1. . Natural life itself is a free-gift given to us by God. We did not merit, nor earn it, nor deserve to be born into the natural world, but were created by God’s sovereign choice. Spiritual life is also a gift of God's grace freely given to us. Now one of the ways we can tell the difference between a corpse and an individual that is alive is through the motion and workings of the body. Where there is human life there is movement, at the very least we detect a heartbeat. Therefore, those who are spiritually alive have received from God a new heart with new affections whose strongest inclination is to love God and ones neighbor. This new hearts motion and bent leans towards a life of good works that desires to be pleasing to the Father who has adopted them. The Christian does not work to obtain eternal-life, but because they already possess eternal-life, they work. The same principle applies to natural life, people work and move not to obtain life, but they do so because they already possess the gift of life. These distinctions are important to point out when discussing the subject of good works. Works are a sign of life, if something is alive it will move even if minutely.
2. New affections of love for God follow conversion and if they do not the individual was probably never born-again. We as Christians have been created in Christ Jesus unto good works”. “If you know that He is righteous, you know that everyone also, who practices righteousness is born of Him” (I John 2:29). “The one who practices sin is of the devil; for the devil has sinned from the beginning. The Son of God appeared for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil. No one who is born of God practices sin, because His seed abides in him; and he cannot sin, because he is born of God” (I John 3:8). “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” (I John 4:7-8). “Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and whoever loves the Father loves the child born of Him.” (I John 5:1). As you can see from these scriptures that those who have truly been born again have a love for God that is genuine, and along with that love they have a new bent that desires to walk in a manner pleasing to Him. The hardest thing for a preacher to do is to know how in love to expose the counterfeit sheep so that they awaken to see their need for salvation, and yet in doing so bring comfort and not condemnation to the sheep whose conscious are easily bruised and suffer from numerous doubts. Lord, help us to be faithful shepherds to both groups of people.
3. A continual dispassionate and affectionless Christianity is not biblical Christianity but a counterfeit. For an individual to serve consistently God out of affectionless duty reveals that there is something drastically wrong with their profession of faith. If day after day my wife was to serve me as a husband obediently doing all that a good wife should do, but it was done just out of a sense of duty and not out of love for my person. I would find no pleasure or delight in our relationship. It is the same with God. God would ask us the same question that he asked Peter three times on the beach “Peter do you love me? The greatest commandment that Christ gave to us is to “love God with all the heart and with all the understanding and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as himself is much more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices” (Mark 12:33).