Wednesday: Right Thinking and Right Emotions
WEEK 30
WEDNESDAY
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.”* This is important; if the work, play, worship, and love are not creative, producing something constructive outside self, they bring disease not 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.
The deliverance from self-preoccupation found in the Acts is the most disease-freeing influence ever let loose in our world. People began to love God and others instead of themselves, and, lo, their bodies blossomed into health.
A very intelligent woman asked me what was the secret of my abounding health and vitality; and I answered, “I suppose it is grace. I’ve learned how to receive—to receive Grace into my body and my spirit.” She thoughtfully replied, “Yes, but it is also right thinking and right emotions.” She was profoundly right. If you depend only on grace and do not look to right thinking and right emotions, then you will be only fitfully, instead of continuously, healthy. Here is where many healing movements break down. They emphasize sudden healing grace but put no emphasis on right thinking and right emotions. They emphasize healing instead of health. It should be both. Jeremiah emphasizes both: “but now I will heal and mend them. I will make them whole and bless them with an abundance of peace and security” (33:6). Health is a continuous state before the healing. And we have no right to ask for healing unless we are practicing attitudes of mind and emotion that produce health.
The effects of thought and emotion reach down into every cell of the body and affect them for good or ill. So much so that doctors say that 50–75 percent of diseases are caused by mind and emotion.
O Christ of the Healing Touch, touch our minds and our emotions and our bodies into health and healing. Make us the best that we can be. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: All my thoughts and all my emotions shall contribute to health.
* See Richard C. Cabot, What Men Live By: Work, Play, Love, Worship (Houghton Mifflin, 1929).