James 4:13

The scripture this morning is James chapter 4, verses 13 through 17.

Now listen, you who say, Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business, and make money. Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, If it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that.

As it is, you boast and brag. All such boasting is evil. Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn't do it, sins.

planning for the future when it comes to planning for the future there are really three types of people my guess is in this group most of us have some sort of plan for the future It may be a plan for ourselves in terms of business, retirement,

plans to go and do certain activities, take certain vacations. We may have plans for family members, children in particular. We have ideas about what we would like for our children to do, and we want to plan for them and help them to plan for the future. But I want to press us today that when it comes to planning for the future, we evaluate what kind of person are we when it comes to planning for the future. And James helps us understand what kind of person we should not be and what kind of person we should be.

So, person number one. Person number one is the person who never considers God's will and plan when planning for the future. this is the person who believes he or she is in control and who only thinks of what he or she wants when planning for the future this is the person who says i am the master of my own destiny and i will do what pleases me and what advances me and what gives me what i want in our text this person is indicated by a businessman. In James' day, there were certain rich business people in the church, and this business person, the hypothetical business person, has already planned the date of his departure, today or tomorrow. He's planned his destination. He's going to a certain city. He knows how long he's going to stay. He's planning to stay there for a year. His purpose is to transact business, but his ultimate goal is to make money.

This is the person who says, I'm the master of my own destiny, who gives no consideration to God's will or plan. James tells us there's a problem with being this type of person. This person who says, I'm the master of my own destiny. I'm going to do what pleases me without plan. The reality is, from our vantage point, life on earth is uncertain. James makes that point in 14a.

You don't know what's going to happen. So from our vantage point, life as lived on this earth is uncertain. And the second point he makes is this. The reality is that life on earth is fragile and fleeting. What is your life? You're just a mist or a vapor. You're like steam. Not all that substantial. It's there for a moment. You can see it, but within just a few moments, it's sort of evaporated away. And with that imagery of being a mist or a vapor, dreams James is trying to tell us that life is fragile.

Life is fleeting. And James says that our behaving as if we are in ultimate control of events is arrogant, presumptuous, illogical, and unspiritual. It's arrogant because in our pride we set up our own plans. We do what we want to do. We are presumptuous because we forget how uncertain life is and fleeting it is. It's illogical because anybody who looks at life and gives it any honest assessment knows that we do not know what may happen to us tomorrow in terms of how we live life on this earth. And it's very unspiritual to only be considered about the earthly, about myself, about my plans and thinking that I am the master of my own destiny.

Job 8, 9 says, days on earth are like a shadow. A shadow is there for a moment, but then it goes away as the sun moves on. Job also says, we're like flowers that wither. We may look pretty for the moment, but not long we wither. Louise and I have been living in our neighborhood that we're in now for about eight years, and people walk in the neighborhood, and she and I have remarked about one person in particular who eight years ago marched with a steady stride, strolling up the hills, but today she walks much slower.

She's stooped. her hair has gone from being a darker color to very gray, almost white. We wither, don't we, on this earth? Abraham Lincoln, as he presided over the Civil War as president, came to the conclusion that there was a greater power behind the events. Because he said, for all of the planning I do, for all the planning of my generals, and the same was true for the Southerners, for all the planning Jeff Davis did, for all the planning of the generals, there was a greater power behind the outcome of events.

And Lincoln, who by most accounts became a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ not long before his death, came in the midst of that struggle and that difficulty to this understanding there's a greater power behind events. who in this country can say we are in control of events. 9-1-1, 2001 showed us otherwise, did it not? You go to work one morning, planning your day, getting ready for your appointments, and then suddenly, tragedy. My plan had been I was going to be a Marine fighter pilot.

That was my goal as a teenager. It's a goal I pursued. I had a full-ride Marine Corps scholarship to go to college. I was going to be a gyrene.

But you know something? I went for my physical. Had all these plans. Had gotten the scholarship. I go for my physical before I start the Citadel.

And guess what? I'm slightly colorblind. There's certain colors, and I didn't even know it. There's certain colors I can't see. It may account for some of my dress.

That's why I married an artist who can help me, you know. She has a poor subject to work with. But suddenly, while you can sometimes get a waiver if you're partially colorblind, it can be very important to be able to tell, is that flashing light green or is it red? So suddenly, plans shifted. I wasn't in control.

I was going to be a lawyer, powerhouse in a big firm, had my own plans, goals, objectives, when I was going to be partner, when I was going to do this, when I was going to do that, and then tragedy. A son is taken. My world is turned upside down. Things look differently.

[Personal prayer concern omitted.]

And what you had planned for is certainly turned upside down. All those human plans just go by the wayside, don't they? And everything takes backseat to deal with that immediate problem, that immediate disease. Is it not true? Maybe we learn this as we get older,

or at least we should. But in this class, I know people who have dealt with tragedy and with sickness, job loss, difficulty. And suddenly we are reminded we are not the masters of our own destiny. We are not in ultimate control.

Christ talked about the man whose goal was to build a bigger barn. He had done well financially, and tomorrow I'll build bigger barns, bigger barns, ever bigger barns. Until the Lord says, today your life is required of you. Because you have planned arrogantly and pridefully for the future. The truth of the matter is, folks, God is in ultimate control of events.

Or as one writer said, we may propose, but God disposes. and I want to give you a number of scriptures here to emphasize this truth. God is sovereign. He is in ultimate control. There's mystery here.

How is it that human beings can be free human agents, free in the sense we can do whatever we want to do, but still God's plan will always be carried out. He's in ultimate control. It's a difficult truth. humans tend to rebel against. We want to be in charge and we are unwilling to surrender to the notion that there is one who is in greater charge than we are.

But the scriptures repeatedly affirm that. For example, Psalm 33 10, the Lord foils the plans of the nations. He thwarts the purposes of the peoples, but the plans of the Lord stand firm purposes of his heart through all generation. Proverbs 16.1, to man belong the plans of the heart, but from the Lord comes the reply of the tongue. The writer of Proverbs would say, we can plan whatever, but before it even gets off our mouth to say what we're going to do, the Lord is in control of the reply of the tongue. Proverbs 16.33, the lot is cast into the lap, but it's every decision is from the Lord.

You can roll the dice. What number is going to turn up? Who's in control of what number turns up?

The Lord. Proverbs 19, 21. Many are the plans in a man's heart but it is the Lord's purpose that prevails. Proverbs 21, 1. The king's heart is in the hand of the Lord.

He directs it like a water course wherever He pleases. Matthew 10, 29, Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father. A sparrow is a very tiny bird. And the point is that not even the tiniest of birds falls to the ground apart from God's will.

Genesis 50, 20, this is Joseph speaking. You remember the story of Joseph? Thrown into slavery by his brothers. Yet ends up in just the right position to plan for a famine to save his family. And when he confronts his brothers near the end of his life, he says, You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done.

The saving of many lives. And in this account we see that even the sinful actions of humanity, God is ultimately in control over those. not the cause of the sinful action, but he is ultimately in control of the sinful action to accomplish his purposes. And lastly, Acts 4.27, Indeed, Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen.

you hear that was the death of Jesus Christ on the cross God's will

in the ultimate sense yes that was his plan for saving humanity if you look at it in another sense it was not because Judas betrayed Jesus and he acted against God's will but in the big picture sense if you look at the big picture through as John Piper says the wide lens if you look at the narrow lens in how Judah should have behaved he acted against God's will but even that sinful act God was in control over it and ultimately it accomplished God's purpose and God's will the reason I review those verses is to emphasize what I think scripture clearly teaches God is in ultimate control not us now Keep that thought because we're going to touch on it further as we go in this class. All right. All right, so the first kind of person is the person who ignores God's will in his planning, thinks he or she is in charge, and gives no consideration to what God wants. That person ignores God's will in planning. The second kind of person is the person who resists God's will in plan.

This is the person who resists God's will in plan. I tell you what, I want to stop right here. I'm going to address one point before I go forward. Because this, I could address it later. But let me do it right now.

Because I'm sure some of you are asking the question.

The person who ignores God's will. If God is in ultimate control, then what difference does it make what we do? You know, that's the question you come to, isn't it, sometimes? If God is really in ultimate control, then what difference does it make? Why do we do anything?

Why do we care what we do? Well, let me try to address that at least briefly. And let me give an illustration. My son Caleb was a little boy, and my daughter Kate was a little girl. Sometimes on Friday, Daddy would say to Caleb or Kate, tomorrow I want you to cut the grass for me.

Grass needs cutting. I want you to cut it. Now the reality is that grass was going to get cut whether they obeyed Daddy or not. right but when they were young enough and they would say okay and they look forward to doing daddy's will as fun we would go out and we'd get on the ride in the lawnmower and I'd hold Caleb between my lap and boy we'd drive you know we'd cruise around boy he was I'm driving daddy I'm driving I'm cutting the grass and I would tell him like a good father supposed to do it. Be careful. Keep the wheel inside the last line where you went around.

Don't let your foot get down near the blade. Here's how you do it. I was in control. I'm the father. Then I take my hands off the wheel. And he said, Daddy, I'm really driving now.

I'm really driving. And then after a while, I got off. But I still watched. I was always there if he needed me. And you know what? He helped me accomplish my will. Now if he hadn't done it, the will was going to get done. But he obeyed me. That was important.

So we should always do what the Father says. We should obey him. That's the first reason we act and care about what we do. If Caleb had disobeyed me, the grass would have gotten and cut, but there would have been punishment.

Right? So we might want to do what the Father wants, because one day we will account for what we did or did not do. But you know what? When we're doing the Father's will, the Father sometimes says, come on and join me. Let's have fun. Let's go out there and do it.

And like Caleb, we can with our Heavenly Father just say, I'm having fun driving. And you know what? When we get through cutting backyard, we would go up to the B, it used to be called the B&B Grocery. Highway 101. Little old cheap store there, you know. Good store, but inexpensive.

I don't mean to. Good store, but we loved that place. And we'd go up there and we'd get us a soft drink and a candy bar. There was reward for obeying the Father. So don't let people say that because the Father is in ultimate control, we don't need to worry about what we're doing.

We should obey the Father because He is the Father, number one. Number two, if we don't, we will account for that. But then we get to have the joy of participating with Him and there's reward from the Father when we do it well. But don't forget, He's still in ultimate control. Now, go to the second person.

The second person, second type of person is the person who resists God's will and plan. And let me just say a word here quickly. When you talk about God's will in Scripture, theologians talk about His will at different levels. But let me break it down to something fairly simple. God's general disclosed will.

You know, God has disclosed His will for probably 90 plus percent of the situations we face. He has generally disclosed it. disclose it to everybody who can read his word.

It's open, it's apparent, it's available. We're not to commit adultery, we're not to steal, we're to be honest, we're to be hardworking. That's his general disclosed will. Some of us resist that general disclosed will, don't we? We can read it in the book, we know we're supposed to do it, not only us, but everybody who's a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ, but sometimes we just say, we don't care what you say, God.

Even though we know it, we're not going to do it, and we disobey. Right? This is the person who resists God's will, his general disclosed will. There's another type of will. It's God's particular disclosed will.

And this is something where he discloses things sometimes to us individually.

the mission that you have in his service is different from my mission. The person that you are to marry is different from the person I was to marry. So sometimes there are very particular decisions that apply to us individually that God will disclose to us how we are to respond. Now sometimes he doesn't tell us the full picture, right? But sometimes he does.

James' point is when God has disclosed to us either generally or individually what we are to do we are to do it. There's a whole class of people out there who never think about God's will and I think the reality is that's where most people are. They just make plans and they never stop to ask the question what would God want me to do? They don't plan their lives around God's will they don't even think about it every day. where I think most people really are. But then there's some of us who know God's will, and we just won't do it. Either his general will or his particular will. Right?

We need to be aware of the sins of omission. James says if we know the good we are to do or the right thing to do and we don't do it, it's sin. So we sometimes think about sin as being something we do positively that's wrong. We steal or something like that. But then sometimes we have sin by omission, what we fail to do. The story of the Good Samaritan, the priest and the Levite omitted to take care of the injured man. It was a sin of omission. God's will was clear. They

How about the parable of the talents? God disperses different talents to different people, and one guy takes his and just goes and buries it out back, doesn't do anything with it. It's a sin of omission. He should have been putting it to use, his talent to use, and he wasn't, and he was condemned for it. How about the parable of the sheep and the goats?

When there's one day will be a universal convocation, and the Lord will say to the goats, you didn't go visit me in prison, you didn't clothe the naked, you didn't feed the hungry, sin of omission and there are terrible consequences for the sin of omission and then there's some of us who are resisting God's call on our lives maybe in this room we know God wants us to go in a certain direction but we just won't do it that's not the kind of person we want to be we want to be the person who does his will and that's the third kind of person those who live according to God's will and plan. The text says if the Lord wills we will do this or we do that. Jesus' prayer on earth when he was in the garden of Gethsemane is not my will but thy will be done and that prayer should be part of all our planning that God's will would be done and we should seek after that will to do it. The model prayer says, thy kingdom come, thy will be done. That should be our prayer, that God's will be done. The apostle Paul, and I've given you a lot of scripture references there, repeatedly talks about God's will in his life and how God acted in his life. So let's, we should be the kind of people who live according to God's will and plan, both his general disclosed will and his particular disclosed will.

So the three types of people, those who ignore his will, don't even consider it, those who know it but resist it, and then the third who know it and do it, we want to be the third type of person. Now, let me close with some thoughts here, and hopefully this will tie some things together because these verses raise a lot of questions. Here are my suggestions about how we should live under God's will. Let's begin our planning for life by considering our end.

My theme verse for this year. I try to pick a verse as a theme for the year. Louise doesn't much like this verse. Psalm 39, 4. Show me, O Lord, my life's end and the number of my days.

Let me know how fleeting is my life. It's not a morbid prayer. It's a prayer that says, think about the end and live now in light of the end of life on this earth. And that gives a whole new perspective to where we focus our attention. If I think about my end first, I want to be sure first I'm in Christ because he is the only hope when life on this earth ends.

but then I want to be sure I'm planning my life in such a way that when I reach the end, he will say to me, well done, good and faithful servant. Number two, adopt a life purpose. I submit to you it helps to adopt one life purpose that you can sum up in a sentence. For example, what's your life purpose? to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

So every time I do anything, coach baseball, coach soccer, I'm a husband, I'm a father, I'm an employee, I want to do it in such a way that the Lord is glorified. So every moment and in every decision with what I say, what I do, what I think, I have a purpose to glorify God. Maybe it could be, the life purpose could be to live as Jesus lived. moment, in every thought, in every action, I say I want to do what Jesus would do right here, WWJD. I think it's helpful to have a central core life purpose like that. It guides us in our decision making. Thirdly, remember time is short. Use it well.

Let's not live under any illusions

that time is not short. It is. thirdly think about and plan for the future james is not urging us to be people who do not plan he is trying to urge us to be people who plan but thinking about god's overall plan proverb 6 6 go to the ant you slugger see how the ant gets ready for winter in the summer we are to plan we're to plan for retirement plan for the future and so forth but plan under god's sovereignty and realize that when we plan we should plan loosely i do not know how many times in my life i've said this is what i'm going to do this is what i'm going to do and the lord has said wrong you're going this way so plan loosely or contingently knowing the lord may have a different plan than what you thought it was start today to do what god has clearly revealed you should do some people say they sit around forever trying to figure out what god's will is what god will is. And sometimes it's hard to discern His will in various particular sorts of decision making. Career choices and so forth. But there's some things that are absolutely clear about His will and what we know clearly, start doing it.

Don't wait to do what you know you should be doing. Start right now, even in the little things. Being honest in your speech. Not gossiping about people. Not being mean spirited.

working hard, being a good employee all those things you know you're supposed to do start to do it now and it becomes a pattern of life to want to do what the Father would want us to do next, remember God does not show us the second step usually until we have taken the first step in much of my life I've said Lord I'm willing to do what you want to do but how about showing me step 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 and let me see where it ends up and then I'll get back with you I want to know exactly where the turns are going, Lord, where this is going to lead, what circumstances I'm going to face. And the Lord said, uh-uh. I said, follow me, and I take the first step. And I usually find once I finally take the first one, he says, all right, here's step two and step three. But it becomes clear as we begin to walk with him.

But until we're prepared to follow him, don't expect to have a clear indication of what his will is. more. When bad things happen, pause and consider God's will. Now I would argue in a certain sense for believers, nothing quote bad ever happens in a certain sense. But I'm talking about bad things in the sense things that are hard for us in this life. Sickness, death of someone we love, job loss.

Sometimes the Lord is trying to get our attention, to get us back on track when we've gotten off So I would urge when we experience life's difficulties, stop and reflect and ask the Lord to show you, what am I supposed to learn here, Lord? What am I supposed to be doing? What do I need to change? And whatever happens, help me to live for your glory and for your honor.

Let us pray thy will be done every day. Thy will be done. and then let us work to accomplish that will. Remember the Titanic.

Human arrogance. The unsinkable ship. Grandeur and glory. I think God taught us a big lesson in the Titanic. My last point is relax.

God's in control. To me, this is one of the most comforting truths that I have begun to understand more clearly in recent years. He's in control. Thank God we're not.

Let's pray.

Lord, forgive us when we resist your will, when we ignore it. Help us to be people who do it. Help us to live for you in a way that honor and glorifies your name. I pray for folks in this class Lord I know some are facing extremely painful and difficult circumstances things they never anticipated give them a special sense of your comfort and peace but in the midst of that pain may they lift their eyes to he who sits on the throne and seek his comfort, his peace and his guidance for it's in Christ's name we pray Amen. Thank you very much