at the time by the name of Charles Chauncey, and like a good Anglican pastor, he believed that true religion was basically you led an outwardly moral life, and you agreed with certain propositions and that was basically it. So he was horrified to see this Great Awakening occurring and all of this emotionalism or what he called animal spirits. So Charles Chauncey writes a book against the Great Awakening and then Jonathan Edwards responds with this book kind of trying to discern what was true and what was good about it and what really wasn't. And he goes through each chapter and says, you know, X, Y, Z emotion or, you know, the ability to feel moved at a scripture verse that really isn't necessarily a sign that someone is saved. It could be, but it could not be. So, the first seven or eight chapters are signs that Edwards thinks are neutral and the remainder of the book is showing what he believes are signs of true religion. And at the end of each class, I'll probably just read an excerpt from Edward's Miscellanies, and you can see it there on your notes. I'll just read this out loud. And if anyone, while we're reading it, can think of a support verse, feel free to volunteer that at the end. He says, I am convinced that there are many things in religion and the scriptures that are made difficult on purpose to try men, and to exercise their faith and scrutiny, and to hinder the proud and self-sufficient, that many of Christ's speeches upon earth which gave great offense and were very much of a stumbling block, which he yet could easily have explained. Yea, he himself gives this account of the matter. Any thoughts on any scripture? That would support that statement. Keith? Right. I wasn't thinking of that. I was thinking of Matthew 13 verses 10 through 13. Could someone read that for us? Tony, you want to read that? The disciples came and said to him, why don't you speak to them in family? For whoever has to him, more will be given, and he will have abundance. But whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him. Therefore I speak to them in parallel, that seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. Thank you. Yeah, I guess that's sometimes counterintuitive. why Christ would do that. But I think Edwards makes a good point about exercising our faith and hindering our pride and humbling us. I have ten minutes left, so I'm going to actually jump into the first chapter here briefly. And it starts off with a question. What are the distinguishing qualifications of those that are in favor with God and entitled to His eternal rewards? Or to say it differently, what is the nature of true spirituality and those features in the human soul that are acceptable on the sight of God? And to answer this, Edwards focuses on 1 Peter 1 verse 8. If someone could read that for us. Laino, do you want to read that? 1 Peter 1 verse 8. from having not seen you love, so now you do not see Him, yet believing you rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory." Now, Edward's point and thesis is that that passage describes true spirituality more than any other. And the reason for that is that immediately preceding that verse, Peter is describing the trials and suffering of the believers. And such experiences when we're going through trials or suffering, that has the capacity to highlight the differences between what is true and what is real, and what is false or hypocritical in our lives. I think later on in 1 Peter he talks about gold being refined in the fire. And Edward says, true virtue never appears so lovely as when it is most oppressed. So in this context in Peter, actually it's in verse 7, he says, as gold that is tried in the fire is purged from its alloy and all remainder of dross and comes forth more solid and beautiful, So, truth, faith, being tried as gold, is tried in the fire, becomes more precious, and is thus also found under praise, honor, and glory. Those are Edward's words. So, in 1 Peter 1 verse 8, after the believers are going through their trials, the sum of it is, it leads to, belief in Christ or in Him. And what's the second thing that it leads to? To rejoice with joy inexpressible. and full of glory. So, and kind of going back to our goals or to the questions that we were trying to answer, the first thing that Edwards points out is if you want to examine your life to see what your thoughts, what your emotions, what your actings of the will lead to. He points to this passage in Peter and says, belief in Christ and I guess grade A faith, so to speak, leads to rejoicing with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory. Any thoughts on that? Any questions? Alright, well, I think that's going to conclude this time. Next time, I hope to consider some of the characteristics that Edward says are really neither here nor there as far as true spirituality. Some of those are being able to recall scripture to mind, having certain experiences in a certain order, the way in which people have their affections or emotions or whether those emotions are raised very high or very intense in the heart. So those are really either signs one way or the other. So we'll get into that next week. Let's close our time in prayer. Lord, we thank You for Your Word and Lord, we thank You for those saints and your children, Lord, who have gone before us, Lord, and who have loved you and set an example for us. Lord, we pray that we would test all things by your word. And Lord, we pray that you would be with us through the remainder of this day, that you would be with our pastor as he brings your word to us, Lord, that we would have open hearts and open ears and that your spirit would apply your word to our hearts. In Jesus' name, Amen.