March 20 Daily Devotional

Scripture for Day 79—James 4:13–17

¹³ 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"—¹⁴ 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. ¹⁵ Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that." ¹⁶ As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. ¹⁷ So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.

Devotional:

God urges you to put off the worldliness of presumption. The most striking thing about presumption is that it’s so common that it seems normal. "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…'" (v. 13). What's so unusual about that? And yet, God says that presumption in speech betrays a worldliness in heart, and he uses a business illustration to make his point.

Now, he's not saying, "Don't plan." He's not saying, "Don't be good stewards of the resources that God has given you." He's not saying, "Don't budget." He's not saying any of that, but he is talking about a form of worldliness that readily pervades our own thinking and comes out in our speech if we don't consciously reject it.

What is striking in this brief illustration is that God is altogether ignored. And that's the point. James is talking to Christians who are not considering God in the stuff of their lives. They isolate God to Sunday morning for an hour, but, in everyday life they don't count him. There's no mention of God. There's no hint of his providence. There's no sign of prayer. There's no humility about what may or may not happen tomorrow. This unmasks a person who is so thoroughly worldly that he's not counting the most important factor of all, God.

Click here for background on the author of Are You For Real?: Meditations in the Epistle of James for Secret or Family Worship.