Double-mindedness

I have your Bibles with you today. Turn with me if you would to 1 Samuel 27 and I'm going to start off with verses 1-4.

Bow with me as we go to our Lord in prayer. Heavenly Father, 1 Samuel 27 presents us with a huge frustration. David is waffling. He's compromising.

He's being double-minded. When David defeated Goliath, we cheered. When David refused to fight Saul, we marveled.

When David listened to Abigail and backed off and didn't kill her sorry husband, we smiled. But in this passage, we feel let down. We expected better of David than this. He's compromising. He's floundering. He's acting faithless. Lord, we've kind of made a hero out of David. Now he's letting us down.

Lord, I think there's a lesson here. David should not be our hero. Jesus should be. And the truth of the matter is we're more like David than we are like Jesus. We're faithful than we're not. We're strong than we're weak. We're uncompromising than we're compromising. We hate sin than we secretly love it. What we need is what David needed.

And that is a deeper, sweeter, more genuine dependence on you. Lord, please use this story to drive double-mindedness out of our hearts and make us like Christ. Help me to preach it correctly this morning. Keep my lips from error. It's in Jesus' precious and holy name that I pray. Amen.

You may be seated. In the epistle of James chapter 1 verses 5 through 8, James says this, If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God that giveth to all men liberally and upbraideth not, and it shall be given him. But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea, driven with the wind and tossed. For let not that man think that he shall receive anything of the Lord. A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. James, the half-brother of the Lord Jesus Christ, the pastor of the first church in Jerusalem, is telling us that double-mindedness is a form of insanity.

It creates such confusion in the hearts of God's people that it causes them to go off in all kinds of different directions. What is double-mindedness? Double-mindedness is an attempt to hold on to serve two masters at the same time. It is an attempt for a Christian to hold on to Christ with one hand and hold on to the world with the other.

It's the idea that we can accept and love the principles of God's Word and yet at the very same time be controlled by the philosophies of the world. James said that the double-minded man is unstable in all of his ways. What does he mean by that? He means that the double-minded man is always sitting on the fence. He has trouble making decisions. He's always waffling on those decisions and he feels pulled apart on the inside.

He's scared to make decisions. Just about anybody can influence him wrongly if they just push him hard enough. In the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew 6, verses 22-24, Jesus gave us some instruction how to defeat double-mindedness. He said this, The eye is the lamp of the body, so if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money. The key to defeating double-mindedness is developing a single eye and a determination not to serve two masters.

I think probably one of the greatest examples that we have in Scripture of a single eye is Daniel. Now Daniel, if you go back to when he was a teenager, had been appointed by the governors and the high-ups in the Babylonian government to come in and to be trained by their greatest teachers, by their most powerful educators. And so Daniel, the first night that he went to the University of Babylon, he comes in and they are taken to the dining hall. And so they bring Daniel in, they sit him down, and they bring all these finest wines before him.

And they bring all this rich, fatty, cholesterol-filled food. And Daniel says, no, I don't want that. He says, just bring me water and some simple vegetables and that will do for me. Now how did Daniel defeat that temptation? Daniel chapter 1 verse 8 tells us. It says that he purposed in his heart beforehand that he would not disobey the dietary laws that were given to him in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. So because he had purposed in his heart, he didn't even have to think about how he was going to act. He knew how he was going to act almost reflexively or instinctively. His heart was established. There was a resoluteness in his thinking.

And the result of that was that there was no instability. Now one of the best examples of a double-minded person in Scripture is found in the person, a prophet of God whose name was Balaam. Balaam knew what the Word of God said. Balaam knew what God wanted him to do.

He knew what was right to do. But Balaam had a problem. He loved money. And King Balak of Moab came to him and said, I will give you all kinds of financial remuneration if you just curse Israel as a prophet of God. Balaam knew that was wrong. He knew that was something he should not do.

But he wanted that money so bad that it was tearing him up on the inside. How did God deal with that? God sent a donkey. And the donkey spoke and rebuked Balaam and straightened out this prophet.

I love to read that story. Balaam is riding down a very narrow road on this donkey. There are two stone walls on the side of the road. And so it's very hard to turn around. And as they're riding all of a sudden the donkey stops and he won't move. What Balaam can't see is that right in front of them there's an angel of the Lord with his sword drawn. The donkey can see it. And so the donkey knows if he goes one step further the angel of the Lord will kill Balaam and that will be it. Well Balaam can't see any of that so he's mad at the donkey. He begins to yell at the donkey. And so what are you doing you stubborn rascal? And then he starts to hit him.

And he gives him a great thrashing. Finally the Lord opens the donkey's mouth and the donkey speaks to Balaam and rebukes the prophet. Now I know donkeys don't talk. I know that some people look at this and say that's got to be a fairy tale. Listen, if the God that we serve is really and truly the creator of the universe, if he was able to speak the universe into existence ex nihilo, that means out of nothing, in just a second of time, do you think it was difficult for God to open the mouth of a donkey to straighten out one of his prophets?

I don't think that was a problem at all. God was so opposed to Balaam's double-mindedness that he used the words of an animal to speak to Balaam's heart to straighten him out. Double-mindedness. I'll tell you God hates it with a passion. It's an enemy of the faith. It's a tool of Satan.

It's a weapon of the flesh. And if we yield to it, we are always headed to destruction. Be well aware of this. Double-mindedness is not just a problem with the superficial surface Christians. This particular evil, double-mindedness, can attack the very greatest of God's servants. We see it right here in this story. Here's David. Here's a man after God's own heart.

The apple of God's eye. And he is a victim of double-mindedness. Now this was the situation. King Saul had put a bounty on David's life. He was chasing him all over Israel, trying to kill him, trying to take his life. Two times God has put David in a situation where he could very easily have taken Saul's life. He could have done that, but he refuses to do it. He says, I will not lift my hand against God's anointed.

And on those two occasions, the Lord used that and it just broke Saul down. When he saw the compassionate love that David had, he said to David, I have sinned. I have done wrong before you. You don't have to worry about me anymore. I'm not going to harm you. I will not kill you.

I will not chase you any longer. Saul lied. For when paranoia hit him again, he went right after David and was continuing to chase him. As we enter into chapter 27, we see this young man, David, who is mentally, physically, and emotionally just worn to a frazzle. He's tired of running. He's tired of being misunderstood.

He's tired of doing right and being kicked for it. Now that's the situation we're in as we enter into 1 Samuel chapter 27. And I wanted to share with you today five points concerning double-mindedness. The first one that I want us to look at is a cause of double-mindedness, and that is fear.

Now notice I said a cause of double-mindedness, not the cause of double-mindedness, for there are a lot of different causes for double-mindedness. I look at Balaam. The reason he was double-minded was greed. I look at Samson. The reason he was double-minded was lust. I look at James and John.

The reason that they were double-minded was because of pride. But David's cause for double-mindedness was fear. Now look at the first part of verse 1 once again. And David said in his heart, Now I shall perish someday by the hand of Saul. Roger Ellsworth has some great insight here.

Listen to what he said. I could well imagine Saul saying, Now I shall perish someday by the hand of David. But in the light of all that God has done for David, another thing I find it impossible to imagine is David is saying he would perish at the hand of Saul. If I may picture it this way, David had two books in his hands. One was the book of God's promise that he would indeed become king of Israel, a book that has been abundantly confirmed.

The other was the book of his own heart, which told him the promise would not be fulfilled. David chose to read the book of his heart. David certainly was not the only one to battle with this tendency. All Christians often find themselves inclined to rely on what their hearts say instead of relying on what the Word of God says. Now listen, did God tell David that Saul was going to kill him?

Absolutely not. God told David that he was going to be the next king of Israel. Why doesn't David believe God? Because David is tired.

He's worn out. He was beaten down emotionally. And what God had said would happen and what he's actually seeing with his eyes looked like two totally different things. And that confusion led to unbelief. Unbelief led to double-mindedness. Double-mindedness led to fear.

Now let me share this with you. I think this is important to go back and look at some others, children of God that had the same problem. I think about Abraham. What is Abraham called? What do we call him?

We call him the father of faith. And if you remember, what did Abraham do when famine hit the land of Canaan? He grabbed his family, grabbed his stuff, and he left Canaan immediately. God told him not to. And he went all the way down to Egypt. Why did he do that? Because he wasn't trusting God to provide for him. He also did a terrible thing to his wife. He said to his wife Sarah, Sarah, I want you to tell the people when we get down to Egypt that you're my sister, not that you're my husband.

Because you're so beautiful, they may want you and they may kill me to get to you. So she obeyed him. And what happened, the king of Egypt took her into his home and then was going to make her part of his harem and would have if God hadn't stopped it. He also took with him his nephew. His nephew's name was Lot. And the scripture tells us that Lot got down into Egypt. He looked at it and he loved it.

For it was the first real taste of the world that he had gotten. And so they decided to distribute the land. And Abraham said, what land do you want? The scripture says that Lot lifted up his eyes. He looked at Sodom.

Sodom was the most wicked city on the face of the earth. And he said, I like that. And let me tell you why he said, I like that.

He said, I like that because it looks like Egypt. And so he moved his family into Sodom. And what happened? He ruined his testimony.

He destroyed his family. And he was filled, his heart was filled with vexation for the rest of his life. And it all happened because of Abraham's fear. We as 21st century Christians have the idea that fear is one of the little problems in our life. That it's just a kind of a little sin that God overlooks.

Not really a big deal. We see fear as a weakness, not really a sin. God doesn't see it that way. In Revelation chapter 21 verse 8 the scripture gives us a list of sins that are horrible sins that if we engage ourselves in and they become part of our life and they control us then those who do these things, the scripture says, will be cast into the burning lake of fire. And the list mentions people like murderers and whoremongers and sorcerers and idolaters. But the first one on that list is the fearful.

That which we call a weakness, God calls an abomination. Why is fear such a big deal? Because fear leads to double-mindedness.

Double-minded people are unstable in all their ways and are useless to the kingdom of God. Now how can we defeat fear? Two ways. Number one, by love. Number two, by faith. The scripture says in 1 John chapter 4 verse 18 that perfect love casteth out fear. If Abraham had loved his wife as he should have then he never would have put her in that danger. The love would have defeated the fear. If David had focused his love on God during this time then God would have driven the fear from his heart. Second, we defeat fear by faith.

Faith in the promises of God's word. Did you realize there are 365 commands in the scripture that we are not to fear? That's a different command from the scripture every single day of the year that we don't have to fear because our God is God. Secondly, the fruit of double-mindedness is flight.

Flight. Look at the second part of verse 1. There is nothing better for me than I should escape to the land of the Philistines.

Then Saul will despair of seeking me any longer within the borders of Israel and I shall escape out of his hand. Now what did David do? David ran.

He took flight and he went to the enemy of the Philistines and he asked permission from King Achish to live with them. Now why in the world did he do that? He did that because of pressure.

There was pressure on him so great that he felt like he just could not handle it any longer. Folks, being godly is no easy task. The world doesn't have to deal with a lot of the things that we have to deal with every day. Because we as Christians, we live our lives in a fishbowl. The world is always looking at us, wondering if we are going to do something wrong. And then if we appear to do something wrong, the world is going to jump on that and call us a hypocrite. That's okay. That's part of the cost of being a Christian.

It's part of what it means that as you come to Christ you die to self. That's part of that. The world watches to see if they can find any hint of hypocrisy in us. And we need to say, that's okay. Let me be real.

Let me be transparent. And let me fight hypocrisy with everything in me. The people of Israel were beating poor David to death. Saul and his army were chasing him. People like Nabal were accusing him of being a traitor. It didn't matter what David did, somebody was not going to like it.

And David dealt with it and dealt with it and dealt with it until finally something snapped. And he said, I'll just go and live with the Philistines. He said, they may be a bunch of godless fools, but at least they won't be busting my chops all the time.

He said, that's what I'll do. Isn't it pitiful? But I'll tell you the truth, Christians sometimes can be heartless. I remember several decades ago now, I was in a protest at an abortion clinic. And we were carrying signs and speaking to girls that were going to go in there to get an abortion, trying to get them to stop giving out gospel tracts and doing that. Some of the people that are here right now are engaged in that same kind of ministry. And I praise God for you.

Keep doing that. What a great and godly thing it is to take a strong stance like that against abortion. Let me tell you something bad that happened that particular day. There was a young girl that had gone into the abortion clinic before we got there. And she's about probably 16. She came out of the abortion clinic. She started walking down the steps and she'd had the abortion and she was white as a sheet. Her hands and body were shaking. She looked like she was going to get sick on her stomach.

And one of the guys that was there in the protest threw his sign down and he ran over to this girl. And his face was red as a bee. He got right in her face and started screaming at her. And I thought he was going to hit her. And all this was going on. And finally he just pointed his finger in her face and said, God has a place called hell for people like you.

And he said, you're nothing but a stinking murderer. And that girl just absolutely lost it. I mean she was bawling. People came up to try to comfort her and she just pushed everybody away and ran off crying like a baby. I couldn't believe that had happened. This was one of the ugliest, it was one of the most mean-spirited things that I had ever seen.

There was nothing about it that looked like Jesus. And I wondered, where's that girl going to go? Is she going to go back to her parents? Parents probably didn't even know she was expecting. Probably she's not going to go to them. Is she going to go to the church?

Probably not. She thinks the people of God hate her. That's a little of what David is feeling. He felt safer with the enemy than he did with the people of God because he felt like he couldn't trust them.

The third point is the trap of double-mindedness and that is friends. Look at verse 3. And David lived with Achish at Gath, he and his men, every man with his household, and David with his two wives, Ahinoam of Jezreel and Abigail of Carmel, Nabal's wife. David's men were right there at his side. He has two of his wives that are with him and they are giving him emotional support during this.

Sometimes well-meaning friends will encourage you to be double-minded because they don't have the right, correct, godly convictions either. I remember when I was in college, I went one Sunday morning to North Anderson Baptist Church and the pastor there is David Wilson. He later on came to Charlotte and he planted a church not too far from us and planted that church and Charlie Robinson, Trudy Robinson went to that church. They love David Wilson. He's just a great man of God.

I love him too. And he's still living and getting to be an older man now but just a wonderful, wonderful man of God. But I went to the church that morning and the next night on Monday night he came to visit. He came with a purpose and that was to witness to me. He sat down in my living room with me and he shared the gospel and then he said to me, Doug, if you don't repent of your sins and trust Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, then you're going to spend a Christless eternity. And I didn't do anything that night. He got up and finally left and I can remember just feeling this unbelievable conviction.

Well, I had a friend and I knew that he'd be in the library at that time so I went immediately to the library to talk to my friend and I told him what had happened. I said, what do you think about that? He said, oh, don't worry about that guy. He said, don't worry about him.

He said, Doug, he said, let me ask you something. He said, do you believe that Jesus died on a cross? I said, yeah. He said, do you believe that Jesus rose from the dead? I said, oh, yeah. He said, that's all that's required. Don't worry about it.

Just let it go. And I can remember kind of breathing a sigh of relief and thinking, well, that pastor was just being a little fanatical. I had what James Kennedy calls a demon theology. And demon theology is found in James chapter 2 verse 19.

It says, thou believeth in one God, thou doest well, the demons also believe and tremble. Two months after that, Chip Sloan came down to my house, shared the gospel with me, and the Lord dealt with my heart that night after I went back home. I got on my face before God, trusted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. I went to Chip the next day, told him what had happened.

We rejoiced together. He said, Doug, where are you going to go to church? And I said, I have no doubt of where I'm going to church. I said, I'm going to North Anderson Baptist. He said, why? I said, I'm going to that church because David Wilson's there, and David Wilson will tell me the truth no matter what.

Wrong friends, even well-meaning friends, can be a trap that leads to double-mindedness. The fourth point I want to make is the lure of double-mindedness, and that is freedom. Look at verse 5. Then David said to Achish, If I have found favor in your eyes, let a place be given me, and one of the country towns, that I may dwell there.

For why should your servant dwell in the royal city with you? The city of Ziklag had been conquered by Joshua years before this, but then after a couple of centuries, Philistines began to move into that area, and they didn't actually legally take it, but they were controlling that area, and they were the ones that were running the show in Ziklag. Folks, this is not just history, but this is a prophetic picture of what can happen to us. The Lord bought us with a price, and that price was the shed blood of Jesus Christ, and because of that, we belong to Him. He has set the captive free, but how often through intentional sin do we let Satan reign over certain areas in our lives? That's why Paul said in Ephesians 4-27, Give no place to the devil.

Listen to Alan Redpath's words concerning this land that David had settled down on. He said this, God forbid that as I get older in my Christian life, that I should settle down like that, to live with some area of my life which God has possessed, yet Satan is overcome, and I have no desire to drive him out. God forbid that I should allow him to conquer in one realm after another and say, Well, I'm saved anyway.

I'm under the blood. If the devil recaptures a bit of that territory, does it really matter? Perish the thought.

Yes, it matters. Isn't it amazing what Satan can do to our thinking? We look at some teenager today that's taking his first hit of marijuana, thinking, Man, this is going to be freedom, not realizing it could lead him to all kinds of paranoia, not realizing that marijuana is a gateway drug to some of the tougher, more hard drugs like cocaine and heroin. I think of the little boy who gets his first glimpse of a pornographic magazine. We say, Oh, that's okay. Everybody does that.

It's just a little trivial thing. How many rapists, how many sex offenders got their start that very same way? And how many marriages are absolutely destroyed because the wife can't measure up to the girl in the magazine or the woman on the video? What the world calls freedom, God calls bondage. And that type of pursuit of freedom always leads to double-mindedness.

The last thing I want to mention is the result of double-mindedness, and that is failure. Look at verse 12. And Achish trusted David, thinking, He has made himself an utter stench to his people Israel, therefore he shall always be my servant. David was not fighting the Israelites, but he was fighting under the rule of Achish, the king of Gath, the Philistine king. And he wouldn't go out and fight against his own people, but he would go and fight other tribes and other nations. Then he'd come back and he'd tell Achish that he was fighting against Israel. So the people of Israel were looking at him, wondering where he stood.

The Philistines were looking at him, wondering where he really stood. And there was great confusion in everybody's mind, because David was being so double-minded that it was looking to everybody like he was an absolute failure. That's not what God called David to do. God said to David, you will be the next king of Israel. And this trial that David was going through here was not a trial to make him fold, it was a trial to make him tough.

It's a shame we have to end here, but this is not the end of the story. David was woken up by the Lord. God woke David out of his lethargy and brought David once again to have a single eye, a single mind, and an established heart.

But all this time, until the time that he gets there, all this time, he's living in absolute frustration. Let me ask you something. Are you living with double-mindedness today? I think in some areas, for every single person in here, we have times of double-mindedness. But it needs to be repented of. Are you trying to hold Jesus in one hand and the world in the other?

If so, there will never be genuine joy. It is Christian insanity, and the price is much too high to pay. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, you said in your Word that the double-minded man is unstable in all of his ways and will receive nothing from God. Help us to see what double-mindedness did to David's heart so that we can run from it, so that we can fight it with a vengeance.

Lord, we have an election this week. Give us guidance and help us to trust you. Our culture is fighting against you, and the church's compromise is aiding their fight.

Lord, we pray for our leaders. Save those who don't know you. Give spiritual resolve to those who do know you. And may you bring revival to the church and salvation to the unsaved in this land. We thank you for the spiritual insight that you gave to our forefathers. Would you have mercy on us and restore that insight? As we prepare to celebrate now with the Lord's Supper, would you bless us with your presence, be exalted through our worship, for it is in the precious and holy name of Jesus that we pray. Amen.