Chalmers: On the Need for a Replacement Warrantee

If our affections for the world are not to be in existence, they cannot simply be striped from us with nothing present to fill the void. It must be replaced with something so much more consuming and desirable lest the vacuum be left to devour itself for lack:

“The heart would revolt against its own emptiness. It could not bear to be so left in a state of waste and cheerless insipidity….You have all heard that nature abhors a vacuum. Such, at least, is the nature of the heart, that though the room which is in it may change one inmate for another, it cannot be left void without pain of most intolerable suffering.”—pg13

“Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and the pride in possessions—is not from the Father but is from the world. And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.” —I John 2:15-17

“…to bid [a man to] love not the world is to pass a sentence of expulsion on all the inmates of his bosom. To estimate the magnitude and the difficulty of such a surrender, let us not only think that it were just as arduous to prevail on him not to love wealth, which is but one of the things in the world….But to desolate his heart of all love for the things of the world, without the substitution of any love in its place, were to him a process of as unnatural violence as to destroy all the things he has in the world and give him nothing in their room. So that, if to love not the world be indispensable to one’s Christianity, then the crucifixion of the old man is not too strong a term to mark that transition in history when all old things are done away, and all things are become new.”—pg 14

“If any man be in Christ he is a new creature. Old things have passed away behold, all things are become new.” —II Corinthians 5:17

“We have already affirmed how impossible it were for the heart, by any innate elasticity of its own, to cast the world away from it and thus reduce itself to a wilderness. The heart is not so constituted, and the only way to dispossess it of an old affection is by the expulsive power of a new one.”—pg 17