adminItai Chipunza
James 1 verse 8
8 he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does.
IN this passage James is talking to the children of God scatted around the world in different parts. He is talking about asking for wisdom and having only a single mind when asking, that mind being that you will receive from God. He is basically saying we should never have any doubt in our mind that God will deliver what he says he will. If God did not say it, well, that then is a different negotiation with God. His reason for saying we must have sound mind being that if we have a double mind we become unstable in all our ways.
Double minded people are what I call flip floppers. People you can never be sure of their standing. These sort of people that allow devilish things like mood swings to affect them. You never know if the same smile you got yesterday is what you will get today. Often people avoid having long term relationships with such kind of people. Those that do get involved in long term relationships with such people actually discover these peoples nature after they are already contractually bound to them. Therefore cannot free themselves.
A double minded man never seems to know what business they want to be in. at one time they are selling clothes, the next they are selling food, then they move on to something else. A double minded man is not clear what he wants to do or achieve thus he is always looking for whatever has a downstream gradient.
When things begin to be hard and need one to endure the time frame of hardships, they are quick to jump ship because they are not fully sold into their own vision. Because of this, most of double minded people seem to work hard but remain poor because they never stay long enough to make actual money. In the end they are dragged into a pyramid scheme because they always seem easy. Well they actually are very easy because it is easy to throw away money.
One of the simplest rules of business is that, there must be asserts to generate the money, or a value addition process in order for the initial invested capital to grow. If there is no assert or service on sale, it is a pyramid scheme, all pyramid schemes will collapse eventually regardless of the fancy names they are given. So unstable people will continue to look for they easy work for fifty years yet they have a lot of experience evidently showing that it will not work.
A mad man can look clean now. When you speak to them, they respond properly and when you meet them tomorrow they have swapped all those clean clothes for rags and are speaking to themselves. As a Christian you should avoid this kind of behaviour. Where you become like a mad man. Where you listen to one pastor on Sunday, but when you are home, you are busy with televangelists that condemn the doctrine that was being taught to you on Sunday. Sift through knowledge, take what your leader tells you is right and confirm it in the word of God. The rest must find its way to the recycle bin.
Make up your mind on exactly what you want. If you want church, go for it fully. If you want African traditional religion, go there and follow them fully, do not waver. If you want spirit and power through the word, go into it with all you heart and mind. Do not create a mixture of pastors, traditional healers and witch doctors in your life. Be stable and be sure of what you want.
There are numerous problems associated with a double mind. Usually the trouble with having a lot of doctrines fighting for dominance in your mind is that you become a liar to all these pastors you are serving. Because you change your talk and character to suit each of their doctrines when you are with them. So you are perpetually lying to everyone because none of the doctrines is really part of you. All of them take over when you are in particular place.
Flip flopping causes a drag in your progress in life. Many doctrines in your head means you are never progressing in a predetermined direction. These sort of people just go as the wind blows. They move where it seems easy to go. When it gets hard to row up stream to your destiny, you quickly pull a doctrine that forbids hard work towards your destiny with the claim that God does not want work. Let me shock you, God actually hates laziness and labour. Let me explain. Laziness is when one does not want to work, labour is working to enrich a system.
What God loves is work. Work is when one is doing it to enrich themselves. So God actually wants us to work, not to be lazy or be in labour. When you are a student of many doctrines, you stay in one place, because when you begins to get it, one doctrine pulls you to one direction and the other doctrine to another. When going right becomes hard, you turn left, when going left becomes hard you turn back right. Meaning you never actually move. You stay in one place.
The other problem that comes with being double minded is the fact that you affect the faith of those under you. This is not only for a double minded leader, this can also mean those you evangelised to and introduced to Christ. They are under you because they are younger than you in the faith. If you are double minded and change churches and beliefs and clearly not stable. You begin to make them feel like there is something missing in the house that you try and obtain from other churches and doctrines. In doing so you are painting a wrong picture of the church. That it is failing to supply your spiritual needs. Yet it is actually you that is a mad man.
The church cannot fail to supply all your needs. God has promised to supply all your needs from his riches in glory. Christians love this verse. How does he supply these needs? He gives them spiritually in the church, if you humble yourself, be sound minded. Receive from him spiritually, because every physical thing in the world is driven by spiritual things. So whatever you are looking for when you move from one church to another, you will not get until you become of a sound mind person. If you do get it, it usually does not last because it has no essential spiritual foundation in Christ. It may have a foundation, but you must ask yourself a simple question. Is Christ the foundation? If he is not, it will not last.
The biggest of all these problems is that you encourage the syndrome of disloyalty in others if they watch you busy trying this and that doctrine. It is especially so in new believers. New believers like children learn largely from observation. So you raise sons that are not loyal to the pastor and the church. We blame them for their disloyalty but the culprit is the brother of sister who by actions taught them to be unfaithful. Any new wave can sway them. You therefore infect the church with a cancer that may take years and years to undo.
One thing I remember clearly from child hood was how my mother never wanted anyone of us to eat at other people’s homes. She would never allow us just to eat all sorts of food from all sorts of people. Though she would enforce this rule, I never understood why, now that I am older I understand. It is because she worried about the source. You cannot trust every source that claims to be good. This same culture is still true when it comes to making up your mind on who you will follow in your life. If you decide to be one thing, do not be found feeding elsewhere without the knowledge of he that is responsible for your life. If he has not permitted you, do not do it, it is because the source is not reliable and cannot be trusted.
Be blessed.
Bongani Ndlovu