**Continuing our theme of “In the Classroom”, teachings from our friend, Elisabeth Elliot…
We were traveling in a car with friends, discussing our great friend whom none of us had ever met, C. S. Lewis. “Lewis thought,” said the man. “It is amazing what you can come up with by really thinking!”
We agreed. (Who could disagree with that?) There was a long pause. Then his wife said, “You know, I believe that’s what’s wrong with me. I never think. Not really.”
Most of us have neither the mental capacity nor the education Lewis had, but we could have the mental discipline “if we had a mind to.”
“The failure to cultivate the power of peaceful concentration is the greatest single cause of mental breakdown,” the great physician William Osler told the students of Yale one Sunday evening many years ago. He urged them to gain power over the mental mechanism by a few hours a day of quiet concentration in routine, in order, and in system. “Concentration is an art of slow acquisition, but little by little the mind is accustomed to habits of slow eating and careful digestion, by which alone you escape the ‘mental dyspepsy.'”
Take the words quoted above from Romans for a beginning exercise in thinking. “Think your way to a sober estimate based on the measure of faith that God has dealt to each of you.” The context is that of self-evaluation. Do we understand our individual assignment within the Body of Christ? What gifts have we been given, what functions? Some of us will say we do not know. Others will give an answer based on others’ estimates of us. Suppose we were to set aside half an hour to think soberly about what we can do and cannot do for the sake of the church. If we start by submitting everything to Christ and asking Him to change our minds and then proceed to concentrate faithfully on these words, we might be surprised to be shown that we have been wasting energy in doing things we are not suited to do, wasting time doing things that contribute nothing to the help of the church, and failing to do things we could do, things the Spirit of God brings to the mind that is directed to Him.
…continued next week
**Excerpt originally published in Discipline: The Glad Surrender (or The Joyful Surrender) pp 59-60.