Week 20 Sunday
Week 20 Sunday
Disciplined Bodily Desires
Philippians 3:19; 1 Timothy 6:8; James 5:1-6
We have been studying our seventh enemy, undisciplined desires, and we have taken up sex as one. We now turn to another: a lack of discipline of other bodily desires.
First, discipline your natural desires. Some of these bodily desires are natural, as the desire for food. If you are to live abundantly, then you must be disciplined at the place of your eating. Every meal should be a sacrament offered on the altar of fitter living and finer possibilities. We must eat just enough to keep us fit, and a little less than will keep us fat. Rubber tires around our waistlines are not lifesavers, but life drags. Why carry around excess baggage, overburdening the heart?
Doctors tell us that excess food, as well as too little food, destroys brain power. The wisest thinkers are the wisest tankers. What is in the stomach often determines what is in the head. “The kingdom of God is not food and drink” (Rom. 14:17), and yet our food and drink often determine our fitness for the kingdom of God. “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31), and the glory of God dwells in a physically fit person.
The Scripture says, “He let you hear his voice out of heaven, for discipline” (Deut. 4:36 Moffatt). The voice from heaven for discipline is turning out to be the same voice that speaks out of the constitution of your physical makeup. The doctors and the interpreters of Christianity are now saying the same thing: Discipline yourself or perish.
Everyone has a natural desire for security. So humanity provides against insecurity through possessions. But this outer security may make inner security insecure, by making outer securities the goal and aim of life. The eighteenth-century Quaker John Woolman refused to enlarge his business beyond his actual needs in order to have time for the real business of life. Discipline your desire for security to the place of actual need; beyond that is luxury and decay.
My Lord and my God, help me harness all my desires and drive them in your purposes lest they drive me. For I become servant or master. Let nothing master me, save you. For in your mastery I find my liberty, and in the mastery of my desires I find my tyranny. You have me—entirely—desires and all. Amen.
Week 20 Monday
The Taking of Narcotics Is a Failure of Nerve
Proverbs 20:1; Habakkuk 2:15; Romans 14:19-21; Ephesians 5:18
Second, discipline your unnatural desires. The outstanding unnatural desire we must discipline is a desire for intoxicants. It is a personal and collective menace, increasingly so. In the last decade, insurance rejections for heavy alcoholic indulgence have increased from 12 percent to 34 percent; one out of three otherwise insurable men and women were declined as unsafe risks because of drinking.* Cook County Hospital, Chicago, made an eight-year study of 3,422 cases of pneumonia in males eighteen years of age and over: 22.45 percent of abstainers, 34.4 percent of moderate users, and 49.87 percent of heavy users died.** Judge Harry H. Porter, Chief Justice Municipal Court, Evanston, Illinois, offers his personal opinion that alcohol is involved in 60 percent of our highway accidents. Neurologist August Forel’s record in studying the relationship between alcohol and syphilis showed 76 percent of the men and 66 percent of the women were infected while under the influence of alcohol.*** Dr. C. C. Weeks, the English authority on alcohol, cites medical writers who name alcoholism one of the four great health scourges in modern civilization—cancer, tuberculosis, and venereal diseases being the other three.****
Teach moderation? It is foolish to counsel moderation in the use of a substance, the first effect of which is to weaken the power to stop. Alcohol affects the functions of the nervous system in the inverse order of their development in the individual and the race. The functions highest and last to be developed are the first to be affected by the narcotic action of alcohol. Alcohol affects first those functions that make humans different from and superior to the animals.
It is not smart to drink; it is weak. It is an escape mentality, a failure of nerve. You have no resources on the inside, so you try to take them from a bottle. Only weak people drink. It is a crutch for lame ducks. An Englishman, after hearing me say that, went to a bar and said, “He’s right; nevertheless, give me a crutch.” Remember the name: a crutch. And who it is for: a lame duck.
O God, I need nothing but you—the wine of your love, the exhilaration that comes from abiding in you, the sheer exuberance of spirits that results from being fully attuned to you, the rhythm and harmony that are mine in you—what need I to add to this fullness to make it fuller? Amen.
* Robert S. Carroll, What Price Alcohol? (New York: Macmillan, 1941), vii.
** Joseph A. Capps and George H. Coleman, “Influence of Alcohol on Prognosis of Pneumonia in Cook County Hospital, Cook County,” Journal of the American Medical Association 80, no. 11 (March 17, 1923): 11:750.
*** Published source of statistics unknown, but Forel was well known for his work in linking the abuse of alcohol with syphilis.
**** See Alcohol and Human Life (London: Lewis, 1929).
Week 20 Tuesday
Undisciplined Desire: Tobacco
Habakkuk 2:5-7; Galatians 4:9; 5:1; Ephesians 2:3
Yesterday we were meditating upon undisciplined desires and talked about the desire for unnatural stimulants. I once saw an electric sign that displayed an American eagle standing on a keg of ale, flapping its wings. If the flapping of your wings is based on narcotics, you will soon be a drooping bird. And if the American eagle soars only as it is “soaked,” then its days of high soaring are over.
We must now turn to another unnatural desire and ask whether it has any place in the life of a disciplined Christian: the use of tobacco. We are about due for a reaction against tobacco. The time is ripe, for we had been propagandized until we were thinking that to use tobacco was the only thing to do, that everybody was using it. Now the reaction is beginning to set in, for we are finding out that chain-smoking, chain-drinking, and chain-living are undermining the health of America.
“Ah,” you say, with a sigh of relief, “that lets me out, for I go in for moderation; I am not yet in the chain gang.”
But wait a moment. The doctors are telling us of the effect of all smoking, and the mounting evidence is startling. A heart specialist said to me: “Of all the poisons that man takes into his system for his supposed pleasure, the worst poison is tobacco. One puff of a cigarette, and you can register the effect upon the arteries; they tighten up and cause the heart to work faster.” And then he added: “When I tell a man that smoking is affecting his heart and that he must cut it out, he usually goes and does it. But when I tell a woman the same thing, she promises and then goes away and continues.” Woman is the latest convert to the god of the yellow stains, and is fast becoming its most ardent devotee. Disillusionment hasn’t set in—yet.
Why is it that insurance statistics tell us that the mortality from pneumonia among smokers is double that of the nonsmokers?*
O God, I come to you for freedom. I do not want to be in bondage to a self-imposed craving, a slave to a thing. I want to depend for comfort, not on smoke, but on a Savior. I want my joy to depend, not on the most boosted brand, but on a quality of life. Help me shift my values. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
* Published source unknown.
Week 20 Wednesday
Undisciplined Desire: Tobacco (continued)
1 Corinthians 6:12; 10:23-24, 31-33
We continue our study. Dr. Raymond Pearl of Johns Hopkins, an early authority on medical statistics, after examining thousands of white men who were heavy smokers (those who smoke over ten cigarettes a day), light smokers, and nonsmokers, found that between the ages of thirty and forty-five the deaths per 1,000 among the heavy smokers were double those of nonsmokers; the light smokers were halfway between. After age forty-five, the lines of the charts converge until they meet at age seventy. If you can stand smoking until age seventy, then it makes no difference—you are a tough customer and immune. But those who survive until seventy are the especially physically fit. Dr. Pearl sums up: “The smoking of tobacco was statistically associated with an impairment of life duration, and the amount or degree of this impairment increased as the habitual amount of smoking increased.”*
Gene Tunney, the ex-heavyweight champion, says in a stinging article on this subject:
No one has ever denied that nicotine is poison. Taken clear, it is as quick-acting and fatal as prussic acid. A drop of it on a shaved rabbit causes immediate convulsions and death. The nicotine dissolved out of a few cigarettes and placed on the tongue of a grown man would kill him in 15 minutes. Luckily the bulk of the nicotine in tobacco is volatilized in smoke; you do not get the poison straight. But if you smoke a pack a day, you inhale 400 milligrams of it a week. That much in a single dose would kill you as quickly as a bullet.
Under the flogging of the nicotine whip, the body burns up sugar faster; heart action, respiration and blood pressure are kept at a ding-dong pitch. At the end of a two-pack day, the smoker’s system has received an unmerciful beating. Impoverished nerves and body cells cry out with fatigue and irritation. The chainsmoker suffers from a chronic “tired feeling.” He is an energy bankrupt and must borrow new energy at the outrageous interest rate of still heavier smoking.**
My Lord and my God, help me be at my very best for you. This business of being a Christian is serious and needs all my powers at their best. Help me then to offer them to you. Help me cut out all parasites that sap my strength and energy. For I have a race to run. Amen.
* “Tobacco Smoking and Longevity,” Science 87, no. 2253 (March 4, 1938): 217.
** “Nicotine Knockout, or the Slow Count,” Reader’s Digest (December 1941): 21-24.
Week 20 Thursday
Undisciplined Desires: Expert Opinion
Isaiah 58:6, 8-9, 11; 61:1; Romans 6:16
It would have been easier for me to have left out this section on the use of tobacco, for many of my friends smoke, and they are Christians too. I do not doubt for a moment their sincerity and their piety; so it would have been easier to skip around this subject and let it alone—easier and more deadly. For the future of the world is in the hands of disciplined people. The user of tobacco is undisciplined.
If you don’t believe this, let the top people speak. Edison said: “Cigarette smoking has a violent reaction on the nerve centers, producing degeneration of the cells of the brain. . . . This degeneration is permanent. I employ no person who uses cigarettes.”
Dr. W. J. Mayo said at a dinner party: “Gentlemen, it is customary to pass around cigars after dinner, but I shall not do it. I do not smoke, and I do not approve of smoking. If you will notice, the practice is going out among the ablest surgeons, the men at the top. No surgeon can afford to smoke.”
Football coach Alonzo Stagg: “From personal observation with athletes who have been addicted to the use of tobacco, I can say with confidence that they do not possess the endurance of athletes who have grown up free from the use of it.”
The late Knute Rockne, coach of Notre Dame, said, “Tobacco slows up reflexes, lowers morale; any advertising that says smoking helps an athlete is a falsehood and a fraud.”
Ty Cobb, the famous baseball player, says, “Cigarette smoking stupefies the brain, saps vitality, undermines health and weakens moral fiber. No one who hopes to be successful in any line can afford so detrimental a habit.”*
A throat specialist said to me: “In all my practice I have never known a nonsmoker to have cancer of the throat.”
No wonder Tolstoy cries out in wonder: “Why do men stupefy themselves with tobacco?”**
Jesus refused narcotics even when hanging in torture on the cross. He would face life matching his inner courage against outer circumstances. He refused to deaden himself with drugs. Only the weak turn to narcotics.
Gracious Lord, forgive the wrongs we inflict upon ourselves by trying to live in ways other than your ways. Your ways produce rhythm; our ways produce ruin. Your ways produce freedom and fitness; our ways produce folly and unfitness. Help me take your ways unreservedly. Amen.
* Edison: from a 1914 memo to Henry Ford. Mayo: published source unknown. Stagg: published source unknown. Rockne and Cobb as quoted in Gene Tunney, “Nicotine Knockout.”
** Leo Tolstoy, “Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?” (1890).
Week 20 Friday
Disciplining Our Time
Proverbs 6:6; John 9:4; Ephesians 5:16; Colossians 1:5
We now turn to the discipline of our time. A lawyer who was in one of our meetings said to a friend at the close, “I’ve had my inside sandpapered today.” All of us need our insides sandpapered by the sandpaper of discipline to make us burnished and fit. We must be reminded that this is an undisciplined generation. It would translate the first line of Psalm 23 into “The Lord is my chauffeur; I shall not walk.” As someone put it, “The church faces a generation which is trying to drink its way to prosperity, war its way to peace, spend its way to wealth, and enjoy its way to heaven.” It can’t be done. We must discipline everything about our lives, especially our time.
In the words of John Wesley, that master user of time, “Never be unemployed. Never be triflingly employed.”* As Ephesians 5:16 expresses it, “[make] the most of the time, because the days are evil.” In photography, we are told that the picture depends not only upon what you put into it but also on what you leave out.
Your capacity to say no determines your capacity to say yes. You have to say no to lesser things in order to say yes to greater things. Life depends upon elimination as well as upon assimilation. Someone asked a successful college president what was the first qualification of a college president, and he replied, “A wastebasket.” I go into many homes and hotels, and the first thing I look for is a wastebasket! Throw away things that do not contribute.
I believe in recreations when they re-create. But when they kill time and exhaust you, let them go. Someone has defined the game of bridge as “an assault on time with intent to kill.” If you kill time, you kill yourself, for you are a part of time. It is said that Dr. William Osler, the great surgeon, used to tie knots in a string while riding in a street car, to prepare for quick tying in the crisis of an operation.
My Lord and my God, I want to be ready for the moment of my highest use, some great moment that shall call for my best. Help me every moment to get ready for that supreme moment. Help me to be prepared, by getting ready every moment. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
* The first of Wesley’s twelve rules for preachers from 1744, as presented in John Telford, “Wesley’s Preachers,” The Life of John Wesley, http://wesley.nnu.edu/?id=96, accessed May 7, 2014.
Week 20 Saturday
A Ladder for Discipline
Matthew 5:29-30; Luke 9:55-62; 12:31
Before we leave these thoughts on discipline we must give a ladder on disciplined living:
(1) Decide what you are going to be disciplined to—your absolute. That absolute is Christ. You are going then to be a Christian. To be a Christlike person is the aim of your discipline. (2) Discipline the center, the self, before disciplining the circumference, things around that self. Bring that self to the discipline of a complete surrender to Christ. With that center unsurrendered, all disciplining of this, that, and the other is tinkering. (3) Now that the center has been disciplined by self-surrender, begin with the most difficult thing you have to discipline. I am afraid I cannot agree with those who advise picking out the easiest things first and then working out to harder things. For in so doing, we seldom go on to the harder; we stay caught in the easier. Jesus said, “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off ” (Matt. 5:30). He didn’t say, “If your right hand causes you to sin, begin by paring your fingernails.” Someone has said, “In tackling any problem, raise it in its most difficult phase, solve it there, and then you solve it all down the line.” I have made it a practice to pick out the worst-looking letter in the pile and open it first.
(4) In tackling the most difficult thing first, don’t taper off in regard to it. Don’t try to give up unnatural habits by reducing them little by little; let them go all at once, bag and baggage. The tapering-off method seldom works. (5) Since habits become power, make them work with you and not against you. Make habits the friends and stabilizers of the new life. (6) Remember that certain things are soils in which the new life grows. Cultivate those soils that contribute. (7) Don’t admit any exception to your discipline. The small victories count. By lighting small successive candles of will power, we generate a beam that becomes a light to the whole of life.
Any exception you tolerate makes it easier to make the next exception and so on down to undisciplined living.
O you disciplined Christ, we would be like you. Your disciplines are so hidden, so a part of you, we can scarcely discern them. We would be that way too. May our very disciplines become so naturalized within us that they become unconscious, and, therefore, effective. Amen.