Sunday January 5^th, Evident Grace Fellowship looked at James 4.13-17:

 

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

 

From those verses, we pursued this Big Idea and these four points:

 

Big Idea: Seeking God’s Will in the New Year

 

God Has an Opinion on Planning

Remember Who You Are

Submit Every Plan to God

Obedience is God’s Will

 

God Has an Opinion on Planning

 

James 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.

 

God has an opinion on your plans. In fact, God knows what’s really going to happen because God has stated that He is the one who ordains all things. So, instead of boasting about what we are going to do, we should recognize that honestly, we don’t know what will happen in the next day or year.

 

Remember Who You Are

 

What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.

 

God wants to remind us of who we are. He is not trying to humiliate us but to humble us. We need to remember that we are finite while serving an infinite God. We are but a moment while God is eternal. We should keep all of this in mind as we make our plans.

 

Submit Every Plan to God

 

15 Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”

 

This should be our posture. God doesn’t forbid planning. Instead, God commands humble planning that submits to the will of God. This was the posture of Jesus in John 6 when He said that He came from heaven, and all He would do was whatever the Father willed Him to do.

 

Obedience is God’s Will

 

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.

 

Instead, many of us make plans in arrogance. Instead, what God would have us do is obey the will of God that we do know. How can we know the will of God? Read the scriptures. The bible gives us God’s will, yet we often neglect it and anxiously worry about God’s unknown.

 

Big Idea: Seeking God’s Will in the New Year

 

God Has an Opinion on Planning

Remember Who You Are

Submit Every Plan to God

Obedience is God’s Will

 

—

 

Truth: Seeking God’s will is about obedience and making plans in humility.

 

Application: Live knowing that seeking God’s will is a grace-filled opportunity for you to be more like Jesus.

 

Action: Drench your heart and mind in God’s will this year by reading more of His word.