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Morning. You know, I’ve noticed that Wes always gets the most applause when he walks up here. It’s okay. He’s actually my favorite, too, so…
Well, hey, welcome again to Red Village Church. My name is Rob Fisher. I am one of the lay elders here at the church. My wife Rachel and I have been in Madison and at Red Village for almost a decade now. We’ve been serving as elders for a couple of years now, and it’s a great privilege and responsibility to serve as your elder and to bring the word to you this morning.
So, we’re nearing the end of our series on the book of James this summer. Over the last handful of summers, we try to give Aaron Josiah, our normal preaching pastor, the summer off for a couple of reasons. One, we think it’s an important way to take care of him and his family and just kind of pull him away from the weekly grind of preaching and teaching. It is a labor, and it’s a grind, and it kind of allows him—he’s still working—it allows him to focus on other areas of pastoral ministry. We think it’s good for the church just to hear from the elders. I think it’s good for the church to be developing men who can handle the word. You’re stuck with junior varsity today. My dad is on next week, up from Missouri. He’s kind of like semi-pro. Then we get Aaron back in a couple of weeks. So thanks for bearing with us. We think it’s important as an elder team, and it’s a great privilege and honor as well.
So, open your Bibles now. We are in James, chapter four, verses 13 through 17. This is a passage that, me being the one that made the preaching schedule, I got to choose for myself. I’ve meditated on it for a long time, and I sometimes love it, and I sometimes loathe it. But that means the Spirit’s working. So let’s read the text together. This is the word of the Lord. This is James, chapter four, verses 13 through 17.
It says, “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 a sin.”
Let’s pray.
Lord, we are grateful for and humbled by your word. We are grateful that it challenges us and convicts us, and it studies us so we study it. We are grateful that your word is for our growth and our sanctification. I’m grateful that you work through sinful men to make it effective for your people. I’m grateful for the challenge of preaching, for the conviction of your word, and the standard that’s set for us in scripture.
And, Lord, we simply ask—and I especially humbly ask—that you would work through me, a very flawed and sinful man, to rightfully and faithfully handle this text so that it would be for the growth, sanctification, and growing in Christlikeness of our congregation and our community. It’s in Christ’s name we pray. Amen.
As we often do here at Red Village, we work through this verse by verse in expositional preaching. Then I’ll summarize it, pull out some main points of application, and Lord willing, it’ll be effective here.
Starting right off here, verse 13. I’m going to read verse 13 again just to refresh us. “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow, we’ll go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit.'”
As we think through verse 13, I just want to note that there’s a specific and also a general audience for this passage. The specific audience is very clear. Obviously, it says those who are traveling and trading and making a profit. We’ll call that, for the sake of simplicity this morning, the merchant class. Right? But I’m also sure that James—it’s not like when he wrote this he’s like, “Okay, everybody that’s not the merchant class, just disregard everything I’m going to say here.” Right? No, as is true in many places in the rest of the Bible, God wants us to learn from this overall narrative because, at our core, every human is sinful. There’s a sin issue that he’s going to address that I think is particularly prone to this merchant class, but it’s applicable to everybody.
So we’ll start off with a specific audience a little bit more. Again, it’s fair to assume he’s addressing this wealthier merchant class as we look at the rest of the book of James. He’s certainly not afraid to address the wealthier class; he addresses them in chapter two and the passage immediately following this one. But right now, he’s going to dial his focus on this certain group of people who are particularly prone to these business ventures and these particular sins just because of the nature of what they do. And I think that’s me too. I’m okay with risk. I’m okay with business ventures, and that’s one of the reasons why I’ve wrestled with this passage for so long.
So, like, I’ve been out of college for ten years now, and I don’t know if I could count the number of business planning and motivational speaking books or sessions I’ve been to, but I can kind of summarize them all into two statements. They’re either going to say you have to believe in yourself, or you have to believe in your plan, or both, or something like that. And as we think about this text, I think James is specifically calling out this merchant class because, in this world of business planning and motivational speaking, and you can do it and believe in your plan, it’s actually very counterproductive when we look at it in the grand scheme of things. If you don’t have this bigger vision of what God is doing in the world, it’s all up to us. That is why I think James is calling out this merchant class specifically.
Then, secondly, how does this passage relate to everyone? Everybody here is a planner to a certain extent. Whether you like it or not, we’re all planners to a certain extent—just that basic need of literally surviving. We’re either consciously or subconsciously planning how to survive. We have to eat, we have to sleep, we have to rest, right? We establish and plan our days in certain ways. So we have these expected norms. So no matter who you are, if we’re a living and breathing person, we have something resembling some regularity in our lives. You are a planner. Therefore, you have to tune into this passage because there’s a core sin issue at humans planning things that this passage is going to address.
So, just to summarize verse 13 again, there’s a specific audience, this merchant class, that James thinks the sin issue is particularly important to. But there’s also this core human condition in all of us to control our lives that makes this passage relevant to everybody. So nobody’s able to tune out; we all have to tune in here.
So verse 13 is all the setup, and then in verse 14, he’s going to kind of come in with a rebuke here.
So verse 14 says this: “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.”
As verse 14 picks up from chapter 13, we see James correcting these people’s false assumptions that are shown in verse 13. So if the people in verse 13 are saying, “Hey, we know the future; we have confidence in the future,” James is trying to correct that. He’s saying it’s actually very frail, and he’s pointing out the frailty of their life and the frailty of really all of human existence in the grand scheme of what God is doing in God’s power.
For me at least, I think this is the—and probably for most of you, this is probably the most challenging part of this passage to teach on because my sin nature is just so fickle. Depending on if things are going well or things are going bad, I always want to credit myself as deserving the unexpected and the good changes in my life. But then I am also, I know, so quick to complain in the midst of hard and challenging changes.
So again, for me, and I would venture to guess most of you, it comes down to we struggle to see beyond what is happening right here and right now. We struggle to see beyond our current circumstances. This verse in this passage is aiming just to broaden our perspectives to the reality of our own impact in the world compared to God’s eternal power and eternal presence.
As I think about my sin nature and positive things happening, I realize that, again, I am so fickle to accept them as a standard and deserving rather than a good gift from God. And so, as I was thinking about this, I recalled a conversation near the end of my time at college.
We went to this very unique college. It’s a work-study college. It’s conservative, Christian, 1500 students, but no student pays tuition, which is just an absurd model to run a college on, right? You have to have money. But it started around the turn of the century. It’s in rural Missouri, bringing these rural farm kids in. A Presbyterian pastor said, “I can serve this region best by giving these kids educations.” So, even now, it’s a ton of first-generation college students, a ton of kids that wouldn’t be able to pay for college otherwise. For the first hundred years of its existence, the school was fundraising, and everybody’s bootstrapping it. It’s just this hardscrabble existence.
But then, in the late nineties, they brought in a new president for fundraising, and the school just became flush with cash. They were able to engage in these initiatives and building projects that wouldn’t have been fathomable a hundred years ago. I asked this director of development, “What do you see as the biggest challenge our school faces over the next generation?” He said, “The biggest challenge is going to be affluenza. Nobody is going to realize how comfortable you have it.” Meaning there’s going to be a generation of the school that forgets or never even knew the challenges it faced just to simply exist for the first hundred years of its life.
Now, part of this is me too. When you’re there, you’re a student; everything’s free. Then you graduate, and you realize everything is not free. You go, “Wow, maybe I should have been a little bit grateful for all the sacrifice that it takes to make this thing work.”
So all of that to say, in times of ease, in times of comfort, we are so quick to forget how much of a struggle it is to get to that point of comfort sometimes.
Now, on the flip side of what that guy called affluenza, when things do not go as we planned, when things are hard. I hesitate to speak too presumptively on this subject just based on, like, I’m 32, right? I don’t have—I’m free of grays so far, but I think I’m on borrowed time here. A quote that Aaron Josiah often says about preaching, I thought it was a Spurgeon quote, but it was a John Piper tweet in 2014. He said, “I believe in homiletics,” and homiletics is like the art and the practice of preaching. He says, “I believe in homiletics, but not much. A thousand sorrows teaches a man to preach.”
So with that caveat, I don’t think I’m at my thousand sorrows threshold yet. We’re just going to open up this thought here of not knowing what tomorrow will bring when tomorrow brings hard times. So if a thousand sorrows teach a man to preach, then a thousand sorrows should also teach us not to boast in tomorrow.
As I think about some of the hardships in this congregation, I don’t pretend to know all of them by any means. I love this time after the service when we invite you to come up and pray with us. It is encouraging for us, as the elders, to share burdens and pray with you. But all that to say, as an elder, I probably know more than most. I don’t know them all, but I’m sure that many of you would be far more qualified to speak to the uncertainty of the future as it relates to pain and unexpected hardships than I am.
But in this congregation right now, there are some very hard and very heavy medical diagnoses—toddlers, middle-aged, older folks. I know there are many of you that probably long to be married or long to have kids. And there are kids; it’s like we can’t run out of space downstairs. Everyone else is having kids, and you’re saying, “We can’t.” It’s hard; we get it. There are hard, unexpected things.
As I was thinking about this topic of children, I recalled when Rachel and I found out she was pregnant for the first time a few years ago. At that same time, we found out some of our college friends and my cousin and his wife were also expecting. All three babies were going to be due within about the same month of each other. My cousin’s wife miscarried after a few months. Our friends from college found out their baby, Lincoln, had a rare genetic disorder, and he likely wouldn’t live an entire day, even if he lived through the entire pregnancy. Lincoln was delivered three months early and died on the day of his birth.
For us, I mean, this is a small sample size, right? We’re the one out of three that made it. For us, there’s another moment where we learned—not even through our direct experience, just kind of through the corollary—that sometimes there’s a painful uncertainty of the future.
So just to summarize verse 14, we are so fickle and forgetful sometimes. We have such a hard time seeing beyond our current circumstances—good, bad, or indifferent.
Moving on, verse 15 here. Verse 15 says this: “Instead, you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.'”
So he’s starting out—James is starting out here with a redirection, right? Instead of these boastful declarations, he says you should be saying that you’ll be doing this or that, if the Lord wills it. More important than the words we say, as I think about this passage, this again comes down to the core state of our hearts, the core sin issues in our hearts, and how these attitudes are shown through our actions and words.
Luke six says, the translation I memorized says, “From the overflow of the heart speaks the mouth.” I think the ESV says, “Out of the abundance of the heart speaks the mouth.” By saying, “If the Lord wills it,” we’re resetting the proper order of God, of being sovereign and in ultimate control in the state of our hearts, right?
As I have gotten more and more leadership experience, I’m growing to realize that so much of leadership is just establishing and setting standards, whether by decree or by action or maybe both. So much of the long-term success of an organization is going to come down to setting and holding standards. As it relates to us here at Red Village Church in 2024, you know, I’ve been here ten years, and in the last few years, I just realized so much of a faithful gospel ministry is repetitive.
We do Lord’s Supper here every week, and we say the same thing, right? Faithful ministry is repetitive. It’s never irrelevant, but it should be repetitive because we’re always setting the standard, right? It should become repetitive because the standard that God has for his people has never changed. It’s always been the gospel, but it should never become irrelevant because we’re always just playing—it’s like whack-a-mole—with these different distractions and false gods that the devil is always reinventing for us, right?
Throughout all of history, God’s people have been in this constant struggle of making false gods and getting our priorities out of line. This whole passage, to me, is really a passage about resetting ourselves to the truth of who God is and that God is in charge and that God is in ultimate control of all things.
I was reading through the Action Bible with my kids every night before bed. It’s like the Bible in comic book form. It’s super engaging, especially to young boys who like battle scenes and stuff like that. I think we’ve read the story of Samson like 20 times, but we recently read about Israel after they leave Egyptian slavery.
Moses is up on the mountain receiving the Ten Commandments. He’s gone for this indefinite amount of time, and the people just start panicking, right? They go to Aaron. He’s kind of the de facto leader, and Aaron panics too, and they make a golden calf statue to worship. As I read the story, I don’t know how many times, but I hadn’t actually seen the picture in a while. I saw this picture, and it’s a jarring image to a modern American Western mind.
It’s crazy! As I was thinking about this, I was like, “Okay, a couple of summers ago, Aaron—not Aaron from the Old Testament, Aaron Josiah—took a sabbatical, and I was just imagining this playing out at Red Village. The people panic; the elder team panics, and we’re like, ‘We’re making a golden calf.’ You would throw us—like, you would throw us in the insane asylum.”
But as we put on the flip side of this, if we as elders or we as the congregation start to say, “Hey, we’re going to—” like, we kind of start to slip with our church attendance. We’re like, “Oh man, I’m just tired. I can’t make it Sunday morning. I can’t devote another night of the week to small groups. I’ve got so much on my plate right now; I can’t make time to read the Bible.”
This one’s a hot topic: “My kids are in sports now. Our kids have this opportunity to play on this great travel ball team. We’re going to be traveling all over the Midwest for the next six months,” right? That’s not quite as crazy to us. But I mention all that to say that in the context in which we now live, we’ve exchanged worshiping statues for worshiping a myriad of worldly pursuits.
Like I said, we’re like playing whack-a-mole with the devil here, right? But at the core of this, we’re fighting this battle of priorities against any pursuit that we prioritize over the pursuit of God.
As I was thinking about this too, I like to think about classic literature if it was set in modern times. I was thinking about The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, right? It’s like this one demon mentoring a younger demon on how he can trick this guy. I think it was written in the sixties or something like that.
But I was thinking, like, if you wrote this in modern times, the older demon would say, “Hey, have you tried getting the guy a new iPhone?” Right? Like, has he downloaded Instagram or whatever your social media drug of choice is, right?
But this is—like, we think it’s crazy that Israel is worshiping golden statues. But meanwhile, we have a million different distractions that are still pulling us away from the one true God.
What James is doing here in verse 15 is just resetting our priorities. Verse 15 is showing us the correct and outward projection of a person whose heart priorities are correctly aligned with God’s control compared to our own. So the man in verse 13 is saying, “I’m going to do it,” but according to verse 15, he should be saying, “I’m going to do it, but only if God does it through me.”
Okay, so moving along in the text, look at verses 16 and 17. We’ll combine these here. James writes, “As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. Whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him, it is a sin.”
In verses 16 and 17, James is just summarizing the issues in the last three verses—13, 14, and 15. He’s tying them back into his main theme throughout this book. He’s really calling out various sins. He’s drawing this line in the sand and trying to pull people back into deeper communion with God and with the church.
As I was prepping this, we look at the last two verses of James. He says, “My brothers, if anyone among you wanders from the truth, and someone brings him back, let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from wandering will save his soul from death and cover a multitude of sins.”
So James summarizes these sins from verses 13 and 14. He says, “You’re boasting in arrogance.” Again, James is always drawing this line of distinction so we can distinguish between what is sin and what is not. He does it quite clearly in the last verse. He says, “Whoever knows the right thing to do,” which in this case is trusting in the Lord’s plans more than our own, “and fails to do it, is sinning.”
Okay, so I’m going to try to land this message here, and we’ll tie it up with just a few thoughts to take with you. First, I want to talk about—I think there are just two core sin issues at the heart of what we’re discussing in this passage. Lastly, I want to leave you with what I think the Bible is showing us to be the correct heart posture of someone who is trusting their plans with the Lord’s will.
The first major sin issue here is that we hold our plans too highly. We hold our own plans too highly. So again, we all have plans—big or small. We hold onto them, and we covet them. When they don’t work out, we throw fits like we’re toddlers who’ve been told no.
By the way, parents, this is why you need to tell your kids no. We need to get used to hearing it. We need to be able to learn and take a no and learn from it and move on. But again, parents and adults, we’re not off the hook here either. I can say with 100% personal experience that I’ve witnessed pity parties and temper tantrums in adults that go far beyond toddlers.
I can say that because I do it. I am my grumpiest; I am my least patient; I am my least loving and caring when the plans that I have in my own head don’t work out how I think they should in real life.
Rachel and I, over ten years of marriage, we’ve embarked on—she’s the most patient woman in the world. We’ve taken a lot of these merchant journeys; we’ve taken a decent amount of risks. As it relates to this passage, this passage says, “Hey, we’re going to go into such and such a town and trade and make a profit.”
But for us, we said, “Hey, we’re going to move to Madison, we’re going to do foster care, we’re going to buy a fixer-upper house. It’ll be fine. We’ll do it on the nights and weekends with all of our kids and all our free time. We’re going to adopt; we’re going to have more kids; we’re going to start a business; we’re going to serve the church.”
You might be tempted to say, “Man, you guys are—I don’t know how you do it. You’re so brave.” I don’t want to loop Rachel into this too much, but I think the reason I’ve been able to do so many of these merchant journeys—as the text says in verse 15—is not due to the presence of bravery, but it’s more so the presence of ignorance.
I like to say I’m rarely fearful. If I ever write an autobiography, it’s going to be titled, “Rarely Fearful, Often Ignorant.” There’s this Eric Church song called “Lessons.” I wish I wouldn’t have learned the hard way. That’s going to be the subtitle of the autobiography.
The song’s just about beer and trucks and love—a good country song. But that title feels super appropriate to a lot of the big things we’ve learned and embarked on. For every single one of these ventures, I start out with this wild optimism and equally, again, wild ignorance as to all the specific details to get to that end goal.
I mean, I think about the details some. We’re taking calculated risks. I’m not auditioning for American Idol, but we’re working generally in spaces where I think we can succeed. But in regards to the specifically hard and probably meticulous details, I personally can see the ten-year goal more clearly than I can see what I need to get done over the next month.
At some point on this journey, I get super frustrated. I’m mad at how I got myself into it, why I talked myself into it, how unfair the world is, and any other inconvenience that comes up along the way. At this point of frustration, I’m usually airing my grievances to Rachel, who just looks at me with equal amounts of love and sarcasm and says, “How do you think this could happen with such detailed planning?”
To pile on myself here a little bit, I had this very interesting interaction at the city of Madison trash dump this week. I was making small talk with this guy who works there. He said, “Man, I had a rough morning. I had an argument earlier this morning with a guy trying to drop off rocks. We can’t take rocks here.”
Then he said, “You look like you’re in your late thirties.” I didn’t correct him; I’m in my early thirties. He started with that. He said, “Do you know the hardest group of people we have here as patrons?” At this point, I was just like, “We’re just going to let this ride.”
He goes, “The hardest patrons we have here are white men in their thirties.” I was like, “Again, not knowing how this conversation was going to end, I just kind of let it ride.” He goes, “The problem is with you guys. You guys think you know everything.”
He’s not wrong. As I was prepping this passage, I was thinking about this passage, meditating on it, and we had this conversation. In this silly illustration of some guy trying to drop off rocks at a dump site and making a huge deal out of it—this is what we always do. If we have plans that are like 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years, or something as small as taking trash to the dump, we throw fits.
We have this really hard time when things don’t go as planned, and it’s all because we’re holding our own plans too highly. So that’s the first issue we have to address when we confess to God. As we apply this in our lives, we can’t hold our own plans too highly. We have to make our plans subservient to God’s sovereign plans.
The second major issue here that we see is that most of our plans are far too short-sighted. Another thing I couldn’t get over as I thought about this text: the great irony is that this merchant class James is calling out is what most people would call the best planners, right? It’s like, “Man, these guys, they’ve done the research; they’ve done the digging. They know that they can go here, they can do this, and they can go that.”
But he says, “No, these guys, they’re a mist.” He’s like, “The long-term planning skills of these guys, they’re going to vanish. Your plans won’t last; they’re a mist.” Earlier on in James 1:11, he takes a similar tone. He says, “The sun rises with its scorching heat, withers the grass, and the flower fails; its beauty perishes. So also will the rich man fade away in the midst of his pursuits.”
So both in chapter one and this passage, James is just hammering this idea that earthly gains are far too short-sighted. Earthly gains are far too short-sighted. In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus says, “Lay up your treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroy, where thieves do not break in and steal. Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”
What James is trying to get us to understand here—and it’s such a battle against distractions—is that the whole weight of the Bible is saying you have to make decisions on earth that have consequences into eternity, far beyond the realm of earth. You have to make decisions on earth with consequences far beyond the realm of earth.
The Bible tells us at the end of our lives, we’re going to spend eternity in toil and pain and suffering in hell, or we’re going to spend eternity joyfully worshiping and praising God in heaven. That endgame is the most important and the most ultimate destiny. James is trying to point our vision towards… I just get the feeling of like—I have four sons, right? We’re in a world of distractions. I’m trying to talk to them, and I’m like pulling their face this way, pulling their face this way. My mom did this to me too.
It’s like James is saying, “No, you’re right here. We need to be looking to heaven.” We have a million distractions, but James is like, “There’s something so much bigger going on here.” We’re having to constantly reset our plans to an eternal goal. We’re constantly fighting off these golden calves in the form of just short-term earthly gains.
If you’re planning goals in the earthly realm, you haven’t—you’re short. You haven’t really planned for the most important decision that every person has to make. Now, it’s important to note, I think nowhere in this text is there an excuse for anyone not to take action.
It’s a lazy, foolish, and false reading of the entire message of the Bible in this passage to say, “Well, if the Lord wills, it means I can just kick my feet up.” As I was preparing this for the sermon, I wish I could say, “We’ll see if the Lord wills it for me to write it or not,” right? Or like, “We’ll see if the Lord wills it for me to pay my taxes,” and we’ll just kind of let the IRS let me know, right?
But all people, and especially Christ followers, I think we have more reason to plan and take action because of our eternal destiny. Earthly failure and earthly success are simply missed. You’re playing with house money here. You can aim big, and you can miss big while trying to do great things for God because God has already secured our most important need through Jesus dying on the cross on our behalf and securing that eternal destiny for us.
There’s this famous Tim Keller quote about the difference between the gospel of Jesus Christ and all religions. He says, “Traditional religion says, ‘If I obey, then God will love and accept me.’ The gospel says, ‘God loves and accepts me; therefore, I want to obey.’” The book of James is full of these imperative statements and commands.
If you don’t look at it through the greater lens of the gospel, you’re going to feel like you can never measure up to the standard that God sets. The truth is that on our own merits and efforts, we never do measure up. We never can. We’ll always fall short. But because God has secured the most important prize for us through Jesus on our behalf, we have to still joyfully strive to live up to those standards that James sets.
As we think about proper planning and proper goal setting in relation to this passage, we can say, “I’m going to set some ambitious, God-honoring goals.” Because no matter what happens to those plans or goals, we can be confident in the most important and the most consequential plans through Jesus.
The most important decision is whether or not you will try to earn your salvation with God on your own or whether you will look to Jesus as your means to salvation and right standing before the holy and righteous God.
So just closing this up, we can and should still make plans for our time while we are amiss here on earth, right? But we have to realize that those plans are not our most important form of identity. We are a flawed and failing people, and we have to keep resetting our focus and our aim towards the plans that have eternal importance.
So let’s pray.
Lord, I’m grateful for the gift of just knowing that your Spirit is working within me and within us as we kind of sit in the discomfort of being challenged by your text, challenged by your word that you’ve given to us to grow us. But even more than that, I am eternally grateful that we do not have to meet this standard on our own to earn salvation. We never can. We’re grateful that you gave us Jesus to live the perfect life that we can never live, die the death that we can never die, so that we could stand in righteousness before you.
So, Lord, be with us the rest of our time together, the rest of our week. Help us to keep our plans and our goals, our desires in proper order and proper ranking with you. It’s in Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.