“Feelings have big muscles. They are often the most powerful force in our lives. They can bully our minds, our consciences, and our wills. They can even knock out the facts and bring truth to its knees.” So begins the first chapter of David Murray’s 2015 book The Happy Christian. In it Pastor Murray wants to help believers become happy, joyful, positive, and strong in a world that is becoming increasingly overloaded with negativity and pessimism.
To combat this onslaught of negative influences, Murray invites us to enroll in a positive math class. We will examine ten different areas in which you ought to change your mind, your heart, your feelings, and your attitude in order to secure a positive outlook. Our goal is to disconnect from our culture’s negativity and reconnect with the positive truth of God’s word. The first of these is what Murray calls “Happy Facts.”
FACTS > FEELINGS = POSITIVE+
Feelings are extremely powerful, as we have already noted. And Murray asks, “How then can we get our emotions under control? How can we knock down guilt and wrestle fear to the ground? How can we summon allies like joy and peace to our side, especially when we often feel so alone in the fight of our lives? How can we be happy when there is so much to be sad about?”
Research suggests that how we think and what we choose to do on a daily basis have the greatest potential to affect our level of happiness, far greater even than our circumstances. This is good news, because most of us cannot do that much to change our circumstances, but we can definitely learn to think differently and to make choices that will help us to live happier and with greater joy.
To do this, Murray says, we must first learn to identify damaging thought patterns. These include things like extreme black-or-white thinking, filtering out the positive and focusing on just the negative, deciding we know what someone else “really meant” by some look or word or act, imposing a standard of perfection on ourselves, or enlarging our past sins and failures while minimizing present blessings and benefits. These are just some of the ways we tend to go wrong in our thinking that leads to negative feelings.
Renewing Our Minds
The good news is that our brains can be retrained, or, to use more biblical terminology, our minds can be renewed. Murray offers a six-step method that will help you address wrong thinking and make a positive change in your outlook.
- What are the facts?
- What are my thoughts about those facts?
- What are my feelings?
- Can I change the facts?
- Can I change how I think about the facts?
- What am I feeling now?
A Biblical Example
In Psalm 77 Asaph writes about a difficult circumstance which had negatively affected his thinking and his emotions. He also describes the way in which he renewed his mind by meditating on the truth, and his experience follows very closely the six-step method that Pastor Murray has laid out.
As the psalm begins, Asaph finds himself in a day of trouble, and his thinking is almost completely negative. He questions whether God will keep his promises, or if he has forgotten all about showing mercy and having compassion on his people. The psalmist feels confused and abandoned by God and wonders if he will ever experience his blessings again.
But while there is no change in his circumstances, Asaph does begin to change the way he thinks about them. He determines to remember God’s gracious acts from the past, and he recounts how Yahweh delivered Israel from Egypt and led them through the wilderness with great demonstrations of his power all along the way. This completely changes the way Asaph feels about his circumstances, so that in v.13-15 he declares, “Who is so great a God as our God? You are the God who does wonders; you have declared your strength among the peoples. You have with your arm redeemed the sons of Jacob and Joseph.”
While Pastor Murray’s technique does overlap somewhat with the power of positive thinking made popular in the 20th century by Norman Vincent Peale, there is one key difference. Peale’s positive thinking gospel ignored reality and even made up its own reality. What we must do is learn to deal with the facts – all the facts – and so gain a more positive perspective. We must learn to believe in God, in his goodness, his mercy, his forgiveness, and his unchanging grace. These facts will help us to have a more accurate view of the world and our circumstances, and so we will come to experience greater joy and happiness in the midst of them.
Do you struggle with your feelings? I think we all do at times. We need to begin to practice renewing our minds daily, so that we can see things as they really are and not through distorted lenses. It will take time and effort to retrain our brains, but the results will be worth it, as we learn to glorify God with our minds and emotions.