“Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee”

(Psalm. 119:11)

You can tell a lot about a home by taking a look at the pictures hanging on the walls. The pictures people hang in their houses reveal in a measure the kind of living that goes on there. The ideals, the tastes, the interests, the loves of that home are placarded before you in the pictures on the walls.

You go into a home and see photographs of a beautiful young girl and a manly boy and you immediately conclude: “There is a son and a daughter in this family who are loved by proud parents. Mother and father are living for these children. In a measure this home is dedicated to that boy and girl.”

Or you call in a home where you see on the walls bright prints of ducks and geese in flight or white-sailed yachts skimming a blue sea. It’s a fair surmise that for someone of that house, hunting and water sports are absorb­ing interests.

Pictures on the walls of a house tell us lots about the folks who live there. But have you ever stopped to think that each of us has an interior picture gallery — our imagination? The imagination is the picture gallery of the soul.

The pictures that hang on the hidden walls of imagination are even more important and influential on personality, and could we but see them, they would be far more revealing than the pictures that hang on the walls of our homes.

Ezekiel puts this quite plainly in one of his visions. In prophetic ecstasy Ezekiel is conducted to the wall of the temple in Jerusalem. He is shown a small hole in the wall and told to dig through. He emerges into a large hall. Looking about him, Ezekiel sees pictures on the walls of that secret chamber, “every form of creeping things, and abominable beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel, portrayed upon the wall round about.” In the hall stand seventy of the nation’s leading men. Engulfed in clouds of ritualistic incense, the elders of the people stand gazing at the images, the degrading pictures on the walls. And the voice of the Lord comes to Ezekiel, saying, “Son of man, hast thou seen what the ancients of the house of Israel do in the dark, every man in the chambers of his imagery? for they say, The Lord seeth us not; the Lord hath forsaken the earth.”

What is the meaning of this vision of the prophet? Just this: The imagination is the picture gallery of the soul. Could we dig in, as Ezekiel did, to the hidden hall of each person’s imagination and see the pictures that hang there, we would know the secret of that life. On the walls of imagination are to be seen the images before which that soul bows down, whether they be vile, slimy, reptilian creatures or shining ones with angels’ wings whose names are Truth and Love and Beauty. It’s a sacred place, this chamber of imagery in every person’s soul. There burn always the fires of faith, and there go up the incense clouds of religious devotion.

C.S. Lewis, in an incredible novel, That Hideous Strength, tells the story of a group of moral perverts possessing preposterous power in technical skills who almost succeed in gaining control of a nation. They force out of power in the government most of the people of good will, of humane instincts, of Christian morality. They invite to earth from outer space all the demonic forces of the universe. It is a tall story, of course, such as only C.S. Lewis could tell, but it is shot through with clever insights into human nature, one of which is this: To dehumanize their recruits to prepare them for positions of power in the new, evil order, the diabolical technocrats use a room filled with obscene, untrue pictures. The neophytes are taken to this gallery, shut in there for hours, and left to contemplate in this chamber of imagery the false, the vile, the unnatural. This is one of the initial steps in their training, an invasion of the imagination with abominable images. Then the new recruits are ready to be taken over, possessed by the evil spiritual forces, the demons, of outer space. In this novel Lewis presents us with a modern parable of the ancient truth that Ezekiel grasped in his vision of the chambers of imagery. The human imagination is the picture gallery of the soul, even the sanctuary of the soul, personality’s most holy place. The images, the pictures enshrined there, could we see them, would lay bare to us that personality, show us what that soul lives for, believes in, and serves.

Educator Allan Bloom, in his book The Closing of the American Mind, decries the devastating effect that rock music has had on the students he has taught. He says that as a teacher he is not so much concerned with what rock music may or may not do to the students’ morals, but rather what it does to the possibility of education in the higher reaches of the mind and soul. Bloom sees rock music poisoning the imaginations of young people at a crucial time, making impossible the “sublimation,” that is, the “making sublime,” of the emotions in a person’s quest for truth and taste and nobler being.

Bloom also deplores the present-day antipathy students have for heroes; for without admirable characters, respected and adored and hung as portraits in the picture gallery of one’s imagination, a strong and ennobling power is banished from the soul.

The power of imagination in structuring character has long been real­ized. George Buttrick, a modern Christian philosopher of rare perception, in his book Prayer, says of imagination:

It fashions both the world and the man. As for the world, every journey or means of journeying is first imagined, any building is fancy frozen into stone, and any music is a dream caught in a net of sounds. As for the man, every crime is first imagined, every heroism…. That is to say, imagination is almost as momentous to character as a seed is to a flower. No man goes wrong suddenly: he falls slowly through a series of unworthy thoughts.

The psychologists have even tested the power of imagination and codified into law the comparative strength of imagination. This is one of the psychological laws: Wherever there is a conflict between the will and the imagination, the imagination will always win the battle.

The classic example is this: You can walk with no difficulty at all a ten-inch-wide plank laid along the floor of your living room, but walking the same board placed on the parapet of a skyscraper is an entirely different matter. Why? Your will to control your muscular action is no weaker fifty stories up, but your imagination plays havoc with your controls. There is before you the electrifying vision of yourself falling through space. Imagina­tion makes you dizzy. Imagination in conflict with will is no match at all. Imagination always wins the day.

You will remember that story of the boy who pitched his best game of baseball on the Saturday after his blind father died. How did he do it? How could he play even at second best? What power of will, what emotional control were his? He did it, the boy said, because it was the first game his blind father had ever watched him pitch. Imagination fed by Christian faith turned the tide. “Compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses,” by faith the boy could visualize his father seeing him.

But how to control the awful power of imagination? If it’s true that imagination possesses a propulsive power in personality, if the pictures in our soul’s gallery determine action and character, it follows that great care should be used in the hanging of those pictures. But can we control our imaginations? Is it within our power to hang the pictures we choose in our chamber of imagery?

Not by force of will can we do it. We have seen that willpower always kneels to the power of imagination. But affection can control imagination. The hands of love can hang up the pictures in our souls’ chambers of imagery. Stopford Brooke, when he was collecting material for his biography of the English minister Fredrick W. Robertson, went into a bookstore in Brighton, the town where Robertson served most of his years in the ministry. He saw hanging on the wall of the shop a picture of Robertson. “Did you know him?” he asked the bookseller, nodding toward the picture. “Yes,” answered the man as he lifted his eyes to the photograph and a smile swept over his face. “Whenever I am tempted to do anything mean, I look at that face, and it recalls me to my better self.” Just as lust can hang up an obscene image in the chamber of imagination, so also can love and admiration nail up a smiling saint.

The Apostle Paul had a lot to say about Christ being “the image of God.” Of course, he had reference primarily to the deity of our Lord. For our human eyes to see, Christ is God incarnate, the very image of the Eternal. But I am convinced that the apostle also had in mind the placing of Jesus Christ at the center of our imagination, the putting there of that dear face in the place of honor in our soul’s picture gallery. Listen to him, “Christ, who is the image of God, should shine unto them…. For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ…. That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith; that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, May be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; And to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge.”

Paul knew the secret of controlling imagination through the power of a higher and superior affection: “(For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;) Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.”

In other words, the Christian who sets Christ in the center of his attention and fixes his thought on Christ sees the whole landscape of imagination judged and transfigured by him. The Christian, by habitual prayer, worship, and gospel reading, drives deep the picture of Christ, on whom to look is not merely to contemplate a picture, but to invite a friend. Christ becomes the center of reference for our whole scheme of imagination. The images in our thought-life incompatible with that dear face are quickly removed, and those congenial are kept. His image has expulsive power until all life becomes his world.

• Scripture Reference: Psalms 119:11-0 • Secondary Scripture References: n/a • Subject : Imagination; 630 • Special Topic: n/a • Series: n/a • Occasion: n/a • First Preached: 11/29/1947 • Last Preached: 7/24/1988 • Rating: 1 • Book/Author References: n/a