Plans, Pride, and Providence: A Call to Honest Humility

James 4:13 – 17

 

I was an Ag student in high school. Ag classes and FFA all four years. Every year, students from local colleges would come visit our Ag classes to talk to us about the benefits of college and going to their college. Even in Ag, the push for higher education and planning out your future was strong.

 

Much to my lovely wife’s frustration, I’m not a planner. I’m very a much a go with the flow guy. So when those moments when I’m asked about my “5-year plan” come up, I used to tend to struggle with answering.

 

But, out of high school, one thing I always believed was certain. I was going to be a dairyman. And I got to be one for a little while, and when my dad changed those plans for me, I knew I was going to be in the dairy industry. I was so certain that was my future.

 

I just knew that I was going to live in Hilmar and work in dairy for my career and retire that way. I just knew I was going to do that and my family would be along for the ride. I just knew. You know who I never asked about it? God.

 

Was it what God wanted? Looking back I see the signs. I’ve always been academically minded, a good learner, a lover of history, and so many people tried to drag me into the teaching world. And I refused. Little did I know that teaching people is precisely what God had in mind for me.

 

But I was stubborn, I refused to give any thought to leaving the dairy business and becoming a teacher. I was quite sure of myself, of my future, and really, I was just deceiving myself.

 

As we continue on in James, we see him continue his threefold calling out of self-deception, arrogance, and pride in our passage today. Last week the issue of pride and arrogance was seen in believers judging one another where he asked, “who are you to judge your neighbor?”. Today it’s seen in believer’s self-assurance of the future, and of blessing and prosperity. Let’s read God’s Word together: James 4:13 – 17.

James continue his attack against pride and arrogance, against placing oneself above God and against presuming to know better than God by focusing on the successful businessmen of his day, almost like a case study that applies to all believers.

 

• Don’t presume to make plans without the big picture.

 

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Most everyone goes through life making plans all the time. They plan out their meals, their schedules, and their lives. They plan to buy a home, start a family, and they plan for retirement. Planning is a natural part of the human life. The issue James is tackling is when believers become overly confident in their own plans.

 

James picks up here with, “Come now, you who say,”. What James is saying is “you who are so sure of your plans, think about what you’re actually saying.” Now James isn’t saying that people shouldn’t make plans. God is most certainly a God of order, not chaos. But he is calling out and warning those who make plans without considering the Master planner.

 

So often people are caught up in their “winning” formula for success: The who (anyone along for the ride), what (business/career), when (timing), where (location), why (profit/prosperity), and how (living situation, business venture, etc.) of their plans.

 

In this case, James’ deluded audience thought and spoke as though all that their plans required was self-assuredness for control of the circumstances of their plans and their desired outcome. (Hilmar dairy internship program & Dalhart).

 

Proverbs 16:9, “The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps.” The “winning” formula from before is missing the most important component to planning, giving consideration to the will of God. It may seem silly to most people to think about God’s will in the most basic and simple of plans, but all of it is under His control, and James’ hearers were quite presumptuously ignoring God’s reality.

 

James struck a blow at this presumption by questioning their view of time, and of human life within it. Having spoken as though they had control over their own destinies and knew the outcome of a year of days, James reminded them of their ignorance, of even just tomorrow.

The irony of believers boasting in themselves is quite dramatic here. They didn’t know anything about what the future held for them. This boast served for James as another example of self-deception that must be replaced by knowledge according to God’s standards.

 

Their ignorance was rooted in not only their immature faith, but in their very nature as human creatures. James uses a powerful metaphor here for the fragility and shortness of human life. “What is your life?” he asked and then answered, “You are mist.”

 

Here in the valley, where we get blanketed in fog most every winter, mist can last quite a while. But in the regularly hot, dry, and arid climate of ancient Judea, mists don’t last very long. They appear with the dew and quickly dissipate and evaporate, much like human life. This one hits home a little harder right now.

 

No one knows the time of his or her own life. Without trust in God, believers become nearly indistinguishable from the wicked, who take no account of God and trust in themselves.

 

Humans were created to be entirely dependent on God. Just as the truth of God’s sovereignty and His sole lordship over all creation are necessary to correct human independence, so too is the truth about the transitory nature of humans. Believers must regularly return and remember these basic Christian truths.

 

• Recognize that nothing happens outside of God’s will.

 

The second part of Proverbs 16:9 comes to mind here, “but the Lord establishes his steps.” Instead of presuming and taking tomorrow for granted, believers ought to always consider God’s will in their plans.

 

In light of what James’ audience was just reminded of, they should not have spoken with presumption of God’s will. The phrase, “If God wills” is a common NT expression.

 

It reminds me of the first time I asked an older friend from Hilmar, Mark Tanksley, if I’d see him at church on Sunday. He answers me with, “Yep, Lord willing and the creek don’t rise.” I remember busting up laughing because I’d never heard that phrase before. But as I grew in my faith, I realized that we’re called to look at life that way. Lord willing.

The simple truth that applies here to everyone is this: Trusting tomorrow and the outcome of plans made according to God’s will is a demonstration of genuine faith. Mature speech and action demonstrate the genuineness and humility of faith, even in the plans believers make.

 

Remember that every good and perfect gift comes from God, even the outcome of human plans here on earth. There is nothing evil or wrong about what God has made and put at the disposal of believers to be able to plan and succeed in life.

 

But God is NOT at our disposal. He is not a means to an end, and neither are His standards for faith. Nothing in a believer’s life lies outside of faith and the good deeds that must flow from it. Life is indeed lived, but only if God wills, just as surely as deeds are done only if God wills.

 

The actions of James’ audience were based on the problem James stated earlier in 4:2, “you do not have, because you do not ask God.” What kind of faith did they have? They didn’t acknowledge God in all their plans and expectations, they acknowledged only themselves.

 

• Humbly give credit where credit is due.

 

In 1 Cor. 1:31 the Apostle Paul quotes the prophet Jeremiah saying, “Therefore, as it is written: “Let the one who boasts boast in the Lord.” Boasting has its place in the Christian life, if it’s done in view of the work of God in our lives and in His church (Jas. 1:9). But that’s not the case with the believers that James was confronting.

 

Instead of confessing their dependence on the will of God, their arrogance and pride erupted and overflowed with bragging. More precisely, to brag here means to put on full display the pretense of being the creator and reason for one’s own well-being in life.

 

The connection between “friendship with the world” and pretense should not be missed here. The worldly power of speech is all about boasting and its heart attitude of pretentiousness.

 

This spiritual fact may be harder to grasp for American believers who love to celebrate “the self-made man.” (Dad and his dairy vs. Simon VW and his dairy)

 

What James calls on believers to do is to have absolutely nothing to do with boasting and arrogance. He calls all such boasting evil because in such statements of certainty about the future without any consideration to God demonstrates no willingness to yield to God’s will.

 

Worst of all the temptation is to make pronouncements that claim the sure knowledge of God’s will for the future to one’s own benefit. Think prosperity gospel, word of faith, name and claim it type of faiths.

 

As such, James was quite strict. He speaks against boasting in one’s plans for the future instead of boasting in the work of the Lord. Such boasting about oneself stems from a prayerless, prideful, and pretentious way of life. James declares what else is this but wickedness.

 

James then sums up for believers what he’s saying here by referring to a fundamental principle of faith. “So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.”

 

As a fundamental principle of genuine faith this applies to pretty much anything. Answering the question about what sin is, this principle makes it simple and clear. In the context of James’ letter we can see it go a step further and calling faith without works sin.

 

But here, in this more focused context of the passage, the good that believers know they must do involves confessing dependence upon God’s will in everything they do.

 

Paul wrote in Romans 14:23 “everything that does not come from faith is sin.” That which is of faith is virtually synonymous with that which is good because faith is the gift of God—James 1:17-18.

 

The problem of disconnecting what one does from what one knows touches on the double mindedness and inactive faith that James has already spoken against at length in his letter.

 

Because they were believers and had heard the Word of God, they knew the good; but because they had not received it with meekness and humility, they contradicted what they knew and committed sin. In all likelihood, James’ hearers knew this principle well, but they probably hadn’t expected it to be cited in this connection.

 

The principle of doing only what one knows to be good begins with placing all of the intentions of the heart before God, placing all of our future plans at His feet. This is genuine faith, this is whole-hearted trust in God.

 

Since God is creator and sovereign over all, true humility calls you to align your plans with God’s purpose and demonstrate faith in His providence.

 

This is not a prohibition against making plans, it’s a call to always keep God at the front of your plans, demonstrating honest humility and complete dependence on God and prioritizing His will above your own.

 

Jesus demonstrated this humility and dependence on God throughout His entire ministry. The Gospel’s record several times when Jesus went off alone to pray to God, to connect with the Father and seek His will. The Gospel’s record Jesus saying many times that He came to do the work of His Father.

 

Christ embodies the ultimate trust in the Father’s plan, showing perfect reliance on God’s will even in moments of great distress, like in Gethsemane before He went to the cross. “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.

 

Jesus demonstrated that true humility involves surrendering our will to God’s. Christ modeled for us what it means to be fully dependent on the Father.

 

As Christians, we must be honest about the reality we live in. Our call to honest humility is about surrendering our illusion of control and understanding of our lives to God.

 

It is a call to believe, in genuine faith, that God’s plan for our lives is so much better than anything we could ever presume to dream up. God’s will for us, God’s work in our lives, God’s providence is what we should rely on and rest in, not ourselves.

 

Let’s pray.