A Search for What is Real: Getting Ahead of Ourselves (James 4:11 – 17)
Have you ever had a decision and didn’t know what to do? Maybe it had to do with a career choice, which college to go to, who to date, whether to get married, buy that first house, start a family. All of us at different times come a fork in the road, all of us have decisions we have to make everyday. Sometimes we know the right answer, other times we don’t. What about the time when both decisions seem to be right? Ever have that situation?
We all come at decisions in different ways. Some of us are planners. Planners can tell you what is going to happen, when it will happen, who will be there, everything is planned to the T. others of us just let things happen, we are more flexible about things.
Maybe you are a goal oriented person, you don’t do anything unless it is attached to a goal. You may think in terms of I want to lose 20 pounds by this date, I want to get my Master’s by the time I am 35. I want to buy my first house in 3 years. We will start having a family in 5 years. One statistic said that 70% of Americans can’t get anything done if it is not attached to a goal. I don’t know how they determined that, but it sounds true.
Our culture holds up those of us who plan as the ideal. When you were a teenager or in college you were always asked, “What are you going to do with your life?” And this question is important because your mom would go on to tell you that “you can’t spend your whole life playing Nintendo in the basement.” The ideal and responsible thing is to have a plan, goals, know where you are going, how you are going to get there. What this brings for us is security, a sense of certainty. We know when something will happen, we feel in control. In fact, if you are a guy and aren’t sure what to do with your life, often, women find this very unattractive. You may even know someone whose family told her to dump a guy because he was “goofing off.”
It is no different among Christians. A lot of times, you might hear words like purpose, plan, calling, destination, God’s will as you talk about this whole idea of decision making.
Here is what I want to do today. I want to dive into this topic of God’s will. Is it possible to know God’s will? Does God have a will for us? What about planning? Should we make plans with our life?
I remember when I worked as a student pastor, I would hear students say all the time, I just wish I could figure out God’s will for my life. In fact, I would have parents come into my office and ask, can you help my son figure out what God’s will is? I would get questions like, do you think God wants me to go to this college? Does God want me to marry that guy? Does God want me to go on that missions trip? Does God want me to take that job?
I started to wonder, are you supposed to know God’s will. Is it something we should have readily in front of us, like a potion? Shake this up, God’s will comes out. Whole books are written on this topic. Many of them say, if you follow these three steps, you will know God’s will for your life. I must be stupid, but I can never get those 3 steps to work.
If you have your bibles, you can open them to the book of James, chapter 4. If you grabbed a bible in the lobby, it is on page 871.
James has just got done talking about are place in the world, in the beginning of chapter 4, which we looked at last week. This is what he says in verse 11: 11Do not speak evil against one another, brothers. The one who speaks against a brother or judges his brother, speaks evil against the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge. 12There is only one lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbor? 13Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit"-- 14yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. 15Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that." 16As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. 17So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.
Verses 11 & 12 almost seem disconnected from the rest of the chapter, like they are about a different topic. One author said “even though it seems like a different topic, it is related, verses 11 – 17 all deal with a form of arrogance.” Verses 11 & 12, the arrogance comes from speaking wrongly of someone, judging someone. Thinking you are better than someone. We do this when it comes to planning. What happens if you are in a group of people and someone says, “I just don’t know what I want to do with my life” or “I just don’t know what I am going to do in this situation.” We think, man I’m glad I’m not that guy. We might think, you should pray more, then you will know what to do. Right. And it is easy to get a high and mighty feeling about ourselves, because we have certainty.
The other reason I think these verses are here is that to know God’s will, how can you hear from God on something if there is sin in your life. James is saying, how can you speak evil in one breath, and then expect to hear from God in the next.
I want to zero in on verses 13 – 17. this is what he says in verse 13: 13Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit"-- 14yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. 15Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that." 16As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.
James goes right into people who are planners. He is speaking specifically about merchants and making money. This ties into what we will look at next week.
One author (David P. Nystrom) said, “James is not arguing against the making of money, or even against the desire to make money; rather, he is against the attitude of self – contained certainty…Such certainty is revelatory of an attitude that does not take God seriously enough, a mind – set for which the making of money outstrips devotion to God in importance.”
Some questions that come to mind, is it wrong to make plans? Is it wrong to have goals? Is it wrong to say, I want to accomplish this or that?
Douglas Moo had this to say on this passage, “Here are people, says James, who are deliberate and self-confident planners. They decide where they will go, when they will go, and how long they will stay. Moreover, they are quite sure about the outcome of all these plans.”
James is speaking about people who are self-sufficient. When you are in high school, you look forward to getting out the house, being your own boss, being self-sufficient. When you are self-sufficient, you no longer need your parents. In the same way, sometimes, when we plan our lives, we create no need for God. We take him out of the equation. What that does is it makes us the hero instead of God. I hate to burst your bubble, but you can’t be the hero of your story.
We make our goals, our dreams, our wants, our desires the king of our lives. It becomes about us and what we want.
The idea that James is forbidding Christians from all forms of planning or concern for the future I think is wrong. Taking out life insurance and saving for retirement, for example, are not condemned by James; these are good stewardship of the resources God gives us. What James says is wrong here is any kind of planning for the future that stems from human arrogance in our ability to determine the course of future events.
Look at verse 14: 14yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.
James compares our lives to a mist. Mist shows up in the morning over a lake, but in a few hours, gone. Not even a memory, you can’t even tell it was there if you didn’t see it. In the book of Psalms our lives are compared to a breath. Proverbs 27:1 says: Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring.
That is what happened in the clip we saw. Here was a woman going about her life and all of a sudden, she learns that she is going to die. That completely changes her outlook on life. When we begin to realize just how short of a run we have in life, it should change our outlook. It should make us want to do something with our one and only life instead of wasting it.
One author (Douglas Moo) said, “Human life is insubstantial and transitory, here one minute and gone the next. Illness, accidental death, or the return of Jesus could cut short our lives just as quickly as the morning sun dissipates the mist or as a shift in wind direction blows away smoke.”
What James is saying is how can you plan your life out, you have no idea what lays ahead for you? You don’t know what tomorrow will bring.
By trying to help us realize the future is uncertain not only teaches us trust in God, it helps us properly to value the present. To be obsessed with future plans may mark our failure to appreciate our present blessings. This is one of the things that I love and sometimes find annoying about little kids. They get so wrapped up in the moment. Ava finds picking up rocks to be a good time. When we take a walk, she is in no hurry, she is just happy to be outside. When we think of walks, we think of exercise, getting some place. Ava thinks of being there, being present.
That is the mindset we need to have when it comes to plans and what God wants for our lives. Beth Moore said, “God is more interested in the journey than in the destination.”
Which makes you wonder, does God care about the destination? Does God have a specific will for your life that you can know? When we think of God’s will, we think of something that we will learn and immediately it will happen. Most of the people in the Bible, though, that God called to do something had to wait. Moses spent 40 years in the wilderness waiting for God’s will to be fulfilled. Jesus waited 30 years.
I remember, after feeling that God wanted me to be a Pastor, it took me 10 years to get me to where God wanted me. That’s the journey.
Verse 15: 15Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that." 16As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.
James then moves to how we need to think about our lives. After condemning those who think they can control their lives without any reference to God, he then says that we should make plans in light of what God wants for us. We need to see our lives as events that God is leading, guiding. Instead of saying, “I will do this” having the attitude that it is really up to God and having the attitude of wanting to follow what God wants for our lives. A lot of times we say this, but James is saying, it needs to be more than words.
What about this part on boasting in verse 16? It is boasting when we presume that we are in complete control of our own lives and do not need God.
So how should you live your life? Do you make plans? How do you discover God’s will?
Garry Friesen in his book Decision making and the will of God said, “If Christians spent as much time praying for God’s will as they did frantically looking for it, most of our problems would be eliminated.”
For James, the real question is how to approach life when the outcome is uncertain. His answer is to trust in God’s graciousness, not in human plans.
Verse 17 says: 17So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.
James is saying, even though life is unpredictable and short, if you know what God wants you to do, if you don’t do it, you are sinning.
Tom Patterson said, “I believe the bigger problem is this: we can understand enough of the Bible to cause us to change our lives radically. However, I suspect that most of us want to do what the Bible says to do, but later, not now. We know the Bible is right, but we procrastinate. We blame our failure of behavior on a failure of understanding when our failure of behavior is a rebellion against our understanding.”
So the questions remain: is it possible to know God’s will, and what God wants you to do and what plans he is calling to you.
First is to know that God has a plan. In Jeremiah 29:11 it says: 11For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for wholeness and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.
The first step is knowing that God has a plan and it is good, they are plans for wholeness to give us hope and a future.
At the end of Forrest Gump, Forrest is standing at the grave of his wife Jenny with his son and he says, “I don’t know if Mama or Lt. Dan was right, do we float around like a feather on a breeze, or do we have a destiny.” Jeremiah is saying, you have a destiny. You have a plan, a hope, a future, you have a purpose. Often though, we go looking for the destiny we want, not the destiny God wants for us. We look for our plan, trying to get the things we want, instead of looking for God’s plan. You can float around like a feather on a breeze through life, or, you can give up on your plan and follow God’s. you can decide to stop being the hero of the story and let God be the hero.
To find that plan will take time. It will take time reading the Bible, talking with God, listening to God, talking with trusted friends and mentors. This is where we get off track a lot of times. I think we can handle that God has a plan for us, but we want the easy plan. We want the 3 easy installments of $19.95 with free shipping and boom, there is the plan. Unwrap the box, put a few pieces together and you have a plan. Wouldn’t that be great? A lot of you right now are thinking, yes, give me that plan. Sorry. It doesn’t work that way. Think about any good relationship, any good vacation, any good event you have been a part, any great team you have been on at work or in a church. What did they all take? Time. The best things do. Patience, it always comes back to the one thing we want to skip.
The other thing we do is we start at the beginning, which seems logical. But when it comes to God’s will, we need to start with the end in mind. Here is what I mean, when we think about making plans, we don’t think about the end in mind. We usually make lists, pros and cons of a decision. In his book Spiritual leadership Henry Blackaby says a Christian should not make decisions that way. Instead, start with the end in mind. Ask the question, will this opportunity get me to where I believe God wants me?
This one sentence has guided me and Katie in our personal decisions and how I lead this church and our leadership team. Start with the end in mind. There are so many great opportunities in front of us, but if it won’t get us to where God wants us, what will it do? Take us away from what God wants.
As we were interviewing here, we were also interviewing with several other churches. All of them were larger than Beginnings. But none of them were to do what I am doing. Many were to be a student pastor, a college pastor, one was to be the teaching pastor. A lot of great churches. One of the things that made it clear that this was the place for us was starting with the end in mind. We knew that God had called us and prepared me to be a lead pastor. It actually made the decision rather easy.
But to know where God wants us to be will take time praying with him, reading the Bible, talking with friends and trusted mentors about what they are sensing.
The important thing to remember is that this is not cut and dry. This is not an easy process that always produces an answer right away. Remember, countless people in the Bible had to wait decades for God to reveal his plans. While this is frustrating, this is part of following God. God waits for us to be ready for him to reveal his plans, as well as making sure we are ready to fulfill them. In fact, I would bet that the reason we are often waiting on God to reveal his plan, is because it has more to do with us and where we are than God. Often, we are not ready for God’s plan, if he revealed it and allowed us to walk in it, we would mess it up.
Throughout my life, there has been one line that has helped me in discovering God’s will in situations and his plan for my life. It is to pray, “Wherever and whenever.” It gives God complete control. It is totally up to him. When we can honestly come to God and say that, he is free to guide and lead our lives. To take us to where he wants us to be, To do what he wants to do in us and what he wants us to do.
That is the challenge today. To honestly pray today, God, wherever and whenever. I don’t want to float around like a feather on a breeze through life, I want to put my life in your hands. To stop making our plans, to give up on our plans and our stories, and our dreams; and to embrace God’s story, God’s plans and God’s dreams.
Let’s pray.
God, I know I don’t want to be a feather. I want to put my life in your hands. This morning, I am recommitting myself, that whatever and wherever, I’m up for it. Right now, many of us in this room are facing decisions and unsure about what to do, many of us need to hear from you on really important decisions. Give us the courage to say, wherever and whenever. Help us to follow you into the places we don’t understand, but know you are there. Give us clarity in the places we need clarity, and the keep things cloudy in the places we aren’t ready to see clearly. Amen.
We are going to move into a time of response now. We have communion set up here in the front and you are free to come and take communion whenever you are ready. Ryan and the band will be leading us in a few songs, so you can stand, you can sing, you can sit and listen, whatever you need to do over the next few moments is up to you. Use this time as you need to.
