James 4:13-17 (The Hardest Prayer)

Our Will and God’s Will

January 2, 1956, was the day that 29-year-old Jim Elliot had waited for most of his life. Almost three years of jungle ministry and many hours of planning and praying had led Jim to this day. Within hours, he and four other missionaries would be setting up camp in the territory of a dangerous and uncivilized Indian tribe known then as the Aucas (Ow-cuz), known now as the Waodani (Wah-o-dah-nee). The Aucas had killed all outsiders ever caught in their area. Even though it was dangerous, Jim Elliot had no doubt God wanted him to tell the Aucas about Jesus.

On February 2, 1952, Jim Elliot waved goodbye to his parents and boarded a ship for the 18-day trip from San Pedro, California to Quito (Kee-toe), Ecuador, South America.

He and his missionary partner, Pete Fleming, first spent a year in Quito learning to speak Spanish. Then they moved to Shandia (Shan-dee-ah), a small Quichua (Kee-chew-wah) Indian village to take the place of the retiring missionary. Jim and Pete studied hard to learn the language and fit in. Their hard work paid off; in six months, both were speaking Spanish well enough to move to Shandia. When they arrived in Shandia, they also had to learn the speech of the Quichuas.

Three years later many Quichuas had become faithful Christians. Jim now began to feel it was time to tell the Aucas about Jesus.

The Aucas had killed many Quichuas. They had also killed several workers at an oil company-drilling site near their territory. The oil company closed the site because everyone was afraid to work there. Jim knew the only way to stop the Aucas from killing was to tell them about Jesus. Jim and the four other Ecuador missionaries began to plan a way to show the Aucas they were friendly.

Nate Saint, a missionary supply pilot, came up with a way to lower a bucket filled with supplies to people on the ground while flying above them. He thought this would be a perfect way to win the trust of the Aucas without putting anyone in danger. They began dropping gifts to the Aucas. They also used an amplifier to speak out friendly Auca phrases. After many months, the Aucas even sent a gift back up in the bucket to the plane. Jim and the other missionaries felt the time had come to meet the Aucas face-to-face.

One day while flying over Auca territory, Nate Saint spotted a beach that looked long enough to land the plane on. He planned to land there and the men would build a tree house to stay safe in until friendly contact could be made.

The missionaries were flown in one-by-one and dropped off on the Auca beach. Nate Saint then flew over the Auca village and called for the Aucas to come to the beach. After four days, an Auca man and two women appeared. It was not easy for them to understand each other since the missionaries only knew a few Auca phrases. They shared a meal with them, and Nate took the man up for a flight in the plane. The missionaries tried to show sincere friendship and asked them to bring others next time.

For the next two days, the missionaries waited for other Aucas to return. Finally, on day six, two Auca women walked out of the jungle. Jim and Pete excitedly jumped in the river and waded over to them. As they got closer, these women did not appear friendly. Jim and Pete almost immediately heard a terrifying cry behind them. As they turned they saw a group of Auca warriors with their spears raised, ready to throw. Jim Elliot reached for the gun in his pocket. He had to decide instantly if he should use it. But he knew he couldn't. Each of the missionaries had promised they would not kill an Auca who did not know Jesus to save himself from being killed. Within seconds, the Auca warriors threw their spears, killing all the missionaries: Ed McCully, Roger Youderian, Nate Saint, Pete Fleming and Jim Elliot.

English Standard Version (Chapter 4)

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 o whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.

James deals with the thought between following our will in this passage and the contrast in following the will of God. I am a planner. I like to think ahead to what needs to be done, make a plan in my head, which isn’t always the best method, and then forge ahead full steam like a general charging the battlefield to accomplish my task. I am adept at determining what my will is to get done and then making sure it gets done. James points out a very important contrast in this section about our will vs. Gods will.

This phrase “Come now” is only used twice in the book of James. This phrase in the Greek was an attention getting phrase. It was saying look! Pay attention! You need to know this! James is setting the reader of the letter up to know the next part is extremely important.

James sets the story of someone who is making plans to go to a specific location, spend a specific amount of time there, and to make money while they are there. This person is making plans that are for the future but these plans for the future are completely worldly. This would fall in line with the historical merchants of the time. They would travel and setup shop for a time, then pack up and go setup somewhere else, until they had gained the money they set out to get then they would return home. The issue James brings up is there is no mention of God in their plans.

*Their is nothing wrong with making plans for the future but when we do not include God in those plans we are acting as practical atheists or even might call ourselves self theists, meaning that we are setting ourselves up as god in place of the sovereign God. We are seeking after our will over asking what the will of God is. We go charging ahead to accomplish what we want to accomplish instead of seeking to glorify God and His Will. We go back and look at vs 7 in this chapter where we are told to submit to God. There are only two options in this life. We either are under submission to God or we are under submission to Satan. The true follower of God will find themselves submitting to the will of God. This is one of the signs of a believer. It doesn’t mean we will be perfect but it does mean that we will be seeking after God and in so doing His will actually becomes our will also.

James shows that there is a lunacy in making plans outside the will of God. Our lives are like a mist. When we think about the span of creation since the beginning when God spoke life into existence, to present day in 2022, to the thought of all eternity before us, greater than any time or distance our brains could even attempt to calculate, our lives are but a minute speck of sand in the timeline of God’s plan. However many years the Lord gives us are just a blink of the eye in the view of eternity. We are here and then we are gone like the mist in the morning when the sunlight comes out.

*Job points this out in Job 7:7

Job 7:7 ESV

“Remember that my life is a breath; my eye will never again see good.

*and the psalmist writes in Psalm 78:39

Psalm 78:39 ESV

He remembered that they were but flesh, a wind that passes and comes not again.

Our time is here and then it is gone. While God sees and knows everything that will happen throughout the vastness of eternity, and how it will be used for His will and His plan, we have a minute small glimpse of this plan in our life time.

*James tells us that instead of seeking after our own will we should seek after the will of God. Seeking after the will of God in life can be some of the hardest prayers or some of the easiest prayers you will ever pray. It all depends on your knowledge and faith in God.

In the Scotts Confession John Knox writes,

“We serve a God who rules the world and our lives accordingly to his “inscrutable providence” ~ John Knox

This inscrutable providence means we serve a sovereign God who is unquestionably good. There is no denying the goodness of our God but if we do not understand His sovereignty and seek after His plan we may tend to think otherwise.

This is why the study of theology, literally the study of God, must be foremost in the life of the Christian. If we are seeking to learn more about God in all we do and we are seeking to know the attributes of God then we will come to understand and know the very nature of God which is God is good.

The boasters James talks about here are boasting in their own power and their own actions. They are saying I have done this and I will do this and I, I, I

When we find ourselves using that pronoun over and over to describe what has been accomplished we are ignoring God and we are setting ourselves up in its place. This is one of the reasons we must be so careful with the songs of worship we sing even now, so many talk of how I’m going to get my victory, or this is how I fight my battles, or I, I, I and there is no mention or acknowledgment of God. This is a profane worship that rises to God and is dishonoring. These are songs I have been guilty of singing, loving, and now I must repent because I don’t fight my battles, God fights my battles. I’m not going to win the victory, God has already won the victory and on and on.

*We set ourselves up over and over in the place of God and we profane the sovereignty of God and claim it for ourselves.

We are judged by our knowledge. The sin of omission is what this final verse is commonly referred to. That these that boasted also did what they shouldn’t do. This is a common problem of the human condition.

*Paul writes in Romans 7:18-20

Romans 7:18–20 ESV

For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.

Even when we have the desire to do what is right and the knowledge to do what is right our flesh wars against us and on our own, of our own power, we are evil and cannot carry it out. It is actually one of the beauties of our salvation. We are both simultaneously justified and sinners. The latin phrase of the protestant reformation was Simul Justus et Peccator. That while we are on this earth in these bodies we will continue to fight sin, we will continue to fight temptation while at the same time we are fully justified in Christs sacrifice and we are saved and adopted into the family of God. There is nothing that can take that away. We are Christ’s and His alone. We must die to our flesh and take what God commands and complete it.

This is where putting the will of God above our own comes into place. These are some of the hardest prayers you could ever pray.

We have the example of Christ praying in the garden before He is to be crucified. He nows the intense agony that awaits Him. If you study the historical aspect of the way Christ was beaten, the whips used would have ripped the flesh from His back and torn the muscle and sinew all the way to the bone and even chipped into the bone of His spine. +

He was stripped naked and spit upon and a crown of large thorns was shoved down onto His head. He was then forced to carry an extremely heavy wooden cross on the back that had been ripped to the bone for the long distance from the courts to Golgotha.

Once on the cross He would die a slow death suffocating to death. Every push upward to get a gasp of air would rub His back against the wood of the cross and tear His wrists and feet until He would scream It is Finished and He would die.

Christ knew all of this is what He was about to endure. He was both God and Man. He still had the power to stop this from happening. He had the power to strike down the soldiers that arrested Him, to cause the crowd that shouted to crucify Him to become mute and yet He prayed, “Father not my will, but yours be done.”

*The Son was in perfect submission to the will of the Father to accomplish His purpose and plan.

Submitting ourselves to the will of the Father is the hardest prayers to pray in our minds, but if we can understand the unquestionable goodness of who God is they become the easiest. When we pray for healing that doesn’t come, when we pray for family and marriages that are not saved, when we pray for peace and rest and yet we experience turmoil and strife do we have enough trust in God to say not my will but Yours be done? When we weep and we cry and we pray for God to step in and He says no do we trust Him enough to say I rest in Your Will?

*The perfect will of the Father is the only place to find perfect rest. To find the place where we die to our wants, our plans, our desires, our definition of victory, and we rest in Christ.

Question 98 of the Westminster Catechism asks “What is Prayer?” The answer is

*“Prayer is an offering up of our desires unto God, for things agreeable to His will, in the name of Christ, with confession of our sins, and thankful acknowledgment of His mercies.”

This is the difference between an earthly mindset that seeks after our will, and a heavenly mindset that seeks after the will of God. Spurgeon said;

“Unless we purposefully live with a view to the next world, we cannot make much out of our present existence.”

We must have a mind, a will, a view, that is focused on the new heavens and the new earth to come and not stuck in the broken world we live in now.

Elizabeth Elliott was the wife of Jim Elliott. After her husband and his fellow missionaries were brutally murdered by the Auca people, she demonstrated a perfect example of following God’s will. Her and her husband along with the other missionaries were convinced that it was God’s plan and will for them to carry the Gospel to this violent people. In less than 2 years following the murder of these men, Elizabeth Elliott, her daughter, and Nate’s sister were able to move in with the Auca people. Many of them became Christians and they are now know as a friendly tribe and no longer a violent people. Missionaries including direct descendants of those killed still live among the Auca today.

Elizabeth wrote during the time that her and Jim were pursuing missions separately prior to dating that;

*“I do know that waiting on God requires the willingness to bear uncertainty, to carry within oneself the unanswered question, lifting the heart to God about it whenever it intrudes up one's thoughts. It's easy to talk oneself into a decision that has no permanence, ­easier sometimes than to wait patiently.”

The hardest and easiest prayers are when God says No, not now, or not yet and we must wait patiently trusting in His unquestionable goodness and mercy.

*Where are areas that you have been seeking after your own will instead of God’s will?

*How easy do we find it to trust fully in God and His goodness?

*Are we able to find ourselves praying not our will but God’s be done no matter what the consequence is?