Nov 8 2026 | Storm Proof: A Study in James S2E5 | Planning in Pencil

Well, we are continuing in our series in the Book of James together, and before we dive in, I was reprimanded last week for not bringing a picture of my newest three-year-old addition to the family. And so we brought photos. There he is. That is day one of coming home from the hospital. That is Denver James. And that's our little fam. Jude's giving him a kiss on the forehead. Golly. Cuteness happening in my home. So now you can't be mad at me, and if this sermon's terrible, think about how cute my kids are. This message is in James 4:13 through 17, so you can open up your Bibles there. And it discusses an idea of plans, of making plans. And I was thinking about after high school, when you graduate high school, you kind of need a plan, right? Because everyone is asking you, "What are you going to do after high school? Where are you going to go to college? What are you going to do?" And it's a little overwhelming, right? If you don't know what your plan is, right? You feel like you have to have a plan. I remember feeling that way when I was graduating high school, and I had gotten a job offer at a place called The Secret Cookie Service. And has anyone heard, raise your hand if you've heard of The Secret Cookie Service. Yeah, we had you right where we wanted you. One person, right? Not the best marketing, probably, business strategy. What The Secret Cookie Service was, this was actually, believe it or not, very popular about a decade ago here in San Diego. We delivered cookies. What it is, is it was a covert late-night cookie delivery company. We would bake cookies during the day, and then from the hours of 7:00 PM and 2:00 AM, we would deliver cookies, mostly to college students who were studying. And we would show up and dress as secret agents, like full suits. We would have full suits. We would have sunglasses. We would have a briefcase full of your cookies. I think there's a photo of me in The Secret Cookie Service there. And so this is what I chose to do out of high school. And you're like, "Oh, okay, so Harry, you didn't get into college." No, I got into college. I applied to San Diego State. I got into San Diego State. It was the only school I applied to, but I thought, "You know what I have a future in? Late-night cookie delivery. That's going to pay the big bucks." And so this is what I chose to do, and I thought it was a foolproof plan, right? This is a great plan, right out of high school. Let's do that for a living. And when all of it started to crumble, get it, because cookies. Joe, where's Joe? You had one job today, remember? There you go. Nailed it. I'm not supposed to have to remind you about your job in front... With a cookie. When it all started crumbling down, right, it started not going well, what happened? I was then, the most recent thing on my resume now, I had no college degree, and the most recent thing on my resume is Secret Cookie Service agent, right? Not the most hirable individual after that. Harder to get into college after I started applying to schools and not getting in afterwards. And so all my plans of entrepreneurial success went away. And in our passage today, James confronts the idea of planning, but specifically prideful planning, plans that are made without regard for God, who is the true planner. So let's jump into our word today as we look at verses 13 through 17. It says, "Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such 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." Well, James continues to be a very straightforward and blunt book for us, and last week, we discussed how the letter of James really largely focuses on the tongue. And specifically, we talked about how we should not use our words to judge and condemn one another, because ultimately, we are not the judge And this week it's a similar idea. Just as we are not the judge and cannot deliver judgments, we also, not being the judge, cannot decree what is going to happen next. We are not in charge. We cannot declare or decree this is what's going to happen next. And before, there's usually in couples, I find, I do a lot of premarital and meetings with couples, there's usually a type A person in a relationship and a type B person in a relationship. I don't know why that is, but that's usually what happens, I've noticed. So if you're the type B person who doesn't plan, you're like Mr. Spontaneous, before you start elbowing your spouse like, "Great, this is all-- I told you I was right. I knew we'd find out in church that I was right," this is not an indictment on planning. I need that to be really clear. James is not giving an indictment on planning. It's an indictment on pride. It's an indictment on arrogance. James is saying when you speak as if you are in control of the future and all of its outcomes, he says it's arrogant. And James' words are in direct opposition to the current cultural proclivity towards the idea of manifestation. All the time you hear people say, "If you want something, you need to manifest it. You need to speak it into existence." I spoke last week in this service, I said that the Denver Broncos were going to beat the Kansas City Chiefs, and they did, right? And some people are like, and people I love here, are like, "You manifested that," and amen for the claps for that. That's a good thing, right? And they will beat the Carolina Panthers today. But the idea of manifestation, the reason that there's a problem with it in our culture is that when you say, "Hey, you need to manifest that. You need to speak that into existence," it's rooted in a belief that my words, that I alone have the self-reliant power to deliver and change the outcomes. As long as I believe it, as long as I speak it, I can change it, and it's all rooted in me, in self-reliance, right? And yeah, there is power in our words. There's power in belief. But we're not in charge, nor can our words, can we manifest. We are fully dependent on the power of God. So James is trying to get us away from that frame of thinking, and instead of declaring what's going to happen next, be fully dependent on God for what happens next. He says, "How are you going to declare what is going to happen in a year, boast about what's going to happen in a year, and all the success you're going to have, when you aren't even in the loop about tomorrow? God has not filled you in on tomorrow. So how are you going to declare you're going to do all these amazing things in a year?" Proverbs 69 says, "The heart of a man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps." See, we make all these plans in our hearts and in our heads, but God is the one who's in the business of carving our path. He is the one who's in the business of putting our feet on solid ground and leading our way, establishing our steps. And so James is saying it is arrogant for us to assume that we are the ones in control. And I put in your notes that the presumption of control is a facade that makes a fool out of all who partake. And I think we've experienced this, right? How often has life not gone according to your plans? For most of us, pretty frequently. If you're my wife, it's almost gone according to her plan, and it's kind of annoying. But for most of us, it's daily. And notice these people in this passage, notice what their plan is. They've got it all mapped out. We're going to go to this town on this timeline, spend a year. Here's the business model. We're going to trade. We're going to make a profit. They got the timeline, the town, the business model, the profit margin. They got it all planned out, but there's no room for the Spirit of God to move and direct and guide. There's just this assumption of control and success. When you are making your plans, how much room do you leave in your everyday planning for the Spirit of God to move and guide and direct? Too often we profess that God is sovereign, but we plan as though we are. We fill our calendars, we set our goals, we map out our futures as if we're the CEOs of our life. And Jesus, we love Jesus. He's still on board, right? He's on the board of directors, right? But we're the CEO. But that's not the biblical picture. The biblical picture is God as Father and us as His children, and it's Dad who packs the kids into the car and tells them where to go. Or God as Master and us as servant, and it's the master that directs the servant. So again, James is trying to instill humility in a religious community that has been afflicted with arrogance, and their arrogance is causing them to slander their neighbor and then boast about their future plans and successes. And so for us to examine ourselves, we might need to ask, is there an arrogance in us that we need to address? Is there something in us that's arrogant? In an effort to mitigate arrogance and instill humility, what James does is he reminds them of their mortality. He says, "How are you going to control your whole life? You're a vapor. You're here for a little while, and then you're gone." And he says, "So instead, because you're a vapor, what you should do is say, 'If the Lord wills, well then, then we should live and do this or that.'" And notice the people said, "Hey, this is what we're going to do. We're going to go to this town. We're going to make all this money." And he says, "Here's what you should say. If God wills, we should live. If God wills, we should live." We should be dependent on God for our very breath. So before you're planning out your next five years, and again, it's not an indictment on planning, it's an indictment on pride and control. And if you leave God out of it and you forget, you are dependent on Him for your every breath. You are dependent on Him to wake up tomorrow. So what you should say, he says, is, "If the Lord wills, we should live, and then do this or do that." We are dependent on God for our very life, and we tend to live as if we're entitled to tomorrow. We have this entitlement and sometimes a lack of gratitude, like, "No, I deserve tomorrow. I'm entitled to tomorrow. This is what's going to happen tomorrow." And James says, "Slow down. If the Lord wills, we should live." Monks, if you look back at Christian monks and Christian saints, if you look back at historical portraits of them, you can often see there's a skull. They're either holding a skull or there's a skull on their desk. And that's because monks would often keep skulls in their study where they would worship to consistently remind themselves of their own mortality and thus dependency on God. That if the Lord wills, they get this next breath, they get this next day. And it also kept them focused on where they were going, which was eternity. And so when it comes to tomorrow, we need to not be arrogant. We need to be dependent. Dependent on God to provide and to guide. Jesus also talks about the idea of tomorrow, but he talks about it from a different angle. He says in Matthew chapter six, "Do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat, what you will drink, what you will wear. Is not the body more than food?" He says, "Look at the birds of the air. They neither sow nor reap nor stow away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you of not much more value than they?" And then at the end, he says, "Therefore, do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself." So Jesus says, "Don't be anxious about tomorrow," and James says, "Don't be arrogant about tomorrow," because tomorrow is not yours to worry about, and it's also not yours to boast about. Tomorrow belongs to Him. And instead, we should be present today and trust the one who holds tomorrow. Another quote for you this week by C.S. Lewis. This time it's from his book, "The Screwtape Letters." And if you're unfamiliar with that book, this is a book Lewis wrote as a fictional dialogue between demons. It's written from the perspective of a demon, and it's a senior demon, Screwtape, writing to his younger demon, Wormwood, and he's trying to tell him about how you can sabotage human beings. And this is what Screwtape says. He says, "The humans live in time, but our enemy," and again, in this case, their enemy is God, "The humans live in time, but our enemy destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity and to the point of time which they call the present. Our business is to get them away from the eternal and from the present." So one of the chief aims of the devil is actually to get us away from our focus on eternity and our focus on right now, our focus on this present moment, where God moves and speaks and guides. And there's multiple ways he can do that. One way he can do that, one way that I think we're really challenged with today, is distraction by our devices. That is one of the most prevalent issues facing not only young people today, but adults. And I want to note that the devil is perfectly content in your indulgence in the distraction of your devices. He's happy with it. He doesn't need you at the bars. He doesn't need you at the club. He doesn't need you doing whatever you do on a Saturday night. Man, if he can just get you just by yourself scrolling, he's content in that, just having you overstimulated, distracted, missing the voice of God. And I struggle with it, too. I have to put specific boundaries I put on myself for my phone every day of the week now, and I might have to add more, but I have specific boundaries now for myself, because I know my call, especially as a pastor, my call is to be present. I have to be able to be present with people, and if I can't be present with people because I'm overstimulated, because I'm constantly distracted, then I'm just going to miss the people in front of me, and that's true for all of us. But if it's not your device, then the devil would love to distract you with the anxieties of tomorrow, just make you real worried about tomorrow, trying to control something completely out of your control. Or make you prideful about tomorrow, boasting about tomorrow, constantly dreaming about tomorrow, where you just live in your vision of tomorrow, and so much so that you're never really here. However he can make you less attentive to the present, he's happy to do so. And he feeds off the reality that most of us are insecure with mystery. Most of us have a deep insecurity when it comes to mystery. We want to know the answers. We want to know what's going to happen. We want to know what's coming. We want to know how it's all going to work out. We want some guarantees in this life. But one of the marks of Christian maturity is a growing contentment with mystery. Some of the most mature Christians that I've been around are not mature and influential because they have all the answers. It's because they are content in tension. They're content in mystery. They're content in uncertainty. That's the mark of a mature Christian. How comfortable are you in the mystery? Or do you feel like, "Man, I got to have it all mapped out. I got to know what's next. I'm waiting on God's plan and God's will to be revealed to me. I got to know the destination. Where are we going, Lord?" When my wife, about a decade ago, my wife had a moment where she was put in the backseat of a car. She was blindfolded, and she was driven out about an hour and a half to the middle of nowhere, to empty field dirt lot. And she didn't know the plan. She didn't know the destination. She didn't know what was happening. And what made her not panic is the fact that the one who blindfolded her was her sister. And then all of a sudden, a scenario that seems very frightening is okay. Why? Because she knows and loves and trusts her sister. So wherever she's going, wherever she's taking her, is for her good. The one thing that would change a nightmare for any of us is because she knew the person who blindfolded her. And this was how I started my proposal to her, with a kidnapping. You know? Let her know what she's getting into. It's a wild ride over here. So we don't need to know the plan. We don't need to know the destination. Because confidence in the future isn't rooted in knowing God's plan, but in knowing God's character. I've said before that you don't need to know the plan. You need to know the planner. Because if you know the planner, then you know whatever he's planning is good, and it's right, and even when you look for it and it seems hard and confusing and mysterious and it doesn't make sense to you, you know that the planner is good, and so you can live in the tension of faith, trusting the planner. And so we become more content in mystery the more we know the character of God. Let's go back and read verses 15 through 17 in our passage. It says, "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." That phrase, "If the Lord wills," it's something that if you read the Book of Acts, if you read 1 Corinthians, this is something that Paul the Apostle actually said. This is actually something he'll write when he writes in his letters. He says, "I'm going to come visit you if the Lord wills." "Hey, I'm going to come stay a while if the Lord wills." Actually, Paul used this multiple times. It's something that I think we need to kind of get into our hearts and our minds and even our language. And not to be weird. You can become a weirdo. I don't think that's his point. My wife and I have a date night every week that's set and calendared, and if my wife is like, "Hey, tomorrow, see you, date night, 6:00 PM." And if I'm like, "If the Lord wills." She'll be like, "Okay." "Are you coming or not?" I'm like, "Well, we're not guaranteed tomorrow." She'll be like, "Are you flirting with me?" Like, "God willing, girl, I don't know. If the Lord wills." And that's a way we could be weird with it. That's not the point. The point is that it's an acknowledgement in our hearts that though we make plans, we know that ultimately, it is up to God, and God can change things at a moment's notice. And by the way, as a Christian, that should be our preference. Our preference is His will, because His ways are better than our ways. And so our preference is the will of God, which is why Jesus taught us to pray, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven." Thy will be done in my life as it is in heaven. Thy will be done in my family as it is in heaven. Thy will be done in my plans as it is in heaven. This is how Jesus taught us to pray is learning to desire the will of God. Everything else in my life is subservient to His will. This is how James wants us to think. This is how Jesus taught us to pray, and it is how Jesus himself prayed Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, looking ahead to his tomorrow, and his tomorrow was challenging. His tomorrow was filled with the greatest of suffering. And looking ahead to his tomorrow, he prays to God, "Take this cup from me, but not my will, but your will be done." Even as he looked ahead to tomorrow, which was full of suffering, he prayed first for his will, God's will. This is how we're to pray. When life is great, when life is challenging, in all the ups and the downs, seeking the will of God, learning to desire and trust the will of God in our life. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel says this about prayer. I love this quote. He says, "Prayer is our humble answer to the inconceivable surprise of living." See, for us, life is always unexpected. Life will always deliver surprises. And so in prayer, what we do is we go to the one who's not surprised. We go to the one who's not unfamiliar with our pain, he's not unfamiliar with our suffering, and he's not unfamiliar with our circumstances and what's going to happen next. He knows pain and suffering because he experienced pain and suffering. And so we learn to depend on him for tomorrow, because he's not surprised by any of it. And he holds our tomorrow. And then James brings us back to the present. He says, "Whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin." And I'll invite the worship band back up as we're going to close. But what I want us to notice is this whole section has been about how we speak. This whole idea has been how we speak, but he closes in discussing how we act. This whole section has been addressing people who are talking about all the things they're going to do in the future. And James is like, "That's great, but if you know the right thing that you're supposed to do today, you should probably do that." If you know how God is leading you and guiding you today, you should probably do that. And actually, if you don't do that, well, then it's sin. And this is another reason that the idea of tomorrow can be a challenge for us, because so often we actually do know the right thing to do today. We actually know how God is guiding and leading us today. And what do we often do? I'll do that tomorrow. Because we just, again, are rolling off the assumption that we deserve tomorrow. But God has called us to be obedient today. And so James is saying, "Stop talking about all the things you think you're going to do tomorrow for your own gain. And instead, identify the right thing for you today. Do today." How is God leading you today? If you can identify that, and walk in that, you will find greater peace and contentment and connection to God. And so many of us, we get caught up in the future hypotheticals of tomorrow. But all you actually can do is make the best decisions that you can make today. That's what makes a life, is just the best decision I can make today. And over the course of a year, and five years, and 10 years, if I make the best decision I can make today by following the will of God today, then I will build a beautiful life of walking with Jesus. So don't get so caught up in the hypotheticals of tomorrow, but follow God, listen to His Spirit, act on His word, make righteous choices today, because more than we need certainty about tomorrow, we need faithfulness today. And it is the practice of faithfulness today that will best equip me for faithfulness tomorrow. If you build a practice of faithfulness today, and you do that every day, as you build that practice, it equips you to be faithful tomorrow. So let's start today, church. Amen? Amen. We're going to respond in worship.