Unlearning Things
Put ye off all these.”” — Cot. iii. 8.
But this is a tremendous business, the putting off of things! There is nothing more difficult. What can be thought of which is more difficult than to drop a way of thinking, or to alter a way of speaking, or to change a way of acting? How difficult it is to put off something which has become a habit! How severe is the task of taking some way, which has become one of life’s grooves and smoothing it out until there is no mark that it has ever been! When we have learned a wrong way of doing a thing it is a fearfully heavy business to unlearn it. For instance, when we have learned a wrong way of using our voice, what a business it is to unlearn it! How difficult is the task, when a young violinist has acquired a wrong pose of the wrist, to undo the twist and to get the right one! How severe is the business of unlearning the wrong way of handling a golf club! These are all biases and inclinations of the body and it is a difficult thing to put them away. But the difficulty becomes enormously greater when the false thing is mental, or emotional, a perversity of mind or of mood. ‘““Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts.” Forsaking a false habit in golf is as nothing to forsaking a false habit of the soul, But just because it is so very difficult it is a ministry which serves our health and strength. It makes moral muscle, and clothes the spirit with heavenly vigour.
Dr. Horace Bushnell had a very dear friend, Dr. Dutton, whose gracious frankness was a vital part of his worth. In one of his letters this sentence occurs: ‘‘ Indeed, I have thought of late that you have made decided improvement in what Willis calls unlearning contempt.” Yes, and such unlearning would be a fine register of the proegress of the soul. To be unlearning an unhealthy accomplishment in contempt, and to unwind its bondage as one would unwind a spool of thread, is a moral exercise which would reveal itself in an emancipating influence over the entire life.
And it is even so with the habit of censoriousness, even when it is not so matured as to have become soured into cynicism. The habit of supercilious criticism, of judging everybody as from a throne, issuing severe judgments in tones of final decree — no task in our schooldays presents the difficulty which we encounter when we begin to unlearn habits like these. Indeed, it is something like taking a closely woven fabric and unravelling it so as to pick out the rotten threads. Unlearning is the most difficult of all learning.
The apostle has this in mind when he offers us the counsel, ‘‘ Put ye off all these.” It is the figure of the removal of a garment, and if it were as easy as throwing off a loose Oriental robe we should have no trouble. But in life the garments of the soul have the intimacy and tenacity of skins, and to remove them is like peeling away a vital texture. But, by the wonderful grace of
God, this putting off of deadly things is not altogether a negative act, like the removal of a garment. Indeed, what is negative is a secondary thing, and it follows what is positive. We have first to “‘ put on the Lord Jesus Christ.’’ The figure is almost fiercely Oriental, but we know what it means. We can point to periods in our life when we put on a friendship, when we began to wear the love of a man or a woman, and ‘we were clad in power like a robe. And by faith we can put on the Lord Jesus so that our whole life is covered by Him, as though some Oriental garment were flowing around us, and we were wrapped in its folds from head to feet. We can become clothed in His holiness, His grace, His love, His strength. We can become invested with. these things in marvellous completeness. ‘‘ He hath covered me with the robe of righteousness and with the garment of salvation.”’
And it is when we have “‘ put on the new man” that we can set to work to “put off the old man.’’ When we have begun to learn of Him we can begin to unlearn the things we ought never to have learned. The two things go together. We can work out our own salvation because God worketh in us to will and to do of His good pleasure. We can unlearn contempt, and every other vicious thing, as we take His yoke upon us and learn of Him.