Pursuing Right Affections

Dannah Gresh: Pastor Kevin DeYoung says, “Memorizing God’s Word encourages us to meditate!”

Pastor Kevin DeYoung: Maybe you say, “You know, I tried Scripture memory, and a month later I forgot that verse!” That’s okay. It’s not even that you can win Bible Quiz Bowl and spit back all the verses. It’s the discipline of slowing down when you try to memorize something.

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, coauthor of Seeking Him, for June 3, 2025. I’m Dannah Gresh.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Today we’re back with Dannah and Pastor Kevin DeYoung to continue a conversation they started yesterday. If you missed it, Pastor DeYoung is an author, speaker, husband, and the father of nine.

He’s been talking with Dannah about God’s Word and our emotions. You can find that conversation linked in the transcript of today’s episode at ReviveOurHearts.com or on the Revive Our Hearts app.

Pastor DeYoung said that our time in God’s Word is more about our obedience than chasing a feeling! I can just hear you breathing a sigh of relief, because we don’t always feel what we think we should, do we?

Sometimes we have moments of awe and wonder when we’re reading God’s Word. But other times, if we’re honest with ourselves, it all feels a little ordinary . . . and that doesn’t mean we’re failing. It means we’re human, and we’re still being sanctified.

But you may be thinking to yourself, Okay, that makes sense, that’s good. On the other hand, I’m not a machine. I do feel things from time to time. You’re not saying my emotions are bad, are you?

I’m not saying that at all, and I have a hunch that you’re going to really appreciate today’s episode. Here’s Dannah to kick us off. She’s talking with Pastor Kevin DeYoung. 

Dannah: So yesterday, we talked a lot about the wonder of the Word, that it is wonderful, that we can feel that wonder! You pointed us to Psalm 119 to stir that up a little bit. But you also cautioned us that even on the days that we’re not feeling that it’s wonderful, but we’re just entering into the discipline of being in God’s Word, it’s not any less wonderful. But we shouldn’t base our pursuit of being in the Word on how we feel. That’s a pretty complex thing to handle. Help me.

Kevin: Let me back into that (it’s a great question) by doing just a little bit of theology and philosophy, because I think this is necessary and will help us. We speak of emotion . . . I have a book on my shelf back here that argues that the word “emotion” in English discourse is probably as recent as maybe the nineteenth century.

For a long time, philosophers and theologians had a more robust vocabulary to talk about this thing that now we just flatly call “an emotion.” They talked about “sentiments” or “sympathy” or . . . I’ll give you two classic words that go way back in the biblical tradition, the Greek tradition: the difference between “affections” and “passions.”

Now we use the word “passion” as something good: “I’m very passionate about something.” But that’s not exactly what they meant. A passion in Western theology and philosophy is something that sweeps over you. Kind of think of the word, “passive” or “passion” like “suffering.”

There’s a line in the Westminster Confession of Faiththat says that God is “without parts or passions,” in my Presbyterian tradition. That trips up a lot of people. “Wait, I want God to be passionate! I don’t want God to be static and lifeless!” But that’s a different use of the word.

When it says God doesn’t have passions, it means He doesn’t have things happen to Him, like things happen to us. You can’t punch Him in the stomach and His stomach hurts. You can’t call Him a bad name and He starts to cry and He feels bad.

He doesn’t have passions like we do, things that sweep over us, that render us passive. On the other hand, theologians often talk about “affections.” They called affections to be a motion (that’s where you get the word “emotion”) of the will, meaning there is something of our choosing and our inclination involved in these things called affections.

Some of your listeners—because you have very esteemed listeners—maybe have heard of a famous book by Jonathan Edwards, the Puritan theologian, called Religious Affections. There’s a reason the book is not Religious Emotions, though we hear the two as the same thing. They’re actually quite different!

So, coming to your point, because that little theological sidetrack, I think, is important. When we talk about emotions in the Christian life, we’re often really thinking about passions. “How do I have these things?!” And we feel powerless by them! 

We feel like, “I can’t do it. I just make myself feel a certain way!” Well, that’s really “passions,” and typically passions were seen as lower parts of your kind of animal appetites. Like, you just can’t help but feel hungry when you haven’t eaten.

Where “affections,” is not divorced from the word we think of as emotions, but they involve our choosing, our volition, our willing. So it’s very hard for us to kind of get this concept. But I think it’s important when we talk about the affectional element of the Christian faith.

I was joking the other day that I’m a Dutchman, and Dutch people aren’t always known for their high emotional register! (laughter) I tell my people, “I do have feelings! I have one or two of them! I’ve got a couple, I’ve got a few feelings. I’m cheap . . . and other things.” But we all have a different emotional register.

But I want to be clear about affections. We want, I want a Christianity that is filled—because the Bible’s filled with this affectional language. But we need to understand this affection comes through the truth of God’s Word. Meaning, if you’re a mom out there and you’ve got diapers and you’ve got laundry and you’ve got all the stuff to do, you think, I’m just feeling tired and exhausted, and how to survive my day, and I don’t think I’m a very good Christian.” That is a long stage of life!

If you think of the high point of spirituality as, “I’m going to feel a certain thing about God today,” then you’re going to end up feeling pretty discouraged! But if you say, “Okay, what does ‘affection’ mean? It means that as I receive God’s Word in my life, I can make a choice to respond to the events in this day in a certain way.”

I can respond by repeating God’s promises to myself. I can respond, and choose to respond, even though I may be feeling one thing toward my child right now. I can yet incline my heart to an affection of gentleness, which may not be really welling up within me!

So you have a passion that is sweeping over you: “I am so frustrated with this kid right now; I must not be a good parent!” Sometimes you need to understand that those passions, let’s call them, or emotions come at you like you’re standing at a beach and you see a big wave coming at you.

We can all relate to this. You’re getting frustrated with your husband, or you’re so upset with your kids right now, or you're anxious and you don’t want to be anxious. The more you tell yourself not to be anxious, the more you get anxious!

Well, sometimes you need to think of those emotions like a wave. You see it coming, and you can’t just tell yourself, “I’m not going to feel anything.” Just like if you’re standing at the ocean and the wave’s coming, you can’t say, “Nope, I’m going to turn the tide back!” You can’t do it. 

But what you can do is steady yourself and lean in and dig in and be secure, so when this wave of anxiety crashes on your shore, on your person, you have some preparation. Now, you still feel something, and you maybe wish you didn’t feel that.

But that kind of passion is different than the affections that I think God wants to work in us by His Word.

Dannah: Yes, and He does work them in us by His Word. What you’re saying is that our feelings don’t have to be in the driver’s seat. 

 

Kevin: Yes, they’re not determinative.

Dannah: Yes! You can turn your will toward what is going to point you to God’s Word, right?

Kevin: Yes, and Jesus says, “Sanctify them.” You want to be holy? “Sanctify them by Your truth; Your Word is truth.” So Jesus tells us how you are going to become more like Him. It’s by His Word!

That’s why I think all of us are tempted to do shortcuts. Again, I’m for feeling things. You can put on a type of music and light a candle, and you can feel something. That’s alright; those might not be bad feelings. But that by itself is not sanctification! 

Again, to use the analogy with a spouse, if you’re first dating, you can have a shortcut to something that feels like love. You’ve got all the hormones going, and you could do a special thing. That’s good. 

But you know, after twenty, thirty, forty years of being married together, some of those feelings aren’t quite as intense as they were the first date you went on. But do you actually love that person a whole lot deeper, fiercer, weightier? But that comes with time, and it comes with knowledge. 

Dannah: Yeah, so good! It does take time. Yesterday you talked about the different paces at which we spend time in God’s Word. And just the last, maybe five years, I’ve started to take just a verse and mull it over all day, think about it all day, put it on a Post-it note on my car windshield, go for a walk and have the letters of every word written with a Sharpie on my wrist so I can remember what it says. 

The intimacy that I’m experiencing with Jesus is so different from years, decades, of my quiet time and my Bible study time, just because I’m devoting that time. I think that’s what you’re getting at, you’re driving at. Intimacy with the Word, wonder in the Word, requires time.

Kevin: Yes, there’s absolutely no shortcut for it! Anything in life that’s going to produce real excellence, maturity, growth, satisfaction is going to take time! Think of any really godly Christian you know in your life, he or she has spent a lot of time in the Word and has probably been through suffering. There are no shortcuts to it.

And what you’ve said is exactly true. We usually think, Okay, Bible reading and prayer. Well, there is a third category, and this was typical for the Puritans, for example. That third category, which overlaps with the other two, is meditation. Not meditation in a yoga class or something, but meditation on God’s Word. “How does this apply?”

I’ve had seasons where I’m more disciplined with Scripture memory and then other seasons where I tend to have great plans, and then I do two months, and then I start to fall apart—like a lot of people.

But here’s why I tell myself and my congregation to do Scripture memory: it forces us to meditate. Maybe you say, “You know, I tried Scripture memory, and a month later I forgot that verse.” That’s okay. You probably remember more of it than you realize.

It’s not even that you can win Bible Quiz Bowl and then spit back all the verses. It’s the discipline of slowing down when you try to memorize something. Like you were saying, you have it on a Post-it note, or you have it on your windshield. 

I think how different and richer would my life be if instead of all of the lines we have to wait in—the grocery store, the doctor’s office—what’s the first thing we all do? We pull out our phone! What if I had a notecard in my pocket, and it was a verse that I was just meditating on for the week?

Dannah: I love that!

Kevin: That simple act could be huge! So, we’re not very good at the meditation part. In my life, the only way I really know to do that is to try some Scripture memory. Because then I have to read over it, or I write it out, or I say it to myself ten times. That’s the act of slowing down, chewing on it, that really brings it home! 

Then you have the experiences you’ve had, and it is really rich! It’s amazing, even if you memorize two or three verses. All of a sudden, you start seeing them everywhere! Like, “Oh, that verse works! I can share the gospel with that verse anytime. That’s the right verse all the time!” It’s amazing how God uses them!

Dannah: It’s like you start to see things when you look at it for a really long time—when you look at a picture or a painting for a long time, or a sunset. You see things that you didn’t notice before. That’s what memorization and meditation does. It’s like, “Oh, eureka! That’s what that verse means! That’s why that word is there!” It’s amazing.

You’re a great teacher! I just geeked out a little bit. I loved that little lesson in philosophy and theology, thank you!

Kevin: Well, good! I’m glad somebody did. 

Dannah: You mentioned yesterday that it’s important for us to listen to good teachers. You even said that it was a gift that when Jesus ascended into heaven, He said, “I’m leaving you some gifts, and here’s one of them: teachers.”

But teachers can be a dime a dozen today with these phones in our pockets. You have access to teachers on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube. I’m not sure all of them are good teachers. How can we be discerning about the ones who are going to help us love and wonder at the Word and the ones who are going to maybe make us less secure when we’re holding our Bibles in our hands?

Kevin: That’s absolutely essential, and it’s really difficult. Our digital age has so many blessings and so many curses. A blessing is, “Wow! We could do something like this!” People all over the world have access to amazing content from the Word!

But the curse is, anybody who says anything, if they say it loud enough, or they put some other people down, or they have enough technological savvy, they can get a following. So it can be really difficult to discern.

Obviously, we want to test everything. We want to be Bereans who want to test everything against the Word of God, so that’s number one. And number two, the people you know as real flesh-and-blood human beings are the first people you should be following.

You should be listening to your local church pastor, who is a thousand times more important than listening to a Kevin DeYoung sermon or Alistair Begg or Tim Keller, or whomever. So, the more you know in some personal nature . . .

People can still fool us, but that’s how you can have some . . . “Okay, this is a real person, and I know him.” Some of the women at the church may listen to this program; they may have certain women that they love to listen to. You have a sense of, “Well, I know their lives, and I know what sort of person this is.” So the more you can have a real in-flesh discernment, that helps! 

And then, I also look at, “Does someone have a track record of being helpful, faithful, and fruitful?” Now, teachers have to start somewhere. I started pastoring at age twenty-five, so hopefully there was something that was right even when I was twenty-five. But the more you can say, “This person has a history and has a record of faithfulness . . .”

And then I want to look at: how does this person conduct themselves? Are they making a name for themselves mainly by triangulating after somebody else? Are they mainly building off of somebody else’s platform by putting them down, by differentiating themselves? Or are they able to give positive content from the Word to others?

Then I look at, are they leading anything? Are they doing anything? Are they under authority? Are they under authority from a board of elders, from a presbytery, from a board of trustees—whatever. I get really nervous when somebody’s out there and I don’t think anyone has any authority over them!

Dannah: These are really good points! I think about some of the people that I started following as a woman—female teachers—and I would think, Oooh, I like what she’s saying! But then I find that there isn’t authority there that they are accountable to or that there’s not fruit. They’re criticizing a lot, but they’re not bearing fruit. You’re not hearing about discipleship and salvation—fruit in their lives!

At some point I had to say, “Yeah, a lot of those things are good, but I have the discernment in me—a check in my spirit—that maybe this isn’t the person I should be following.” So I delete their app or stop following it on Instagram. That’s an important thing to listen to when you feel that, when you sense that, right?

Kevin: Yeah, and you really hit on it! Of course, our sense can be wrong, but if you’ve been a Christian for a while, you should not ignore that sense. When you think, Something doesn’t seem right here . . .

One of the things you said is so important: “What is the teacher passionate about?” Not simply, “What does their statement of faith say?” There are all sorts of people where you can look on their website at their statement of faith, and you can say, “Well, that sounds like a good statement of faith.” But then when you step back, you think, I never hear them talk about these things, or They did years ago, and now, I’m not hearing them talk about the cross. I’m not hearing about heaven and hell. I’m not hearing about the Trinity. I’m not hearing about conversion, regeneration, sanctification, holiness, the Bible; I’m not hearing these things, even though they may say, “Of course, I believe all of that.” 

D.A. Carson, great Bible teacher, I once heard him say regarding his years of teaching students, “I’ve learned that my students don’t learn what I teach them; they learn what I’m passionate about!”

I think that’s very true. That’s just a good discernment, regarding the people that you’re following: what are they really animated about? And what can be hard is that sometimes someone starts out animated about one thing, and they never quite reject those things. But you look back over the last five or ten years (and this happens to a lot of people) and all of a sudden the people they were once trying to build up are now the people they are really frustrated with and only want to put down. 

So here’s another last thing (I’m talking too much . . .but I’m a pastor!), “How does this person talk about the church?” You find teachers who think it’s trendy and spiritual to dis the Bride of Christ.” They are not teachers you ought to listen to. You want teachers that make you, with all of her faults, lead you to love the Church, be more involved in the Church, more committed to the Church.

Dannah: Yes, amen! I think you’re hitting the nail on the head about some of the areas where I’ve been like, “There’s just too much discontent, and too much verge of deconstructing here. We’re on the edge of something that I’m not comfortable with.” Because the Church is broken, but, boy, Jesus loves the Church! And we ought to, too. 

Kevin: Absolutely!

Dannah: So you’re going to be with us—I’m so excited!—at the True Woman conference in just a few weeks. What does it mean for you, as a pastor, that there are going to be thousands of women rekindling their wonder of God’s Word? What does that mean for the Church?

Kevin: Thanks for letting a man come to the True Woman conference. I appreciate that, and it is a privilege! So, I’m a pastor, and there are hard things about being a pastor. But my job is to study the Word. There are scads of pastors’ conferences, and I get to meet with our pastors weekly, and we get to do things. Women have Bible studies and other good things, but to gather in a large group with a lot of women, away from some of the hurly-burly of life for a couple of days . . . I just know how much that means in the life of my dear wife, and how much that means to the women in a church like Christ Covenant, where I serve. 

In most churches the men are the leaders, rightfully so, but the women are often the spiritual heartbeat, pumping the blood and the energy and the oxygen throughout that! But they get depleted. So to go to something like this conference and have some fresh blood cells, get reinvigorated for your walk, to sing and to hear and to learn and to realize you’re not doing this alone . . . and actually there’s a whole lot more than you thought! . . . that can be really encouraging!

Conferences never replace the Church (shame on anyone who thinks that!). And yet, for years and years, you can go to conferences that help you come back and be an even more fruitful, faithful member of your church, more encouraged. We need those things, and we need those rhythms.

Just like in ancient Israel, they had rhythms where they had the pilgrimages, they had the feasts. You need that in the sameness of life—to have those high points that you look forward to, and you come back, and it helps you live the rest of your life faithfully.

Dannah: Yes, I love what you just said, about how you realize you’re not alone. I invited a woman, a friend, to the True Woman conference a few years ago. We met for a few moments in the hustle and bustle of everything, because I was helping Nancy and coordinating things.

And I just said, “How’s it going? Are you having a good time?” 

And she said, “I feel like I’ve found my people! Even in my church where I know I’m with like-minded believers, it’s so good to see the breadth of the Body of Christ and to know that the headlines in my news feed, they’re an echo chamber compared to the power and the truth of the Body of Christ!”

So, it’s good to come together and see that and sense that. We’re so grateful that you’re going to be joining us. I can’t wait to hear your message!

Kevin: I’m looking forward to being with you; it’s an honor. And may the Lord use His Word, because that’s what we all love, that’s what we’ve been talking about, and that’s what we need!

Dannah: Amen! 

Nancy: We’ve been listening to Dannah Gresh and Pastor Kevin DeYoung. Oh, I hope you’re going to seriously consider joining us at theTrue Womanconference in Indianapolis this October. 

It’s going to be such a wonderful time to be encouraged by sisters in Christ and to be reminded that you are not alone in your love for God’s Word. I’ll be there, Pastor Kevin will be there, so will Dannah, Mary Kassian, Jackie Hill Perry, Kelly Needham, and so many other women we love here at Revive Our Hearts!

We’ll be together October 2nd through the 4th in Indianapolis, and our theme for this conference will be The Word: Behold the Wonder! You can find more information and get your ticket by visiting TrueWoman25.com. And even if you can’t make it in person, we have some livestream options available for you to consider.

If you’ve been following along with Pastor Kevin DeYoung yesterday and today, and you’re thinking, I’d really like to become more familiar with God’s wonderful Word, then we have a resource for you!

It’s a small book called Fly through the Bible. It’s written by Pastor Colin Smith, a dear friend of this ministry. It gives a high-altitude overview of the whole Bible. This month we’re offering this resource along with a beautifully designed art piece with a bit of poetry I’ve written about the wonder of the Word!

We’re offering both the book and the art print to any listener who makes a donation of any amount. To make your gift and to request the book and the poem, visit us at ReviveOurHearts.com, or give us a call at 1-800-569-5959. 

Our emphasis here in the month of June is: His Word Is Wonderful! Tomorrow we’ll continue growing our sense of wonder when it comes to God’s Word. If you tend to think of the Bible as sometimes being a boring or irrelevant book, I’m hoping your perspective will change as you listen to our series, “The Book of Books.” Be sure and be back tomorrow for Revive Our Hearts.

This program is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness and fruitfulness in Christ.

*Offers available only during the broadcast of the podcast season.