The Power Of Positive Thinking Order Printed Copy

Author: Norman Vincent Peale
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About the Book

"The Power of Positive Thinking" by Norman Vincent Peale outlines the importance of maintaining a positive mindset in order to achieve success and happiness in life. The author offers practical advice and techniques for developing a positive attitude and overcoming challenges through faith, belief in oneself, and the power of prayer. Peale emphasizes the impact of thoughts on our actions and outcomes, and encourages readers to cultivate a strong sense of optimism and self-confidence in order to pursue their goals with enthusiasm and determination.

St. Patrick

St. Patrick, (flourished 5th century, Britain and Ireland; feast day March 17), patron saint and national apostle of Ireland, credited with bringing Christianity to Ireland and probably responsible in part for the Christianization of the Picts and Anglo-Saxons. He is known only from two short works, the Confessio, a spiritual autobiography, and his Letter to Coroticus, a denunciation of British mistreatment of Irish Christians. Patrick was born in Britain of a Romanized family. At age 16 he was torn by Irish raiders from the villa of his father, Calpurnius, a deacon and minor local official, and carried into slavery in Ireland. He spent six bleak years there as a herdsman, during which he turned with fervour to his faith. Upon dreaming that the ship in which he was to escape was ready, he fled his master and found passage to Britain. There he came near to starvation and suffered a second brief captivity before he was reunited with his family. Thereafter, he may have paid a short visit to the Continent. The best known passage in the Confessio tells of a dream, after his return to Britain, in which one Victoricus delivered him a letter headed “The Voice of the Irish.” As he read it, he seemed to hear a certain company of Irish beseeching him to walk once more among them. “Deeply moved,” he says, “I could read no more.” Nevertheless, because of the shortcomings of his education, he was reluctant for a long time to respond to the call. Even on the eve of reembarkation for Ireland he was beset by doubts of his fitness for the task. Once in the field, however, his hesitations vanished. Utterly confident in the Lord, he journeyed far and wide, baptizing and confirming with untiring zeal. In diplomatic fashion he brought gifts to a kinglet here and a lawgiver there but accepted none from any. On at least one occasion, he was cast into chains. On another, he addressed with lyrical pathos a last farewell to his converts who had been slain or kidnapped by the soldiers of Coroticus. Careful to deal fairly with the non-Christian Irish, he nevertheless lived in constant danger of martyrdom. The evocation of such incidents of what he called his “laborious episcopate” was his reply to a charge, to his great grief endorsed by his ecclesiastical superiors in Britain, that he had originally sought office for the sake of office. In point of fact, he was a most humble-minded man, pouring forth a continuous paean of thanks to his Maker for having chosen him as the instrument whereby multitudes who had worshipped “idols and unclean things” had become “the people of God.” The phenomenal success of Patrick’s mission is not, however, the full measure of his personality. Since his writings have come to be better understood, it is increasingly recognized that, despite their occasional incoherence, they mirror a truth and a simplicity of the rarest quality. Not since St. Augustine of Hippo had any religious diarist bared his inmost soul as Patrick did in his writings. As D.A. Binchy, the most austerely critical of Patrician (i.e., of Patrick) scholars, put it, “The moral and spiritual greatness of the man shines through every stumbling sentence of his ‘rustic’ Latin.” It is not possible to say with any assurance when Patrick was born. There are, however, a number of pointers to his missionary career having lain within the second half of the 5th century. In the Coroticus letter, his mention of the Franks as still “heathen” indicates that the letter must have been written between 451, the date generally accepted as that of the Franks’ irruption into Gaul as far as the Somme River, and 496, when they were baptized en masse. Patrick, who speaks of himself as having evangelized heathen Ireland, is not to be confused with Palladius, sent by Pope Celestine I in 431 as “first bishop to the Irish believers in Christ.” Toward the end of his life, he retired to Saul, where he may have written his Confessio. It is said that an angel conveyed to him that he was to die at Saul, the site of his first church, despite his wishes to die within the ecclesiastical metropolis of Ireland. His last rites were administered by St. Tussach (also spelled Tassach or Tassac). Legends Before the end of the 7th century, Patrick had become a legendary figure, and the legends have continued to grow. One of these would have it that he drove the snakes of Ireland into the sea to their destruction. Patrick himself wrote that he raised people from the dead, and a 12th-century hagiography places this number at 33 men, some of whom are said to have been deceased for many years. He also reportedly prayed for the provision of food for hungry sailors traveling by land through a desolate area, and a herd of swine miraculously appeared. Another legend, probably the most popular, is that of the shamrock, which has him explain the concept of the Holy Trinity, three persons in one God, to an unbeliever by showing him the three-leaved plant with one stalk. Traditionally, Irishmen have worn shamrocks, the national flower of Ireland, in their lapels on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17.

What Cravings Will Take from You

We spend our lives with hands out and mouths open, looking for what we might consume. This is our experience as humans, in part because of how God designed us: we eat because our bodies require energy, and we reach with gentle affection for those we love out of a shared hunger for relationships. We’re born in need, and our desires, implanted by God himself (Acts 17:24–27), send us on a search for fullness of joy. Our desires, however, so easily turn into obsessions, leading us into wild over-consumption (James 4:1–3). Our desires become cravings, the ultimate pursuit and point of life itself. Rather than signals meant to send us off in exploration for the original source of joy (Psalm 16:11), they instead become taskmasters, demanding our undivided loyalty and taking our peace and joy right along with them. In our unchecked drive to consume, we ourselves become the ones consumed. My Primary (False) Allegiance When we don’t allow our desires to send us seeking fullness of joy from the source of all joy — God himself — we develop an allegiance to false kings. My primary false allegiance is to the love and admiration that come from other people. I crave validation, and I find myself performing for it like a circus animal. This is how I’ve come to know just how much I’ve allowed this false king to rule over me: the past few years have been brutal, full of confusion and emotional pain. Somewhere along the way, my heart, bowing before this false king, started aching for belonging. I started wondering if my presence mattered as a person and not as a performance. I started wondering if I was truly known. I started wondering if anyone might notice my need. My deep self-focus drew me further and further inside, and at some point I simply disengaged my heart. If I couldn’t have what I craved, I would not give of myself any longer. I began to look back at who I once was and how passionately I’d loved others, and I wanted so badly to be that person again. But I couldn’t manufacture love, and I started to believe that joy would never come again. My heart instead felt hard and apathetic, looking to be served, noticing every slight, envying the belonging of others. False Kings Only Take The trouble for an idolatrous heart (and the gift for the repentant heart) is that God will stubbornly interrupt and intercept our pursuit of joy as we seek it in anything less than him. He will not give us lasting peace in our false allegiances, because he is jealous for us to have the actual peace we’re pursuing. In those years of struggle, a chorus of people could have sung my praises, and it never would have settled as peace in my heart. Anytime a friend offered a word of encouragement, my mind immediately turned to panic: “What must I do to keep that love?” Or I’d think, “What about the one who didn’t voice encouragement? How do I win her over?” I was so hungry and thirsty that I was withering away, consumed by what I was trying to consume. False kings never give; they only take. Kings Who Take When the prophet Samuel was growing old, the Israelites worried about their future. Samuel had mediated for them well as both priest and prophet before God, but they needed a new leader, and humanly speaking, there were no options available. Samuel’s sons, the next sure thing for the nation, didn’t walk in the ways of the Lord, so the elders sought answers by looking around at how other nations were structured. They approached Samuel with their solution: “Now appoint for us a king to judge us like all the nations” (1 Samuel 8:5). At first glance, this doesn’t seem like such a bad request, but Scripture says it displeased Samuel, and it also displeased God, because the elders hadn’t thought to bring God into their calculations (1 Samuel 8:6–9). Did they not already have a King? They had, in effect, spurned the perfect rule of the One who’d delivered, provided for, led, and protected them, and they’d turned in their desire toward another option. They weren’t ready to reject God entirely. They just wanted him plus a safe, tangible plan B king like everyone else around them. Samuel’s response is a fair warning to us as well about plan B kings: they will only take from you. Samuel warns that a king appointed by people takes sons and sends them to war, takes children and turns them into slave labor, takes daughters into his service, and takes crops in order to feed his servants (1 Samuel 8:10–17). Samuel knows what false kings do: they take our best and then make us their slaves. Kingdoms with Two Kings We tend to believe the same as the Israelite elders: What will it hurt to have God and also hedge our bets a little? We want to believe we can pledge allegiance to King Jesus and also throw our heart to human kings or human things. But the Bible is plain: No one can serve two masters (Matthew 6:24). A divided kingdom cannot stand (Matthew 12:25). Jesus is our king, not merely a wise consultant we turn to when we need to know what to do. And as the Israelite leaders show us, a divided heart is actually not divided at all: it has already chosen sides. A divided heart is one that’s spurned God. We turn toward false kings who we think will give us comfort, security, belonging, approval, validation, love, sexual gratification — but in the end they only take. They promise life but give death. Consumed to Satisfy But God. Through Jesus Christ, he made a way for us out of this death spiral, giving us a direction to point our desires, providing something we can consume that doesn’t consume us in return. Jesus came saying, Repent and believe (Mark 1:15). His words were an invitation, a stretched-out hand, an open door for us to enter with him into the kingdom of God. Jesus came saying, This is my body, broken for you. This is my blood, poured out for you (Luke 22:19–20). Feed on me (John 6:51–58). Jesus was consumed by death precisely so that we would feast on him. This king is called Bread of Life (John 6:35) and Living Water (John 4:13–14), so we might know we can, in our hunger, eat, and in our thirst, drink. When we consume him, we find ourselves consuming his good rule, loving provision, and peaceful reign. We cannot reach the end of him, but in him we can certainly satisfy the longing underlying all of our desires: the longing for joy. The King Who Gives The Israelites placed a mirror before my heart, helping me see my false allegiances clearly. My actions were their actions: turning toward kings who couldn’t fulfill their promises. Like them, my desires and needs weren’t all wrong; what had been wrong was where I turned with them. I turned in repentance to Jesus and found joy again in allegiance to him. Do you have a need? A desire? Submit it totally to King Jesus. He doesn’t just require our allegiance, as if obedience is a form of punishment or something through which we grit our teeth. His demand of wholeheartedness is an invitation to receive what is his: the very kingdom (Matthew 5:3). He opens his treasury to us, sharing his peace, love, joy, life, and fruitfulness. And perhaps best of all, we receive his allegiance in return (Romans 8:38–39; Matthew 28:20; Hebrews 13:5). He is a king who gives. Article by Christine Hoover