Listen to this quote from P. J. Conlon in the Monthly Journal of International Association of Machinists, dated January 1899:
“…I say if [the public] would only stop to consider this before forming an opinion perhaps the wage-earners might win; but no, they believe everything they see in the newspapers. If the newspaper says the sky is painted with green chalk that is what goes. Verily, I say unto you, the public is a hot mess.”
That is the first recorded instance of the phrase “hot mess” being used in as a metaphor where previously it was used at a literal term to describe hot food from a mess hall. Despite diligent research, I could not locate a source to how “hot mess” transitioned into the “hot mess express” that many people seem to be buying tickets for in modern culture.
So what does that have to do with the Bible? The Bible opens up its narrative with the Garden of Eden – an absolute picture of perfection. And then the Bible ends by painting a picture of a New Heaven and a New Earth – another absolute picture of perfection. But we live in between these two bookends, where we experience the hot mess of living in a fallen world. But here’s the good news…God doesn’t leave us to figure out things on our own. He has given us the Bible which contains ALL the wisdom we need to navigate life in a fallen world (2 Peter 1:3).
Turn with me this morning to James 4 as we continue in our series called Faith and Works. For four and half chapters now, James has been giving us the wisdom we need to help us close the gap between what we SAY we believe and how we ACTUALLY live. At every turn, we’ve been challenged on things like how we treat the poor, where we get our wisdom from, how we handle conflict, and how we respond to things like temptations and trials. And I don’t know about you, but I’ve found myself asking some hard questions of myself over these past two months. And here’s the simple (and yet again HARD) question that we’re going to ask ourselves today: “How does God fit into the plans I’VE made for MY life?”
James 4:13-17
Come 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”— 14 yet 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. 15 Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” 16 As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. 17 So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.
One of the things that I love about this campus is that you can look around and see people from many different backgrounds, different professions, and different stages of life. You see people that love Jesus and root for the Bengals…and you see depraved people that still root for the Steelers (you get the idea). And one of the things that makes the body of Christ so incredible is the ability, through the Holy Spirit, to experience supernatural UNITY amongst incredible DIVERSITY. One of the reasons for so much diversity is because we live in a country where we have so many unique freedoms to make our own choices. In fact, it’s not uncommon to hear someone defend some of their choices by saying, “It’s a free country.”
And if you think about it, your life (for the most part), is the sum total of those choices you make. But if you are a Christian, you are not just a citizen of the great country where you have the freedom to make many different you choices, you are ultimately a citizen of heaven. And as a Christian, you are NOT free to do as you please, because you signed up to be a servant to Christ. And because of this, there should be a distinction in how the Christian plans their life, in regards to motive, process, and desired outcomes. And that means my actual faith in God is evident in how I approach planning: I can plan my life as if I am in control…or I can plan as if GOD is ultimately in control of my life.
And so as we take a deeper dive into these five verses this morning, the first thing James seems to be saying is…
1. DON’T BE A PRACTICAL ATHEIST – vs 13,14a
What do we mean by this statement? An intellectual atheist is a person who has no belief in a god. But a practical atheist is a person who professes belief in God, but God has no bearing in the day-to-day life they are living. This person treats God like a set of fancy dishes which are only used on certain days of the year. But in the everyday life that they are living, God doesn’t really figure into their plans…outside of Sunday morning.
In the text we read this morning, James uses the illustration of a salesman who plans a business trip with the intention of making a big sale with the hopes of turning a big profit. Nothing wrong with this at all…I lived this life for my first 10 years out of college. And James is describing these businessmen who were all talking about their plans to travel to some different towns, and how much money they’d make, and even how long they’d be away. And there was only one thing missing in their plans – God! It was if they thought they could control outcomes and plans without even considering God.
Now, don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing inherently evil about making money, and there’s nothing wrong with planning. In fact, Jesus said this in Luke 14:28: “For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it?” It’s wise to plan. It’s good to make money. But here’s where practical atheism comes into play. It’s when we plan these things without God at the forefront of our minds. It’s when we think about our career path or our business plan or educational journey or even our family life and we neglect to consult God. We might call this presumptuous planning where we don’t even consult him. And if we DO consult him, it’s only to ask him to bless the plans that we already made.
Now I’m not talking this morning about committing to a season of prayer and fasting before you make your grocery list (although I would be thrilled if my family would begin now giving some prayerful consideration about where we might go to lunch today). But in all seriousness, if I am pursuing dependence on God in the regular rhythms of life, over time, God is going to give me accumulated wisdom to act on…meaning I don’t have to prayerfully agonize over every single choice I make. So what are we talking about practically?
It always starts with motives – big or small, “What would it look like to please the Lord in these decisions?” And then practically, in the more life-shaping decisions we make, we consider these three things:
• Prayer – prayer puts on our hearts what’s on the heart of God
• Scripture – where we learn the ways and character of God
• Wise counsel – there is safety in the multitude of counselors (Proverbs)
Just for my own curiosity this morning, raise your hand if you love planning. Alright, now raise your hand if you theme song is Freebird. Keep them up just so the first group knows who to judge! I love planning! I love intentionality. In my previous life, I was in charge of the design process of building homes and I actually wrote a manual on the ENTIRE process of how to build a house…right down to very last detail of things like when you use nails versus when you use screws.
Now one of the ditches that a planner falls into when someone or something interrupts their well-thought-out plans…and any deviation from their plan causes them great angst, that they sometimes take out on the people around them. Anybody remember the economic collapse of 2008? We saw a lot of angry people. Or the craziness of living through a pandemic? Our family is STILL bummed about a trip to Cancun that we had to cancel in May of 2020, and the fact that we can’t go to Sanibel Island for Thanksgiving.
So how DO we manage the tension between being wise planners and our favorite Thanksgiving spot being wiped off the face of the earth? The answer is in verse 15 where James says, “If the Lord wills...” We have to live in light of the fact that God is in control, and we are not. And because this is true, we still prayerfully make plans, but then we place them in God’s hand. “If the Lord wills” should not be a cliché to us…it should be the conviction of our hearts. Is God really in control…or am I? That’s the difference between being a practical atheist who doesn’t include God in any of their plans, or actually following Jesus.
My life gives evidence to the fact that I either believe God is sovereign, in full control, or that I am the one in control. It’s one or the other…both statements can’t be true. I love how Paul Tripp often calls (us) humans “little self-sovereigns.” And it’s such a good representation of who we often are, because, as the term suggests, we often think we know best. We think we can foresee the future. We think we can run the metrics and projections. And when we arrogantly do this we are being practical atheists. We are making decisions with a large amount of pride and a limited view of the biblical reality that actually says, “God is bigger and wiser than I am.”
Now, if you are listening, smack your neighbor and say WAKE UP. When we talk about making plans for our lives, we may come face to face with the idol of control. Last week we talked about check engine lights being the behaviors and attitudes that tells us something is wrong under the hood of our hearts. Let me point out two common check engines lights to let us know an idol of control has taken root in our hearts. Number one—anger. I am furious when I lose control or when situations or people threaten my sense of control. Number two—despair/fear where I can’t trust God with outcomes. I may believe intellectually that God is both sovereign and good, but I live like a practical atheist when despair/fear begin to dominate my life when my demand for control is unmet or greatly challenged. These check engine lights are warning you to stop trying to play God. Don’t be a practical atheist. Write your plans in pencil and give God the eraser.
We wanted to spend the majority of our time here this morning because this is really where the rubber meets the road…but let’s look briefly at two more truths in this passage. James shifts gears and asks a very pastoral and sobering question… Look at verse 14: “What is your life?” Church, this is a question that should stop us in our tracks. “What is your life?”
And in asking this question, I think what James is trying to do is remind us that…
2. LIFE IS BRIEF – vs 14b-15
Now, let’s all be honest – most of us don’t like to think about our limited time on earth. I know to some of you, I’m still a young pup, but the older I get, the faster time seems to go. I spend a lot of time around a variety of people from different generations and here’s an observation: the younger generation wants everything to move faster, and the older generation wants everything to slow things down. Why? You guessed it. The youngins think they’re going to live forever and the older ones recognize they are in the 4th quarter. What’s really sobering to me is that all my fashion choices in high school are now back on display when I step foot on college campuses. And so no matter if you’re rolling your pants like we did back in the 80’s (or for some of us, the 50’s), James asks us all a sobering question. “What is your life?”
The book of Ecclesiastes talks a lot about life. And do you know what the author says life? He says, “it’s all vanity.” And what he’s referring to is that life is fleeting and temporal. And he’s saying that when we chase treasures and status and all that life on earth has to offer us, then it’s just an endless cycle of ups and downs with no real purpose. The Hebrew word for “vanity” is “hebel” and it’s found 38 times in Ecclesiastes. And do you know what another rendering for “hebel” is? It’s the word we see here in James 4 – the word “vapor.”
James says it like this in verse 14 after he poses the question “What is your life?” He goes on to say, “For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.” Everyone look up here. Your life, my life, is a mist, a puff of smoke, a vapor, a morning fog. Just like when you walk outside on a cold, December morning and you blow air out, you can see it, and then it vanishes. This is our life. Here and then gone quickly. Now, why does James ask this question…and follow it up by telling us that life is a mist? I think the answer has to do with our planning. Since we have such limited time on this earth, we don’t have time waste trying to navigate this life without God in the driver’s seat. Time is too short for me to be at the helm.
And when we stop to consider that life IS so brief, then our response should be to aim everything we have at heaven. Our deceitful hearts lull us into thinking more about the temporal than the eternal. But think about this for just a minute – who would aim everything they have, who would leverage every resource they have, for something that lasts as long as a puff of smoke? How foolish is that? To leverage all your parental resources at your kids’ sports development is to invest your life in a puff of smoke. To leverage all of your career goals for your own glory, is to invest your life in a blade of grass. To make all your financial plans with no concern for heaven is to literally invest your money into a mist or a vapor. Do you see how this conviction about the brevity of life should actually changes the trajectory of your life?
Instead of worrying about managing your money so you can maintain a certain standard of living, your start managing your money out of a deep concern that people are going to hell. Instead of managing your schedule out of the great concern that your kid may not know how to hit a baseball, you start managing your schedule with the concern that they are going to stand before the Lord one day. And while that may sound radical compared to the standard of nominal, superficial Christianity that is common in America, it is the normal outcome for people who really believe what James is saying in verse 14.
One of our pastors has a friend who has studied the age of which the men in his family tree have died. And he has averaged their age together and has used that average to determine that he is likely to live to a specific age. And he’s taken that age and has developed a countdown clock in his office that tells him how many days he has left on earth. And while this may feel morbid to some, he wants to answer the question, “What is your life?” And then to use every moment left to aim everything he has at heaven. Church, let’s let verse 14 get so ahold of our hearts today that we aim everything we have at heaven because we can no longer be satisfied to invest all of our resources in a puff of smoke.
Well, James has one last challenge for us this morning, and it’s to…
3. DO THE RIGHT THING – vs 17
James says in verse 17 “So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.”
Do you know what the natural overflow is when we don’t think life is brief compared to eternity? We put off doing good? We think we have plenty of time down the road to do what God is calling us to do. We live with this mentality…
• Tomorrow I’ll forgive that person who’s hurt me
• Tomorrow I’ll be present with my family
• Tomorrow I’ll share the gospel with my lost neighbor
• Tomorrow I’ll pray with my kids
• I’ll wait to New Years to start reading the Bible faithfully
• Next year I’ll sign up for that mission trip
Now, we could apply this principle to every area of Christian living. We could apply it to prayer, evangelism, teaching Scripture to our kids, gathering together as the church, serving the poor, or any other number of imperatives in Scripture…and we should. But let’s circle back to what’s already been preached this morning and the context of this text: planning and viewing our life in light of eternity. NOW the question becomes, what are you going to do with these truths? The truth that God is sovereign and life is short. The truth that to never consult God in the motives of our planning is practical atheism.
Here’s where many of us are tempted to let ourselves off the hook (me included). A lot of times we view sin in terms of the sins we actually commit. I know it’s a sin to lie to someone or to steal from someone. But what we often neglect is to consider the sins of omission. And this is what James is talking about here in verse 17. He’s saying that if you know the right thing to do, and you don’t do it, it’s still a sin. If you know now to plan with God at the center and you don’t, it’s sin.
Verse 17 offers us some really good tension by asking a simple question: “Today, what is something that you know you should have already done or should be regularly doing, but you keep procrastinating?” Remember, our life is the sum total of our daily choices. And what James is saying a good place to start is to choose to no longer put off doing something that you know the Lord requires of you. Doesn’t get any more practical than that! If God is calling you to change something, or do something, or to reconcile with someone, or to re-evaluate your plans this morning, and you choose to ignore this… “whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.”
Let me close this morning by addressing two people in the room: the Christian who is maybe struggling with this message today, and the person who does not identify as a Christian (that should just about cover all of us). Why does the Christian struggle to submit their plans to God, and why does the Christian not live with a sense of urgency? And why do people not entrust their lives to Jesus for salvation? The answer is the same for both groups of people this morning. The answer is found in verse 16. “As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.”
The problem we all have, and the problem that has plagued humanity for over 2,000 years is PRIDE. We think we know best. We think we have the answers. We think there’s a better way. We think we can cut corners and make it on our own. We are prideful people. And this fleshes out in every way possible. You can be a Christian and pridefully never consult God in your plans because you think you can figure everything out. And pride is also one of the primary reasons people are not Christians. They think that they not only DON’T need Jesus to be included in their plans, they think they don’t need him to get into heaven.
And I believe James is inviting all of us to repentance this morning. And here is the good news – repentance is the dam that releases God’s grace this morning…and the name for his grace is Jesus. Some need to submit their plans to his lordship and others need to surrender their soul to him, but we all need him desperately. And here’s the best news ever – his grace is freely available to everyone who seeks it.
