Thinking - Chambers, Oswald

For who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him? A man discovers intellectual things for himself but he can- not discover god by his intellect. . . . Even so the things of god none knoweth, save the spirit of god (1 Corinthians 2:11 RV ).

Think of the labour and patience of men in the domain of science and then think of our lack of patience in endeavouring to appreciate the atone- ment, and you see the need there is for us to be con- scientious in our thinking, basing everything on the reality of the atonement. We prefer to be average Christians, we don’t mind it having broken gods heart to save us, but we do object to having a sleepless night while we learn to say thank you to god so that the angels can hear us. We need to be staggered out of our shocking indolence.

We have no business to limit gods revelations to the bias of the human mind.

I cant alter my thinking. You can. It is actually possible to identify your mind with the highest point of view, and to habituate yourself by degrees to the thinking and the living in accordance with it.

A mans mental belief will show sooner or later in his practical living.

If i make my life in my intellect i will certainly delude myself that i am as good as i think i am. As [a man] thinketh in his heart that means me, as i express my thinking in actual life, so is he. I can think out a whole system of life, reason it all out well, but it does not necessarily make any differ- ence to my actual life, i may think like an angel and live like a tadpole.

Note the things your thinking does not account for.

Truth is discerned by moral obedience. There are points in our thinking which remain obscure until a crisis arises in personal life where we ought to obey, immediately we obey the intellectual difficulty alters. Whenever we have to obey it is always in something immensely practical. Obedience is the basis of christian thinking. Never be surprised if there are whole areas of think- ing that are not clear, they never will be until you obey. Every new domain into which your personal life is introduced necessitates a new form of responsible intelligence.

Watch what you say you dont understand you understand only too clearly.

Learn to be glad when you feel yourself a chaos that makes you bitterly disappointed with yourself, because from that moment you will begin to under- stand that god alone can make you order and beauty.

Young life must be in chaos or there is no development possible.

Until you get an answer that satisfies your best moods only, don’t stop thinking, keep on querying god. The answers that satisfy you go all over you, like health, or fresh air.

Dont shut up any avenue of your nature, let god come into every avenue, every relationship, and you will find the nightmare curse of secular and sacred will go. Intellectual obstinacy produces the sealed mind jesus said unto them, if ye were blind, ye would have no sin: but now ye say, we see: your sin remaineth ( john 9:41 RV ). There is no jump into thinking, it is only done by a steady determined facing of the facts brought by the engineering of circumstances. God always insists that i think where i am. Beware of that abortion of providence if i were you . . . With regard to other mens minds, take all you can get, whether those minds are in flesh-and-blood editions or in books, but remember, the best you get from another mind is not that minds verdict, but its standpoint. Note the writers who provoke you to do your best mentally. Never cease to think until you think things home and they become character. Very few of us are real as god is real, we are only real in spots awake morally and spiritually and dead intellectually, or vice versa, awake intellectually and dead morally and spiritually. It takes the shaking of gods providence to awaken us up as whole beings, and when we are awakened we get growing pains in moral senses, in spiritual muscles we have never used. It is not the devil, it is god trying to make us appreciative sons and daughters of his. Our thinking is often allowed to be antichristian while our feelings are christian. The way i think will colour my attitude towards my fellow-men. Always make a practise of provoking your mind to think about what it easily accepts. A position is not yours until you make it yours through suffering. If you have ever done any thinking you don’t feel very complacent after it, you get your first touch of pessimism; if you don’t, you have never thought clearly and truly. An appalling thing is that men who ignore Jesus Christ have their eyes open in a way many a preacher of the gospel has not. Ibsen, for instance, saw things clearly: he saw the inexorable results of sin but with- out any deliverance or forgiveness, because he saw things apart from the atonement. The first thing that goes when you begin to think is your theology. If you stick too long to a theological point of view you become stagnant, without vitality.

Never try to pillory incarnate reason by your own petty intelligence.

I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now ( john 16:12 RV ). These words are true in our mental life as well as in our spiritual life.

Doubt is not always a sign that a man is wrong, it may be a sign that he is thinking.

Keep the powers of your mind going full pace, always maintaining the secret life right with god.

If you teach anything out of an idle intellect, you will have to answer to god for it.

Never be distressed at the immediate result of thinking on the deep truths of religion because it will take years of profound familiarity with such truths before you gain an expression sufficient to satisfy you. God never simply gives us an answer, he puts us on a line where it is possible for truth to break more and more as we go on. Before the mind has begun to grapple with prob- lems it is easy to talk; when the mind has begun to grapple with problems it is a humiliating thing to talk.

Unless you think, you will be untouched, unbroken, by the truths you utter.

A logical position is satisfying to intellect, but it can never be true to life. Logic is simply the method mans intellect follows in making things definable to himself, but you cant define what is greater than yourself.

We command what we can explain, and if we bring our explanation into the spiritual domain we are in danger of explaining Jesus away and every spirit which annulleth Jesus is not of god (1 john 4:3 RV mg). We have to be intelligently more than intelligent, intellectually more than intellectual, that is, we have to use all our wits in order not to worship our wits but be humble enough to worship god. Dont run away with the idea that everything that runs contrary to your complacent scheme of things is of the devil.

As you go on with god he will give you thoughts that are a bit too big for you. God will never leave a servant of his with ideas he can easily express, he will always express through him more than he can grasp.

It takes a long time to get rid of atheism in thinking.