This week as I was driving to speak at the Ladies Bible Study, I was engaged in a minor vehicle wreck in my truck. It was no person’s fault but my own. Thankfully, no one was hurt, but I damaged property and shamefully felt very foolish. This has soberly reminded me of something I have been faced with a thousand times or more. We are all very vulnerable. There is no limit to the number of times that any person living very long has not been to the edge of serious, unexpected, and even life-threatening danger. What do we make of these situations and how do we face them? I know that each time in my life that something out of the ordinary has come my way, it has caught me by complete surprise, and I have been unprepared. Maybe a better question is how can I be prepared to expect the unexpected?

James addresses this from a biblical perspective that should reside in a righteously prepared heart. He says, “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.’ Yet, you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow” (James 4:13-14). This text is not against doing, or diligence, or planning – it is about the attitude behind every movement in whatever we do. The phrase, “Come now” is like saying in today’s jargon – “Come-on!”  What is the attitude that is being rebuked by James? It is an attitude of presumption. It is an attitude carrying a form of pride that takes self in relation to time and events for granted. It is an attitude which says in effect that the immediate and the future are all settled, and are sure things based on nothing but our expectations. 

What is most significantly missing as we charge off in our presumption is God! Not that we have forgotten God entirely, but we assume He is there for us to make our pathway what we expect it to be. The godless world would simply say, we were in the wrong place at the wrong time. We have likely all experienced the aftermath of an unexpected tragic situation in which we play over and over in our minds the “what if” or the “if only.” We call it shock when a person encounters something totally unexpected. The sobering answer to this continues in James. He says, “You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away” (James 4:14b). This is our reality. A vapor contains very little substance with very limited time. What is God communicating to us through James? He is forcing us to see ourselves and our situations with wisdom. Wisdom identifies presumption in us as the same reference of existence as that of vapor. So that when our confidence for living at any level is wrapped up in ourselves, it is no wonder that our pathway has many surprising interruptions. By contrast the only reliable constant is God Himself, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever” (Heb 13:8). Think how foolish we are when our expectations are wrapped up around ourselves and our abilities. We are knowingly or unknowingly placing our confidence the same as if we placed it in a vapor!

So, what practically should be our constant approach to living and doing? “Instead, we ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this and that’”(James 4:15).  This is a condition which is entirely in the Lord’s control and maybe He has something entirely different in His plan than what we plan. No matter how big or small to us, or how important to us, everything about assurance of the next moment lies completely in His sovereign hands. Acceptance and identification with this, like all things in relation to God, is a heart issue.  I am not happy that I had a wreck this week, but our events in the scheme of God’s eternal view of history is not seen or understood by us. We know that we are here to fulfill His purposes which are far greater than our daily comforts or expectations. We must therefore see our lives in every event as being directed by God and for His purposes in us. That does not mean we can blame Him for our failures, but we can know that He has orchestrated our situations into our lives for our good and the good of others. Our times are known and settled before Him, and thereby we can have peace and contentment even in our failures and trials.