The Decision You Make Twice

Owen prays about everything, and he decides everything on a spreadsheet, and it took him eleven years to notice that these were two separate activities.

He is not a cynical man. This is not a story about somebody going through the motions. He prays properly, on his own, early, with the door shut, and he brings it all: the work, the house, the boy who is struggling, the decision that is coming. He asks God plainly and he waits, and sometimes he gets something and sometimes he does not, and he keeps a small notebook.

And then, later in the same week, he opens a file and he decides.

The file is where it actually happens. That is the thing he saw. Whatever comes up in the notebook is real to him and he is not pretending, but the decision gets made in the file, by a man with columns, in a completely different register, using a completely different set of considerations, and the two have never once been introduced.

He found this out because his wife asked him a straightforward question about a choice he had made, and he heard himself answer it twice.

He gave her the file answer first, because that was the real one, and it was clear and it had reasons in it. And then, about two minutes later, he found himself adding something about having prayed about it, and he heard the join, and the join was audible.

They were not the same answer. They had arrived at the same place, roughly, this time, but they were not the same answer, and he could not have told you how the second one had contributed to the first.

He went for a walk after that.

Now hear the important thing, before you start being hard on yourself.

Owen is not a hypocrite. He was not performing piety in that kitchen. He genuinely prayed and he genuinely decided, and if you asked him which one he trusted he would say God without hesitating and he would be telling the truth about what he believes.

That is exactly the trouble. He believes one thing and he runs another, and the running one is not a rival faith. It is not a false god with a temple. It is a habit of mind that was there long before he came to Christ and that has never been asked to leave, because it was never once identified as a thing that was staying.

You have your own version of this. There is a place where you pray, and there is a place where you decide, and they are not the same place, and you have never sat down and worked out which one has been in charge.

Nobody is calling you two faced. That is not what this is.

There are simply two answers, and only one of them has ever actually been used.

He does not say it is difficult. He says it cannot be done.

Everybody knows this verse and almost nobody hears how absolute it is.

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.Matthew 6:24

He does not say it is unwise. He does not say it is exhausting, though it is. He says cannot. It is not a warning about a bad arrangement, it is a statement that the arrangement does not exist and never has, in the same way that a square circle does not exist.

Which means, and this is the freeing part, that Owen has not been serving two masters for eleven years. Nobody has. What he has been doing is serving one and maintaining a fiction about the other, and the fiction is where all the tiredness comes from.

Divided service is not half service. That is the mistake everybody makes. It is not that you have been giving God fifty per cent and the file fifty per cent. It is that the file has been deciding, and God has been consulted, and the effort of holding those two things in a shape that looks like one thing is a full time job that nobody is paying you for.

And hear what is already true of you standing there. You are not divided at the root. That is not my encouragement, it is what the written word says: you have been given one heart and one way, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a man on a walk who has just heard the join in his own sentence.

And the exhaustion you have been carrying is not spiritual failure. It is the cost of maintaining something that was never real. The word says His yoke is easy and His burden is light, and the Spirit is the one who lets a person feel the difference between a burden that fits and a fiction that has to be held up.

Nobody is coming for your spreadsheet

Now I want to be very plain, because this is where a message like this usually goes wrong and tells somebody to be irresponsible in the name of faith.

Nobody here is telling you to stop using the file. Wisdom is not the rival. Counting the cost is a thing Jesus Himself recommended in as many words, and the man who builds without checking whether he can finish is held up in the Gospels as a warning and not as an example. A spreadsheet is not mammon. A spreadsheet is arithmetic, and arithmetic is a gift.

And nobody here is telling you that having money, or being careful with it, puts you further away from God. It does not, and the opposite error does just as much harm: a person who becomes poor on purpose to prove something has still made the amount the point, and the amount is not the point and never was.

The question is not whether you use the file.

The question is which one of them is the master and which one is the tool, because one of them is each, and the arrangement where they are both masters has never existed.

So hear this. You already have one Master. Not once you have sorted the process out, and not once you pray better: the word says you are not your own, you were bought at a price, and it is the Spirit who bears witness with your spirit that this is already the case rather than a target to reach.

And the other one was never paying you anyway. It has never kept anybody. The written word says riches make themselves wings and fly away, and the Spirit is entirely able to make a man feel the truth of that without taking a single thing off him to prove it.