Two Answers, One Man

Karim has two answers for the same question, and he can tell in under a second which one a room wants.

It is not a lie in either direction. That is what makes it so hard to put down. Both answers are true things he actually thinks. One of them is truer on a Sunday and one of them is truer on a Thursday, and both of them come out of his own mouth in his own voice, and neither has ever once been rehearsed.

The question, if you want it, is the ordinary one. What are you going to do about the thing.

In one room he says the answer that trusts God. He means it. He is not performing for anybody, and if you knew him you would know that he is the last man in that building to say a religious thing he does not believe.

In the other room he says the answer that has numbers in it and a fallback and a date. He means that too. It is careful and it is competent and it is the reason people bring him difficult problems.

He has never once given both answers in the same room.

He noticed on a Friday afternoon, driving between the two, and what he noticed was not guilt. It was tiredness. A specific kind of tiredness that he has carried for so long he had stopped attributing it to anything, the way you stop noticing a bag until somebody takes it off you.

He was tired of the change. Not of either room. Of the changing.

And sitting in that car he asked himself a question that had never occurred to him in eleven years, which was: which one of those two men is me?

He could not answer it. That is the honest report. He sat there with the engine running and he genuinely could not say.

Now hear the thing I want said before anything else, because a good man will start hitting himself here.

Karim is not a hypocrite. He is not two faced. Nobody in either of those rooms is being deceived, and if you brought the two rooms together most of the people in them would be mildly surprised and then get on with their day.

What is happening is not duplicity. It is division, and they are not the same thing at all. Duplicity is a man showing two faces on purpose to get something. Division is a man who has never been asked to reconcile two true things about himself, and who has quietly built two houses rather than doing the harder work of building one.

You have your own version. There is a question you answer differently depending on the room, and both answers are yours, and you could not tell me on the spot which one you would land on if the rooms were merged.

Nobody is calling you a fraud. Not one word of this is that.

But you are tired, and it is worth knowing exactly what has been costing you.

The word is not "wicked", it is "unstable"

There is a line in James that people quote as a rebuke and that is actually a diagnosis.

A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.James 1:8

Read the two halves. Double minded is the condition. Unstable is the symptom. And instability is not a moral word, it is a structural one: it is what a thing does when it is built on two footings that move independently, and no amount of effort by the building will fix it, because the problem is underneath.

He does not say a double minded man is a liar. He says he cannot stand still.

That is the tiredness in the car. It is not conscience and it is not conviction. It is the ordinary exhaustion of a structure holding itself together across a seam.

And now hear what is already settled over you. You are not double minded at the root. That is not my kindness: the written word says God gives one heart and one way to those who are His, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a man sitting in a car with the engine running.

And you have not been serving two masters. Nobody ever has. Jesus said plainly that it cannot be done, and He was not describing a difficult achievement, He was describing something that does not exist. So the honest account of your last eleven years is not that you gave half to God. It is that one of them has been deciding, and the other has been consulted, and the effort of holding those two together in a shape that looks like one man is the whole of what has been tiring you out.

Nobody is coming for your competence

Now I am going to be very clear, because this is where a message like this starts asking a man to be foolish in the name of faith.

Nobody here is telling you to stop giving the careful answer. Numbers, fallbacks and dates are not the rival. Jesus Himself pointed at a man who started building without checking whether he could finish, and He did not hold him up as a model of trust, He held him up as a warning. Counting is not the opposite of faith. Counting is often what faith uses.

And nobody is telling you that having means, or being good with them, sets you further from God. It does not. The mirror error does exactly as much damage: a man who makes himself poor on purpose to prove a point has made the amount the center of the story again, and the amount was never the center.

The question was never whether you give the careful answer.

The question is which of the two gets to decide who you are, because one of them does, and the arrangement in which they both do has never once existed anywhere.

And you already have one Master. Not once the rooms are reconciled and not once you have worked out what to say: the word says you are not your own, you were bought at a price, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit that this is a fact rather than a target.

And the other one has never paid a wage. It has never kept anybody, not one person, not once. The written word says riches make themselves wings and fly away, and it is the Spirit who lets a man feel the truth of that without a single thing being taken off him to demonstrate it.