Tomorrow Belongs To Him
Scripture:
13 Look here, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we are going to a certain town and will stay there a year. We will do business there and make a profit.” 14 How do you know what your life will be like tomorrow? Your life is like the morning fog—it’s here a little while, then it’s gone. 15 What you ought to say is, “If the Lord wants us to, we will live and do this or that.” 16 Otherwise you are boasting about your own pretentious plans, and all such boasting is evil. 17 Remember, it is sin to know what you ought to do and then not do it.
James 4:13–17 (NLT)
James does not open gently here. He zeroes in on a very specific kind of pride, the kind that does not look proud at all. It sounds like planning. It sounds like ambition. Today or tomorrow we are going to a certain town and will stay there a year. We will do business there and make a profit. There is nothing wrong with those words on the surface. The problem is what is missing from them. Not a whisper of God. Not a moment of asking what He thinks. The future is assumed, claimed, arranged, and God is nowhere in the picture. James calls it boasting. He calls it evil. And then he asks a question that should stop every one of us cold. How do you know what your life will be like tomorrow?
The answer, of course, is that we do not. Life is like the morning fog, here briefly and then gone. We know this. We have felt it when someone we loved was here one day and gone the next, when a plan we counted on dissolved without warning, when the future we had mapped so carefully turned out to look nothing like we expected. The fragility of life is not a grim theological abstraction. It is something we have all lived. And James says that living as if it were not true, planning as if we were in control, is not just unwise. It is a kind of arrogance that excludes God from His own world.
“Here is the history of the grass — sown, grown, blown, mown, gone; and the history of man is not much more.”¹ — C.H. Spurgeon
Spurgeon understood what James is pointing at. We are not as substantial as we feel. Our days are numbered by Someone other than ourselves. And the remedy James offers is not passivity or fatalism. It is a posture. What you ought to say is, if the Lord wants us to, we will live and do this or that. That is not a religious phrase to tack onto our sentences. It is a way of holding every plan, every ambition, every tomorrow with open hands before the God who actually holds it.
And then James closes with a line that cuts deeper than the rest. It is sin to know what you ought to do and then not do it. The sin is not in the planning. It is in the excluding. We know we should bring God into our decisions. We know we should hold our future loosely before Him. We know what it looks like to live surrendered rather than self-sufficient. The question James leaves us with is whether we will do it. Tomorrow belongs to Him. May we live today like we believe that.
Reflection:
- What fears or desires make it difficult for you to hold your future plans with open hands before God?
- James says our life is like morning fog. How does remembering the brevity of life change what you prioritize today?
- Is there anything right now that you know you should be doing but are not?
Prayer:
Ask God to show you where you have been relying on your own wisdom and excluding Him from your plans. Pray for a heart that trusts Him fully and a willingness to obey what He has already made clear.
Footnote:
¹ C.H. Spurgeon.