“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’—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.” James 4:13–14
We all plan. It’s just a way to get from point A to point B. We live with discontentment in the way things are and make plans for the way we want them to be. James 4 gives some surprising instruction of the futility of plans, and the urgency of obedience.
Instruction #1: How you view your life affects how you will spend it.
James 4:13–14 is a stark remind that planning that is rooted in the impermanence of man is futile. If you view your life as your own, you’ll find yourself shocked that indeed you are not sovereign, you are not all-knowing.
Even the best-laid plans rely upon confidence and trust in another. So, I may make all the plans perfectly, but I cannot make them succeed because my plans inevitably will involve other people. I may orchestrate everything to my desire, but I can’t control the universe. After all, we are all a “mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.” This seems like a heartless and cold way to view life, and it would be if it ended there. But it doesn’t.
Instruction #2: How you view God’s will affects how you will plan.
If I am just a mist that vanishes, there seems little reason to plan. But James continues in 4:15, “Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.’” Read wrongly, the verse almost lends itself toward indifference. It could become an attitude of “My planning doesn’t matter because God’s will is sure to happen,” or “Whatever he has predestined is sure to happen.”
But James is not arguing for fatalism—he’s arguing for obedience. The tables are turned. I am supposed to plan, but they are plans around God’s desire, not mine. James is persuading us that, if the will of God may be known (and surely it may be), then we must urgently act in obedience to follow him. That’s why James continues in 4:16-17 with, “As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.”
James doesn’t let us off the hook. You would expect him to just say “Stop being so arrogant and just trust God; he’ll work out the details.” Instead he says to pray, plan, and act quickly in obedience. So our planning is not rooted in our will, but in his.
Instruction #3: How you view obedience to God affects the urgency and confidence with which you will act.
God’s sovereignty is the reason for our planning. Planning rooted in the impermanence of man is futile. Planning rooted in the permanence of the plans and will of God leads to confident obedience.
One of our pastors at Mars Hill has said that we would all do well to forget about ourselves and “grow in the blessed self-forgetfulness of confidence in Christ.” Confidence in self leads to boasting, but confidence in Christ leads to obedience.
When we delay obedience, we’re actually rebelling. When rooted in the fear of God and confidence in Christ, we are compelled to obey urgently.
Jesus calls for men and women to act quickly in obedience to what God has called them to, not out of self-confidence and not out of fear of man, but out of the fear of God and the desire to be obedient to him.
