I am delighted to announced that Target is currently running a buy 2, get 1 free offer on selected titles, and one of those titles is my book Gratitude in Life’s Trenches. This is a wonderful opportunity to get some extra copies to pass out to your friends at Thanksgiving. [UPDATE: as of November 18th, this offer is no longer available.]
In this book, published by Ancient Faith Publishing four years ago, I tried to emphasize a neglected aspect of ethics which is the following four-fold progression:
- Over many years of right behavior and obedience to God’s commands, we come to have good habits.
- Over time, good habits lead to character traits (virtues).
- Over time, good character traits (virtues) result in us loving God’s commands.
- As we love God’s commands, we start to find goodness beautiful, and our affections become rightly-ordered. This is true freedom.
The problem with legalism is that it stops at #1 and thinks that’s enough. So the legalist who wants to progress further in the faith simply adds more dos and don’ts, becoming overscrupulous and finding more things to be fussy about. Legalist don’t understand that God actually calls us to a higher standard, namely, to move from the first step to the later stages where God’s commands are sweet to us and where our affections are sanctified (without, of course, losing the earlier steps, which is the whole point about habituation).
The sinister side of this is that because of sin, this whole process can also work in reverse. Through wrong behavior and disobedience to God’s commands, we can reach a point where we do not find God’s commands beautiful, but actually come to delight in things that are ugly and wrong. Then our affections become disordered. In our society the disordering of affection is often packaged as true freedom even though it is the ultimate type of bondage.
When our affections are rightly ordered, the result is spiritual emotions. Spiritual emotions are involved in virtues such as peace, contrition, joy, patience, love, and of course gratitude. These virtues certainly involve more than emotion but not less. For example, a person cannot be completely contrite without feeling repentant for his or her sins. You cannot be wholly patient while you’re feeling frustrated and agitated. So growing in virtue involves, at whatever level, the formation of right feelings. And that means cultivating FEELINGS of gratitude. But how do you do that? Buy my book and find out.
Further Reading