James Session 11
Tom Shrader teaches from James 4:11-17 about two dangerous attitudes: judging fellow believers maliciously and planning life as if we control our own destiny. He warns against slander and critical speech within the church, emphasizing that only God is the lawgiver and judge. Shrader then addresses the foolishness of making plans without acknowledging God's sovereignty, reminding listeners that life is but a vapor and all our planning should be submitted to His will.
“You're planning your life as if there is no God.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: James (2009)
Recorded: 2009 at Cannon Beach Conference Center
Duration: 1 hr
Themes: judgment, slander, planning, sovereignty, criticism, speech, authority, humility, struggling with criticism, church conflict, planning without god, critical spirit, church member, believer, feeling judgmental, making life decisions
Scripture: James 4:11-17, Leviticus 19:16, Psalm 15:3, Matthew 7:1-5, Isaiah 14, Luke 12:13-31, Psalm 40, Psalm 143, John 4, Proverbs 27:1, Psalm 37, James 5:1-6
Theological Themes: divine judgment, gods sovereignty, biblical authority, sanctification, ecclesiology, church discipline, providence, spiritual maturity
Full Transcript
Good morning! Great to see you this morning. Why don't you open your Bibles to the book of James, and what we're going to do today is finish up our study in this book. I mentioned it as I was praying when he gets to this point. I said to Susan this morning as we were walking over, "What time does our plane leave?" You start to go into that mode pretty quickly.
You know you look at the calendar, you understand that I assume for most of you leave tomorrow morning, maybe for a few of you even this afternoon, and your mind starts to kick into that getting things packed, start to begin to-do list. I started a new on my phone yesterday, a new list of things that I need to do next week when I get done, and your mind goes there. There's probably good and bad in that. I mean the good is that we're consciously understanding that we're about to go back into what we would term the real world. This is not the real world. This is a bubble, but this is a place to come to be refreshed so that I can re-engage the real world.
Susan and I have for 25 years probably taken the month of August off for a long time, and I love to get away. I used to love to get away because I love to get away. I like that now, but literally the idea is recreation—recreate so that I can go back and be engaged in what God's called me to do. Well the same thing is true for you: to recreate a moment like this, to relax, rest, so that you can go back and begin to tackle that world, that place, that ministry that God's given you and where He's placed you.
James Gets Personal About Family Business
James, as he reaches this point in the book, in my mind becomes very personal. He said, "Do not speak against one another, brethren. He who speaks against a brother or judges his brother speaks against the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law, but a judge of it. There is only one Lawgiver and Judge, the One who is able to save and to destroy; but who are you who judge your neighbor?" (verse 11 of chapter 4).
In verse 11, James uses the word "brethren," "brother," "brother." He really personalizes this, and it takes only a casual reading to see that he is talking in a very intimate way. It's family business he's addressing here. He's talking about the way they're dealing with one another. He's talking about judging, and we've touched on that before.
If you go into a place where no one knows any Bible, they almost all know that one verse: "Judge not lest you be judged." To be clear what James is not saying to us: He's not saying or forbidding us to deal with sin. We know we have to do that.
The Sin of Malicious Speech
What he's talking about is this malicious intent by which we engage in mindless, thoughtless, careless, critical, untrue speech directed at other people. We might use the word slander. It's a sin. It's a devastating sin. "You shall not go about as a slanderer among your people," God commands us in Leviticus 19:16. A mark of a godly man, Psalm 15:3, is that he does not slander with his tongue. David vows and promises, "Whoever secretly slanders his neighbor, I will destroy," says God. Jesus said that when we talk and engage in this speech, we are identifying our evil heart—it defiles the person.
Again, Jesus' own words from the Sermon on the Mount: "Do not judge so that you will not be judged." There's the passage that we talked about. "Judge not lest you be judged, for in the way you judge, you will be judged, and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own? Or how can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' and behold, the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother's eye."
It's fun for me at this point to get a word picture. So if you can close your eyes and see this guy with a log protruding from his eye—and most scholars will say that speck that you see in the other brother's eye is a chip off this log. It's the same thing. So often, isn't that what we see? We see somebody who really drives us nuts when they do—and then you fill in the blank and whatever it is—they do, you pretty much do yourself. That's why you recognize it so quickly in others.
Why We Love to Talk About People
James is simply saying, "Listen, watch out for this. We're prone to talk. We love to talk about people." We talked about this in the last couple sessions. We love to engage in this. We love to take words that can be so damaging and we just say them with very little thought. Perhaps you need to be on the receiving end of that to really understand how destructive it is, because once that's done, it doesn't matter.
There's a senator from Alaska right before the last election. There were all these charges leveled at him, and then all these things were brought at him. He loses the election, and within 30 days they drop all the charges. Now I'm not trying to engage in politics, and I'm not saying he's innocent. I'm just saying, where does that guy go to get his reputation back? Once there's an accusation made, it's almost impossible to undo this.
James is saying, "I get it that the world is that way, but hey, brothers, why are you eating each other up? Why are you talking about one another this way? Why are you judging things?" Now He's not saying don't deal with sin. Jesus quoted there at the end of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 7. When you get a little further into the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is telling us we need to deal with sin in our life and in the body. If somebody sins against you, you go to them. They don't respond, you take two people. They don't respond to that, you take—in our case, we would take three people. We're very slow, but ultimately we...
The Danger of Playing God
James is saying that within the body we have to deal with sin—blatant, overt sin. But that's not what we're talking about here. You're judging arbitrarily one another, you're setting yourself up. You see that in verse 12: you're playing God is what he's saying.
You're saying "this is what I'll do"—very similar to what Satan is all about, revealed in Isaiah 14. Where Lucifer says "I will ascend to heaven. I will raise my throne above the stars of God. I will sit on the Mount of the Assemblies in the recesses of the north. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds. I will make myself like the Most High." That's what you're doing. You're playing God.
That's what happens to us when we begin to engage in sin, whatever it is. Literally, you are taking the place of the one who is the lawgiver and judge, the one who is able to save and to destroy—and the idea of destroy here is eternal destruction. James is saying this is really, really serious business that you're involved in.
The Context of Quarrels and Arguments
Again, it's in the context of wisdom. It's in the context of dealing with one another. Look at—remember back at the beginning of this chapter—it's in the context of the quarrels and the arguments they were having. We're talking about how we're just devouring one another for our own selfish reasons, making huge issues out of things that ultimately don't matter, or if they matter, they're preferential. Ultimately, you're setting yourself as God, and that's His business, not yours.
Planning Without God
When he gets to verse 13, he says "come now." He uses this phrase only twice—here in verse 13 and again in chapter 5 verse 1. It's kind of "listen up here, let me get your attention here."
"Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we'll go to such-and-such a city and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.' You do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You're just a vapor that appears for a while and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, 'If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.' But as it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. Therefore, to the one who knows the right thing to do and doesn't do it, it is sin."
He literally says to the one who says—and in the tense in the Greek, it's a continual habitual practice—you're planning your life as if there is no God. You're saying "I'll go do this and I'll do that and I'll take God's place and I'll make His decisions and I'll determine my own will, not His."
Examples of Doing God's Will
David wrote in Psalm 40: "I delight to do your will, O God. Your law is within my heart." Psalm 143: "Teach me to do your will, for you are my God." Jesus taught: "Whoever does the will of God is my brother or my sister."
Jesus says: "I come down from heaven not to do my will but the will of Him who sent me." Jesus comments in John 4: "My food is to do the will of Him who sent me, to accomplish His work." The night before He died, Jesus prays: "Father, if it's possible, let this cup pass from me, but not my will but your will be done."
The driving force in our life is God's will. To understand that's what the psalmist is saying: "I want to understand your will. What's your will? Your law."
Three Types of God's Will
When we talk about the will of God, we have to be really clear. We use that in our speech in three ways.
One is to speak of God's known will—His law. So we don't have to wonder or guess about God's structure for marriage. We don't have to wonder about what God would have us do in so many situations because it's right here in front of us. He says it, it's clear, that settles it.
The second way we use the word is God's sovereign will or mysterious will, which is by definition unknowable. So He has a sovereign will, He's working out His plans. It's mystery, some of it, to us. We don't know when He's coming again—we know that He's coming again. We're not sure how He orchestrates relationships and how He moves things together and how He brings them about.
God's Sovereign Orchestration
Why did Susan decide to leave Boise and come to Phoenix for just a year? And when she decided to come, why did she decide to live at 68th Street and Osborne? And when she moved into that apartment building, why is it that the vacancy was right next to me?
I think God orchestrated that and knit those things and then ultimately our hearts together. He knit our hearts together—we even dress alike! I think God orchestrates that. I think God brings those things together. He brought her into my life, He did that, but that's mysterious.
The Third Type: Individual Will
There's a third way we use God's will, moving just a bit away from the text here. There's a third way we use God's will, and that is "what is God's will for my life?" as though it were some knowable individual will that He has for me.
So we ask something like: "Who does God—where does God want me to go to school? Where does God want me to live? Where is it God's will that I work? Who is it God's will that I marry, if I marry?"
So you see people frequently who are absolutely locked up tight trying to figure out the will of God. Are we clear on these three things? Trying to find out this will of God on what I ought to do, and I'm suggesting to you, you can never figure it out.
There was a wonderful book—it's a little tedious, it's longer than it needs to be—but it's a wonderful book that was done by Multnomah years ago in their critical concern series. It went out of print and now...
I think is back in print by Gary Friesen called *Decision-Making and the Will of God*. It's way longer than it needs to be, but it's really good. What he says, and I'll get it down to the core for you, is that when we have this idea of a dot, this idea of this thing—let's take where I should work. If we have this idea that God has a specific place for me to work, it's there.
Reason says I don't think that you can have this knowable will on where you ought to work, because God doesn't speak to that. You cannot find in here a chapter and verse that says Bob should work at Microsoft. There's some realities to that.
The Problem with Looking for the "Perfect" Decision
When all of a sudden you're trying to operate in that economy, there's no joy in your life and decision-making becomes very difficult because you're afraid that you're going to do something wrong. My daughter Haley was—both girls were cheerleaders, but her junior year she was on the cheer team and they won the state championship. So it's her junior year. Her senior year, she would come back and she would be the captain of the cheer team and all of the stuff that goes with it.
Well, in that time she was wrestling with whether she wanted to go back or not. Unheard of in the history of cheerleading to not repeat, to walk away on top. The decision became really difficult for her, and I remember one night she was laying in her bed and I went down. I said, "How you doing?" She said, "I don't know what to do with this." I said, "Well, just what do you want to do?"
Here's what she said: "I don't want to make a wrong decision." So I said to her, "Wait, hang on. You can't make a wrong decision. It's not a moral issue." We use that verbiage all the time: "I don't want to make a wrong decision." There's not a moral right or wrong. You may make a decision that doesn't turn out the way you want it, but who knows? So I did the old Ben Franklin with her and gave her a legal pad. Here's the reasons to do it. Here's the reasons to not do it. Then we said, "You got any ongoing sin in your life?" No. "You're in good right relationship with the Lord?" Yes. "Well, then here's the deal: Just do whatever you want to do."
The Freedom We Have in Non-Moral Decisions
That's really important when it comes to making decisions. We have enormous freedom. Again, I use marriage all the time. So guys, you're trying to figure out who to marry. Well, here's what you know. We can do both ways.
Guys, you need to love her. So you better pick out somebody that's lovable. If there's this constant friction and she's just driving you nuts and there's this crazy tingly loving thing, but it's just like bone-on-bone, get rid of her. I wouldn't try to work that out. It's not working for you. There's three billion women in the world. There's got to be one somewhere that you can work with.
Gals, you have to submit to him. So when you're looking, you have to submit to him, which means he needs to lead. If you're with this guy and you go out and he says, "You want to go out tonight?" "Sure. What do you want to do?" "I don't care, you pick." "Oh man, I don't know. Let's go get something to eat." "Okay, that'd be great. Where do you want to eat?" "I don't know, you decide." "Well, I don't really know. Okay, well, let's just go get a cheeseburger." "All right, great, we'll go get a cheeseburger."
The gal comes up: "What do you want?" "Cheeseburger." "What kind of cheese?" "What do you have?" "American, Swiss, cheddar." "Oh wow, can you come back?" If that's the guy, and you're going to submit to this guy, do you not see how life could be a little tough for you? This is the leader. This is a guy who's going to say, "Let's take the hill. I think. But I don't know which one. You go first." That's not... Girls, you're nuts. Why would you sign up for that deal?
Practical Guidelines for Decision-Making
So who do you marry? I do it all the time. Here's what I do with the guys all the time. Here's what the Bible says: she needs to be a Christian. I would say way more than that. She needs to love Jesus. She needs to know all about Him, and you have to be able to say, "What are you reading? How's God working in your life?" She should have an answer. Then you need to love her.
So get somebody that fits personality-wise. Put all the key... Here's the way I would do it: put all the candidates through the grid, take what's left, and pick the prettiest. That's just what you do. That's what I would do. Why would you do it any other way than that? Then you flip it around. But you see that.
So all of a sudden you're trying to decide where should I go to college? "I got a scholarship to Washington and Washington State and Oregon and Oregon State. Oh, which one is right? Which one is right? Which one is right?" There's no right or wrong. Now I know every time you do that, I know, but I'm just telling you the minute you pick one, because you're going to have hardship there, you're going to go, "I knew it. I knew it wasn't this. I should have gone to State." You go to State: "I knew it was the wrong State. I should have gone to Oregon State." You see that?
God's Will vs. Independent Living
God gives you His will. He's not saying you're just a free agent to do whatever you want to do. You line up with His will. I said here's the problem you have in verse 13. He says there's five ways here you're living independently of Me.
You say, "Here's what we're going to do today or tomorrow." So you're living on your own time frame—today and tomorrow. "We're going to go to such-and-such a city." You're operating as a free agent. You're going to pick the city. You're going to go and you say you're going to stay there for a year. You're setting your own time frames. And you're engaging in business. You're determining your own activity, and you're determining your own result. You're saying you're going to make a profit.
Jesus' Parable on the Futility of Greed
I want to show you a great illustration of this. Let's go to the gospel of Luke chapter 12, which is a beautiful illustration of what we're studying. In Luke chapter 12 verse 13, there's a crowd and there's a man who says, "Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me." Jesus said, "Who made me judge over you?"
Now Jesus gives us a principle that applies to what we're going to look at, and then a story. He said, "Beware and be on guard against every form of greed, for not even when one has abundance does life consist of possessions." So there's the principle. The principle is even if I have a whole bunch of stuff, that's not where I find life. I don't find life in stuff.
There was a question yesterday—and there always is when you do a Q&A—about identity. Where do you find your identity? How do you deal with your identity? I can only speak for myself. I don't have my identity wrapped up in my activity or what I do. I hang around with a lot of pastors. They tend to be very insecure people. I don't understand that completely because they teach to rely on Christ and Christ alone, but they have in their own life a difficult time doing it. Their church becomes their identity.
Identity Beyond Circumstances
At our church, at one point we were about 5,000 people. Right now we're probably running about 3,500. It's hard to say because of summer. We'll probably come back from summer around 3,800 to 4,000—something like that. We're down a thousand. That doesn't bother me a bit. We planted two churches. Then we had somebody get frustrated and leave, so we had an unplanned church plant. Then we have people that are unhappy about that. I don't care. My identity is not there.
If Susan and I go away on vacation—and we always do this kind of introspective stuff—and while we're gone this August and we start talking and we come to the conclusion that now's the time for me to move on (which I don't think it is), but if we came to that conclusion, it would be easy for me to do in terms of identity. My identity is not that church. My identity is not how I look or what I wear, or even that I'm married to Susan. My identity is in Christ.
The Rich Fool's Fatal Error
Stuff, He says, can be a real seductive thing. There's a tendency to think this is really living—if I have stuff, I'm really living. Then He tells a story in verse 16. There's a certain man. He's a rich man. He's very productive, and he began reasoning with himself. Now look at the singular personal pronouns.
He said, "This is what I will do since I have no place to store my crops. This is what I will do: I will tear down my barns and I will build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, 'Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years to come. Take your ease, eat, drink, and be merry.'" It's exactly the parallel of what He's talking about in James 4.
But God said to him, "You fool! This night your soul is required of you. Now who will get what you've prepared?" And He's making the point: "So is the man who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God."
God's Care for His Creation
So He says to you, "For this reason don't be anxious about anything," and then He talks about that. He said don't be worrying about what you're going to wear, where you're going to work, or what you're going to eat. Don't be worrying about those things. He says that's what the ravens do. See verse 24: "Consider the ravens. They don't sow or reap or store up in barns, and yet God feeds them. Are you more valuable than a bird?" Well, of course the answer is yes.
But look at the ravens. I did this—I took two days when I was teaching through Luke. I took two days and contemplated "consider the ravens." I Googled ravens and read a bunch of stuff about ravens. Consider the ravens. When I was all done, about all I could get that a raven does is eat, eliminate what he eats, and procreate. Now there may be some other things, some other purpose that serves our ecosystem, I don't know, but that's what I got.
In other words, think about this now: Consider the raven. God takes care of him. What's the raven do? Exactly what he was designed to do. Aren't you more important than a bird? Yes, so God's going to take care of you. He's going to handle you.
The Futility of Worry
By the way, why worry? Look at verse 25: "Why worry? Has being anxious added a single cubit to your lifespan? Has being anxious lengthened your life one bit?" Look at the lilies of the field. Look how beautiful they are. God takes care of them.
Don't seek, verse 29, what you'll eat or what you'll drink. Don't keep on worrying, for all these things the nations of the world eagerly seek. Here's what He says: When you're sitting and worrying, stewing, when you're checking the stock every five minutes to see what it's doing, when you're all in angst about what you're going to wear, where you're going to live—these worldly things—you're thinking just like in another passage, a parallel passage. You're thinking like a Gentile. You're thinking like an unbeliever. That's what unbelievers worry about.
Now He's not saying don't be concerned, and He's not saying don't plan. We'll come to that in a minute. But He's saying you're not obsessing about these things. We're not immune from this. I know it's difficult—it's difficult in your life and mine. The future is uncertain. It's the bumper sticker: "I don't know what the future holds, but I know who holds the future."
Seeking First His Kingdom
Now He's not saying just sit there and don't do anything. When He says wait—we'll look tonight at patience—when He says wait, it's not a passive activity. He said no. Verse 31: "Seek first His kingdom." Be about His kingdom work, advancing His kingdom. "Don't be afraid, for your God has chosen to give you the kingdom. Wherever your treasure is, there your heart will be also."
Now that illustrates from Jesus' life—this parable illustrates what James is saying back in chapter 4 verse 13: You're saying, "Come to such and such a city, engage in business, do business, make a profit, build bigger..."
Now there's nothing wrong with business at all. Business is good. There's nothing wrong with profit. I think profit is good. If it wasn't for money and your generosity, this place, this building you're sitting in, wouldn't exist. The reason you have money is because there's profit and there's good and you work. Those are all good things. There's nothing wrong with any of those.
To be engaged in commerce - God made you to work. That's why you want to work. He created you to work. We always go, "I know work is the result of the fall." No, they were working in Genesis 2. Work became toilsome after the fall, but you were designed to work. You were designed to be engaged. You're designed to be involved in enterprise and commerce and all these different things.
James is not saying here, "Don't plan." What he's saying is make your plans, but make them with the understanding that God trumps all of them. So the way I describe it is I write my plan in pencil with a clear understanding that God has the eraser. I can't just sit in neutral, so I'm going to make a decision. Now's the time that we're going to do this. This is where we're going to do it. We think we're going to be here for a year or two. We're going to do business. We hope to make a profit. We hope to at least sustain our life. But God could change all of that tomorrow.
You Are Not God
See, that's in the context of verse 12 saying you're acting like God. You're acting like a lawgiver. You're acting like the judge. You aren't. You're a puny little molecule, nothing in this whole deal, but you're acting like God.
He said here's the reality. It's the second part of verse 14: you are just a vapor. That's what you are. You're here a little while, then you go away.
Again, this is consistent not even just through all the Scripture. It's consistent in what James is saying. If you turn back to chapter 1, verse 9, that's what he was saying to the man who was rich and trying to find his identification in that. He says in verse 10, "Let the rich man glory in his humiliation, because like the flowering grass he'll pass away. The sun will rise with a scorching wind, withers the grass, the flowers fall off, the beauty of the appearance is destroyed." So it too is a rich man who - look at that phrase - "in the midst of his pursuits will just fade away."
That is reality. And I believe to be a man or woman of God, that reality has to permeate my life. I have to get this temporariness of life.
A Personal Reflection on Reality
I was born and raised in Davenport, Iowa. I went to grade school, high school, and then to college there. The college I went to was then St. Ambrose College, was a small Catholic liberal arts college. It is now a small Catholic liberal arts university, St. Ambrose University. Our mascot was the stinging bees. Struck fear into the hearts of our opposition.
On our campus, in the center of the campus, was the Memorial Union, which appropriately enough was called what? The Beehive. We would - now this would be 1969, 1970, 1971, on into the 80s, but the formative years were there - we would sit in the Beehive most of the time loaded, smoking dope, and we would look at each other with deep, deep, deep, deep philosophical questions. And we would say things like, "What is reality?" Then we would ponder that and say, "I'm hungry. Are you?" And then go eat. That's how that went down most of the time.
That's a very important question. We just didn't have any answers. We would say, "Well, what do you think it is? What do you think it is? What do you think it is?" Well, is there a reality? Is there a truth? Yeah, right here. God gives it to us.
The Reality of Death
And what we need to understand, and we have a ton of empirical data to support this, is that you're going to die. George Bernard Shaw said it this way: "The statistics on death are impressive. One out of one people die." You're going to die. Don't know when. Don't know how. Don't know where. Life is fragile. It's unpredictable. There's these things that happen.
What James comes back to, He says, "Listen, this is a vapor. You're treating this as though it's permanent. It's not. It's temporary." Your mindset is that you are somehow in the land of the living heading for the land of the dead, when in reality you're in the land of the dead headed for the land of the living. You got it all backwards. And you know it. You don't act like it.
Grandma's Wisdom
I can't remember - I think I mentioned my grandmother, but my grandma was really this cool gal. This is my dad's mom. Really this cool kind of feisty little lady. They had six kids. They had no money. Put all six kids in one bedroom, and the bedroom was - I'm not kidding - it was like the size of this right here. Boys, girls, didn't matter. Y'all went there. You got to go to the bathroom? Well, that would be down the stairs to the left, out the door, around the bend by the cars over there.
Nothing stopped this feisty gal. And you'd come and see her. I read a book - I cannot remember the name of this book, but I gave it to Susan to read. She read it, and it was just - it's a non-Christian book, but this gal just gave great insights into that generation and older people and would say, "Like your grandma, didn't she always kind of shove food at you?" At least mine did. It was always food. Well, that's because they didn't have anything. Food was how they communicated love.
So I would go down and my grandma would always bake bread when we came. And she'd say, "What do you want for lunch, Tommy?" And I would say, "I don't know." She said, "You like chicken? You want some chicken?" I'd say, "Yeah." She goes, "All right." And she'd go out back. And then she'd come in and they'd have chicken.
And I would go back and forth with her. Her morning drive time radio guy was a guy out of WHO in Des Moines whose name was Ronald Reagan. That was her morning talk guy. She was the first guy I ever heard a person call him Dutch. So when he became governor in California, I'm talking to my grandma. She's two hours ahead of us, but she'd be up. So I'd be up in my old party days. I'd be up drinking, and it might be like two in the morning, but it didn't matter. She'd be up.
When I was young, my grandmother and I had this banter back and forth. She would stay up late watching games, and I'd be awake and I'd call her and we'd go back and forth. She loved the twins. So if the twins were playing on the west coast, I knew she'd be listening to the game. She loved wrestling. She loved Bobby Knight. But she would always say, if you remember the old days, "I feel so sad for him because he only has that one plaid red coat." I said, "Well, I think he's got more than one, Susan."
I went to see my grandma and we walked in the door and I fired a jab at her and she didn't come back with anything. And I realized all of a sudden I fired another little one at her and she didn't come back with anything. And I realized she wasn't getting this. She was frail. I have no idea—not unlike my mother, and my mother now is about this big and she can't weigh 90 pounds. My grandma was so frail.
The Reality of Our Mortality
Now I'm going to try to express this and I always kind of stink at this, but see if you can get it. I know that where she was at that moment is in my future, but I can't see myself there. I can't see myself there. That makes sense. I know that's where I'm headed, if not that, some version of that. I know when I listen to my mom on the phone or I talk to my mom her world's getting smaller by choice. I know that's where I'm headed.
I'll say to Susan, "Don't let me start to think like that," and she'll say, "Well, it's too late. I'm already thinking like that." "Well, don't let me go any further." Well, I know that that's where I'm going. I've got to get that onto my hard drive to motivate how I live because I'm young and free.
One of the girls—I remember one of the two girls, Evans daughters—one of them was over here last night and she had the chair and the chair in front of her and she was just stretched. She was doing it and I thought, if I did that, if I did that I'd be at the chiropractor for a month. I just can't. She was just bending and I thought, it's really cool she's doing that because someday she won't be able to do that anymore. But that doesn't compute to her now.
Living as a Vapor
The faster I can live—that doesn't mean don't be young, don't be vibrant. I'm all for that. It means do all that planning in the context of the fact that you are a vapor. That's all you are. You're just a vapor. Susan and I walked out the other night. I don't know, might have been the first or second night, but we were all done and we went down to the Driftwood I think and had a cup of coffee or whatever. We're driving or walking back and we're standing out in front of one of these stores and you could see your breath. That's what He says: you're like a vapor, you're like the steam that comes out of a laundry room, you're like the smoke that comes out of one of those campfires.
Remember when the Challenger had that accident? They were like two minutes and 14 seconds into the flight and they said, "Permission to power up, power up." The next morning the editorial cartoon in the paper was the Challenger all like this and the caption was "Life is but a vapor."
I have to understand that reality because that gives me great freedom to make choices. I'm not out pursuing an agenda other than God's agenda. It doesn't rob me of my ambition or my purpose or my drive.
Our Changed Purpose
When God saved you He changed your designation—no longer sinner, but saint. He changed your destination from hell to heaven, but He changed your destiny, your reason for being here. You're now His guy. You're an ambassador. "Behold, all things have passed away and you're a new creature." Reconciled to Him and He's given to you the ministry of reconciliation, and then we take that into the world. That's what drives us.
Even if I say I'm going to go here, work at this, stay for this length of time, engage in business and make a profit, it's all against the backdrop of "if God wills." If God wills, if God wills I'll do that, and the reason that I'm doing that is to glorify Him in the midst of the process, not to build my own resume, my own agenda.
The Problem of Boasting
He said instead you don't do that. You don't think that way. Instead, here's what you say: "You ought to say if the Lord wills we will live and do this or that. But as it is, you boast." Literally, you're a loud-mouth. You're speaking loudly. You're arrogant. It represents wandering around. It's an emptiness. You ought to do this, but you don't. You boast. You brag.
As a person who didn't know Christ as Lord and Savior, I've always thought about my funeral. It's just kind of weird, but I always thought here's what we'll do: we'll have this service, will be all done, when it's all done. This would be ideal: as they wheel me out or carry me out, they would kick in Frank Sinatra—who I love Sinatra—they would kick into Sinatra singing "My Way." "He did it my way. Regrets, I had a few, but then again, too few to mention. My way."
James is saying when you think "my way," you are thinking in a complete ungodly way. Rather than say "my way," my life ought to be about saying "His way"—if He wills, if He desires. That's His decision, not mine.
Trusting God's Will
Proverbs 27:1: "Do not boast about tomorrow, for you don't know what the day may bring." You don't even know if it's going to come.
David wrote in Psalm 37: "Trust in the Lord and do good, dwell on the land, cultivate faithfulness. Delight yourself in the Lord. He'll give you the desires of your heart. Commit your way to Him, trust in Him also, and He will do it."
When He says "the desires of your heart," He's saying it's not just He's going to give you what you want. Bigger than that, He's going to change your wanter. It's not that He's going to say bring Him a wish list and He's just like Santa Claus going, "Have you been a good little boy this year? Oh yes." No, He's going to come into your life and He's going to change your heart.
God's Transforming Work
Transformed heart, informed mind, radical life. He's going to transform your heart. He's going to take those desires that were worldly, natural, demonic and He's going to replace them with desires from above that are supernatural and godly. That ties into what we've been talking about. He's going to give you the desires of your heart.
The Right Motivation for Living
He's not saying to place in your heart a whole new way to live. Even if I've engaged in the same activity, I'll do it with a different motivation. Don't walk away from this here saying you heard me say I need to get out of business. That's not what he's saying.
He's not saying, by the way, don't plan. He's not saying don't make preparations. He's not saying don't have insurance. Of course, and I'll give it to you. He's not saying any of those things.
Here's what he's saying. He's saying you do all that against the backdrop of what God wants, what God has in mind for you. He carries the thought—we'll take another five or ten minutes or so.
A Warning to the Rich
"Come now, you rich, weep and howl for your miseries which are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments have become moth-eaten." You get this—see the connection, the temporariness of this. "Your gold and your silver have rusted, and the rust will be a witness against you and consume your flesh like fire. It is in the last days that you've stored up this treasure."
Let me read to you from Eugene Peterson's paraphrase, The Message, these three verses: "A final word to you arrogant rich: take some lessons in lament. You'll need buckets of tears when the crash comes upon you. Your money is corrupt, your fine clothes stink. Your greedy luxuries are a cancer in your gut, destroying your life from within. You thought you were piling up wealth. What you've actually piled up is judgment."
It's really sobering, isn't it?
The Cry of Exploited Workers
Then he gives them a really practical application. "Behold, the pay of the laborers who mowed your fields, which have been withheld by you, cries out against you, and the outcry of those who did the harvesting has reached the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth." He said there's a testimony against you. In our context, you've stiffed the subcontractors, and it's not that they're taking you to court. It's that their cries have reached the ears of God.
I'll give you verses four and five again from The Message, and we'll spend a second on it and then wrap up with it tonight: "All the workers you've exploited and cheated cry out for judgment. The groans of the workers you used and abused are a roar in the ears of the Master Avenger. You've looted the earth and lived it up, but all you have to show for it is a fatter than usual corpse."
He said here you are in your pursuit for riches—not only have you left out God, but by leaving Him out, you begin to exploit others.
A Real-World Example
I have no idea what issues are important politically up here, but down where we live, one of the huge issues is immigration, specifically illegal immigration. So citizens of Mexico pour over that border as though it doesn't exist. There's essentially nothing that stops them. So our town is filled with people who are there illegally—thousands and thousands of them. By the way, less than before, but lots of illegals there, and it is a volatile issue.
Here's my point: once they're here, do you have any obligation to them as humans? So you drive right down—about four or five miles from our house—you ride right down. There's a Circle K there, and in front of that Circle K and then up a little bit, there's a Starbucks and a hotel. You can drive in those places any morning all day, but every morning you'll see 100 to 150 guys there. When people walk up or drive up, pick them up, throw them in the back of a pickup, take them out, and let them work for the day. Frequently at the end of the day, they stiff them.
And of course, the illegal has no recourse. What are they going to do?
A Church's Response
Our church partnered with a local businessman to build a day labor center. When they came to us with the idea, I immediately went to the city and said, "Here's the deal. We don't want to do anything that violates the law. You're the city. What they want us to do is come alongside and facilitate, help get this started. We still, I think, to some degree serve down there, and the whole idea was to take these guys who were on the street and move them back over here in kind of an orchestrated way where at least there's some level of protection. But you're the law. We don't want to violate the law. If you don't want this built, we don't want to engage in it."
They said to us, "Not only do we want it built—at the ribbon cutting, the mayor will be there." Now, do you think there's confusion in our immigration policy here?
Basic Human Obligation
So while Washington and Arizona and the cities figure all that out, what's my obligation to the guy that doesn't have anything to eat or drink? How do you treat the poorest of the poor, the lowly? When it's 113 degrees, do you think it's a crime to give that guy a bottle of water? You think that guy's coming from Guadalajara because he can get a bottle of water? The hardest-nosed guys I'm aware of on illegal immigration fully understand why those guys are coming over.
I can argue about all the other stuff—to me, there are real simple solutions if somebody would take them—but the reality is they're there and you're abusing them. And James is saying to these guys that are rich: your greed is—your workers, the ones you're exploiting, they cry out for judgment, and God will avenge that.
You've looted the earth. You've lived here. I'll read it from the New American Standard: "You have lived luxuriously on earth and led a life of wanton pleasure; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter." You're just living for yourself. You're obsessed with yourself. It's all about you.
Living in the Last Days
There's a little phrase I skipped over, and then we'll close with it. It's in verse 3. It says, "It is in the last days that you've stored up treasure." He's not saying you stored up treasure for the last days. He says it's in the midst of this—you're making long-term plans and you have a short lifespan. It's in the midst of these times that you are pursuing these things.
Here's the call to you and me: the call to you and me is to live with an understanding that Christ could come at any time and our lives could be changed at any moment. "Changed lives"—this was a motto we used in church.
Changed lives. To live against that backdrop, one author writes, "Our passion for God and our passion for heaven should be inseparable. The more I learn about God, the more excited I get about heaven. The more I learn about heaven, the more excited I get about God."
A.W. Tozer writes, "Let no one apologize for the powerful emphasis Christianity lays upon the doctrine of the world to come. Right there lies its immense superiority to everything else within the whole sphere of human thought or experience." We do well to think of the long tomorrow.
On his deathbed, D.L. Moody said, "Soon you will read in the newspaper that I'm dead. Don't believe it for a moment. I'll be more alive than ever before." That's what James is saying. There is this moment out there, this moment in time to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord.
Living Heavenly Minded for Earthly Good
But we don't just live for that. We are not so heavenly minded we're no earthly good. We're so heavenly minded that we now are of earthly good. We reprioritize, reengage, and recalibrate our life.
We still plan. We still say we're going to go do this or that, but we understand we're not the lawgiver. We're not the one who determines that. We don't determine the success or failure of an enterprise - that's in God's hands. I work hard, I work diligently, but the scripture says to me again and again, I can't do anything apart from Him.
Here you go: I can't do that without Him. He empowers me to do everything. Yet I live like I'm the one who's on the throne, I'm the one who's the ruler, I'm the one who makes the laws, I'm the one who will determine. Even at the end of the day if He blesses me, there's some dark side of me that says, "Sure He blessed me. Why wouldn't He? Look at me. Is He going to bless that guy? No, I worked hard. I put..."
The Danger of Strategic Pride
I'm not a very good strategic planner. I don't mind thinking in the long term, but I'm not a really good strategic X's and O's guy. At our church, we've never had that. I'm aware if they had it, they had meetings without me. We've never had a strategic plan that I'm aware of.
I know guys who have a strategic plan, and at the end of the day when that plan is fulfilled, they kind of go, "Wow, what a strategic plan. We're good planners." Now I think it's okay to plan. I'm just saying that plan all of a sudden becomes more your god than God. Your goals, mission, vision, values - I'm all for that. But your mission, vision, values become your god, not God.
I have all of those things, but I bathe them in this reality that life is temporary. Let me read it to you again as we'll close: "You are just a vapor that appears for a little while, and then you vanish." Not to extinction, by the way. You vanish from this planet. You get rid of this earth suit and trade it in for a new body. I can't wait for that.
Looking Ahead: The Call to Patience
Well, James again is not done. You can look and see that though we're at verse 5, there's some left for us to cover. When you look at verse 7 and 8, there's a word that's used three times in those two verses: be patient.
"Therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. Behold, the farmer waits for the precious produce of his soil. Be patient about it until it gets the early and late rain. You too be patient. Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand."
That's what we'll do tonight. We'll look at this idea of patience. We'll close this book out. I'll do a summary of this, and then we'll pray as we head out from this place tonight and tomorrow.
Closing Prayer
Let me pray now. Father, thank You for these amazing, wonderful truths. Remind us that though we are helpless, we are never hopeless. If we put our hope in this earth, this life, we will be disappointed. To think that we have control is delusionary.
We can make plans and we should, but we write them with a pencil and give You the eraser. God, help us say, "This is our plan. This is what we want to do. This is our desire. But if it's not Your desire, God, put a bullet in this now. Kill it now."
God, here are our deepest, deepest desires: to be Your kids living a life in line with Your will, to desire and love the things that You love, to care for the things that You care for, to pursue the agenda, the goals that are Your goals, Your vision. God, we pray that we see You in everything, that You're all over all of our pursuits, all of our desires, our relationships.
Families that are here, that You might even take marriages that are there, maybe just a little bit tired, and breathe freshness into them. Maybe marriages that are falling apart, that God, You put them back together. Maybe relationships between siblings or parents and kids or friends, that God, there would be a joy and a happiness and a peace in our life, not because the circumstances have changed, but because You've climbed into these circumstances with us.
Remind us again that peace is not the absence of turmoil, but it's Your presence right in the midst of our lives. God, we love You, and we declare that openly. Even as we declare our love for You boldly, we declare it against the backdrop that acknowledges that the only reason that we love You is because You first loved us. On our own, we would have never arrived at that conclusion.
But You poured out Your love to us. You sent Jesus who lived and died and rose from the dead, declared the victory over death, allows us to say, "Death, where's your sting?" It's not there anymore. It frees us up to live a life earth-bound but heavenly minded, to take those daily difficult things in life and bring You into the midst of them.
And God, also to take some of the things that maybe appear so big and so important and put them in perspective and realize they're small, minute, trivial, insignificant. But we let them become big. Why? Well, we've acted in bitter jealousy with selfish ambition, and the result is disorder and every evil thing around us.
God, let us be more like Jesus. Let us love like He loved. Serve like He served. Let that be driving us this afternoon. Let us live not to be served but to serve, to give our lives.
to those that You bring around us. Well, that is huge and beyond anything that we can do on our own. It's supernatural. God, will You send Your Spirit? Stir Him up in our lives. Give us a thirst and a hunger for Your word and for Your people and for what's best for them and for You, not for us. This gigantic prayer and desire we offer to You in Jesus' name. Amen.