Fear Gear

Holiness of heart or true religion lies very much in the affections of the heart.  And so the Scriptures consistently refer to hardness of heart as being the sin of the heart.  Christ felt grief and displeasure toward the Jews because of the hardness of their hearts.  … The great work of God in conversion or the deliverance of a person from the power of sin is … expressed in this way.  It is God’s “taking away of the heart of stone and giving a heart of flesh”.   A hard heart clearly implies an unaffected heart, or a heart that is not readily moved with virtuous affections.  Like a stone, it is insensible, stupid, unmoved and hard to impress. … We read in Scripture of a hard heart and a tender heart.  Doubtless we are to view these as opportunities.  – Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections

I suppose I should be encouraged by the fact that I am easily moved to anger, to indignation, to sympathy -- at least in some cases.   Edwards talks at length about how emotions are untrustworthy.  He did not seem overly impressed with the effectiveness of terror -- despite the millions who have been terrified by "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God". 

The world is full of cowards, people who are too weak and too much in love with their pitiful lives to step out and do either the right thing or the wrong thing.  I am as guilty of cowardice as most -- too often I have quailed at the prospect of doing something that needed to be done or stepped back from something I wanted to do because my imagination ran ahead and told me the bridge was out.   Fear is a powerful motivator, but it can be elicited by phantoms as easily as by reality. 

All of us know that some fears are groundless -- not ours, of course, but the irrational fears of some people that we know.  Right?  What happens when we encounter an attempt to frighten us into following Christ is that we tend to act on what we already believe.  If we doubt the truth of the assertion, we dismiss it.  If we are affected by the appeal, we probably already believed and were attempting to follow anyway. 

Using emotion as motivation may be effective in that it can break down barriers of false rationality, but the application is rather limited and uncertain.  Unfortunately, emotion is also subject to abuse.  We can play on emotions to manipulate people -- a common form of witchcraft.  We may get what we want in the short-term, but the long-term consequences are detrimental to all concerned.  Most of the time manipulating emotions to "convert" people is about as effective as holding a lighter under a thermometer to halt a blizzard.