Mental Health
MENTAL HEALTH
The Kingdom Written Within
Jeremiah 31:33; Romans 2:14-16; 2 Corinthians 3:1-8
What does the psychologist mean by saying, “To be frank and honest in all relations, but especially in relations with oneself, is the first law of mental hygiene.” Doesn’t that mean that the universe and you and I are built for truth, that the universe won’t back a lie, that all lies sooner or later break themselves upon the facts of things? Since the kingdom stands for absolute truth, and our own mental makeup demands the same thing, then are not the laws of the kingdom written within us?
Victorious Living
(Week 2, Thursday)
How Can We Arrive at the Goal of Inward Unity?
Matthew 6:22; Ephesians 4:1-6; James 4:8
If there is one thing that both modern psychology and the way of Christ agree on, it is this: Apart from inward unity there can be no personal happiness and no effective living. . . .
So we toil in rowing, trying to get to the land of inward unity. We are tossed by many a wind and many a wave. And it gets very dark. Then Jesus quietly comes. We more easily let him in this time, for there seems no other alternative. The soul seems instinctively to feel, “The Master has come.” He gathers up the inward distinctions, cleanses away the points of conflict, and unifies life around himself. We have arrived.
Victorious Living
(Week 3, Saturday)
“It Will Spring Up Out of the Earth”
Psalm 139:14-16; Proverbs 17:22; Luke 19:40; Ephesians 6:1-3
Dr. Henry Link, in his study of psychology, gave up Christianity as an outmoded superstition. When, however, he began to try to untangle snarled-up lives, he found he had to give them something outside themselves to love. The only thing permanent he could give them was God; and soon he found he was talking himself back into being a Christian. Life wouldn’t come out right in any other way. He became a Christian, and wrote two great books on the Christian way, led back to it by the very pressures of life (see, for example, Henry C. Link, Return to Religion [New York: Macmillan, 1936]).
Abundant Living
(Week 46, Monday)
Intellectually Mature, Emotionally Immature
1 Corinthians 2:10-12
The church today is, in large measure, halfway between Easter and Pentecost, and is behind closed doors in fear. The grandest good news that ever broke upon human ears had broken freshly upon them: Jesus was alive, yet that didn’t free them; they were still locked behind closed doors.
One of the greatest fallacies of this age of intellectual progress is the fallacy that knowledge in itself is necessarily freeing. It may free you, it may not. Many intellectually mature people are emotionally immature. That accounts for the fact that many psychologists and psychiatrists are not integrated. They know, but they don’t know freedom. Emotionally they are still bound by old fears and frustrations. That is the basic reason we need some powerful impulse within that will free us from our unreasoning fears and anxieties. That impulse within can be supplied only by the Holy Spirit.
Mastery
(Week 4, Saturday)
God-Salvation or Self-Salvation
Ephesians 2:7-8
Since maturity cannot be found unless we have a faith that is mature, it is all-important to fasten our loyalty and our love upon the maturest faith that can be found. Where is that faith? [I] have no hesitancy in pointing straight to the heart of the matter; the center of that faith is a Person, and that Person is Jesus.
Christian Maturity
(Week 1, Thursday)
Maturity in Spiritual Contagion
Acts 4:18-20
To be able and willing to share Christ with others is the highest and most mature sign of maturity. It shows that we are mature enough to have a surplus, an exportable surplus.
Christian Maturity
(Week 45, Sunday)
Share in Christ
His all for our all. It is all there for the taking. I can be strong in his strength, pure in his purity, loving in his love, and mature in his maturity. I share in the highest there is.
In Christ
(Week 45, Thursday)
The Five Steps in Following Christ
Joshua 24:15; Psalm 55:17; Matthew 6:22; John 6:67-69
Make up your mind: “All who want to come after me” [see Luke 9:23 CEB]. Here is the great decision that decides all decisions. It is what they call in psychology “a major choice”—a choice that you do not have to make over again each day; a choice into which the lesser choices of life fit, and not a choice that fits into them; it is the choice that organizes everything around itself.
Abundant Living
(Week 47, Thursday)
Is the Way Impersonal?
1 Corinthians 13:1-3
The Christian way is not only sanctity; it is sanity. Take any way you will and pursue it, and you will come out to one of two things: if it is not-the-way, you will come to a dead end; if it is the way, you will come to the Way. All the right ways lead to the Way.
The Way
(Week 7, Sunday)
Roads with Dead Ends
Matthew 14:29-31; 1 John 4:18
The first road with a dead end is Fear. . . . Fear harnessed to constructive ends may be constructive. When we use fear and control it, then it is good. When fear uses us and controls us, then it is bad. When fear becomes Fear, then it becomes master and runs us into roads with dead ends.
The Way
(Week 13, Sunday)
Don’t Fight Your Fears; Surrender Them
John 6:20-21; 12:15
Don’t fight your fears; surrender them to God. If you fight your fears, your mind will be upon those fears, and it cannot be repeated too often that “whatever gets your attention gets you.” If your fears get your attention, even though it be a fighting attention, they will get you. A struggle will ensue between the imagination and the will, and in any such struggle the imagination always wins. You must not fight your fears, but surrender them into the hands of God.
The Way
(Week 14, Thursday)
Psalm 4:8; Isaiah 54:10
When you get too tense and begin to take yourself and your troubles too seriously, walk to the mirror and burst out laughing. I often do it; it lets down tensions. As you stand there before the mirror, repeat these words: “O fool, to carry yourself upon your own shoulders! O beggar, to come to beg at your own door!” And then burst out laughing—at yourself.
The Way
(Week 14, Friday)
The Steps out of Negativism
Acts 5:20-21; 18:9-11
Will to be positive. This is important, for you have been willing to be negative, perhaps unconsciously. . . .
The first thing to decide is: Do I will to be well? To be positive? To go out and meet life and master it? When you decide this affirmatively, then all the resources of God are behind that decision. In the inner quietness of your heart throw your will on the side of freedom.
Remember that you are made in the inner structure of your being for creative activity. You are fulfilling yourself when you are creative and positive. You are frustrating yourself when you are noncreative and negative. . . .
Remember that your happiness does not come through what happens to you, but through what you make happen to others. . . .
Happiness doesn’t come to you; you join happiness on the way to doing something for others.
The Way
(Week 17, Tuesday)
I Can Do All Things through Christ
Colossians 1:11; 2 Timothy 4:5; 1 Peter 1:13
Keep repeating to yourself, “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me” (Phil 4:13 KJV). Say it the last thing before you drop off to sleep, for the subconscious mind is susceptible then.
The Way
(Week 17, Wednesday)
Conscious and Subconscious Unified
Ephesians 4:1-7
O living Spirit, I want my whole being to be redeemed. Your work is in the area of the subconscious, an area I can’t control. So I turn it over to you, for you to cleanse and control and redirect. I thank you. Amen.
The Way
(Week 40, Tuesday)
Self-Cultivation: Another Attempt
Psalm 17:1-5
To leave you concentrated on your self is unhealthy and bad psychology. . . . Any system that leaves you occupied with yourself is wrong, however learned it may be.
This is the essential wrong in the cults of self-cultivation. Self-cultivation means self-concentration, and self-concentration means self-deterioration—inevitably. It may bring an initial inner boost to begin to cultivate yourself, but it will mean an inevitable letdown. Gordon Allport, professor of psychology at Harvard, says: “Paradoxically ‘self-expression’ requires the capacity to transcend oneself in the pursuit of objectives not primarily referred to the self.” [No published source found.] Here psychology and Christian faith coincide: “He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matt 10:39). Self-cultivation is all right and very necessary, provided the self has been surrendered to God. Then it can be cultivated, for it is God-centered and not self-centered.
The Way to Power and Poise
(Week 2, Saturday)
The Holy Spirit Is Power: Where It Counts
Ephesians 3:14-21
The modern emphasis on psychology in the remaking of personality is good, but not good enough. Psychology lays bare our problems and our motives. But it lacks power to solve those problems and to unify those motives. It lacks central dynamic. Psychology is successful only where it is combined with religious faith that provides dynamic: one provides information; the other transformation. . . .
Psychology can explain; religion as precepts can exhort; the Holy Spirit makes us exult. For the Spirit gives above “all that we ask [religion] or think [psychology]” (Eph 3:20).
The Way to Power and Poise
(Week 17, Thursday)
Luke 14:26-2
No one is free until free at the center. When we let go, there and then we are free indeed. When the self is renounced, then we stands utterly disillusioned, apart, asking for nothing. We anticipate the buffeting, the slights, the separations, the disappointments of life by their acceptance in one great renunciation. It is life’s supreme strategic retreat. You can say to life, “What can you do to me? I want nothing.” You can say to death, “What can you do to me? I have already died.” Then we are truly free. In the bath of renunciation we have washed our souls clean from a thousand clamoring, conflicting desires. Asking for nothing, if anything comes to us, it is all sheer gain. Then life becomes one constant surprise.
Everything belongs to the person who wants nothing. Having nothing, that person possesses all things in life, including life itself. Nothing will be denied the person who denies self. Having chosen to be utterly solitary, that person comes into possession of the most utterly social fact of the universe, the kingdom of God. He or she wants nothing of people and matter. He or she has God. That is enough. Now the person is ready to go back into the world. Washed clean of desires, now the person can form new ones, from a new center and with a new motive. This detachment is necessary to a new attachment. The fullest and most complete life comes out of most completely empty life.
Would the best in psychology agree? Listen to Anton T. Boisen: “To be at one with that which is supreme in our hierarchy of loyalties, that to which men generally give the name of God, is ever essential to mental health; to be isolated or estranged through the consciousness that there is that within which we cannot acknowledge without being condemned means mental disorder and spiritual death” (The Exploration of the Inner World [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1936], 173). Self-adjustment through self-surrender to God equals mental health.
How to Be a Transformed Person
(Week 19, Wednesday)
Come . . . Take . . . Learn
Luke 18:9-12
In reading books on counseling, I have been amazed at the way this question of self-surrender to God is sidestepped and bypassed. Advice is given about every question, but this central question is skirted. And this by Christian leaders. They seem to hesitate to confront the persons counseled with the supreme need of getting off their own hands into the hands of God by self-surrender. They name their method “nondirective counseling.” They do not direct the counselees; they allow them to do it themselves. Suppose Jesus had used this nondirective method. Suppose in the Sermon on the Mount he had gathered afflicted humanity about himself and had said to them, “Now talk about yourself. I’ll throw in a question now and then.” No. He directed people, for he knew the direction, and they didn’t. He directed them through presenting truth, which was self-verifying, and for which they were made.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 10, Thursday)
Faith and Love That Jesus Christ Inspire
1 John 5:1-5
This passage depicts Jesus’ impact: “Faith and love that Christ inspires” (1 Tim 1:14 Moffatt). Now, interestingly enough, psychology is more and more emphasizing . . . faith and love, as centrally necessary to mental health. If you do not have faith, you become cynical; and if you do not have love, you become self-centered; and if you are cynical and self-centered, you are on the road to inner disruption. Only those who have faith in others and faith in themselves have the basis for mental and spiritual, and hence physical soundness. And only those who have love—genuine, outgoing love for others—are themselves healthy personalities.
But you cannot have faith in and love for others unless they are rooted in faith in and love for some center other than a human center: God. So Jesus, by producing faith in and love for God, by making God worthy of faith and lovable, stimulates in people the two things essential to mental and spiritual, and hence physical health. The impact of Jesus upon human nature has stimulated more growth than any other single influence.
Growing Spiritually
(Week 15, Tuesday)
Right Thinking and Right Emotions
Philippians 4:8-9
I mentioned yesterday two things necessary to health: work and love. Karl Menninger, head of the famous Topeka Clinic, gives four things necessary to mental and physical health: creative work, creative play, creative worship, and creative love. He adds to Cabot’s list the word creative (see Richard C. Cabot, What Men Live By: Work, Play, Love, Worship [Houghton Mifflin, 1929]). This is important; for if the work, play, worship, and love are not creative, producing something constructive outside self, they bring disease instead of health. It is the element of self-losing and self-transcending that produces health. If any of these leave you in a state of self-reference or self-preoccupation, they are not fruitful—they are festering.
Mastery
(Week 30, Wednesday)
Psychotherapy Does Not Create Saints
1 Corinthians 1:22-24
The Holy Spirit brings new power into life: power to change thought and emotion, power to change the total life.
Christian Maturity
(Week 42, Saturday)
Psychology is stressing the health of joyfulness. The joyless person is on the skids—physically. Nothing tones up the system as much as a constant flow of joy. Nothing tones down the system as much as a constant flow of depression and sadness.
In Christ
(Week 37, Thursday)
Peace . . . in Christ Jesus
Is there a peace called “my peace”? Is it different, profoundly different, from the psychological peace called “peace of mind”? Yes.
In Christ
(Week 46, Wednesday)
Is Science Coming Out to the Supremacy of Love?
1 Corinthians 13:8-133
In one of my books, Christian Maturity, I took the position that the human personality is as mature as it is mature in love, and no more. One may be mature in culture and knowledge and in ability, but if one is immature in love, that person is an immature personality. And the psychologists are increasingly agreeing.
Dr. Carl Menninger wrote a book on Love Against Hate. He took the position that love is the constructive element; love builds up and hate tears down. When he came to the conclusion that people are in his institution because they had not loved or been loved, it was an epoch in his thinking. For psychiatry had been founded on the idea that insight is the cure-all for human personality problems. Give patients insight as to their troubles, and they are automatically cured. Mental institutions are filled with people who have insight as to what is the matter with them, but they are still there. Insight is not necessarily curative. When the diagnosis shifted, the technique had to shift. These people were there because they hadn’t loved or been loved. They must be loved into loving.
The Word Became Flesh
(Week 11, Wednesday)