Since the election I have heard a lot things being said by folks who make the news that leads me to believe they are conflicted with double-mindedness. We are told one thing and then we hear the same person denying they said it in the first place. Or we have been told one thing and the person then says something different at a different time in the same day. This is what is referred to as being double-minded.
One of many examples of double-mindedness found this week in the news is Vietnam-era radical and terrorist, Bill Ayers, professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In an interview Friday morning on ABC's "Good Morning America," Ayers distanced himself from President-elect Barrack Hussein Obama. Ayers said — for example — the two didn't even meet before Ayers hosted an event in 2001 at his home for Obama when Obama was running for his first public office in the Illinois State Senate. Ayers says he knows President-elect Obama no better than thousands of other people in Chicago.
In the new release of his 2001 memoir 'Fugitive Days,' an afterword Ayers refers to the two (He and Obama) as "neighbors and family friends."
Ayers was a prominent member of the Weather Underground, that bombed the Capitol, the Pentagon and the New York City Police Department. He and his wife were arrested, then spent a decade on the lam, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
Ayers served alongside Obama between December 1999 and December 2002 on the board of the not-for-profit Woods Fund of Chicago. That board met four times a year, and members would see each other at occasional dinners the group hosted.
Ayers and Obama also interacted occasionally in their roles with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, a not-for-profit group charged with spending tens of millions of dollars it obtained through its affiliation with a school-improvement foundation created by late Ambassador Walter H. Annenberg. Obama chaired the Chicago Annenberg Challenge's board of directors. Ayers served on the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, which made recommendations to the board on which organizations should get grants. The groups worked on school-reform efforts between 1995 and 2000.
One other interesting comment by Ayers on Friday's morning news show interview is his denial he was a domestic terrorist. Ayers stated that, "It's not terrorism because it doesn't target people, to kill or injure."
This seems to be the season for a lot of double-mindedness. We are warned by Paul in 2 Timothy Chapter 3 (paraphrased): But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with them. They are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires, always learning but never able to acknowledge the truth. These men oppose the truth—men of depraved minds, who, as far as the faith is concerned, are rejected. But they will not get very far because, as in the case of those men, their folly will be clear to everyone.
James 1:7-8 tells us that a man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does.
Think about being double-minded. Do you say one thing and do another? Do you say one thing and then later say something different? Don't be a Bill Ayers!
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