Thank you for joining me for this special limited edition of God-Law and Liberty. It's really a precursor to this Friday's publication, and it's an excerpt today from John Owens' Treatise, The Grace and Duty of being spiritually minded. And Friday I will begin to offer my application of this excerpt to present efforts to end abortion. A preface to the excerpt, though, is that a few years ago I was led to see that I spent most of my political career focused on the effect a particular proposed law would seem to have good or bad. Not on what law is, let alone how to work in the sphere of law and public policy advocacy in a way that would restore a Christian view of law. The problem with my previous approach is that law is spiritual, Roman 714. That being the case, Romans 8-6 must come into our thinking about law, for to be carnaly minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. In other words, we must be spiritually minded about the subject of law because law is spiritual. Any other approach is to me, carnal, and it will end in death not life and peace. But what does it mean to be spiritually minded? So this is the excerpt from Owens' Treatise that I've adapted slightly to accommodate better to the way we now write and read. It's addressed to what he calls the Grace and Duty of being spiritually minded. So many are bearing in this duty because they don't know what to fix themselves on or how to do it. Hence, they spend their time on fruitless desires instead of using their thoughts towards this purpose and making any progress in the duty of being spiritually minded. Now, when our affections are applied unto spiritual things, they will be prevalent and victorious against solicitations or allurements to draw them off on other objects. The work of all our spiritual adversaries is to solicit and tempt our affections to divert them from their proper object. There are some temptations of Satan that make an immediate impression on the mind and conscience, such as his injection of diabolical blast from his thoughts concerning God, his being, nature, and will, and the distresses of our conscience on these subjects through darkness and misrepresentations of God. But the high road and constant practice of all our spiritual adversaries is by one, the solicitation of our affections unto objects that are in themselves or to in the degree of our affections toward them evil and sinful. The first sort, affections that are in themselves evil and sinful, are all sensual pleasures of the flesh as drunkenness, uncleanness, gluttony, chambering, clamoring, wantoness, and all sorts of sensual pleasures. The latter sort, regarding degrees of affection, pertain to an inordinate love of ourselves, our families, and the whole world, or the things of it. In this way, everything in the whole world is made use of to make provision for a lust against God and being spiritually minded. These solicitations of our affections to other things, even otherwise good things, can be drawn off from spiritual and heavenly things and diverted unto other things. Hereby do our enemies endeavor to be guile us as the servant be guiled, Eve. It is almost incredible how apt we are to be guiled by the species pretense that solicit our affections and thoughts away from this duty of being spiritually minded. There are affections are lawful and allowable, is one of the softisms and artifices whereby many are deluded. So long as those affections don't run out into obvious scandalous excesses, Christians can approve of themselves in such a worldly frame of mind and acting towards it, that they render their rightful affections and thoughts of them fruitless, useless, senseless. It is the degree to which these affections and thoughts run that can be inconsistent with what should be a prevailing adherence of our affections and the spiritual things. One such ruinous solicitation is fear. Multitudes have lost all their affections and undispiratory things through a fear of losing that which is temporal as their lives, their liberties, their goods and the like. When once Satan and the world have gotten the mastery of this affection or prevalent interest in it, they will not fail to draw all others into a defection from Christ in the gospel. He that loveth his life shall lose it. In view of these solicitations for our affections, it is not an easy thing to preserve our affections pure, entire, and steady in a vigorous adherence under spiritual things. Watchfulness, prayer, faith in exercise, and a daily examination of ourselves are required for their preservation. For a lack in these duties, with respect unto this end, the preservation of our spiritual affections in their integrity, many, even before they realize it, die away as to all power and vigor of spiritual life. Thank you for joining me.