"The chief aim of order is to give room for good things to run wild." – G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Everything in its right place makes everything right in its place.
Colossians 3:5 (KJV)
Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry:
Tell your feelings to fall into formation. Teach them their place. Make them march in line and in step with their Commander's intent.
When our affections are out of order, the result is inevitably disorder and chaotic affections topple everything over. Even the best of affections, if assembled incorrectly, eventually collapse.
Matthew 22:34-40
But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
Our highest affections ought to be reserved for God. He is our chief aim and of the highest order. We cannot place too much value on Him. We cannot conjure too much affection for Him. There is nothing disproportionately possible when it comes to throwing praise upward when He occupies the highest place. When we worship Him with our first and best because we recognize Him as the first and best in everything we do, it makes room for everything else to fall into place.
Certain things must follow from placing God first, like loving your neighbor, leading your family, raising your kids, honoring your elders, etc... but they can only be done properly if they follow feelings submitted primarily to God. In other words, there must be second things, but they can only be properly done when they don't come first. We do violence to ourselves, God and others when we conjure feelings for them that rival those we ought to have first found in Him. We do a disservice to those we attempt to love by focusing our feelings on them in disproportion to their place in the universe.
We are responsible for the ordering our of affections. If we have feelings for second things that rival our affections for God and diminish His place of priority in our heart, it is our duty to feed our affections proportionate to where they should be placed. It is our responsibility to feed our flagging affections for God, even when -- especially when -- we don't feel like it. In fact, that is the time we must do it most. If we find in ourselves feelings for second things that are inordinate, it is our duty to withhold from them or force them further back in the feeding line.
We must manage the intensity of our feelings. God has made us feelings farmers. We have a crop to monitor and a garden to which we must attend. We must fertilize what we want to grow, prune what we want to see grow more, cut back that which we desire to see only at certain levels, and cut off that which we never want to see again. If we want to complete a picture of layer and texture and depth, some plants will need to be kept smaller, while others will need to be promoted higher. We must tend to the gardens of our emotions and resist the temptation to believe that we have no say in what or how much we feel anything. If we feel something too much, it is our duty to resist it. We are obligated to turn a cold shoulder to our own internal pleadings if they aspire disproportionate to their designated stations.
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