GUARDING THE GATES
89
to your taxi driver! He was right; you can’t go out with two girls at the same time and get away with it for long. My first date wondered why she was home before eight, and the second girl wondered why the taxi driver kept laughing to himself and winking at me the whole way to the restaurant. Both girls smelled a rat; and neither girl ever went out with me again. You can’t date two girls at the same time and get away with it. The Bible says you can’t serve two masters, either. It will catch up with you. When it does, you will discover it was a very expensive mistake. If you dance at the devil’s party, be certain that he’s going to make you pay the cover charge. Back in 1982 the ABC evening news ran a story about a strange work of art that had gone on display at a prominent gallery. It was a chair with a loaded shotgun attached and pointed to it. The gun was connected to a timer that was programmed to go off at random some time in the next 100 years. Visitors were invited to sit in the chair for one full minute and stare down the barrel of the gun, taking the chance that it might go off. It’s crazy, right? You would like to think that nobody is dumb enough to gamble with his or her life for no good reason. However, when the exhibit opened there was a line-up of thrill-seekers several blocks long. Unfortunately, the same thrill-seeking tendency seems to be true of many Christians. After living through all the heartache and pain the devil has brought to our world, you’d think that no Christian would be willing or dumb enough to go and play in the devil’s backyard; but there they are––splashing in his pool. They brush aside the still small voice of the Holy Spirit. They gamble that the spiritual gun won’t go off when it’s their turn to sit in the chair, choosing to allow their minds to be pulled in two directions. This, in spite of the fact that the apostle James warns that a “double minded man is unstable in all his ways” (James 1:8). In others words, if you load your mind with all sorts of conflicting information, it will become unstable. Count on it; it’s a spiritual law. You simply can’t have the world and still have Jesus. “Don’t you know,” warns James, “that friendship with the world is enmity with God?” (James 4:4) You have got to choose. Look at what the Bible says: