I have been dealing with intense headaches for years and have experimented with all sorts of cures and solutions for dealing with the strange ailment. While Christmas shopping with my wife last December, she noticed that the florescent lights in stores like Sam’s Club or Walmart seem to trigger my headache symptoms. I researched the phenomena and found that it isn’t uncommon for light to cause headaches, particularly florescent lights. I quickly picked up various types of filtering glasses, including blue light and florescent light filtering lenses. I have been pleasantly surprised to discover that the glasses have helped cut back on my problem. The odd result of this discovery is that I now sometimes carry around several different types of glasses to change between depending on the situation I am in. In particular, I attend a couple of men’s Bible studies in which I wear my reading glasses to read and change to my rose-colored-lensed florescent light filtering glasses to look around and talk to people. I find myself a bit self conscious about how weird it is that I am changing glasses to talk or read.
A few weeks ago, while studying Paul’s instructions for how believers are to deal with the world around them, it occurred to me that many followers of Jesus do the same thing. They change the lenses through which they look at the world based on the situation they are in. There are certain settings where they employ their “look at the world with the mind of Jesus” glasses and others where they slip on their “political party glasses” or their “what I want is what is right worldview” or maybe their “double life” disguise glasses where they struggle with a hidden sin in private but wear incognito disguise glasses in public.
The reality is that I need to switch lenses in my day to day life because I can’t read small print as I age and headaches from lights make my life miserable. These are legitimate reasons to change the way I look at the world. However, Paul directs believers to approach the world with the “mind of Christ” as our way of thinking things through. The scriptures are our measure of true/‘false or right/wrong. However, sometimes we want to put those things aside because they don’t fit our political preferences or they get in the way of us living the way we want to live. There are times when our business interests aren’t well served by obedience to Christ or honesty is too terrifying to engage in. In those instances, it’s tempting to change our worldview to one more amenable to our preferences in the moment.
The book of James calls this approach to the world being “double-minded.” The idea is that believers are learning to think with the mind of Christ, but at times, fall into thinking with a mind bound to the sinful nature. Those two worldviews cannot live in harmony and will only produce a life of divided loyalty and confusion. It’s easy to see this tendency in others, but vital that we search for it in ourselves constantly. The difficult thing about double-mindedness is that it is terribly difficult to see in our own lives, largely because we justify it to ourselves, explaining why it’s the sensible thing to do or the only right choice or just pretending that we are being consistent. John Flavel, a Puritan preacher, once said, “It is easier to cry against one-thousand sins of others than to kill one of your own.” The first step in the labor of killing our own double-mindedness is recognizing it by shining the light of day on it. We must learn to train our eyes and mind to view the world through the mindset given to us in the word and by the Savior.
