I’ve been wondering if anyone noticed my failure to discipline myself enough to keep up with my blog. It’s been four months of sloth! Finally, a dear friend who is going through a most difficult time in her life asked me if I had quit with Window Reflections. I guess that’s what I needed. Time will tell if I can find enough to write about but I’m willing to give it a shot.
I’ve been preaching through James and last week we came to James 4:13-17. It was a very good reminder for me and the way I look at the ministry with which God has charged me. “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.’”
James is speaking to a specific group of businessmen, the group he identifies when he says, “…you who say…” We have to recognize that the Bible never condemns business or hard work or honest initiative or even profit making. James is not condemning businessmen in general. He addresses the arrogant businessmen who are acting as if nothing could ever interfere with their excellent plans to go and make a lot of money!
What these men were doing was looking into the future and making specific plans about what they were going to do with their businesses to make money. It never even entered their minds that something might happen to prevent them from working out their plans. I remember when I was a child I used to look forward to going on our family vacation. It never even occurred to me that something might come up that would mess up our plans. But these men were not children! They should have known they were not in control of their future! They completely disregarded God’s plans for their futures and acted as if they were in control. This is called presumption! They were like so many of us today. They simply presumed that tomorrow would come and it would be just like any other day!
These men had laid out their plans. They had identified a target area in which to do business and they had determined that they could succeed and make enough money in a year. Can you identify with this kind of life planning? I certainly can! I was like so many other young people who laid out their “life plans.” Mine looked like this: go to college and grad school, meet and marry a wife, go to the mission field in South America, become a famous Bible translator, and come back to the States and humbly travel around speaking about my experiences. We can almost picture these men studying maps with the latest population information and demographics. We can see them pinpointing the perfect location to set up shop. And we can hear them finally coming to the conclusion that this can all be done in a year! James does not condemn their planning. He condemns their presumption! He condemns them for acting as if their plans carried the ultimate authority and could not be upset! James wants his readers to remember they cannot count on tomorrow! They don’t know if they will be alive tomorrow. They don’t know if their house will be standing tomorrow! They don’t even know that their city will be there tomorrow. What if they had planned to go to Italy, to a city called Pompeii? When the people of Pompeii went to sleep the night before the volcano’s eruption they had no idea it would be their last night on earth! Or in our own day, what about those poor folks in Sendai, Japan who were shaken by an earthquake in the afternoon and then struck by a devastating tsunami fifteen minutes later? When they woke up that morning they had all kinds of plans for their lives! Before dinner time that day their city was gone! It appears the businessmen to whom James was writing never took into account the possibility of natural disasters, sickness, or death! It is this pride and presumption James condemned!
