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TOPIC: Gordon, Samuel Dickey - Quiet Talks About the Healing Christ (Other Topics in this Collection)
SUBJECT: 38. One's Mental Attitude
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One's Mental Attitude
There are two things that will grow up in such a simple, true, Christian life. They are simple things, but they lie at the very foundation.
They are, a right mental attitude, and an intelligent obedience to the laws of health. And these are the two things to be emphasized in this Quiet Talk.
Let us talk first about that right mental attitude. I do not mean that you are to try to have a right mental attitude, simply. That becomes incidental. The emphasis is on something else. That attitude comes naturally out of that something else.
I mean this: you think about Christ. He died for you. He has won the love of your heart. You trust Him.
You believe Him. You accept what He says in the Book. You follow where He plainly leads. All this is what faith is. It is thinking about Him.
You get filled up with Him, who He is, how He loved and loves, what He did, His plans for you, and His promises to you.
You are full of this, that He is living today. He is all absorbed with things down here. He's intensely interested in you, with personal solicitude for your personal need, and with a plan for your life.
This is what faith means; not thinking about your faith, thinking about Him. It isn't looking in; it's looking up—to Him.
Now, once that gets fixed in some measure, as a habit, a growing habit, it will affect your mental attitude.
Your plans and problems, your difficulties and perplexities, your personal habits and temptation, all will instinctively be affected by this mental attitude.
Christ will loom up in your mind practically as the biggest thing in all your life. You will get into the habit of connecting everything with Him. And that mental attitude will vitally and radically affect your body.
The worst enemy we all have (outside of the Devil himself) is fear. I mean the fear that is a dread of something.
There are three kinds of fear. The fear of reverence grows out of love, and is good. The fear of caution grows out of the presence or possibility of danger, and is only good.
The fear that is afraid of something or some one, a dread, a slavish fear, is bad, only bad, and is a positive injury to one's body.
It may grow out of ignorance. Often it is a result of overwrought nerves. It exerts an in calculable influence on one 's bodily condition. It controls the imagination, and the imagination controls the body.
All diseases and bodily ailments of whatever sort fall into three groups. Those that are imaginary; they have no existence at all except in imagination.
Then there are those ailments which are the result of the imagination's influence on the body. And then there are ailments originating otherwise.
It will seem astonishing if I say that a very large proportion of all bodily ailments is above the ears, or have their origin there, that is, in the imagination. And the smaller proportion is below the ears.
This seems astonishing. It may be honestly questioned by those not familiar with the subject. But increased observation only tends to confirm the truth of the statement.
Job says, "I feared a fear and it came upon me" (Job_3:25—free reading). His sense of dread acted so on his imagination that it actually produced in his body the thing he feared.