How to Make Up Your Mind

Rev. Dr. Christopher Carlson

“Next year I’m going to be a changed person,” Charlie Brown tells Lucy.  “That’s a laugh Charlie Brown,” she says.  “I mean it,” he replies, “I’m going to be strong and firm.”  “Forget it,” she says as she walks off, “you’ll always be wishy-washy.”  “Why can’t I change just a little bit?” Charlie Brown asks himself, “I’ll be wishy one day and washy the next.” Life is full of decisions.  Life is basically a series of choices that we make every day.  We have to evaluate, decide, draw conclusions.  Someone once said, “We make our decisions and then our decisions make us.”  The quality of our life will be determined by the kinds of decisions you make in your life.  I’m sure all of us have made decisions we would like to take back. Some decisions are easy some don’t mean much but often they mean a great deal, very serious.  And sometimes they are so hard to make. 

In our scripture today James talks about making decisions.  We are going through James in a series of messages called “Developing a Faith That Works”.  And for you bible scholars out there, when you read a letter in the New Testament, particularly, usually that letter has a greeting of some kind, a greeting from James or Peter or Paul to the Church and such and such. But then right after that is a paragraph where you can almost always find the theme of what that writer is going to talk about.  And you can trace that theme throughout the whole book.  James is that way.  Remember last week we talked about “Count it all joy my brothers when you receive various trials for you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance, and let endurance have its full effect that you may be perfect and complete and mature.” And there you are.  Maturity that is what James is after.  Particularly explaining things that come along in our life that cause maturity or help us become mature.  Last week we talked about trials.  Trials looked at properly help us become mature in our lives and our religion and our faith in Christ.  And today is no different.  A different kind of trial if you will, the struggle to make the right decisions.  It is a struggle isn’t it?  I don’t know about you but sometimes I wish God would just write something in sky, “Just do this Chris.” 

Reminds me of a story of a farmer who was plowing the fields and wondering what he should do with his life and he saw written up in the sky, “P C”. So he thought that that meant preach Christ.  And so he dropped his farm materials, left and went to seminary and became a pastor.  And he was just awful.  Every church he went to diminished in size.  Nobody wanted to listen to him.  And it went on and on and on and finally he died and went to heaven, “Lord I thought I did what you told me to do.”  And the Lord looked at him and said, “My son PC did not preach Christ it meant plant corn.” James instructs us about decisions. Listen to what he has to say in his first chapter beginning at verse five.

If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does.

This is the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Would you pray with me?

Father, I ask your Holy Spirit to be upon us that it would influence as we hear this word today.  That You would touch our hearts and minds. We pray Lord that we would not just merely listen as James says but do and change, that we would not be ears of the word only but doers.  Father be with us.  The word as you would have me preach it I pray that you would be with me and I pray as we all listen to what you have to say to us.  In Jesus name, amen.

The problem James tells us is indecision or actually the word James uses is double mindedness. Now double mindedness is an interesting word, it literally means two souled.  It doesn’t mean you have to be lying to one another, or ourselves.  It doesn’t mean necessarily to be two faced.  What it means is to look in two separate directions, one side and then the other.  It’s like the person who is trying to decide to go one way or the other but can’t decide.  Standing in the threshold of the door, and trying to decide to go in or not.  I think the idea kind of relates to people who are Christians and there is a verse in Revelation, “Behold I stand at the door and knock and if you would only open and let me come in I would eat with you.”  And that word is to Christians.  It is to the people who already believe.  We often think of it in terms of those who don’t believe.  It can apply to them but it is really meant to us because as Christians often with Christ we are double minded.  We want the Lord around but not too close.  When the Lord gets too close we get a little uncomfortable because he might tell us what we have to do.  He might say to us, “you need to change this.”  Using the image of the house, if He is outside on the porch we know He is there and we are comfortable with that.  And He is there if we need Him, if we get in trouble, but basically, we would like to keep him on the porch.  If He comes into the living room we have to straighten up, and if He wants to go into the bedrooms, oh boy.  We’re often double minded.  That is what James is talking about.  It’s the idea of indecision.  And indecision is regular life can be debilitating, just apart from Christ.  Not making a decision to do something hurts.  It leads to emotional instability, we all know that. Sometimes you come to this decision you need to make and you loose sleep over it. You fret over it.  You worry about it, or at least relational instability.  Sometimes we are married but we aren’t sure.  I read an old story about a man who was on trial for bigamy and they couldn’t find enough evidence to convict him and he said to the man, “The case against you for bigamy is dismissed.  Go home to your wife.”  The man said, “Which one?”  Relational indecision hurts, as does instability, as James calls it, in our spiritual lives.  That was what I was talking about with Christ. 

All of us in our lives, have to the decision along the way to draw closer to God.  It is what God wants us to do.  God sends us trials so that we have to make choices and C.S. Lewis once said, “Our choices are very simple sometimes, we are either choosing for the Lord or not.”  And really sometimes it comes down to that.  So what is the answer, or what is the prescription?  James says the prescription is to seek wisdom.  Now what is wisdom?   Well if often has been said that wisdom is being able to use knowledge in a practical or good way.  And I think that that is exactly right.  We are all familiar with the idea of book learning but book learning has to be applied to real life.  We all know the stereotypical professor in college, they get up and talk about all these theories and then they themselves don’t know how to tie their shoes sometimes.  I have met people like that.  I had one guy that I ate lunch with every day because I just wanted him to talk about baseball.  I wanted him to talk about something normal.  I couldn’t do it – he refused but that’s another story.  That’s what wisdom is but in this context and in the context of James and the context of the Bible, wisdom is the idea of looking at the world as God wants us to look at it and then acting on it.  It’s the idea of knowing how to look at things that happen to us and things that come across our paths in the way that God wants us to look at them and then acting on them.  We talked about this last week, the idea of interpreting trials in our lives with the idea of God is in control and that God brings us through trials in order to produce endurance.  And having endurance produces character, maturity in our lives.  Of course, not everything that happens to us can be looked at that way but as Christians we know that we are in God’s hands and that God uses that kind of thing to help us.  The same way was the idea of making decisions.  God uses the struggle, the real struggle in making decisions to help us have faith because God does show up.  God shows up when we are making decisions.  It doesn’t seem like it sometimes.  I literally have prayed it to God, “Write it in the sky,” and God has never done that.  But in the end He has always showed up or helped with the decision or sometimes I have made decisions I probably shouldn’t have, but he shows up.  So what are we to do?  James says this, “First if any of you lacks wisdom, ask.”  Very simple “ask”.  Ask for wisdom.  Ask God to help you. Now that may be simple enough but you know the first ways we are healed of any problem is to admit that we have a problem.  And that is where the rub is for a lot of us. 

You know I discovered as a parent my children don’t always listen to me.  Do you have that problem, parents?  And very often what they want to do is go out and do it themselves.  When they get hurt or have a problem, then they come.  It seems to be getting better as they get older.  We are all that way.  We want to do it ourselves and then come to God when we absolutely need Him, out there on the porch.  We want to do it ourselves just like our children.  I can’t say to my children, “You don’t listen to me,” without knowing that I didn’t listen to my parents.  I can still hear my mother say, “You would argue with the saints in heaven, boy!”  And she was right.  Of course that was like the pot calling the kettle black but that’s another story. 

Admit and then ask.  You admit that you have a need and then you ask for help.  There are three ways to ask God for help.  The first is through the scriptures.  That may seem obvious but how often do we really read the scriptures. I was talking to someone the other day about how many bibles we actually own.  I happen to have a lot more than probably most, but I know I have at least twenty in the house laying around somehow or another.  And that’s the problem with a lot of our bibles, they’re just lying around.  I wonder why that is true.  I know some of it is that we don’t have time or we just don’t want to read it or whatever.  But I really believe that even for Christians we don’t take the Bible very seriously.  It was written after all by those folks who lived two thousand years ago and they don’t know anything.  They don’t know anything about modern life.  We don’t take the Bible literally, do we?  Some of it we can’t take literally, it’s symbolic or it’s trying to make a point using an exaggeration like Jesus often did.  He would say something like, “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off.”  He doesn’t mean go cut off your hand.  I had a kid ask me that one time and he was serious. Of course not.  But there are things that we take literally.  We ought to take the resurrection literally.  We ought to take the fact that God exists literally.  We ought to take the fact that God is working in our lives literally.  We need to take the Bible seriously.  It actually has things to say to us.  

There are lots of things in the Bible that we blow off because we think that just applies to them.  My example of that today, and there are many, is the idea of living together before marriage.  In my twenty three years as a pastor the many marriages I have done, many of the couples have already been living together. I think that is getting a little better and I am glad.  The common idea today is that, “We need to live together to try it out first.  We need to try each other out first.”  It’s like going and test riding a car.  We need to try it out first.  But you know low and behold the street knowledge is wrong yet again and the Bible is right.  I want you to hear this for those of you who may be laughing at me right now.  I’m not trying to step on your toes, I’m just trying to teach.  It is shown that the divorce rate is much higher for those who live together than for those that don’t.  I want you to hear that.  The common idea is “we’ve got to try it out so that once we get married we will stay together.”  That’s not happening.  The divorce rate is higher for the people who live together than the people that don’t.  I don’t know the total answer to that why that is happening.  I have some ideas but that is another sermon.  I believe that part of it is that we are double minded in this area.  We haven’t made up our mind.  We are standing in the threshold.  Do we walk in or do we walk out. You haven’t made a commitment.  You may think you have but you haven’t. you have left your options open.  And when you do get married suddenly you’re stuck.  Somehow it becomes intolerable.  Another example of the way the Bible gets blown off because it’s the Bible, it was written by all those old fogies, it doesn’t apply to us, but it does.  If you want wisdom then get in touch with the book of wisdom, learn about it, read it, talk about it. 

Another way of asking God is to get together with godly friends.  I want you to have as many friends as you can both in the church and out but I am talking particularly about people who are believers here, people who know the Lord.  Sometimes when we are making decisions they are rather emotional.  Maybe it is really an attractive thing.  You really want to do it.  It may not be a bad thing, it may be a good thing but it may not be the right thing at the time.  You are really invested emotionally.  You need a friend just to say, “settle down and think about it clearly.”  Godly friends who can help you make that decision.  That’s why I believe in small groups.  I believe that we go to our small groups, people who love us, who know us, “What about this?  Help me with this.” I’ll never forget many, many years ago I had a church in West Virginia and I really began to believe that God was calling me away from there, to go back to school in Colorado from West Virginia.  I fought it.  I fought it for months.  You know you have this, “What if?” or “Yea but…” “We don’t have enough money to do that Lord.”  “Yea, but my children are going to get uprooted from all their friends Lord.” “Yea but…” “Yea but…”  The Lord kept saying, “You need to go.” I remember flying out there for an interview to go to this school.  As I was flying back I’m going, “Lord don’t let me get in.  It would solve a lot of problems if you would just have them say ‘no’.  There’s a hundred spaces and there are five hundred people, let the other people go, Lord.”  I got a notice three days later, “You’re in.”  “Okay Lord, lets do something else.”  And on and on it went.  Finally, a friend, the day before I had a long talk with him and he said, “You need to do this.”  And I did and it was one of the best things we’ve ever done.  Decisions are hard.  But friends help you sometimes.  Help you see beyond your own emotions. 

And last but not least, of course, is prayer, prayer with the Lord to help us make that decision.  If you were to ask for one thing in prayer, above anything else, what would it be?  Well there was a man who that question was asked of.  He had everything else he needed but he asked for wisdom.  His name was Solomon.  Solomon could have had anything and the Lord said, “Because you have asked for wisdom and not for riches and power and fame, I’m going to give you all those things anyway.”  But He gave him wisdom.  That’s our prayer. We need to pray for wisdom.  I often challenge people with this, write down what you prayed for and you will find often in a few months you’ll see that your prayers have been answered or the thing has been resolved or you have gotten what you needed.  Often we pray for things and then forget about it or don’t do anything with it and we’ve forgotten we’ve got an answer.  God will answer your prayers.  The reason is because of who God is.  James says, “Ask of God who gives to all generously without finding reproach or finding fault.” 

There are parts of the Bible that I don’t care for.  That’s okay.  There are some parts of the Bible that just don’t do anything for you.  There is one particular book I just dislike totally.  It’s the book of Judges, because it is just so evil. There is so much garbage going on.  When you read it you get depressed.  It’s a bummer of a book but its good instruction, you have to read it, but I don’t like reading it.  I don’t like James either.  James is the older brother of Jesus.  Older siblings, you know how they can be sometimes. James always strikes me as a person who has a list of things you have to do and not do.  I always wondered about his view of God but this verse right here that I like.  The verb in the Greek is He “gives”, it is the idea of giving continuously, that the nature of God is a giver but it is not just simply a giver, he’s a giver always.  The word “giving” there in its form is a giver always.  God is a god that gives continuously.  Then he gives generously and in abundance, then without finding fault.  How many times have I had people say to me, “Oh, God wouldn’t give me anything, I have to clean my act up first.”  If that were true, God would give none of us anything.  How many people I have had say to me, “I’ll come to church when I get my act together” and they never show up. You don’t get your act together and then go to church. You come to church to get your act together.  We are in Christ when we believe in Christ. We are His, we belong to Him for ever and ever.  When we come to God, with warts and all, everything that’s wrong, sometimes there’s more wrong than not wrong, God loves us.  He gives without reproach, generously, continuously. 

We pray to God and believe He will give wisdom because that is his nature, He is a giver.  There is a caveat and you might say, “Ah-ha I knew there was something.”  James goes on to say, “Yes God will give but there must be no doubting.” We have to understand what he means here.  When James says “doubting” here he’s not really referring to intellectual doubt.  We all have intellectual doubt.  We all have times when we doubt things.  Doubt is not always a bad thing.  He’s talking about a very specific kind of doubting.  He’s really talking about a willful doubting.  The kind where we say, “You know I already know the answer but I’m not sure I want to hear it.”  The kind that says, “I know that I’m going to have to invite you in but I’d rather keep you out on the porch.”  It’s that kind of doubt.  The doubting which says, “I really don’t want you that close.”  When we do that, it’s no wonder we’re putting a barrier between us and God. 

How can God answer our prayers when we have the door closed?  How can God answer our prayers when we’re standing in the threshold?  We all are double minded in one way or another.  We all have problems with deciding what we should do.  Maybe for you it’s this idea that you would rather be left alone.  You can be a Christian and still want God to leave you alone.  That kind of comes with the territory.  Maybe you have a habit that you are doing that you know you shouldn’t be doing.  It may be from watching too much TV to more serious things like porn or alcohol or something.  Maybe it’s a lifestyle that you know God would really like to have you change but this is your lifestyle and you are going to live your life the way you want to live it.  Its no wonder God doesn’t always answer our prayers.  He hears our prayers but it’s like there is a barrier between us and Him.  He can’t answer in that way.  God is a gentleman.  God doesn’t always beat down the door and tear down the walls. He waits for us to open to invite Him in.  I will ask you today:  in what area are you double minded? Are you two souled?  That’s the area you need to address.  It’s the area that keeps you from making good decisions if your holding on to. Good decisions are made in the context of God being in the midst of our lives.  Where we’re aware of what God wants and we’re willing to obey.  Are you double minded?  I can’t answer that question for you and your particulars, you have to answer it for yourself in your own life. I would say in most cases all of us have an area of double mindedness, I would just simply ask you to ask God what that area is.  Let His light shine on you.  Let His presence overcome.  God loves you.  God is out to help you.  He is a giver continuously and generously.  He will not find fault.

Let us pray.