JOURNALING Quotes

Keeping a thoughtful record of your spiritual journey can promote godliness. It can help us in our meditation and prayer. It can remind us of the Lord’s faithfulness and work. It can help us understand and evaluate ourselves. It can help us monitor our goals and priorities as well as maintain other spiritual disciplines. Donald Whitney, Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life, 1991

Here are some reasons for writing out our thoughts:

1. We more easily discipline our minds to sustain our thoughts without interruption.

2. If interrupted, because we have written our thoughts, we are able to return to them again for further contemplation and development.

3. We can also return to our reflections in the distant future, when otherwise they might have been totally forgotten.

4. Writing demands that we organize our thinking connectedly or cohesively on a subject.

5. We train our minds to express ourselves meaningfully and accurately.

6. We build a reserve of good thoughts for a time when our thinking is more vacuous, or our spirituality is in decline.

7. We teach ourselves the significance of learning by demonstrating to ourselves that cogent, biblical thinking is worth writing down.

8. We find that our developed thoughts sometimes emerge in our public speaking or private conversations, even though we did not prepare to use them.

9. We have a cache of mature thoughts to peruse as seed for public writing or speaking.

10. We leave our thoughts to future generations when normally the preponderance of them, if not every last one of them, would have vaporized upon our death or mental decline.

Jim Elliff
Writing Down Our Thoughts, Christian Communicators Worldwide