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." 14 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. 15 Instead, you ought to say, "If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that." 16 As it is, you boast and brag. All such boasting is evil. 17 Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins.
When historian H.G. Wells died in 1946, many newspapers quoted the last words he ever spoke. Friends and nurses were fluttering about his bedside trying to be helpful, adjusting his pillows, pulling up the covers, administering sedatives and so on.
Wells turned to them and said, "Don’t bother me! Can’t you see I’m busy dying?" It was the last flicker of humor from a gallant spirit.
The way people die says a lot about the way they have lived; in fact it says almost everything about the way they lived.
Tony Campolo, that remarkable Christian communicator, tells about the Baptist Church of which he is the associate pastor in Philadelphia. It celebrates Student Recognition Day once a year.
In one of those services, after a few students had spoken, the Pastor began his sermon in a shocking manner. He said, "Young people, you may not think you are going to die, but you are. One of these days, they’ll take you to the cemetery, drop you in a hole, throw some dirt on your face, and go back to the church and eat potato salad."
What a way to open a sermon! But what an unforgettable underscoring of the inevitable fact of death. Now I don’t want this sermon to be morbid, but that pastor was trying to impress upon his congregation that death is a fact of life, and earthly life is temporary.
In this Scripture passage, James emphasizes the truth that a life of faith is one of daily dependence on the Lord. Our day-to-day planning must always be done with the awareness that our minutes, our hours, and our days are subject to the will of the Lord.
In November of 1986 my father had a seizure. The doctors conducted extensive tests but could find nothing that would cause the seizure. A month later they repeated the tests and found he had a brain tumor. There was nothing they could do to treat his tumor as it was a type that was extremely resistant to radiation and chemotherapy. My father was told he had twelve to eighteen months to live. He was only fifty-four. I was living in Alaska at the time, and I will never forget the night he called to tell me that his condition was terminal. He said something I will always remember. He said, "Chuck, we are all dying; I just happen to know when I will die." As it turned out, he only had six more months on this earth. But his attitude was so positive about his remaining days that he was asked to speak to groups of terminally ill patients. My father was not a preacher, nor was he Superman, but he was a man of faith.
James describes our life as "a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes." Then he adds that our attitude at all times must be: "If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or do that."
Let’s be clear. Those words are not intended to minimize the need for planning and preparation for each day of our lives, but to stress the overriding importance of living each day in complete dependence on the Lord.
So in the midst of this passage, James asks the penetrating question, "What is your life?" And he helps to answer it.
In one of Arthur Miller’s plays called, The Price, a middle-aged couple is reminiscing. Life for them had turned out to be a disappointment. They thought they had it all mapped out. They knew what they wanted to do, the schooling they needed. Their goals seemed clear. But they never realized their goals.
At a climatic moment of the play, the woman says to her husband, "Everything was always temporary with us. It’s as if we never were anything. We were always just about to be."
Isn’t that tragic? But it is a very common experience. Many of us enter middle age and look down the road toward a retirement that is not all that far away, and we wonder what happened? Or maybe we are already at that stage in life; and we ask, "What happened? Where did it all go? Where did we make the wrong turn?" Or maybe we didn’t make a wrong turn — maybe we didn’t make a turn at all. Or maybe, at a crucial moment, we failed to decide. We were too afraid to take the risk. So we stand, asking the question that was asked in a popular song a few years ago: "Is That All There Is?"
We all have plans for our lives don’t we? How can we be sure that we plan our lives and live our lives in a way that is pleasing to God? James tells us how to look at life in a Godly way, but first he tells us about three sins to avoid. The first is the sin of presumption. Listen again to verses 13-15 as James describes this:
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 describes a merchant planning his future business as though he was really in control. He not only presumes to know what will happen tomorrow, but for the next year! We are like that aren’t we? We are presumptuous enough to think we are in control of our lives. Think you’re in control? It is only an illusion. There is very little we can control. Proverbs 27:1 says, "Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring forth."
The second sin James warns us against is boasting. In verse 16 he says, "As it is, you boast and brag. All such boasting is evil." Not only do we presume we have control over our lives, but we even boast about it. Such boasting mocks the Creator who really is the One in control of our lives.
The third sin is the sin of omission. Take a look at verse 17: "Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins." Sin is not only doing something wrong; it is not doing something right. God has given each of us certain gifts to do what is right in His eyes and here the Bible tells us that if we don’t do it we have sinned against God.
And then James leads us to a question, which answered gives us the key to the proper attitude toward life and our planning. The question is: "What is your life?" Implicit in our Scripture lesson is James’ answer: Life is a gift. And, Life is opportunity.
Before we look at those two understandings of life, let me make the point that the way we look at life makes all the difference in the world.
Alfred Adler told a story — an intriguing encounter that took place in the main train station of inner Austria, back in the early 1930’s.
A well-dressed businessman got off the train and was walking through the lobby, when an alcoholic beggar stopped him and asked for just enough money for one more meal. The businessman said he usually did not respond to such requests, but he would this time on one condition.
He said, "Tell me, how has an intelligent-looking person, as you appear to be, allowed yourself to get into these straights?"
With that the beggar turned red in the face with anger and responded, "Listen, if you had happen to you what has happened to me, you wouldn’t be asking that question. You would be exactly where I am.... I was one of several children. My mother died when I was young. My father was an abusive and very cruel man. The state finally took my brothers and my sisters and me away from him and put us in an orphanage. During World War I a battle raged around the orphanage, the building caught fire, and I had to flee into the night. I have never seen any of my family since. I don’t know whether they are alive or they are dead. It’s been that way all my life. Every time I get on my feet, something knocks me down. If you had happen to you what’s happened to me, you would be standing in these very shoes."
The businessman said, "It’s interesting that you should say that, because as you tell your story, it does, in fact, parallel my own." Shocked that their stories were so closely related, they began to talk more fully. As you probably have anticipated by now, they discovered that they were in fact brothers, separated years before and now, mysteriously, their lives had intersected.
Dr. Adler used this story to raise the perplexing question, "Why is it that some humans respond so differently to the same circumstances?" Here were two individuals who had the same genetic background, who had much the same things happen to them, and yet, while one had allowed those circumstances to crush him to the ground, the other had somehow used events that went against him as energy to move forward. Why did these two brothers respond so differently to the same set of circumstances?
George Buttrick gets at the same question with a different metaphor: "Why is it, do you suppose, that the same sun melts the wax and hardens the clay?" Two people look on exactly the same landscape; one pair of eyes gravitates to the lowest and grimiest; the other pair, for some reason, reaches up to the highest and the best. Why is it that we respond so differently to the same set of circumstances?
So how we look at life makes all the difference in the world. With that as our foundational thought, let’s now focus on Life as a Gift, and Life as an Opportunity.
Geddes MacGregor tells that when he was six years old, he went with his mother to visit her mother, his grandmother. One afternoon, the grandmother said offhandedly to his mother, "I’m so glad you decided to have little Geddes, because he’s been such a pleasure to all of us."
Geddes suddenly appeared and asked, "What do you mean, Grandmother?"
Little Geddes learned that his mother, who had been forty-eight when he was conceived, had considered having an abortion to protect her own life. At the last moment, she decided to go ahead and risk the pregnancy.
Geddes said that he went off to ponder this new information, and as he sat alone, there came to him two very vivid images.
In the first image, he saw himself in a line of people walking step by step toward a big doorway. Suddenly a hand reached out, pulled him from the line, and said, "You’ve been disqualified. You cannot be born."
Then that image dissolved and a new image appeared. Again he was in a line, and again moving toward the door. Only this time, he made it through and was born.
Geddes MacGregor said that from that day forward, he has never taken his life for granted for a single moment. Realizing how close he came to not being born has made the wonder of being alive a tremendous gift for him.
Is life any less a gift for us? Do you see your life as a gift? Or like so many people, do you see it as an entitlement — something you deserve, or must do, or even worse, something you must endure? It makes all the difference in the world in the way you view your life.
If you see life as an entitlement — something you deserve, or something you must accomplish — then there will be all sorts of pressure to perform; pressure to be worthy; pressure to be accepted by others; pressure to make things happen; pressure to stand up under the burden that comes from thinking that everything rests upon your shoulders.
But if you feel that life is a gift, not an entitlement, then you can move through life with a kind of freedom. A sense of wonder will pervade your very being, and the theme song of your life will be one of gratitude.
Life is a gift; and it is also an opportunity.
Roy L. Smith, an exciting Methodist preacher of a past generation, once told his congregation about the day he watched his five-year-old boy head off to kindergarten. He looked at the proud little boy, scrubbed, starched, and probably looking better than he ever would again until he went to his senior prom.
He had a little box of pencils in his hand and a smile on his face. The sun was shining as if it couldn’t contain itself. The little boy turned around to wave at his mother and daddy one more time.
"And he never returned," Dr. Smith said. "He never returned."
No, the boy wasn’t killed or kidnapped. He came home at noontime. But he wasn’t the same little boy anymore. And he never again would be. He had launched into the sea of a new life.
And that’s a picture of life. Life is opportunity; an opportunity to be faithful, to be good stewards of the gift that God has given us.
A teacher once had her class conduct an experiment with "jumping" fleas. The students put hundreds of fleas on a table and observed how they jumped. Then they took a large glass container and turned it upside down over the fleas. Now when the fleas jumped, they kept hitting the top of the container. When they finally realized they couldn’t jump any higher, they began to measure their jumps.
Later, the teacher removed the container. But the fleas continued to jump at the same height, just as if the container were still confining them.
That’s a parable of life. Too easily we allow circumstances to limit us. We settle for less than is possible. We allow mediocrity to become the standard for our life. So we are not faithful — we are not good stewards of the gift of life God has given us.
This is illustrated in so many ways. In churches across America our mediocrity in faithfulness is represented by what we do with our financial resources. Did you know that the wealthy give a smaller percentage of their income to the church than the poor? There are few tithers in the church any more, yet in the early church that was the minimum.
We have become a church who is unwilling to give of our time as well. In seminary and in ministry I have come in contact with a great many pastors and assistant pastors from many different denominations. They often dread their annual meetings when they elect officers because it is like pulling teeth to get people to serve as officers or on committees.
We are also mediocre in America in our church and Sunday School attendance. It’s too hot; it’s too wet; it’s too cold; it’s too nice out. It’s too long; the material is too new; it’s too old. There are too many kids; there are too many old people. There’s no one but hypocrites in there!
We need to recognize the truth about our mediocrity in faithfulness. The real reason we do not risk being truly faithful is that if we truly seek to become disciples of Christ our lives will change. We will love God with all our heart, not just the leftovers. We will have to love our neighbors enough to sacrifice for them, and often we are not willing. If we truly love God and seek to become disciples it will mean changes for many of us, and we don’t want to change. Paul wrote to the new Christian church at Corinth, "So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!" But we are comfortable just where we are and we do not like change! And we have deluded ourselves that we can be comfortable in this world and be Christians too. What a lie that we have bought hook, line and sinker!
But there is Good News. Jesus Christ offers us the opportunity to be His disciples; He has given us the opportunity for commitment and service and love. There is hope yet for us. There is hope if we realize that Life is a gift; life is an opportunity!
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