Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast and brag. All such boasting is evil. Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins. (James 4:13-17)
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How many of us keep putting things off, and putting them them off, and putting them off some more, sometimes until we reach the point at which there’s no point doing them anymore? It’s called procrastination, and the truth of the matter is that I do it as well as anyone! When I first began to feel called into the ministry, I put my response off and off, almost as if I was hoping that by the time I did anything about it, it would be too late. I finally managed to find my way to Emmanuel College to ask about registering for courses, only to be told by the Registrar that I was two weeks late to meet the deadline. But then she pulled some papers out of her drawer and handed them to me and said, “but if you get these filled out and back to us within a week I think we can squeeze you in.” Which says either that she had discerned the same call to the ministry in me that I had, or that Emmanuel College was really desperate for some tuition money that year! I did the same thing three years ago when I applied to do my doctoral degree. The deadline for applications was February 1. I put off sending my application to Chicago until January 31. I did send it by Express Mail, but it’s almost as if I was hoping it wouldn’t arrive on time. It did. But I see a pattern emerging from those two experiences. In both cases I was doing something that I felt called by God to do, and in both cases I put it off as long as I could, almost hoping to avoid God’s will. I wonder how many others do that? After all, the things that God calls us to usually involve some degree of challenge, and the magazine Psychology Today says that “everyone procrastinates sometimes, but 20 percent of people chronically avoid difficult tasks and deliberately look for distractions - which, unfortunately, are increasingly available.”
The modern world is a procrastinators’ paradise. If there’s nothing specific happening in your life at any given moment that you can waste time with, but there’s still something calling you that you want to avoid doing, just find the nearest computer, or iphone, or ipad. You’ll have access to an entire planet’s worth of distractions to occupy yourself with. Rest assured, somewhere on the World Wide Web there will be something that you’ll be able to waste time with - to avoid doing those things that you really just don’t want to do. After all, a little bit of Farmville never hurt anyone, did it? Psychology Today went on to say that “procrastination in large part reflects our perennial struggle with self-control …” We can’t control ourselves against the countless temptations that come our way every day. Instead, it’s far too easy for us to succumb to them, so that we can avoid those important things that we know have to be done, but that we also know we don’t really want to do.
In today’s Scripture passage, James is sharing his thoughts on a number of issues, that eventually all lead up to the same thing: we procrastinate, and we especially procrastinate over doing the things that we know God wants us to do. We’re pretty good at making sure we do those things that we want to do, we’re less good at making sure that we do the things that we need to do, and we have huge problems doing the things that God wants us to do!
In today’s passage, James deals with priorities: “Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” I find it interesting that the focus of the hypothetical person speaking here is on “making money” - that seems to be their priority. It’s what they want to do. And because it’s something they want to do, they have a time limited plan for accomplishing this goal. It’s going to happen “today or tomorrow,” or, as Eugene Peterson translates v.13 in The Message: “And now I have a word for you who brashly announce, "Today - at the latest, tomorrow - we're off to such and such a city for the year. We’re going to start a business and make a lot of money.” I have no objection to entrepeneurship! But the focus of this hypothetical man is all wrong; his priorities are entirely misplaced. All other things (including, apparently, any plan for doing something of benefit to others) can wait but that which is for our own benefit usually gets the priority. I wonder how many things this man needed to do are getting left behind in his pursuit of the things he wants? In today’s world how many people leave their family behind in the pursuit of the things they want until they realize to their own dismay that the things that were really important have been lost in the midst of the pursuit? How many people today can’t be bothered trying to discern what God wants of them because they have their own plans, only to discover later that doing what God wanted would have brought them much more happiness and satisfaction than the course they chose? I wonder. Priorities can get so easily mixed up in the whirlwind of a society that we live in, where we’re taught that we should simply be fulfilling our desires, making our fantasies reality, and often expecting others to pay for our desires and fantasies in one way or another.
James seems to believe that our focus should be on the truly important things - the things that might help others rather than just the things that are going to be of benefit (primarily) to us. The nerve of him getting in the way of our desire for self-satisfaction and self-gratification! We should focus on the bigger things (we should focus on making sure that our works make a difference not only to us but to a wider constituency) simply because life is an uncertain thing: we have no idea what’s going to happen tomorrow. Let’s face it - life comes and goes very quickly. In a cosmic sense, even the oldest person we can imagine lives for only a moment, and so we have a very, very finite amount of time to make a positive difference in the world. When James writes “you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes ,“ it’s important to understand what he means. This is a problematic verse for some people. It can be misunderstood as James suggesting that our lives aren’t important, but in fact, James is saying quite the opposite - our lives are very important because we have the chance to make a positive difference, and the fact that we’re here for only a short time means that we have to do as much as we can of real importance to make that positive difference while we have the chance.
To make that positive difference, we need to realize that our focus needs to be on God’s will. To focus on what we want or on what we have planned is arrogant. When James writes, “you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that,” he’s basically writing to those who could be called “functional atheists” - people who profess belief in God but don’t even think about what God wants from them, so caught up are they in their own ambitions, or so certain are they that their desires for themselves are God’s desires for them. They take no time to discern the will of God, instead focussing on achieving their will.
In an increasingly difficult time for the church in general, this principle works as well. All too often we seem to come to the conclusion that we’re going to save the church with our own plans and ideas, whatever they are: with new programming, with innovative worship styles, with contemporary music, with meaningful mission projects, with thoughtful stewardship campaigns to raise more money, by cutting the budget to spend less money, etc., etc. Before we choose to do any of those things we need to ask ourselves this question: “Why are we doing this? Is it to save the church, to bring more people into the church, or to do more effective ministry?” The only faithful answer is the third. The reality is that we need to focus not on our plans for saving the church but on God’s plan for using the church, because we can’t save the church - only God can do that. After all, whether we live or not, whether we succeed or not - that all in, as James says, “the Lord’s will.” We’re just God’s servants. We have free will, but we’re not free agents. Ultimately we’re responsible to God for how we live, for what we do and for how we use the resources we’ve been given.
So, whether as individuals or as a church, we need to commit ourselves to God’s will, and even more important, to not procrastinating over doing the good that God calls us to do. “Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins.” We need to find something good to do - and we need to find it today! Sins of omission (the sins we commit by not doing the right thing) are just as serious as sins of commission (the sins we commit by doing the wrong thing.) I’ve mentioned before that I’m a great admirer of former South African President Nelson Mandela. On the website mandeladay.org there’s a very do-able list of “67 Ways To Change The World.” Most of them are pretty simple, and a lot of them we can do right here in Port Colborne. The point is that there is a lot of good to be done. So why put it off until tomorrow when we could do that good today?
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