Sunday: The Mastery of Negative Attitudes
WEEK 26
SUNDAY
THE MASTERY OF NEGATIVE ATTITUDES
Job 2:13; Ezekiel 3:14-15; 4:1-6
We turn now to another mastery—the mastery of negative attitudes. Since they had found mastery over confusion and knew what they wanted to do and say, and where they wanted to go, they became positive persons leaving a positive result. They were no longer nay-saying but yea-saying. The world listens to the yea-saying.
I picked up a magazine and read an article by a very able Indian on the question of Christian missions in India. Fully 90 percent of the article was negative. When I got through, I had a sinking feeling in my middle. And more serious still, I found myself saying to myself, “Why should I continue to support financially and morally all this negativism?” His negativism affected my person and my purse! We never follow a negative person.
The one negative person in the Acts was a deeply spiritual man and a very accurate prophet: Agabus. He made two prophecies, and they both came true. One was that a famine would fall on the land (Acts 11:28), and the other that the Jews would “bind the man who owns this belt” (Paul) and imprison him (Acts 21:10-11). Both these prophecies came true. But they were both negative—famine and imprisonment. Agabus seems without further influence in the pages of the Acts. No one can follow long a person who emphasizes the famine and imprisonment side of things, however true it may be. So no one names his son “Agabus.” At least I have never heard of anyone doing so. Why? For we lean to the positive, innately so. We want to see beyond famine to fullness, beyond imprisonment to immensities.
The “friends” of Job “sat with Job on the ground seven days and seven nights, not speaking a word to him, for they saw that he was in excruciating pain” (Job 2:13). Ezekiel says of himself, “I came to the exiles who lived beside the Chebar River at Tel-abib. I stayed there among them for seven desolate days” (Ezek 3:15). The “friends” of Job arose after seven days, critical and negative of Job. Ezekiel arose after seven days with deep sympathy and love for the captives. The “friends” of Job dropped out; Ezekiel lives on with power.
O Lord, help me to come out on the constructive side of things. Help me to rescue a positive out of every negative. For I live only as I live positively and affirmatively. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I am a positive person; therefore I shall think, act, and be positive.