Tuesday: ISmoke Because It Helps aBunion
WEEK 44
TUESDAY
I SMOKE BECAUSE IT HELPS A BUNION
Hebrews 12:1-2
For many years I seemed to be a voice in the wilderness against the evils of smoking. Now powerful voices are being lifted against it. A leading statistical scientist told the annual meeting of the American Cancer Society that the evidence connecting cigarette smoking with both lung and heart disease is overwhelming. Results of investigations in both Britain and America, carried on independently, could be placed one on top of the other, and they would almost exactly coincide; they both say that cigarette smoking causes cancer. Now the tobacco people are frantically trying to find a safe cigarette. The only safe cigarette is an abandoned cigarette.
And it can be abandoned provided one wants to abandon it. To want to abandon it will mean to give up alibis and rationalizations.
Three ministers were talking about why they smoked. One said, “It soothes my nerves so I can think better.” Another said, “I use it because it makes me sleep better.” They turned to Dr. S. Parkes Cadman and asked him why he smoked, and with a twinkle in his eye he said, “I smoke because it helps a bunion on my right foot.” He knew and they knew that they smoked because they were hooked by a habit, an unnatural habit that created an artificial demand for repetition, a demand they could not break.
But one can break it by the grace and power of Christ. In one of my books I noted the story of George Fox saying to William Penn, when Penn asked whether, as a Quaker, he should wear a sword, “Wear it, William, as long as thou canst.” I said in comment: “Smoke as long as you can as a Christian.” A friend read that comment and said, “That stuck in my mind. One day I said, ‘I can’t smoke any longer as a Christian.’ I had smoked three or four packs a day for thirty years, I quit just like that. There was no struggle; the desire left me, and I was free.” When the will was really decided, the power of Christ reinforced that weakened will—an Almighty will—worked in his will. Anyone can be free provided he or she wants to be free more than to smoke. The tipping of the will is important.
O Lord, help me to tip my will in the direction of freedom, not bondage. I would be free. I will to be free. And now I know that all your power is behind my will. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I need be the slave of nothing,
absolutely nothing, if I am the slave of Christ.