Study - Chambers, Oswald
Study to begin with can never be easy; the determination to form systematic mental habits is the only secret. Dont begin anything with reluctance.
Beware of any cleverness that keeps you from working. No one is born a worker; men are born poets and artists, but we have to make ourselves labourers.
The discipline of our mind is the one domain god has put in our keeping. It is impossible to be of any use to god if we are lazy. God wont cure lazi- ness, we have to cure it.
More danger arises from physical laziness (which is called brain fag) than from almost any other thing.
Inspiration wont come irrespective of study, but only because of it. Dont trust to inspiration, use your own axe (psalm 74:5). Work! Think! Dont luxuriate on the mount! The demand for inspiration is the measure of our laziness. Do the things that dont come by inspiration. It is difficult to get yourself under control to do work you are not used to, the time spent seems wasted at first, but get at it again. The thing that hinders control is impulse.
Your mind can never be under your control unless you bring it there; there is no gift for control. You may pray till doomsday but your brain will never concentrate if you don’t make it concentrate. In the most superficial matters put yourself under control, your own control. Be as scrupulously punctual in your private habits as you would be in a government office. Dont insult god by telling him he forgot to give you any brains when you were born. We all have brains, what we need is work.
It is better for your mental life to study several subjects at once rather than one alone. What exhausts the brain is not using it, but abusing it by nervous waste in other directions. As a general rule, the brain can never do too much. You can never work by impulse, you can only work by steady patient plod. It is the odd five minutes that tells. To learn a thing is different from thinking out a problem. The only way to learn a thing is to keep at it uninterruptedly, day after day, whether you feel like it or not, and you will wake up one morning and find the thing is learned. Beware of succumbing to failure as inevitable; make it the stepping-stone to success. In beginning to study a new subject you do it by repeated starts until you get your mind into a certain channel, after that the subject becomes full of sustained interest.
Beware of mental lounging. Whenever we see notebooks for study, or work of any kind waiting to be done, we either go into dreamland, or we gather everything around us in an enormously bustling style, but we never do good solid work. It is nothing in the world but a habit of nerves which we have to check, and take time to see that we do. A subject has never truly gripped you until you are mentally out of breath with it. We have no business to go on impulses spiritually, we have to form the mind which was also in Christ Jesus. People say their impulses are their guidei feel impelled to do this, or that that may be sufficient indication that they should not do it. Remember, there must always be a mechanical outlet for spiritual inspiration. We infect our surroundings with our own personal character. If i make my study a place of stern industry, it will act as an inspiration every time i go into it; but if i am lazy there, the place will revenge itself on me.
Note two things about your intelligence: first, when your intelligence feels numb, quit at once, and play or sleep; for the time being the brain must recuperate; second, when you feel a fidget of associated ideas, take yourself sternly in hand and say, you shall study, so its no use whining. Mental stodge is different. Mental stodge is the result of one of three forms of over-feeding too much dinner, too much reading, or too much meetings. Irritation may be simply the result of not using your brain. Remember, the brain gets exhausted when it is not doing anything. Beware of saying, i haven’t time to read the bible, or to pray; say rather, i haven’t disciplined myself to do these things. Before any habit is formed you must put yourself under mechanical laws of obedience, and the higher the emotion started by the spirit of god, the keener must be the determination to commit yourself.
If we have no system of work we shall easily come to think we are working when we are only thinking of working, that we are busy when we are only engaged.
The more we talk about work, the less we work, and the same with prayer.
We must be willing to do in the spiritual domain what we have to do in the natural domain if we want to develop, viz. , discipline ourselves. Vision is an inspiration to stand us in good stead in the drudgery of discipline; the temptation is to despise the discipline.
Enchain your body to habitual obedience.
Beware of being haunted by a suppressed dissatisfaction with the arrangements of your actual life get the right programme ! The secret of slacking is just here.