ARE YOU DOUBLE-MINDED?

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In Christ, Mark

The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

I hate double-minded people, but I love your law. You are my refuge and my shield; I have put my hope in Your word. Away from me, you evildoers, that I may keep the commands of my God!

Sustain me, my God, according to Your promise, and I will live; do not let my hopes be dashed. Uphold me, and I will be delivered; I will always have regard for Your decrees. You reject all who stray from Your decrees, for their delusions come to nothing. All the wicked of the earth, You discard like dross; therefore I love Your statutes.

My flesh trembles in fear of You; I stand in awe of Your laws.

Psalm 119:113-120

This ends this reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

At the beginning of today’s passage, we read the psalmist make a bold statement:

I hate double-minded people, but I love your law. You are my refuge and my shield; I have put my hope in Your word. Away from me, you evildoers, that I may keep the commands of my God!

Why would the psalmist have such a dislike for double-minded people? We need to get to the root of what being double-minded means before we can get to the root of it.

In looking at different bible translations, you’ll find that the word “double-minded” is replaced by divided loyalty and this offers us a window of insight into what the psalmist was getting at when we read the passage in its context.

Being double-minded meant having a divided loyalty in one’s faith life. In other words, one would be faithful to God part of the time but then faithful to sin and evil ways the rest of the time. It was this kind of person that the psalmist didn’t want to be around, someone who might influence him to come along with them into transgressive ways and away from the will and way of God as expressed through His holy word.

This brings a question to bear: Are you double-minded?

It’s obvious that being double-minded is not only something that the psalmist despises but God as well. Our God is for us 100 percent and expects that we return that loyalty to Him. We are in the world but we are not to be of it. Instead, we are expected to live at a level that is above the world’s ways, a level where we find consistent, unrelenting righteousness and holiness. When we live for God and God alone, this is where we should find ourselves. Anywhere else, means we are divided in our faith and our loyalty, and thus double-minded.

So what does the psalmist say about evildoers, those who choose to opt for sin and their own desires over God’s? Look at these verses:

You reject all who stray from Your decrees, for their delusions come to nothing. All the wicked of the earth, You discard like dross.  

Friends, this passage today sends us a clear message. God will not stand for anyone to divide their loyalty between Him and sin which He despises. He will not stand by idly and allow anyone He created to disrespect Him by opting to not follow His word and will. If you want to be rejected by God and discarded like dross, which is essentially scum removed from molten ore, then continue to live in a double-minded fashion.

The psalmist, for one, was not going there. In fact, in the final verse of this scripture, you can see he feared being in a position where he might be rejected or discarded. Look at his final words in our passage:

“My flesh trembles in fear of You.”

We can’t go about our lives dividing our devotion between God and the world. And we shouldn’t even want to go there and yet we do all too often.

Why?

In my opinion, it’s because we don’t have the deep reverence and respect for God (what the bible refers to as fearing God) that God expects us to have.

It’s high time we wake up and realize that life isn’t a game we are playing with God. We need to honor, admire, and esteem Him for who He is, the Almighty Maker, Creator, and Sustainer of everything. It’s what He commands and it’s our requirement to respond to Him in full and undivided loyalty and obedience.

Amen.

In Christ,

Mark

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