Thursday: The Leisured Heart
WEEK 13
THURSDAY
THE LEISURED HEART
Philippians 2:1-4
We saw yesterday that the disciples had been cleansed of much before the coming of the Holy Spirit—of much but not of all. The conscious mind had been changed and redeemed but not the subconscious.
With the coming of the Holy Spirit, the subconscious was cleansed and redeemed. They had gained mastery of the self urge, the first of the three main urges. How do we know? Only by inference. But the inferences are clear. A person with an unredeemed subconscious is constantly struggling with the self, preoccupied with sitting on a lid. The spiritual life is precarious, for it is always in danger of being upset from below. There is consequently a state of tension.
After the coming of the Holy Spirit, these disciples were not preoccupied with themselves and their own inner spiritual problems. They were set free to witness, to serve, to push a moral and spiritual offensive. In the Acts of the Apostles the consciousness of personal, inner problems is almost entirely absent. The problems shifted from the inner to the outer, from themselves to their environment. The fact is that we look in vain through the whole of the Acts to find raised one single inner, personal spiritual problem. All their problems were concerned with the reactions of the people to their witnessing. Here is the most healthy-minded group of people that has ever existed on the earth before or since. A people freed from their own problems, freed to turn their energies and interests into one channel, the channel of witnessing to others of what they had found. They certainly had learned how to live—and to live with hearts “at leisure to soothe and sympathize.”* If psychologists want to study healthy mindedness, let them pour over the Acts and learn what it is to live. The word problem isn’t mentioned once! They were not a problem-centered group but a power-centered group. Their problems were in their hands, not in their hearts. No wonder they turned the world upside down, for they had been turned inside out. Their civil war was over; there was peace and nothing but peace within, and now they could turn all their redeemed energies to the prosecution of an outside war, a foreign war.
O Christ, I thank you for what you have done for this group of followers. Help me to see, to seek, and to obtain my blessed freedom in you and obtain it now. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: I no longer belong to the problem-centered but the power-centered, for I am wholly his.
* “The Sympathy and Grace of Jesus, Things New and Old, vol. 4: (London: G. Morrish, 1861): 7.