‘You are not straitened in us, but you are straitened in your own affections. Now for a recompense in like kind (I speak as to my children), be you also enlarged.'
He stresses to them that it is not his affections and loving concern for them that are narrowed and hemmed in. He has not allowed himself to be affected by their failure of loyalty towards him. He still loves them like a father. There is nothing that is limiting his affection. But rather it is their affections for him that are restricted. They are too constrained by the things around them, and are withholding their full affection from him and from Christ. So he now pleads for reciprocation and enlargement of their affections in response to his own, because he looks on them as his dear children.
And with a view to that enlargement he will now go on to deal with the things that they have been setting their affections on which have caused the present situation, and calls on them to recognise that their hearts are wrongly taken up with false attractions, and that they must therefore separate themselves from them before they destroy them.