Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] What if I told you that the main thing that's holding you back isn't lack of talent, opportunity or even gifting, but the fact that you're wrestling with two different versions of yourself is the reason why we struggle and particularly you might be struggling today. Let's talk about it.
[00:00:24] God doesn't design us to fit. He designs us to be impactful.
[00:00:31] Welcome to Shifts and Ladders. This is Ryan Robinson. Hope that you are doing well. We're just going to jump right in. There is a concept and many of us at this point in our lives have struggled with. This is indecisiveness when we've struggled to enjoy something that we like or we might be conflicted. So it might be your favorite sports team, it might be some clothes, it might be something that you're like, I'm not really sure which one you want. You become indecisive, you struggle with it. And again, I'm just utilizing some everyday things, right, where we can't make a decision about something. But honestly, there are times when we struggle because of our double mindedness. That sounds crazy, right? So how can someone be double minded? Well, I'm going to talk about what this actually means based on the word of God. Okay. And we're going to be coming from, and I want to really like set this straight up for everybody. We're going to come from the Book of James. Okay. And the Book of James is probably one of the most straightforward books in the Bible. Yes, it is. Even my watch knows it.
[00:01:50] This is what happens with the book of James. The book of James contextually talks about, it's basically about as a letter that's sent to those who have been scattered abroad due to persecution. This is when Jesus the movement of the way, which was what Christianity was before it had the name Christian came about and they got scattered across all over the Middle East.
[00:02:23] And this is James book to communicate with them as to what they need to do. And it's very, very practical. I mean it's probably so prescriptive and descriptive on what to do on a daily basis. It's not even funny.
[00:02:41] And believe it or not, some of the most spiritual things that you will do are some of the most common things you will be executing, believe it or not. So I'm actually going to open up to James chapter one. Okay. Now I'm a read about seven verses where we start getting in this idea of double mindedness and we're going to talk about it a little bit. Okay. So it says James chapter one, verse one says this letter is from James, a slave of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ. I am writing to the twelve tribes Jewish believer believers scattered abroad. Greetings. It's a nice little. Hello. Dear brothers and sisters, when troubles of any kind come your way, consider it an opportunity for great joy. For when you know that when your faith is tested, your endurance has a chance to grow. Let it so, let it grow. For when your endurance is fully developed, you will be perfect and complete, lacking nothing. If you need wisdom, ask our generous God and he will give it to you. He will not rebuke you for asking. That's good. But when you ask, be sure your faith is in God alone.
[00:04:01] Do not waver. For a person with divided loyalty, or in some translations, double mindedness is as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is blown and tossed by the wind. Such people should not be expected to receive anything from the Lord. Their loyalty is divided between God and the world, and they are unstable in everything they do. I'm gonna stop right there.
[00:04:31] And double mindedness. Okay, so there's a couple things that you'll kind of find out with this double mindedness is the imagery. If you think of someone who has a.
[00:04:50] It is. The Bible does. A perfect depiction of. This is like a ship toward, tossed to and fro.
[00:05:00] You might be feeling like that sometimes. Sometimes you can't make a decision here. This is what you want to do at one point in time, but now you can't do it. If there's something that you really, really wanted as an adult or as a kid, you might have been like a wave, like a ship who's been tossed to and fro. Okay.
[00:05:21] Whether it might be a career, it might be fill in the blank. There's times when you have wrestled with something, and actually what that wrestling is is what we call double mindedness, where you cannot make a clear decision on what to do. Now, in the context of this, he's saying, if you need wisdom from God, ask him.
[00:05:46] If you don't know something, ask him. If you. If you're going through a tough time, have faith to believe and have endurance. So faith, endurance, wisdom, all are tied into this, because if you believe, and we talked about this before, if you believe that there is something greater and better on the end of a particular tough season that you are in, you will endure. And essentially, that enduring builds you up in character, in stature, in ways that you probably have not and will not be able to calculate for yourself. Okay, so that's. That's locked in there, right? The Next piece is if you need wisdom, ask God. Because when you're going through painful stuff, you need some wisdom. Because I'm just trying to escape pain. I don't know if there's any gluttons for pain, but I'm not one of them.
[00:06:46] And I need wisdom. I need wisdom. And to know that God generously gives this wisdom is important. So we actually have all the ingredients that we need in order to make sure that we come out on top of whatever turbulent situation we're going through. But it's this one thing that James says, it says, if you ask though, make sure you are asking and believing and trusting only in God.
[00:07:25] Okay, how many times have we trusted in.
[00:07:34] I'm just going to tell myself, in books that we've read, in experiences that we have had, in people that we trusted, and in circumstances that no longer are current, in circumstances that were what they were in a season, it's no longer viable. It's expired. You don't need that anymore. How many times have we trusted in other things besides God?
[00:08:09] And what James is saying is that a person who asks God of something but does not believe what he's asking of God is like a man who is on a ship that is tossed to and fro on the waters. He's just not steady. And in the new King James version it says a double minded man is unstable in all of his ways. Now I'm going to give you a couple signs of a double minded man. Okay? So first of all, perfect depiction. Waves.
[00:08:45] He's wavy, she's wavy, she's shaky. It depends on what's going on that they get tossed to and fro.
[00:08:56] There's inconsistencies in their thought. They also have, this is another example, divided loyalties. And that was mentioned in the translation I read. There's divided loyalties.
[00:09:09] They're double agents.
[00:09:12] Yeah, they're a double agent. In Matthew, chapter six, I believe it's in verse 24, Jesus is actually talking about money. And in that verse he says no one can serve two masters for they will love the one and hate the other. And then he says God, God can. A man cannot serve God and mammon or God and money. Mammon is actually a false God of prosperity, which actually, if you believed in the mammon, and let me put a pin here, isn't it interesting that the Bible says you can't serve God and mammon, not God in the devil, okay, we either serving God or we serving mammon. And essentially what we think mammon can bring. So the Image of Mammon is a. Is a false God that essentially has this prosperity that disappears. So it's like a mirage. Like there's hopes, there's all these things that are given to you in perpetuity, but essentially it provides and vanishes and empties you. And you're looking for what you thought you had, but really you never had it in the first place. So it's like you're thirsty for what you lost, so you'll continue to run on Mammon instead of running to God. All right, so the imagery here is a person who can't choose between the two, depending on what the circumstances are for that individual to get what they need or what they think they need. Okay, now it's undecisive.
[00:11:06] Undecisive thinking is another one. Bible says, I say it all the time. Proverbs 3, 5 and 6 says, Trust in the Lord with all of your heart and lean not unto your own understanding. In all of your ways, acknowledge him and he will direct thy path. That is making a decision to trust in who, God. One time, one thing. Not trusting your money, trusting God. Right. And those are maybe a few of many examples in the Bible about what it looks like to be double minded. And the reason why. And the root cause for people who are double minded is that they lack trust in God.
[00:11:49] The reason why individuals and people are double minded is because they lack trust in God. Okay? They trust their own strengths.
[00:12:01] We believe that we can control the outcomes. I'm talking about this before a couple of weeks, but I want to bring this back again because if we don't get this first, everything after this means nothing.
[00:12:16] Okay? You literally will not be able to move forward, not Pass, go collect $200. If you have divided hope and loyalties in two things instead of the one. Okay? The other piece is you have influences.
[00:12:37] You have influences in the world that actually cause you to trust in that.
[00:12:44] And look at what you listen to, look at what you digest. Look at, look at what you watch.
[00:12:51] There's a lot of things that in books, and I'm a book person, I keep telling everybody this. I've read so many books that I began to trust in what the author said instead of reading in the Bible what God had already said.
[00:13:11] Right? So because we have essentially dethroned God and not gone to where the wisdom is resourced, instead of going to, excuse me, we haven't gone to the source for wisdom. We went to resources, and really poor resources at that compared to God himself. We've got knowledge that may not even be literally suitable for what we're in at that current time.
[00:13:45] And it makes it such a challenging circumstance because people make books sound good.
[00:13:52] I mean, you got New York Times best selling books. You have Dale Carnegie's how to Win Friends and Influence Others.
[00:14:03] You have Napoleon Hill Think and Grow Rich. You have, I'm thinking all of these like self help books that I can name Essentialism and by Greg McEwen. And there's so many other books that you, you've got to seven Gosh.
[00:14:27] Stephen Covey's I Can't Even Think about it.
[00:14:33] Seven something.
[00:14:37] Google it. I promise it starts with a seven. And I've read it. You probably read it. Good to Great by Jim Collins, all of these business books. But honestly, let's keep it 100. Some of these are actually revelations and glimpses that God gave these men and women to create the book that had been the New York Times best selling book for however long ago it was. And if we really want to look at it again, some of it still applies, but it's not timeless like the Bible is. And in fact these folks have died. The book is still living. The Bible is still living.
[00:15:12] I think we're still going to find all the things and circumstances that we are going through in this present day in the word of God. Okay? So I want us to really nail down and understand that the Bible and it's not just the Bible, but the sources of which we use that we think are better than the Bible is putting God's or putting these individuals in front of God and actually creating a double minded experience.
[00:15:48] Nothing can get to this person if they're double minded.
[00:15:52] And if we look back at our lives, we have had seasons where we have been double minded, where we couldn't make a clear decision, where we couldn't say yes. Our Bible says this. Allow your yes to mean yes and your no mean no. That sometimes if we say we mean yes, but we really mean no, that's double mindedness all day long.
[00:16:13] So why is it important?
[00:16:16] Because what's in your heart isn't aligned with what you are saying in your mouth.
[00:16:23] So you are praying for something you really don't want.
[00:16:30] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:16:33] So I want to stop there because this is what's going to help be a double minded man. And this is what we're going to talk about, what it means to.
[00:16:46] Let me say this right, we are going to find what the cure is for double mindedness and what that unlocks for us in the next podcast. Okay? I just gotta establish why double mindedness is what it is and what the effects are. You are literally frozen in time in decision making. You are petrified. You can't move left, you can't move right because you did make a decision.
[00:17:24] God can't do a whole lot with that. All right, so we're going to get to the next pod but if you haven't yet share this with somebody you might know someone who's double minded, you might be double minded. Make sure you subscribe on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and if you do share share a like on on YouTube leave a review on the podcast because I really believe that as we're making shifts we have no room for double mindedness period. Okay. And I want to help unlock and make the shift for you, help you make the shift in 2025. With that said we'll catch you in the next one. Peace.
