Monday, October 3, 2022

Divided Mind

 

Monday, October 3, 2022

If you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and he will give it to you.  He will not rebuke you for asking.  But when you ask him, be sure that your faith is in God alone.  Do not waver, for a person with divided loyalty is as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is blown and tossed by the wind.  Such people should not expect to receive anything from the Lord.  Their loyalty is divided between God and the world, and they are unstable in everything they do.  James 1:5-8

To have a divided mind means a person’s loyalty is being pulled between opposing choices.  Up or Down, Right or Left, Good or Evil – we must constantly choose.  Even taking the next step is only possible when we choose which foot goes first. 

The person who has a history of choosing that which ends badly, eventually comes to the state of a divided mind.  Still sensing what is right and good, that person finds it impossible to decide; it’s being stuck, paralyzed by a mountain of drama and decline.  This is the instability of mind that, left unchecked, can sadly wind-up behind locked doors of a hospital ward.  At the very least, it is a painful existance.

This is a common problem in spiritual matters.  Apostle James may have been a sufferer.  James grew up in the same house as his older brother, Jesus.  He may have had typical sibling issues early on, but eventually found faith in his brother as Lord.  But the struggle to arrive at that surrender point, letting go of doubt and fear, may have been what was behind the sentences he wrote about the problem of coming to God with a divided loyalty, that which gets blown-about like a feather in a hurricane…basket-case unstable, and unable to focus on a useful life. 

Another Apostle, Paul, admitted to that syndrome:

I have discovered this principle of life—that when I want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong.  I love God’s law with all my heart.  But there is another power within me that is at war with my mind. This power makes me a slave to the sin that is still within me.  Romans 3:21-23

Paul understood what it was like to be unstable, unable to control his thoughts or actions.  He was powerless to consistently live out the life of self-control, or doing good, because the fight within was too strong.

Have you been there?   ---   Yeah, me too!

So, we don’t just want to identify the problem and leave it at that.  That would be like noticing that you have cancer, and saying:  Oh…I have cancer, I think I’ll go play golf. 

No…if your mind is divided by the cancer of sin’s pull, you DO something about it.  Let’s go back to both James and Paul for the answer to the dilemma.  The starting point, says James, is to ask God for wisdom:

If you need wisdom, ask our generous God, and he will give it to you. James 1:5

And, recognizing his spiritual life-threatening condition, Paul takes us home to what to do with that wisdom:

Oh, what a miserable person I am!  Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin and death?  Thank God!  The answer is in Jesus Christ our Lord.  Romans 3:24

For You Today

The answer is Jesus Christ, the LORD over all.  He was there in the beginning when God put us together.[1]  He knows how to put you back together – stable!

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day!

Go to VIDEO (read by author)

There are about 2,000 devotional posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions library.  To dig deeper on today’s topic, explore some of these: 

Difficult Choices   and   Side Tracks & Sure Things   

[1] Images:  via Pixabay.com   Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©  

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