Among the pearls of wisdom found in the book of Proverbs is the advice to not pester our neighbour too much with our presence. It seems there’s no danger of that happening today: most of us don’t even know our neighbor’s names. People live next to each other for years and never communicate for a minute. Nevertheless, there’s a principle here:
Withdraw thy foot from thy neighbour’s house; lest he be weary of thee, and so hate thee (Proverbs 25:17 KJV).
Isn’t it interesting that you can at the same time want your foot to go one way and yet make it go another. You can want to do something and yet not do it. You can not want to do something, but make yourself do it anyway. The Proverbs are all about resisting your own weaknesses and doing something better instead.
TWO MINDS
You can even control what you think. You have the power to tell yourself what to think and what not to think. Failure to do this is what leads some people down a path to disaster, first for others, and finally for the one failing to control his thinking. This is why our culture needs to encourage personal responsibility in children from the earliest age. Our thoughts are sometimes far out of line with responsible living, and certainly with a godly life.
This apparent double-mindedness occurs for a variety of reasons, good and bad, but the point is that we’re capable of controlling our impulses, our drives and our decisions. Our Creator gave us the ability to reason, to prefer, and to have a conscience in the things which may affect others or ourselves negatively.
However, it’s the motivation to direct our drives, and the object of our personal philosophy which is most important. Are we re-directing our foot simply so we don’t get into trouble? Are we shaping our lives to meet a goal which is narcissistic, unrealistic or downright sinful? In this case there’s a deep need for more worthwhile and purer motivation.
James warned of the bad kind of double-mindedness in those who profess faith, in which we can be in one moment living in faith and obedience, and in the next acting like hypocrites and failing to trust. He was counselling us to walk perpetually in faith and obedience (James 1:8).
We live in a time when that innate sense of conscience, built into every human, is being negated and ignored. It’s a defining sign of our times, and the reason for immorality, adultery, violence and all kinds of evil. This is what happens when people become divorced from their own God-given self-control-and so from God, and instead are determined to follow selfish and base impulses.
MISGUIDED
Paul warned of people following the lies of godless philosophies:
Now the Spirit]expressly says that in latter times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons, speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their own conscience seared with a hot iron (1 Timothy 4:1-2NKJV).
When we routinely ignore our conscience, it becomes “seared”: burned and ineffective.
THE ANIMAL IN ALL OF US
Asaph noted that when he was failing to trust in God, he became in his attitude more like an animal, following feelings and urges only:
When my heart was grieved
and my spirit embittered,
I was senseless and ignorant;
I was a brute beast before you (Psalm 73:21-22).
YOUR POTENTIAL
The unbeliever may or may not be living by that natural sense of reason, right and wrong, but he or she is still unable to follow the ways of God from his heart, were he even to know what those ways are. When we come to faith in Jesus Christ and in his gospel, we’re given a new heart-one which not only is in contact with our innate conscience but which is open to the conscience and the will of God. Paul poetically described this blessing and new life:
Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation (Colossians 1:21-22).
Paul suggested that this reconciliation is conditional:
“… if you continue in your faith, established and firm, and do not move from the hope held out in the gospel” (verse 23).
The decision to trust and obey is ours, every day. That’s not to say that we can lose and regain salvation over and over-it means that the evidence of genuine faith is in the way we live as a pattern and a commitment. We pray for forgiveness-daily-and God is faithful to forgive us, if we mean it.
THE EXAMPLE OF JESUS
Jesus Christ demonstrated his obedience, love and trust daily also, but particularly at Gethsemane. There He was tested and faced with the spectre of execution. Even He had a choice here. He could have gone either way, but He committed himself to the will of the Father. He had the choice to obey or to give in to self:
“Father, if it is Your will, take this cup away from Me; nevertheless not My will, but Yours, be done” (Luke 22:42).
Jesus went to the cross willingly, in obedience to the Father, overcoming his own fear of the suffering involved. In a far smaller way we daily face decisions. Our fleshly nature-the brute beast in us-wants to go one way, but the will and wisdom of our God is telling us to go another. Amazingly, we can view the choices in our mind, and despite having an urge to go one way, we can tell ourselves, with the help of God’s indwelling Spirit, to go the other. Only by “walking in the Spirit”, or by walking hourly with our God, can we hope to trust and obey, and to overcome self.
Fuel for Faith, Food for Thought 