James 4:13-17
13 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit”; 14 whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. 15 Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.” 16 But now you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. 17 Therefore, to him who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is sin.
It's hard for me to imagine waking up one day and say to myself, "I am going to what I want to today, and I don't care what God has to say about it!" If I ever do something like that, I would pray God just take me out of this world right now.
Now, there may be times when temptation gets the better of me and I fall. But I also pray that my fall is not intentional or worse, willful. You see we all contend with this battle of wills. If you don't, you are fooling yourself.
When you find that there is a competing will going on in your soul, let us be reminded that, if you are a Christ follower, you are bound to do His will. James offers us this explanation of how our will versus God's will for us will lead us to sin against our Creator.
We might say to ourselves that our life is our own and we can live it anyway we want. Or, I have made all these plans, perhaps even created a bucket list of things to do before I die.
Depending how ambitious you are or how willful you intend to be, you may or may not succeed. Chances are very good that if your desires are aligned to the will of the Father, you will find greater joy and success.
But, if you try to fulfill your earthly and fleshly desires and oppose the will of God, you are headed for a great disappointment. Just look at Joshua in the 7th Chapter when he and the Israelites were conquering the Promised Land. They came to the city of Ai and were defeated.
Joshua 7:2 Now Joshua sent men from Jericho to Ai, which is beside Beth Aven, on the east side of Bethel, and spoke to them, saying, “Go up and spy out the country.” So the men went up and spied out Ai. 3 And they returned to Joshua and said to him, “Do not let all the people go up, but let about two or three thousand men go up and attack Ai. Do not weary all the people there, for the people of Ai are few.” 4 So about three thousand men went up there from the people, but they fled before the men of Ai. 5 And the men of Ai struck down about thirty-six men, for they chased them from before the gate as far as Shebarim, and struck them down on the descent; therefore the hearts of the people melted and became like water.
Joshua went to conquer Ai based on the reports from the spies he sent out, but failed to pray to God and ask Him if it was His will to do so. In other words, Joshua went on his own and by his own will went into battle without God's protection and they were defeated.
This may seem like an exaggeration of sorts, but keep in mind that Joshua was chosen by God to lead His people and conquer the land, not by Joshua's will, but by God's will. James said likewise, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit” What did Joshua profit by going into a place that God did not will for him to go? Not a thing. In fact, he lost thirty-six men by the sword of Ai.
To make matters worse, Joshua blamed God for this defeat. Joshua v7 And Joshua said, “Alas, Lord God, why have You brought this people over the Jordan at all—to deliver us into the hand of the Amorites, to destroy us? Oh, that we had been content, and dwelt on the other side of the Jordan!"
Joshua was restored and forgiven and yet faced other trials. But he learned the hard lesson of his disobedience and learned to obey God and do His will. That's a good lesson for all of us too! Sometimes we have to go through those moments of defeat for us to open our eyes and realize how far off base we are.
As James closes the 4th Chapter with this verse: 17 Therefore, to him who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is sin. Let us be committed to doing good by the will of God every day. There are no do-overs for what we fail to do good yesterday, so let's make each day count for the glory of God!
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