“Have you realized that most of your unhappiness in life is due to the fact that you are listening to yourself instead of talking to yourself?” David Martyn Lloyd-Jones
We’re always told to listen more and talk less, aren’t we? The one exception to this rule is in our interactions with ourselves.
As I understand it, Lloyd-Jones (who was a medical doctor before becoming a pastor) is using the word “listening” to denote a passive state, as you sit and let your thoughts just wash over you. “Talking to yourself” means to actively engage with those thoughts, to argue with them if need be. I’ve written recently about following your own rules and the power of saying “no” to yourself. Both of those concepts involve thinking right before doing right. There I am, heading to the freezer to get some ice cream and letting myself think, “I just want some of this. I just do. I know I’m supposed to be restricted to one dessert a week but . . . ” If I stop and talk to myself, telling myself that I’ll be very unhappy once the ice cream has been consumed, then I will be much more likely to resist the temptation. I’ll close the freezer door.
Mark Dever, the pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church which we attended for over a decade, was fond of saying that we needed to “preach the Gospel to ourselves.” Boy, do I need to do that every day! It’s so important to think the right thoughts and avoid wearing those neural paths in the wrong places. The raised blood sugar levels and excess weight from the ice cream consumption are minor, minor, minor in comparison with other problems that can come from wrong thoughts. I like the way The Message renders II Corinthians 10:5: “fitting every loose thought and emotion and impulse into the structure of life shaped by Christ.” I have puh-lenty of those loose thoughts rattling around in my head. By talking to myself that way I should, I can indeed grab hold of them and control them, fit them in where they belong or boot them out. I can’t afford to just listen to them. How about you?