A Christian's Habits: Chapter Six
A Christian's Habits: Chapter Six
The Habit of Good Thinking.
“…for the most part it is the good which needs to be brought out, and we can easily find it and bring it out if we wish.” -Robert Speer
Imagine someone giving you the gift of a report of all of the news, video streaming, YouTube clips, books, and Bible passages that you turned to throughout the year. Would the results be what you wanted them to be? Did all of that content that you returned to again and again, facilitate the kind of life that you want to live?
Those are the questions that went through my mind when my son took my cell phone and showed me my Unwrapped Spotify results for the year. It was really interesting to find out the artists, the albums, and the style of music that I listened to most frequently throughout the year. But would I be as happy with a report about the other content I spent my time with?
“The Habit of Good Thinking” is one of my favorite chapters in Speer’s book. It surfaces a power that all of us have but few of us use. When I look back on the year I realize how much time I have spent watching and reading what others have decided is most important for me. As a result I have begun to think their thoughts after them. Speer urges us to creatively curate our own content so that we are we focusing on the things that will shape and mold us in a way that makesgoodhappen.
I am excited to share this chapter with you. I hope it inspires you as it has me.
So without further ado, here is Chapter 6: The Habit of Good Thinking.
I. The Goal of Good Thinking
What do you think about?
“He was an essentially pure-minded man,” said Edward Caird of his brother John Caird, the head of the University of Glasgow and one of the greatest speakers and scholars of his day, “to whom no one could speak of anything doubtful or equivocal.”1 He was a thinking man and he thought of good things, and his good thinking shaped his character and gave him a good defense against all that was unworthy and base. Such things stayed away from the man whose mind was always busy and always clean.
II. Ridding Ourselves of Bad Thoughts
What do you do to change what you think about?
The habit of good thinking is one of the most necessary habits to acquire. We have to think. We can only choose what we will think about and how we will think, whether carefully and consecutively or in disorder and at random. What we think about is the first thing. “I do not know what to do,” said a student in one of our colleges. “My father is one of the best men and my grandfather was a noble man before him, and yet I have such bad thoughts in my mind. I am ashamed of them, and I want to get rid of them.” There is good hope that the boy who is ashamed of bad thoughts can get rid of them. If we despise them, and try to make it uncomfortable for them, they will soon go away of their own accord. And we can do this best, not by dwelling upon the wrong thoughts, but by refusing to dwell upon them, by turning the mind, instead, at once to good things. “Try thinking about Christ whenever a bad thought comes,” one friend advised another as they sat and talked under the trees on a hill overlooking a river in North Carolina. “Let me hear how the plan works after you have tried it.” In due time he had the simple answer: “I have tried it. It works.”
III. Collecting Good Thoughts
What does your collection of good thoughts include?
Each one of us should have a stock of good thoughts - of places where we have been, of great games we have seen or played in, of rivers where we have fished or forests we have hunted in, of great men we have seen, of books we have read, of bits of poetry or pictures of real deeds of heroism, or of problems of life or politics. These we should have at hand, so as to be able to draw on them at any moment, and thus never be alone with only wasteful or harmful thoughts. And each time we have to make a choice between the thoughts that help and those that harm, we need only to say, “Now which thoughts are the right ones?” and think these alone.
“…brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable – if anything is excellent or praiseworthy – think about such things.” 2
IV. A Study Of Character
-Whose character do you seek to emulate?
But some say it is hard to control thought. It is at first. That is why the law of habit must be used in the matter of thoughts. Character will show itself in the firm control of our thoughts, and on the other hand, the firm control of our thoughts will breed solid character. We can see this clearly in Mr. Gladstone.
“Character, says John Morley in the “Life of Gladstone,” “as has often been repeated, is completely fashioned will, and this superlative requirement, so indispensable for every man of action, in whatever walk or whatever scale, was eminently Mr. Gladstone’s.” From force of will, with all its roots in habit, example, conviction, purpose sprang his leading and most effective qualities. He was never very ready to talk about himself, but when asked what he regarded as his master secret, he always said, ‘Concentration.’ Slackness of mind, vacuity of mind, the wheels of the mind revolving without biting the rails of the subject were insupportable. Such habits were of the family of faintheartedness, which he abhorred.
Steady practice of instant, fixed, effectual attention, was the key alike to his rapidity of apprehension and to his powerful memory. In the orator’s temperament, exertion is often followed by a reaction that looks like indolence. That was never so with him. By instinct, by nature, by constitution, he was a man of action in all the highest senses of a phrase too narrowly applied and too narrowly construed. The currents of daimonic energy seemed never to stop, the vivid susceptibility to impressions never to grow dull. He was an idealist, yet always applying ideals to their purposes in act. Toil was his native element; and though he found himself possessed of many inborn gifts, he was never visited by the dream so fatal to many well-laden argosy, that genius alone does all. There was nobody like him when it came to difficult business, for bending his whole strength to it, like a mighty archer stringing a stiff bow.”
We do not have the sort of mind Mr. Gladstone had, but we can apply his principles to such minds as we have.
Don’t you envy that state of mind where this has ceased to be a work of effort and conscious toil, when duty becomes a delight, God’s presence constantly realized without endeavor, and so his service perfect freedom?” -John Caird
V. Our Minds, Our Thoughts and Everyday Life
How do you integrate your thought life and your spiritual journey?
And, indeed, it is not great and original thoughts which need to constitute the stuff on which we keep our minds at work. What we need is to bring our common experiences and necessities under the conscious dominance of simple religious convictions. We shall find problems here to tax us and to give our minds all the occupation they are capable of. Even so great a man as John Caird found it so.
“The difficulty you talk of is a most real one,” he wrote. “I mean that of bringing principles to bear on the common trials and petty anxieties of daily life. Theoretical affliction and submission in a book, or in solemn and sometimes formal words in prayer, are very different things from that homely, rugged, hard-featured thing that meets us in the face, when we come down from the clouds to the world of realities, the world of headaches and heartaches, of coarse, uncongenial contacts and intercourses. But this is our trial, and the trial which, since the age of persecution is passed away, is perhaps the most common and the most difficult to which a Christian is subjected. I know of no hope for it but perseverance and prayer. It is the old thought of great principles and small duties and trials, and I need not descant upon it to you. But I am quite convinced that Christian advancement consists in nothing so much as habit, acquired by long effort and after many struggles and failures, of bringing high religious motive and feeling to bear on the common incidents of life. Don’t you envy that state of mind where this has ceased to be a work of effort and conscious toil, when duty becomes a delight, God’s presence constantly realized without endeavor, and so his service perfect freedom?”3
This is what comes to those who do bring all their thoughts under control of the obedience of Christ.
“The treasure of good thoughts is better than all other wealth.”
VI. Choosing to Emphasize the Good
Do your news, social media, and streaming habits facilitate seeing the good in people and things?
We can help ourselves to acquire the habit of good thinking by persisting in seeing always the good in people and in things. And we can help ourselves to seeing the good by refusing to speak of the evil unless it is clearly necessary to do so. We do not need to fall into the moral slovenliness of the lines which declare that there is so much bad in the best of us, and so much good in the worst of us, that scarcely behooves any of us to speak ill of the rest of us. There is ill which needs to be spoken of and spoken against. But for the most part it is the good which needs to be brought out, and we can easily find it and bring it out if we wish. Acquiring the habit of doing this will react upon our thoughts, and we shall have our minds filled with what is pure and worthy and of good report.
No habit can give more pleasure at all times than the habit of good thinking. When we are with others it will be the source and ally of unselfish service, and when we are alone and have no opportunity to serve others, we can be glad and content alone because we have always satisfying resources with us. At night, when we lie awake, we are not unemployed. Old Dr. Samuel T. Spear said that he would go over in his mind, as he lay awake, whole books of the Bible. And those whose storehouse is less richly supplied than his, should still have enough there for all hours of solitude. The treasure of good thoughts is better than all other wealth.
VII. Start the Habit Now
What is one thing you can do today to strengthen your habit of good thinking?
We can begin to acquire the habit of good thinking at once if we do not have it already. The moment we lay down this book we can begin to recall the lessons we learned from it. We can review these in our minds, talk them over with the first people we meet, and begin at once to practice them in our own lives. We can be on the watch and not allow any vagrant thoughts to creep in and lull the mind into indolence. When the evening comes we can read some good book and turn it over in our thought as we get ready for rest. In the morning when we awake, we can turn our minds at once to the last thought the evening before, and then to the principles by which we are to live the new day. A few days of discipline like this will set our minds toward good ways, and by patient continuance in good thoughts, we shall soon have the habit of them and the peace and strength which come with a mind established in the love and practice of what is good alone.
cxxxvi, A Memoir, by Edward Caird included in John Caird’s The Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, Vol. 1
Philippians 4:8b
Ibid