Week 24 Sunday
Week 24 Sunday
Ignorance and Lack of Judgment
Acts 6:1; Colossians 1:9; James 1:5, 19; 3:17
We pass on now to the eleventh of the fifteen major enemies: ignorance and lack of judgment.
Goodness not guided by intelligence is almost as dangerous as intelligence not guided by goodness. Ignorance has produced as much confusion and suffering in the world as wrong intentions. It is true that it is easier to act yourself into right thinking than it is to think yourself into right acting. The universe is a moral universe, and the greatest organ of knowledge is moral response. You know as much as you are willing to put into practice, and no more. While this is true, nevertheless, whether you learn right thinking through intellectual processes alone, or through moral response, it is necessary to learn right thinking. “For the ancestor of every action is a thought.”* If the thinking goes wrong, then life goes wrong with it.
Therefore, in nature and in grace, ignorance is not excused. It must be paid for in suffering. Sincerity amid the ignorance won’t atone for the ignorance; the results are the same. Some Hindus sincerely believe that smallpox is caused by the goddess of smallpox, Sitla. That sincere ignorance blocks scientific remedies, and people die, sincerity or no sincerity.
For a long time people believed that malaria was caused by bad air, hence its name: mal = bad, aria = air. That ignorance let people die by the millions. The same thing is happening spiritually. We are ignorant of the laws of mental and spiritual health, and as a consequence humanity is tearing and lacerating itself like the man among the Gadarenes. Neuroses and the jitters are the weapons with which we flay ourselves.
Jesus was the revealer of the nature of reality, and he often said, “Don’t you understand?” The stupidities of humanity astonished him more than their wickedness. He saw people trying to live against the nature of reality—attempting the impossible—and getting hurt in the process.
O God, we hurt ourselves because we do not know your laws; and when we know them, we do not obey them. Give us minds that know and obey, and then we shall know how to live. We would know the truth and do it, and then we shall be free. Give us light and give us life, to walk in that light. Amen.
*Ralph Waldo Emerson
Week 24 Monday
A Well-trained Conscience
Romans 10:2-3, 14-17; Ephesians 4:18; Hebrews 5:14
Christians are foes to ignorance; we fight it on every front. To get in touch with Christ is to have a mental awakening. It was no mere chance that so many higher educational institutions in North America came out of the Christian Church. Jesus said, “You shall love the Lord your God . . . with all your mind” (Matt. 22:37; Luke 10:27). That phrase “with all your mind” was not in the original Old Testament command (Deut. 6:5); Jesus put it in. Scientists tell us that most of us use only about half of our brains. Jesus would awaken that other dormant half and help us to love God with “all” our minds.
“Where ignorance is bliss, ’tis folly to be wise,”* does not fit into the Christian outlook, which says, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (John 8:32 CEB). Jesus would encourage us to think for ourselves: “Why don’t you judge for yourselves what is right?” (Luke 12:57 CEB). An upstanding, thinking, free personality is the aim of the Christian discipline.
An ignorantly trained conscience is a danger to the world. The conscience is not an infallible guide unless properly trained. It is a capacity within us that decides when a thing is right or wrong, but what it decides as right or wrong is determined by the training we give it. Paul killed people in all good conscience until his conscience began to be trained under the tutelage of Christ. Then and then only was it a safe guide. We make our consciences, and then our consciences make us. Many people have their consciences trained to be sensitive to very marginal sins and shortcomings, and not to be at all acute to central and fundamental sins. They have petty consciences that load them with a sense of guilt over trivialities. A truly Christian conscience is a great achievement, as well as a great gift of God.
Not only does conscience approve or disapprove within the framework of what it is taught; it also provides guidance within the framework of our intellectual conceptions. To give the safest and highest guidance, our minds must be Christianly informed and trained.
O God, I begin to see that I must love you with an intellectual love as well as with an emotional love. Awaken my brain cells to activity and to acuteness, so that I may be the sharpest instrument I can be. Save me from intellectual laziness, and help me think your thoughts after you. Amen.
* Thomas Gray, “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” 1742.
Week 24 Tuesday
Steps in Becoming Informed and Balanced
1 Corinthians 2
We said yesterday that both our consciences and our guidance work within the framework of our information and knowledge. The story is told that one of John Wesley’s preachers said, “I get my text and my sermons from God without studying.”
Wesley asked, “Does God ever give you a text you have not read?”
“No,” replied the preacher.
Wesley added, “Then you would better read more.”
An uninformed Christian is an uninspiring Christian. That which does not hold the mind will soon not hold the heart.
But Christians must not only be well informed; we must also be well balanced. A lack of judgment is as disastrous as a lack of information. You must know what to do with your knowledge after you acquire it. A judge said to an oratorical young lawyer: “Young man, if you will pluck some feathers from the wings of your imagination and stick them in the tail of your judgment, you will fly better.” Perhaps if we take the following steps we shall become better informed and better-balanced Christians:
(1) Go over your life and see where you are illiterate. You will probably find vital areas of life where you are uninformed. (2) See if your conscience isn’t badly trained, especially on the great social issues. Your knowledge of these issues being neglected, your conscience will have little or nothing to work on. (3) Determine to become educated in areas where now you are not. Break up your mental habits by a mighty effort and a strict discipline. (4) Set aside a certain amount of time each day to inform yourself in the areas where you are falling down. Count that time out of the day—a standing engagement with knowledge. (5) Review your judgments and don’t be afraid to reverse them. Let the mind know that its judgments will be reviewed. This will make the mind more careful.
Be an informed and balanced Christian—the most beautiful handiwork of God.
O God, I would have an informed and disciplined mind. Help me this day to begin a regime of strict discipline with myself. Help me admit of no exceptions. For I am in the serious business of being at my best for you. Help me be “a worker who doesn’t need to be ashamed” (2 Tim. 2:15 CEB). Amen.
Week 24 Wednesday
Bodily Disharmony and Disease
John 1:14; Romans 12:1; Galatians 6:17; Hebrews 10:5, 9
We pass on to the twelfth of the fifteen major enemies of the personality: bodily disharmony and disease. We have been a long time getting to the physical basis of abundant living. Some would have started with it as the all-important factor. But we have reserved it for this place, for while we consider the physical basis important, it is not all-important. Many are compelled to live abundantly, if at all, in spite of physical conditions; and they do. I know a man left disabled by World War I and entirely bedridden. Yet he runs his business from his bedroom. And that bedroom is the center of a wholesome gaiety. He is one of the most magnetic persons in his town. He lives abundantly—in spite of.
While this is true, nevertheless, there is a very definite physical basis of abundant living. Body and mind are intertwined until one can scarcely say “body and mind,” but “body-mind.” If the soul and mind pass on their sicknesses to the body, then just as definitely does the body pass on its sicknesses to the mind and soul. The whole person becomes sick.
Hawthorne says, “A bodily disease, which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.”* True. And just as truly a soul disease, which we look upon as whole and entire, may, after all, be a symptom of some ailment in the physical part.
Many people castigate their souls and load them with guilt when they should attend to their nutrition, or have out an infected tonsil. If the nerves are starved on account of the lack of vitamins, they will kick back in spiritual depression in exactly the same way that a starved soul will kick back in bodily depression. Therefore, Christianity shows its absolute sanity by taking the body seriously. It is the only one of the great faiths that does so. It is founded on an Incarnation.
O God of my body, I would have it at your best. You have made me for health and rhythm; help me to present this body of mine for you to make out of it the very finest instrument for your purposes. Help every brain cell and every tissue and every nerve to be the strings upon which your creative fingers shall play and bring out undreamed-of harmony and effectiveness. Amen.
*Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (London, 1851), 166.
Week 24 Thursday
The Physical and Spiritual Bases of Health
1 Corinthians 6:19-20; 2 Corinthians 4:10-11; 6:16; 1 Thessalonians 5:23
There are those who say that all disease has a physical origin—they are the materialists. There are others who say that all disease has a spiritual or mental origin—they are the mentalists. To hold either position is to fly in the face of the facts. To hold that all disease is mental in origin is to alienate the whole scientific movement for health. To hold that all disease is physical in origin is to alienate the whole mental and spiritual movement for health. Both positions have filled graveyards as a result of their half-truths. Many people have died repeating the slogan that disease was all in their minds, when a surgeon could have applied a physical remedy and healed them. But, as Dr. Joseph Hersey Pratt says, bushels of tonsils and teeth have been taken out of people who needed to be delivered from fears and self-centeredness and resentments in order to be well.*
Both positions have made for hypocrisy and unnecessary martyrdoms. The time has now come to bring these two positions together. The truth in each has been established; it is now time that the error in each should be eliminated, and the two positions—the thesis and the antithesis—be brought together in a higher synthesis. The fact is that the balance will probably work out as about fifty-fifty; about half the diseases are mental and spiritual and half physical in origin.
A young man once became ill after eating shrimp. Ten years later, he became physically ill at the sight of the word shrimp on a menu. The first time the illness was purely physical in origin—he was allergic to shrimp; the second time it was purely mental.
Four times I have eaten shrimp with the same result. The last time I ate them, I did so unknowingly, as they were camouflaged. This was at noon, and I should have been ill a couple of hours later, but I had an important mass meeting and was absorbed in it until nine o’clock at night, when I returned home. Then I remarked that this time I had conquered my usual reaction to shrimp. I had, until I came near the table for supper, and then I hadn’t! The mind held the illness off for eight hours, but at last the physical fact conquered.
O God of my mind and of my body, I come to you to have both under the control of your redemption and guidance. May I pass on the health of my mind to my body, and the health of my body to my mind. But in order to do this, pass on your health to both my mind and my body. Amen.
*Joseph Hersey Pratt (1872–1956) was one of the founders of group psychotherapy in the United States.
Week 24 Friday
Does Character Affect the Glands?
Psalm 63:1; Romans 8:11, 21-23, 26; 2 Corinthians 5:10
When the effects of glands were first discovered in any real way, many people felt they had found the basis of morality and character: The glands decided everything. One could change a person’s moral character by changing the secretion of the glands. So character and morality must be purely physical in origin. This seemed a terrific blow to Christianity, which says that morality has its origin in a spiritual being, God. But now the truth is emerging: If the secretions of glands determine character, then character determines the secretions of glands. A person’s mental and spiritual state determines in what proportion the glands flow.
Moreover, this important fact is being realized: Unchristian mental and spiritual attitudes upset the proper secretion of the glands. I asked an able medical man this question: “If we live in a truly Christian way, will not the glands, provided that they are healthy, function perfectly?”
The answer was an unqualified yes.
Then we have Christian glands! Unchristian fear, hate, selfishness, and guilt upset them, throw them out of proportion. Christian confidence, love, unselfishness, and reconciliation make the glands function naturally and in the right proportion. If our glands make us, then it is equally true that we make our glands. Perhaps the truth could be better stated this way: God made our glands and into their structure wrote the Christian law; when we obey that law, our glands are harmonious and rightly proportioned for health.
“Three weeks after I lost my boy, I went to the hospital with a stomach ulcer. Worry and anxiety—grief—had brought the ulcer on,” said a pastor. He surrendered his grief to God and found release from the ulcer.
“You restored me to health and newness of life,” said a radiant young woman. And the two were connected; her newness of life brought health.
Said a doctor to me: “If three quarters of my patients found God, they would be well. My wife had a peptic ulcer, but it was functional—when she became straightened out spiritually, she was well.”
O God of harmony and peace and health, I bring to you my disharmonies, my unrest, my unhealth. Take them all into your hands and reshape them into harmony. Where they have missed the way, bring them back, and where they are out of balance, balance them. I would be harmonized like you. Amen.
Week 24 Saturday
The Moral and Spiritual Bases of Disease
Psalms 31:9-10; 32:1-5; Isaiah 1:4-6
The physical basis of disease is so obvious and insistent that we need not emphasize it; it emphasizes itself. Nor need we emphasize its effects upon the spiritual condition. The idea that you can be more spiritual if your body is mortified is false. If that is tried, the body kicks back and clouds the soul; so mortified bodies produce morbid saints, and they are usually more morbid than saintly. The surgeon with his scalpel who lacerates the flesh in order to restore health helps to produce more saintliness than the would-be saint who lacerates the body in order to produce saintliness.
To the effect of the physical upon the spiritual we increasingly agree. But the other truth—the effect of the mental and spiritual upon the physical—is insufficiently emphasized. One lady put her case this way: “I was informed that there was very little organically wrong with me and that my mental state was causing my trouble. I had lost weight steadily in spite of medication. My mind had become so bad I was afraid to go out by myself, and I avoided meeting people. But a remarkable change has taken place in my life, and my health has steadily improved. My husband’s love for me is growing stronger each day. The Lord is truly transforming our home from a morgue to a sanctuary.”
“From a morgue to a sanctuary”! Not only are many homes morgues; many bodies are; they harbor death cells of anger, fear, self-centeredness, and guilt. Many a person, instead of having a living vibrant body—awake in every cell and harmonious in every relationship—has a body of death. That body of death can become a sanctuary. “The first concept I had that God could heal a body, wrung dry of all ability to resist disease, came from your book The Christ of the Indian Road,” a reader confesses. “The leaven of your ideas was responsible for the metamorphosis of a lump of clay into a seeker after truth.”
“A body wrung dry of all ability to resist disease”—a Christian has no business with that kind of body.
O God, if my mind and my body are wrung dry of the ability to resist disease, then give to me what Paul meant when he said that our mortal bodies would be quickened by the Spirit that dwells within us (see Rom. 8:11). Let me be quickened, quickened. Amen.