James 4:13-17 (ESV Strong's)
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.
Do Right Today; Let God Do Right Tomorrow
We often get really carried away about worry. We worry about next week, next month and even next year. The presumptuousness of that thinking, according to the above passage, is sin. The above passage is all one paragraph. It is teaching us about our trying to usurp God’s sovereignty with our planning, plotting and prognosticating. We are to focus on the evil we face each day, individual days of it. Our lives are but a “mist.” We appear for a moment and then we are gone. It is arrogant to plot out our lives in a way that simply attempts to dictate what God should or not do. This all does not mean we don’t plan. James, Peter and Paul all made plans. God makes plans. James is here speaking about the presumptuousness of our planning. That we leave out the sovereign purpose and plans of God. We ought to plan. But, we ought to plan based upon “if the Lord wills or does not will” our plans. He states to “boast” about our plans, absent God’s sovereign will being the guiding factor, is evil. His conclusion is quite remarkable:
James 5:17
So, whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.
This is not just a blanket statement about walking in faith (although it certainly is a principle we need to follow). What James is concluding is that to believers we should know to make our plans based upon the sovereign will and choice of God. All other type of planning is sin!! We are to make our plans and do right today and let God take care of and do right tomorrow.
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