Be the Reed - Pt 8 - Audio
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We're continuing our series, yeah, thanks, continue our series, be the read and last week, we kind of talked about plans and the way that God's plans are higher than ours, his thoughts are higher than ours. And so today we want to continue that, but to do so, we kind of have to hit a little bit of the epistle of James, the letter of James. And so this is James 4, this is near the end of James, and he says this, "Pay attention, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town. We will stay there a year, buying and selling and making a profit.' You don't really know about tomorrow, what's your life? You're a miss that appears for only a short while before it vanishes. Here's what you should be saying, here's what you ought to say. If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that, but now you boast and brag and all such boasting is evil." It's a sin when someone knows the good thing to do and doesn't do it. The first thing to think about is, especially for us here in the West, how many plans we're making, how much we are always scheming, always thinking about what's next. And so notice that bit, today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town. We'll stay there a year, buying and selling and making a profit. That sounds like a good thing to do, right? That sounds like something that we should all be thinking about. We shouldn't be not thinking about the future, right? If we didn't think about the future at all, everything would fall into chaos and disaster in our lives, and some of us have lived that way, right? Some of us have actually tried not to make any plans whatsoever and things didn't go very well. And so if the question then is like, why is that such a big problem? Why is it that James is like, hey, hey, don't do this? And there's a part of it that's arrogance and boasting, which we saw later on in the text, but there's a bigger issue. And we talked about it last week, and the big issue is this, we are broken inside. We talked about the sports drink of the '90s, right, '80s and '90s, the sports drink of the '80s and '90s. When I was a kid, this is how I cooled down on a hard day of playing outside, because we weren't allowed to stay inside when I was a kid. We were forced out into the wilderness. And there we ran around on our bikes and footballs, and when we got sweaty and hot, we came back and we drank from the hose. And my dad always said, you gotta wait, wait, wait, because when you first start the hose, the orange water comes out, the brown water, the nasty stuff, the dead spiders and their eggs and whatnot, gotta wait till that all gets flushed out. But then once that's gone, you have pure golden, beautiful water. But it turns out he was wrong. And we know this now. We know that just by going through our pipe system, our water is very, very dirty. At least, that's what all of you have told me. I still make my kids drink out of the hose because, come on, guys. But nevertheless, it is true, I'm aware of the fact that there are minerals and there are germs and whatnot in our pipe system. And that pipe system in our hoses, well, that's actually a lot like us, okay? We are the kinds of people where we are corrupted at our source.
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Coast Bible Church, PastorTom Bennett, San Juan Capistrano, CA, www.coastbible.org