The Difference Christ Makes
In Your Conscious Mind

It is unfortunate that this chapter and the next cannot be written and read at exactly the same time. But since we are still living in time we can only approach ideas consecutively.

   Psychology has loosely divided our minds into conscious and subconscious. This is relatively accurate. In this chapter and the next we are going to take an honest, non-technical, and I hope, practical look at both.

   To all appearances, the conscious and subconscious are separate. It must always be remembered, however, that they make up the whole of the mind. We control our conscious minds and we do not have direct control over the actual functioning of our subconscious mind. But they are inseparably related. They hold terrifying influence one over the other.

   Your conscious mind is the part of your mind with which you knowingly think. It is the part of your mind with which you form habits. It is the, part of your mind with which you made decisions. It is the part of your mind with which you

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reason. With which you form likes and dislikes. With which you make judgments.

   It is the part of your mind over which you have control.

   You have definite influence over your subconscious mind, as we shall see in the next chapter, but over your conscious mind you have control. We do not always make use of this gift from God, this ability to control our thoughts, but we do have it. And with this conscious mind we decide what kind of conscious mind it will be!

   The Bible says, "God looks on the heart." He does. But when the Bible speaks of the heart, I believe it includes the mind and the will, as well as the seat of our emotions. So, I believe that with our conscious minds we control the very attitudes of our hearts.

   Most of the problems about which I learn, from personal conversation with women or from their letters, have to do with these key words: peace, poise, energy, worry, anxiety or fear.

   Women seem to be uneasy, nervous, weary, worried, anxious or afraid. All of these conditions are interrelated. What is said here about one will apply equally to all.

   But let's look at these words one by one, and see how we can change them to their opposites through a conscious action on our part. Before we look at each word, however, we must look at the fact of Christ. When we receive Him as our Saviour, He comes to live in our mortal bodies. This means He also makes His home in our conscious minds. And since they are under our control, we and we alone decide whether we are going to attempt to handle them in a somewhat Christian manner ourselves, or whether we are going to make the decision to turn the control of our conscious minds over to Christ. This can be done at one moment of decision. But its results are gradual. (It is here that the conscious mind is in a different relationship to Christ from that of the subconscious mind.)

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   Where our conscious minds are concerned, He requires our cooperation.

   Jesus always leaves the final choice to us.

   He did not say, "I will drag you along with me." He said, "Follow me." We decide, and then His Spirit empowers us to act on our decisions, provided we have decided in His favor. (Let it be remembered that no one needs to be empowered to act selfishly. We were born with that power!)

   Paul did not say, "When you become a follower of Jesus Christ you will never think on anything but lovely things." He said, "Let this mind be in you . . . think on these things."

   Since the New Testament is the greatest textbook on depth psychology ever written by the One who thought up the human mind in the first place, it should surprise no one that He knows and works with this mind exactly as He created it.

   And one of the strong characteristics of the conscious mind is its ability to form habits. Habits do not form overnight. They are not broken overnight. God knows this. He, for reasons of His own, created the conscious mind this way.

   Keeping this firmly in mind, let's look at the chronic ailments seemingly native to the conscious mind of modern woman.

   Lack of peace. Is this characteristic of the modern Christian woman? Yes, it is. I have placed it first, because letter by letter, it comes up again and again more frequently than any other in my mail from women. My heart aches over these letters.

   My heart aches for the women and it also aches for Christ! They are, for the most part, devout, sincere believers. And they almost always ask, "What is wrong with me? I know it can't be the Lord. It must be my fault."

   Yes, but I have come to see that these women are dependent

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upon prayer, the Bible, meetings, their experience, my experience, Christian books — almost everything but Christ Himself! They have not allowed the great simplicity of who He is dawn on their conscious minds. Right to the point goes Paul on this subject: "He is our peace." And he has promised never to leave us nor forsake us. "Lo, I am with you always." Peace is not something we can wrap in a package or store away on a shelf. It is not a "something" at all. It is a Person. Peace is Jesus Christ Himself. He has given us a conscious mind with which to take hold of this. We control that conscious mind. Whether you feel peaceful or not as you read these lines, if you belong to Jesus Christ, you have peace because you have Him.

   One of the greatest tricks of the strange depths of our human personalities is to cause us to think that just because we don't feel a certain way, we are not that way. Just by making use of my God-given conscious mind, I have decided to cultivate the habit of remembering that He will never leave me. I may leave Him, but He will never leave me. And "He is our peace." Therefore, I can know and have peace, Himself, in the midst of great weeping. In the midst of nerve-shattering confusion. In the midst of misunderstanding and anger. And as I use my conscious mind to remember this, I find, when I least expect it, that some sense of this peace returns to my emotions, too.

   The next most often complained about state of mind is lack of poise. Letters come which say, "I tried to keep calm. I tried to control myself, but when he let me have it as he did last Saturday night, etc., etc." Or "How can I overcome this terrible shyness? I just can't pray aloud. I was asked to lead devotions in the new church I have just joined and I actually lied to get out of it! I said I was ill and stayed at home — and wept and wept for shame."

   You may think these two illustrations are contradictory.

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   No, they're basically alike. One woman couldn't control her temper and the other couldn't control her shyness. One seems "worse" than the other. But both instances show definite lack of poise. No one is going to be perfectly poised all the time and under all circumstances. You must accept yourself as you are. You are not someone else. You are you. But here again, discipline of the conscious mind which God has given you is the answer. Do I mean force yourself to be quiet or force yourself to speak aloud? No. Cultivate the habit of remembering who it is who has come to live within you. And rely on His Poise! The quiet that comes from the knowledge that He is there will in time restore your poise.

   This does not come overnight. Developing a habit is a slow — sometimes discouragingly slow — process. But because of the way in which God created your conscious mind, it is never a hopeless process. You can depend entirely upon Him. But you had better act as though in one way, at least, you are depending entirely upon yourself. What is that way? In the matter of continuing even after you have fallen down, in the matter of the cultivation of the habit of remembering that Christ lives within you.

   Somehow He always manages to make things work out for our character-building. If He waved a magic wand over your head and shut your mouth when you wanted to "sound of" of if He spoke a magic word over you and whisked your shyness into a Celestial Ashcan, what would it profit you? What would it profit me? Soon we would fancy ourselves privileged daughters of the Most High. We would become so smug and self-righteous, we'd lose our last earthly friend because we would have become unbearable company! God wants to make us "good company." He wants to naturalize us by a supernatural process known as the working of His Spirit within us.

   But we must be willing to cooperate with our conscious

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minds and form the habit of remembering that we are embarked on an eternal adventure with God Himself.

   What of your energy? Again and again I hear, "I'm just so tired all the time, I can't have an adequate prayer time. I can't attend church regularly, etc." Some of us are tired physically and for admirable reasons. I personally don't think I'd be able to get through one week as a mother and homemaker! I'd collapse in a heap by the ironing board or become a willing candidate for the nearest mental institution.

   A lady in Iowa said to me recently, "If I had to travel the way you travel and still write a whole book a year, I wouldn't last a month!"

   She had four small children, a husband, a family laundry every day, a six-room house, a Sunday school class, was the family chauffeur, sang in the choir and was president of the P.T.A. She probably would last longer than a month in my life, but I still set my limit to a week if I were in hers.

   God knows all of this. He knows this lady in Iowa loves children. So do I, as long as they belong (at quite a distance) to someone else. My nerves would be naked and screaming in no time with four small children around me. This woman would be, as she put it "pulling her hair and shrieking" if she had to sit at a typewriter just one day. She likes to read, but she wants someone else to work over the writing. I feel the same way about her children. I enjoy them as long as someone else has to take care of them.

   In her position, I'd be excessively weary most of the time. In mine, she would be. And yet, while God puts us, if He has His way in our lives, where He knows we will function best, fortune and circumstances and bad judgments sometimes put us into circumstances where we are not suited to the job.

   Where is the God factor here?

   Once more, it is the conscious mind which must be put

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into play. He has promised that if we will come to Him, He will give us rest, no matter where we are.

   Circumstances may be forcing you to stay in a job you hate. You may feel your talents are worth a great deal more. Perhaps they are. Perhaps they're not. But one thing I know, if Christ dwells in you, then the "ground on which you stand is holy ground." Because He is standing on it, too. And because He is a redeemer God, He will give you a way to make creative use of even your unpleasant surroundings. If you have read my story The Burden Is Light, you know He did it for me. He acts according to what He knows is the right timing. He does not act according to what we keep telling Him about time in our prayers.

   He has promised that He will give us rest no matter where we are. And He is a God of His Word.

   What does this mean when my physical energy is all gone at the end of a long day of travel, speaking, writing letters and (most tiring of all) constantly giving out to people? What does it mean after your long day of whatever it is that fills your days? If you and I have learned the habit of remembering that "He is our peace," much of our physical weariness is absorbed in that knowing.

   Not all of it. There is nothing in the New Testament which tells us that we are not going to get tired. Jesus did. But the extra weariness that settles upon the heart and body of those who are irritable, jumpy, maladjusted or uneasy, is lifted by remembering that peace is a Person. As I have already told you, during the first day's writing on this book (all of which I threw away!) I was tired all day. When I readjusted my thinking (making use of the conscious mind which I control) and began to remember whose I am, the weariness left me. On the second day of writing, I accomplished twice as much, went out to dinner at night, attended a board meeting, and still felt like studying the book criticisms in the

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Saturday Review when I got home at eleven in the evening!

   Much weariness comes from disturbance within us. But if we remember that He is also within us, rest comes. Not from a trick of self-hypnosis or auto-suggestion, but from the simple use of our conscious minds in forming the habit of remembering that He is always here.

   Many people recite the twenty-third Psalm in order to go to sleep at night. It is not the words themselves that give you rest. It is the presence of the Shepherd Himself in your life. Think on Him.

   Worry and anxiety and fear are playmates. They play havoc with our poor conscious minds. We fall victims of them. All three of them. One woman said to me, "What will keep my family together if I don't worry?"

   Poor, poor woman. Perhaps the conditions in her family were cause for worry from a human standpoint. But the conditions at Calvary and the present conditions in heaven are the antidote! In my very first book Discoveries, when I had been a Christian only three years, I wrote about worry. I used a definition about which hundreds of people have written me in the years since the little book was published. I did not know who wrote the definition then and even with all those letters, I still have not discovered who wrote it. But acknowledging someone's great insight, I'd like to repeat it here. "Worry is a cycle of inefficient thought, whirling about a center of fear."

   Yes, worry and anxiety and fear are playmates. Whirling playmates. Demonic little authors of confusion. Where there is worry, there is fear. Where there is anxiety, there is also fear. Worry and anxiety do whirl about a center of fear.

   But is the Bible wrong when we are told that "Perfect love casts out fear?" And are you replying, "I know the Bible is right, but I still have my fear?"

   Let's examine this more closely. Is fear in the center of

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your life? Are you seemingly helpless to do anything about it? Good. Because while you can't do anything about your fear, you can once more make use of your conscious mind to allow Jesus Christ to step into the center of your life and He will cast the fear out!

   Does the Bible mean Jesus Christ when it says that "perfect love casts out fear"? Yes, it does. "God is love." Is Jesus Christ one and the same with God? Yes He is, or He Himself was mistaken, because remember (recall right now with your conscious mind) that Jesus said, "I and the Father are one... if you have seen me, you have seen the Father."

   It is difficult, impossible at certain times of great fear, for us to lay hold of what seems to be only a spiritual principle about a spiritual phenomenon called love. However, when we use the minds God gave us to think through to the fact that this love is not a spiritual phenomenon but a Person, miracles occur! A Person can literally "cast out." A principle can't, but a Person can. And most glorious of all, we can know this Person. We can know what He is like. We can see His heart exposed on a cross. We can experience His healing touch on our minds.

   We must not be impatient when our conscious minds are not changed as rapidly as we think they should be. After all, if we have given the control of those minds over to Jesus Christ, we can trust His timing in reforming our thought patterns. He made those conscious minds in the first place. Surely if we use them to form the habit of remembering what He is really like, we can leave the results to Him, can't we?

   Here it is well to remember that anything we do thirty-five times becomes a habit!

   In the next chapter, we will look at our subconscious minds. In them we find the hidden factory in which most of our fears are manufactured.

Chapter Four  ||  Table of Contents