Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

-Scottish poet Robert Burns once wrote in his sonnet entitled TO A MOUSE this ever-famous quip (given in more modern English):

THE BEST LAID PLANS OF MICE AND MEN OFTEN GO AWRY

-If there ever was a motto for the year 2020, that sounds like a good one to me.

Just when you think you are able to make some plans, things change, and you have to start from scratch.

-I know that I have had to learn some hard lessons in these trying times that go against my natural grain.

I am one who likes to know the plan ahead of time, get my ducks in a row, and then execute the plan having already accounted for all contingencies.

And I do not like to turn to the left or the right—you stay the course.

~That doesn’t work right now.

One week I come into a staff meeting with all these ideas, and by the time the next staff meeting roles around whatever I said the week before has to be scrapped and you start again.

-Of course, my notion that I could control every aspect of every plan, or come up with a fool-proof plan, was nothing short of fool-hardy, naïve, and a fantasy.

There is no human being that is able to make perfect plans or able to ensure their plans go without a hitch.

~There is only one Sovereign who is able to control everything, and none of us are Him

-Not that we just stop making plans or dreaming dreams—there is never a call for that.

We have plans for school and jobs, plans for marriage and family, plans for vacation and retirement, etc.

~it’s just that we have to be flexible enough that when circumstances change, or our plans don’t quite pan out, that we are able to adjust and to walk with God wherever He leads.

-In the passage that we are reading today, James warned Christian businessmen against the arrogant attitude of thinking that they are in such control of their circumstances and their plans that they completely ignore God.

-And what we want to take away from our text is that we Christians must humbly submit our plans and dreams to the sovereign purposes of Almighty God.

We can’t become so clingy to our own plans that we become inflexible to the will of God.

I believe this is important given the current circumstances in which we find ourselves.

-There are four lessons about making plans in uncertain times that I want to touch upon:

1) Keep a proper perspective

-James addresses people who make their plans without any thought about the bigger picture

~They think that they can go on and say: I’m going to do this and I’m going to do that, and there’s no one and nothing to stop me…

-But in v. 14 he gives them a dose of reality:

~One thing he mentions is that we have limited information.

We are finite creatures who are not able to tell the future or predict the future.

We don’t even know what tomorrow will bring much less what circumstances are going to be like further down the road.

~We are not omniscient.

We don’t know what is going on in someone’s heart and mind or what is going on somewhere else in the world.

There are so many factors that come into play when it comes to the plans we make, there is no way that a finite human knows them all or can take account of them all.

-And we most certainly do not know the mind of God without Him revealing it to us.

We may think that we should go one direction, but God (who has all of eternity before Him) knows that with His will and plans our life is going to go in a completely different direction, and we won’t know that until God reveals it to us.

-We are working with limited knowledge, so, knowing that, we go into our plan-making with the perspective that things might change as more information becomes available.

-But James doesn’t only warn us that we have limited information, he also warns us that we have limited time and power.

At the end of v. 14 he reminds us that our lives are like mists that appear for a little time and then vanish.

-James isn’t trying to be some sort of Debby Downer, he is giving us a perspective on reality.

~Because, first, it reminds us how little power we really have to control things around us.

Think about what makes up mist—it’s nothing much.

Mist can’t hold anything up.

Mist can’t hold anything back.

You can put your hand right through mist and it can’t do a thing about it.

-Even so, while we like to think we have control over many aspects of life, we really don’t.

We can’t control other people.

We can’t control the weather.

We can’t control a virus.

James is giving us some perspective on what we can control, and it’s not much.

-But this metaphor he uses also reminds us that our time on earth is short in comparison to eternity.

And so, instead of making big plans for our earthly life, we need to think in terms of the long run (think in terms of eternity) because, relatively speaking, most of our plans won’t outlast our time on earth.

~So, the plans we do make take into consideration our lack of knowledge and our lack of power and our lack of time.

We begin to take on an eternal perspective as we make our plans.

-Now, I do have to note that I am not subscribing to some sort of fatalism that just gives up any sort of planning or throws caution to the wind, que sera sera, whatever will be will be.

That is not a biblical view on life.

~Rather, we know that even though we are not in control and we are finite, we can make plans with the provision knowing that even though we don’t have all the circumstances under control, we know the One that does

~This leads me:

2) Submit to the sovereign Lord

-James says that this is the way we approach our plans (in v. 15)—IF THE LORD WILL WE WILL LIVE AND DO WHATEVER OUR PLAN IS

-That is, we submit our plans to God’s watchful care and eye, and if they fit within His plan, all is well and good; and if our plans do not fit into God’s plans, all is still well and good because God has something different in store for us

-It is good to plan, and it is good to have dreams, but always with the provision that if our plans somehow run contrary to God’s overall plan, then His plans will always take precedence.

~God has the power and wisdom to override anything that does not ultimately accomplish His sovereign purposes, or to adjust our plans as He sees fit.

-Yes, sometimes God allows things to happen on earth that seemingly run contrary to what we would consider His heart and character (and goes against our plans and desires), but, ultimately, they fulfill what God planned all along.

~We think of Joseph, who literally had a dream that his dad and brothers would bow down to him.

He was all ready for that plan to take place, but instead he was sold into slavery, falsely accused of rape, and forgotten in prison.

Yet years later God lifted him up, Joseph’s dream was fulfilled, and God’s purposes were advanced.

~If it was left up to Joseph, the whole slavery and prison bit would not have been part of his plan, yet in God’s sovereignty God used those circumstances to advance a plan better than Joseph could have done on his own without those things happening to him.

-Other times God allows someone to advance their own plans against His will but it is to their own detriment.

They so stubbornly set themselves to fulfill their own desires and will, God gives them over to their plans and uses the consequences of their ill-sought plans as a means of discipline.

~For example, in the Book of Esther, Haman, the evil Persian prime minister, thought that nothing could ever stop his plan to have all the Jews in the Persian Empire destroyed and slaughtered, because it was guaranteed by the sealed decree of the Persian king which was irreversible.

But God saw to it that his plan would fail, and that Haman instead would be executed.

-God has the sovereign power to do whatever is going to advance His own plan of redemption on earth according to His loving wisdom.

Our lives as Christians are always at His disposal for His use in the grand scheme of things.

~Yes, He wants us to have the spiritually abundant life given through Jesus Christ.

Yes, He wants us to experience shalom peace and well-being available through Jesus Christ.

But, ultimately, only His plans will lead us there.

-God tells us in Proverbs that:

Proverbs 16:9 (ESV)

9 The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps.

-God is in sovereign control over our plans.

-And think about what this means for our salvation.

If it were left to humanity, our plan would be that we would try to save ourselves through religion or works so we have a sense of accomplishment.

But that doesn’t work.

Our sin so separates us from God that we can do nothing about it.

Yet, thankfully, God had a different plan, where His Son would take on humanity, die a cruel death on a cross after experiencing the Father’s full wrath against humanity’s sins.

No human would have ever come up with a plan like that, therefore if left up to our plans we would be lost.

-That’s why, instead of thinking that we are so smart or so in control that our plans could never go wrong, we hold onto our plans very loosely, willingly saying that even though these are our plans, they will only happen if the sovereign Lord wills them to be.

3) Maintain a humble attitude

-In v. 16 James tells the businessmen that boasting in any form is evil—and, in context, more specifically, boasting about how great your plans are and that they are so air-tight they will never fail, is just plain foolishness.

Boasting about how good and smart and talented you think you are is wrong.

-I’m imagining that there were businessmen who were successful in many of their ventures, and so they just took it for granted that anything else that they would come up with in the future would work out just as well.

~I can hear them say: I successfully started this company, and I took over that company, and I got this project off the ground, and I moved that project in the right direction, I just can’t fail on this next venture of mine

-Or maybe some dared to say: I’m just so good at what I do, nothing can stop me

-We’ve seen how that attitude has worked in the past:

~The creators of the Titanic boasted that even God couldn’t sink that ship.

We saw how that worked out.

-The bragging of these businessmen took on many forms.

In one sense, it means that they had the pretense of self-creation and sole causation.

To put it in more slang terms: they thought that they were self-made men and women

~They didn’t think anybody helped them get to where they were at in life, and nobody else was going to keep getting them ahead, so they just continued down the road of self-reliance.

~They said: I got me this far, and I’m the only one that’s going to continue bringing me success and making my plans all work out

-James says that it is evil to boast like that—not that you’d boast like that out loud, but you boast like that in your heart