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. Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” 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.
We detect a note of exasperation when the Spirit through James says Come now, you who say… he’s finding fault with some of his readers. His readers back then up to today. There is a tendency – kinda surprising for image-bearers when you think about it – to leave God out of our real-life plans and language.
The fault in the sentence that starts Today or tomorrow we will go… is not in the fact that the speaker intends to do business or make a profit. Even if that’s lots of profit. In fact, the Bible throughout assumes that it is man’s duty to invest, grow, move things forward, be fruitful. Generally speaking, your house should look better the day that you sell it than the day you moved in. In the house of the righteous there is much treasure (Proverbs 15:6). By wisdom a house is built/ and by understanding it is established/ by knowledge the rooms are filled/ with all precious and pleasant riches. (Proverbs 24: 3,4).
Remember that the man who buries his money, who doesn’t invest or attempt to increase, is the bad guy in Jesus’ parable. So, be ambitious: get the education, look to make money then look to make more money, start a business, think inside the box and outside the box, invent, hustle, burn the midnight oil, network…
So, to repeat: the problem is not business or profit. The underlying problem is planning, acting without reference to God. The image bearing creation imagining life with no God in sight. This happens…a lot. A lot! The image bearing creation imagining life with no God in sight.
We get a bad notion in our head. Hey, I have an idea: let’s create a secular state where we on purpose never define God and refer to him as little as possible… and less and less as years go by! That’s a bad idea and the kind of thing James is condemning. When a person or a family or a society or a nation makes plans without invoking God, it’s the height of arrogance.
I heard about a small town council drafting a letter and one of the members suggested a sentence that included this phrase: we wish him godspeed. That sentence was struck out…why?… because we can’t be bringing God anywhere close to government. Arrogant!
Hey, I have an idea: let’s create a public-serving, free-of-charge structure to educate image bearers about reality – we’ll call it public school. Yes, starting at 4 years old we’ll explain to impressionable minds what is important, tell them about how they should behave, teach about what has happened before they arrived and how they should think about that…but here’s the thing – we won’t bring up God the Source and Maintainer of all – in any of this education except in the most vanilla of ways! And James looks on and comments, how arrogant!
Or, why don’t we have a “business” mindset Mon-Fri, 9-5, an “around the house” mindset on Saturdays, and then for a couple hours on Sunday we’ll remember God and say some pretty things about him?
Or, if we do think about God during business hours it’ll start and end only with ‘how can I witness to my colleagues?’ Bringing a dash of Sunday thinking into Mon-Fri!
But surely, as I work as a project manager at Eversource, I can’t be thinking about how to bring the wisdom and justice of God into planning power grids, setting prices, constructing bridges? We can’t be actively discerning the Creator’s will in managing his creation?!?
Yes, James says. Figure out how to merge your boss’s will into the policies of the Son of Man. What is it to manage people’s investments in the name of Jesus Christ? THINK! What is it to load and deliver package or lumber to fellow image bearers? PUT YOUR MIND INTO IT!
Don’t leave Christ – let’s call him The Christ, King of Kings, the Last Adam, the First and the Last – out of anything! To do so is to insert yourself into the spotlight and attempt to crowd him out. Arrogant!
So a reader/listener to James responds, a little skeptically: What then, should Christian public-school teacher show up at class tomorrow and lead with, “as we learn algebra today let’s first consider that it’s Jesus, the Logos who from the beginning was with God and is God who’s behind the order we see in mathematics”?
Well, that would be a great first sentence but then would be also probably one of your last. The administration would call you in and say: we can’t give preference to any religion and so we’re just going to leave religion out of the curriculum and we’re also firing you. And then the guy who replaces you is a dutiful secularist…so, then on the train goes, absent God.
So, no, you hardly ever lead with the dramatic religious moves but rather you think politically… and practice the art of the possible. What small thing can we do to admit into this gray secular environment at least a light ray of the truth that Jesus of Nazareth is the resurrected Lord and God has begun a new creation when he raised him from the dead? You think hard about that small practical thing. You think hard about the long term, about starting to change the trajectory of things. You scheme with other Christians about how to properly bear witness to the resurrection in an environment that is spiritually thin.
But what you cannot do is arrogantly accept that there are segments of life where God can be fenced out, left behind!
Ok, that’s the first part of the sermon.
Now, let’s ask: What do you miss, what goes wrong, when you leave out God? Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. For starters, when you leave out God, that simple, obvious truth that James plops in here hangs over you as a threat. You do not know what tomorrow will bring. Ominous…And so, under that threat you either curl up in the fetal position before the future… or you attempt to master it.
There are people living scared of the unknown future because they’ve lived in the present without God in their language or plans. Or perhaps there’s a small God is in some corner of their thoughts but the real powers who range freely in their souls are those called Economy, Crypto, China, the Libs, Losing my Boyfriend, Crime Stats, Bad News, Threat of Embarrassment. The future belongs to these baddies!
When you haven’t done the work of believing God and worshiping him… when you haven’t done the work of making God your refuge – – – – dear brothers and sisters – – – – you could be an orthodox or conservative Christian and that could be true of you – – – –
– – – – the unknown future is a threat… and so you’re constantly flirting with a low-grade anxiety, you’re likely a restless sleeper, many 2ams you’re scrolling on your phone, so you’re regularly a little sleepy, and so perhaps you’re turning toward bbq chips, doomscrolling, or some other stimulant – maybe it’s rage posting or controversy…
What’s behind it all? The image bearer is running scared of the future because his Most High is not to be seen… and the lesser gods that are seen are capricious and cruel. God is not your friend, your partner!
Contrast with the sort of person Psalm 112 describes his outlook toward the future: He will not fear bad news; his heart is confident, trusting in the Lord.
God absent from your regular thinking leads to being threatened by the unknown future… which can present in low-grade anxiety… … but also in a fierce, grim planning.
You do not know what tomorrow will bring.. But, not so, says the fiercely planning secularist, the one who isn’t used to referring to God in any practical sense, who is threatened by an unknown future. (Again, I say, this person might be a Christian!) For him or her, tomorrow will most certainly not bring something whether we like that or not; rather tomorrow is something we can completely fashion. If I work hard enough tomorrow will show up according to how I plan for it to show up.
Yeah, I’m getting my electrical engineering degree and then we’re getting married after I graduate and yeah there are tons of jobs in my field and first year employees with my degree are making low six figures and so we’ll pay this off and then three years later…
There’s that wise old question: How do you get the Almighty to laugh? Answer: Tell him your plans.
Now, of course, there’s another angle here. A prudent man foresees evil and hides himself… Proverbs 22:3. It is good to look down the road and make provision, have a plan, work the plan, head for the target, not easily be put off it when various pressures come.
But what is the color, the texture of your planning, and your overall thoughts of the future? Are you dating with underlying grimness? This relationship better end up in a beautiful marriage or I’ll be devastated. If my dad doesn’t leave me a good inheritance I’m sunk. My car has to keep going for two more years…
Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. Does that sound ominous to you? Is that a fact for you to defeat? Or because in every aspect of your life you have made God your refuge you say – yes, I do not know and I’m a little nervous but also kinda look forward to it. Because you have held in your plans a big God over all life, because you fear God, you laugh at the time to come.
A family that honors God in their practical decisions laughs at the time to come.
A nation that honors God because their leaders craft policies with the God in mind laughs at the time to come. The future – though unknown – isn’t a threat.
What else happens if you leave out God from your practical experience, if you relegate him to being a Sunday God? Well, listen again. What is your life? asks James. Though his answer doesn’t seem to fit the question, it seems too specific. His answer simply has to do with life’s transitoriness.
Or if we wanted to be a little highfalutin: our lightness of being. We’re consumed with work-life balance, bucket lists, leaving a legacy, meeting our goals, making a deep impression important this important that – and yet the true metaphor of our lives is something so lightweight, filmy….a mist that appears for a little time.
What is your life? And James says a big thing to say about it – what your life is, a big thing to say about what it means – is that it’s vanishing. A lady lived in 12 Colonial Drive for 50+ years before we arrived. I couldn’t say her name; I don’t know it! She’s just gone. Here’s another image the Scriptures give us: As for man, his days are like grass/ he flourishes like a flower of the field/ for the wind passes over it, and it is gone/ and its place knows it no more. Psalm 103: 15,16.
Transitoriness is just a fact. But when you’re accustomed to living your real life away from God, your impermanence will drive you crazy.
Yes, human…family…society…nation…world: if you leave out God from your practical experience, if you don’t do the work of seeing him in your real life, your mortality will more and more trouble you, and eventually terrify you. See 2020. Arrogant leaving God out of all your plans and verbiage, which might for a time seem so natural, will soon catch up to you.
If you’re not tending to worshiping, believing in a big God over all aspects of life, making certain you’re at one with him: as you get into your 40s… and then your 50s… and then as each birthday arrives… as you arrive to the same decade of your life as your parents were when they died… as you start to see your friends and siblings succumb – your thoughts will be overwhelmed with fear of death.
From professional experience I can tell you there are Christians whose thoughts are consumed with their physical condition, with noticing and reacting to every sign of deterioration, however faint. Who are regularly brought to panic that they’re about to go.
Contrast that with verbiage of Psalm 91: I will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress/ my God, in whom I trust.”… Because you have made the Lord your dwelling place/—the Most High, who is my refuge… Because he holds fast to me in love/ I will deliver him/ I will protect him, because he knows my name.
Because he knows my name. Because he knows my name. Let’s drop some truths: The Lord has numbered your days. He already knows…has decided…your day of death. Some people think that each year, on the calendar day that you’re going to die, if you’re really alert you’ll feel a chill pass over you. Whatever. God knows.
Other facts: For the most of us, our death will be proceeded by weakness, needle poking, getting undressed in front of strangers, people forgetting to check up on us or at least society rushing on, physical pain, loss of memory and other faculties. Smelliness. For all of us, the moment of death will take us by surprise.
None of us understands death, what we will experience as we cross over. It truly is the great “undiscovered country.”
Yet God knows all this. Do you know that God’s name, what kind of Being he is? Have you learned to trust him? Are you assured in the fact that he. is. for. you? A loving and wise Father that you are at one with? Are you at peace with the notion that the whole process of dying and death and the whole fact of transitoriness is part of God’s plans for us now?
Or, because we’ve lived with this God merely as a slogan, as a religious idea, carelessly, formally, Sunday-ly only…haven’t gone about our days in his fellowship, discerning his will… … … We could be enraged and be terrified at this God who would allow in such pain, such loss, such tragedy…and such mystery surrounding it all. Panic sets in.
We have time, though, to get rid of our Sunday-only God and come to believe and worship the God of all reality, who is over needles, over sleepiness, over progress and regress. We have time now to learn how to hold fast to this God in love, to trust him in the small setbacks so as to be prepared for the “are you sitting down” phone calls.
Of course there are tensions in every lesson. Even as we actively entrust our decline and dying to God, we should also, as the poet said, rage against the dying of the light. Hold on to life as a great gift and scornfully look down on our enemy, death. We should regret leaving loved ones and have done our best to provide for them – both examples and money – before we go. Husbands, do you have a life insurance policy? (My son Ben likes to remind me that a good man leaveth an inheritance to his children’s children (Proverbs 13:22). We should keep moving as long as possible, practice moderation in eating, drinking alcohol. Not be addicted to tobacco or any substance. Get good sleep.
But here’s the inescapable thing: to be human is to be vanishing, in a way, lightweight. What we should do with that fact is to lay hold of the eternal, to find God – not just as a password or a slogan – but do the work of living before him Sun-Sat, mulling over his ways in our professional life, in our leisure, coming to conclude that he is deeply good, being convinced that he is the Rock of salvation.
This is the work of God: that you believe in him and the one that he sent. Don’t leave God out of any part of your life. Bring him in – deliberately speak him and his commandments – into every corner of your internal and external experience: investing, selling, e-mailing. Young people, do the work of believing now instead of arrogant secularism… so that later you’re not overwhelmed, terrified, of the future that brings who knows what, especially that you’re not living your latter days in secret terror, in quiet desperation because your chest is hurting, you’ve forgotten what you went upstairs to grab etc..
Now that you realize that it’s not enough to do the right thing, but the right things must be done with active faith in God, looking for his will in the details… now that you know what to do, to not do is just more of the same falling short of good image bearing. Glorify God, Humans!
To the end of doing the work, putting in the time of trusting in God, learning to not be afraid of him or his will, a few closing pastoral words:
· Keep a clean conscience. Confess your faults to one another. Tell someone where the bodies are buried so you’re not carrying around secrets that – at least in your mind – distance you from God and turn God into a threat.
· Take seriously those habits/ environments that create psychological distance between you and God. STOP. Say, I’m a simple man: I obey God and keep channels open with him.
· Think through…discuss…what it’d look like to be a Christian HVACer. Would you cut the sheet metal differently? Store the circuit boards in a different spot? Then, what? How is having Jesus Christ as Uber-Master affecting your professional life?
· Say “no” to being a Sunday Christian. Don’t have a church voice or a church smile. Go with God deliberately throughout your whole week.
· Understand that you’re an embodied spirit or a spiritual body. Your creaks and ailments and decline and doctor visits will be the stuff and theaters of spiritual battles. God’s Spirit, as he ever does, is leading you to say “Abba” throughout – to trust God as your great and wise Father. Growing up in Christ is to be assured of sonship in every situation because of your adoption by God. The devil on the other hand is aiming for you to feel alone and terrified in your bodily aches. For God’s ways to seem menacing. Battle is joined!
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Our trust in God – not just our belief that He exists and that he’s good and powerful and wise – but also that we are at one with him, that he is for us…our trust in God is founded in Jesus Christ. That great Man fought off the devil and at every moment trusted God. He the perfect image bearer died for sinners taking their judgment of imperfect image bearing into his body. God raised Jesus from the dead, this resurrection justifying both he who had been condemned for us and all who are in him through a faithful response. Jesus – the Man in full, the Strong One who took down the devil – is the Rock of our salvation.
We come to his Table to remember his death, to thank God for his finished work and the gift of his Spirit, to signify that we the baptized into Jesus’ death and resurrection are his united body, to enjoy our Lord’s special presence by faith. Even if you’re not a member of this church, if you’re a Christian holding to the orthodox faith, if you’ve been baptized into Christ Jesus and if you’re accountable to a local church and its elders (that’s a few ifs!) by the Lord’s authority I invite to his table!
Part of being a Christian is believing certain facts. If you believe, let’s together recite the Creed found on the back of your bulletin:
Our God and Father – thank you for the gospel of Jesus Christ by which we’ve been adopted as sons and daughters. Spirit of Jesus Christ, thank you for your tireless labors by which you’ve gathered us together at this table. Lord Jesus Christ, our Elder Brother, meet with us at this Table and renew our faith in your mediation, renew our love for God and for all the Church, renew our hope as we head into whatever future you have for us. Especially in fellowship with you now, be our courage, our joy, our Rock of salvation.
Amen. Brothers and sisters, welcome to the Table of the Lord Jesus Christ. I’m going to ask
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