Monday: Only 8 Percent Really Worth a Wrestle
WEEK 31
MONDAY
ONLY 8 PERCENT REALLY WORTH A WRESTLE
John 14:12-14
We are studying the great source of healing health—the Holy Spirit quickening us within.
The Holy Spirit within gives us power to face our fears and anxieties and thus keeps us free from the illnesses produced by fears and anxieties. Professors at the University of Wisconsin, making a study of fears and worries, found that “40 percent are about things that never happen; 30 percent are about things past help; 22 percent are petty and needless. That leaves only 8 percent really worth a wrestle.”* But even that 8 percent need not produce a wrestle. When we surrender them to God, with the aid of the Spirit, we can face them together. We supply willingness, and God supplies power. It is fighting the good fight of faith.
For instance, on the same day, two different women came to me and said they could not speak in public, got all tied up with fear. One got all balled up in a solo once; since then her voice has been cracked and strained.
The obvious remedy is not to fight those fears but to surrender them. Then the words of Jesus will be fulfilled: “Don’t worry about . . . what you should say. The Holy Spirit will tell you at that very moment what you must say” (Luke 12:11-12). The Holy Spirit within is the Counselor, telling you what and how you are to speak. That includes the “how” as well as the “what”—the gesture as well as the gist.
“Man’s character is largely built on relationships with some exalted power lying outside himself,” writes chief psychologist John A. Blake at the Central State Hospital at Petersburg, Virginia.
Psychologists have observed that when such a relationship, early acquired and strongly rooted in the depths of humanity’s personality in infancy and childhood, is either lost or seriously impaired in later life, a conflict results, manifesting itself in some form and degree of personality disorder. . . . In such cases one might rightly say [a] man became literally “sick in the spirit.**
Through surrender and the acceptance of the Holy Spirit within, we are no longer “sick in the spirit”; We are “well in the spirit,” or better, “well in the Spirit.” The Spirit within is the source of our health and well-being.
O Spirit Divine, we thank you that you are the Spirit of Health. In you we are well and whole. As long as we can take and take fully, that wellness and wholeness continue. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I am well in the Spirit, for the Spirit has full and absolute control.
*No published source was found for this quotation, but references online attribute the study to Margaret McCordie at the University of Wisconsin.
** “John A. Blake, Former Greenwood Resident, Quoted in Two National Magazines on Work in Psychology,” The Index-Journal, Greenwood, SC September 14, 1953, 10.