Have you ever watched a heavily loaded freight train getting under way? It uses an enormous amount of power in starting, and when it finally moves, it creeps at a snail's pace – except on the downgrades. There it travels rapidly enough, but oh, the effort that goes into making the upgrade!

The train of life proceeds in much the same way. When our life is heavily burdened with bad habits of thought and action and much that is nonessential, we are like the heavily loaded freight train, using up power and squandering energy and making slow progress except on the downgrades. Here, unfortunately, the very weight of that extra baggage we are carrying rushes us along into situations and problems from which we find it exceedingly difficult to pull out.

… How may we unload? We have tried many a time by making what we called good resolutions. Spiritually considered, there is a right way and a wrong way to make a resolution. To say “I will not do thus and so” is the wrong way. It is the way of “won't” power. Only our personal will is behind such a declaration, and that is weak at best. The right way to overcome the weakness is by relying upon the unfailing strength of divine will, to affirm that God's goodwill is now operative in our life.

If we wish to drop our load of bad habits, let us waste no time on declarations like this: “I will not smoke too much, drink too much, eat too much, talk too much” – as the case may be. Instead, let us sturdily affirm: I am temperate in all ways because I am a child of God.

... Let us no more declare, “I will not gossip, I will not criticize,” but, instead, affirm constantly and with deepest conviction: I am loving in all ways because I am a child of God. What a joy to think of oneself as a loving child of God! The bit of scandal dies on the lips; the criticism dissolves, like ice in the warm glow of the sun, before it is ever voiced.

… When you have the courage to stand firmly, with faith believing, upon the Truth of your own being, the light of understanding shines through your mind. When you are renewed in the spirit of your mind, you soon find yourself restored to better and happier ways of living. The mind that is rejoicing in its own divine heritage just naturally cannot be filled with the desire to speak unkindly or untruthfully. The glorious sense of freedom that comes with the realization of spiritual power completely shatters the bondage of fleshly appetites, and the bad habits we have acquired pass into the limbo of forgotten things.

Come out of the past; live in the now. Claim all the power, all the strength, all the growth that is yours.
 

Georgiana Tree West, an ordained Unity minister, founded the Unity Center of Practical Christianity in New York City. Between 1937 and 1948, Georgiana taught periodically at the Unity Training School in Missouri. This article is excerpted from the book for which she is best known, Prosperity's Ten Commandments, published by Unity House®.

For more about Prosperity's Ten Commandments, click here.