“The Lord Willing”

“The Lord willing”; superstition, rote saying, or Biblical awareness? “The Lord willing and the creek don’t rise,” perhaps this one covers both God and nature, just in case God doesn’t rule over nature.

 

My memory is not good enough for me to be able to tell you how I may have said, “The Lord willing,” over the decades of my life, but I can tell you that as far back as I can go until my memory is enveloped with fog that I have said it with an acknowledgment that life is uncertain and fragile, and with an awareness of the reverential fear of the Lord. I take no credit for this, it is the result of others, and of James the Apostle, and of the grace of God.

 

When I was a young man I was around older people who said, “The Lord willing,” as a natural part of their conversation; it was woven into the fabric of their lives. While some may have said it out of habit or superstition, I have a sense that many of them said it out of a deep awareness that our lives are not our own, but that they belong to our Father – Creator. I think they knew that life is uncertain, fragile, and that we don’t really know about tomorrow. These men and women had life experience and God experience, they knew joys and sorrows, gain and loss; this was before our hearts and minds in America were transformed into narcissistic idolatry and self-deification, this was before the professing – church abandoned the self-denial of the Cross.

 

It seems to me that the Covid – 19 pandemic ought to cause us to pause and consider the wisdom and Biblical truth within the words, “The Lord willing.” Here’s the statement in its Biblical context:

 

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. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.” But as it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil. Therefore, to one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sin. (James 4:13 – 17).

 

Let me begin at the end of this passage, “Therefore, to one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sin.” I confess that before this morning I’d not thought about its context, and while it does have a broad application, what is its immediate application? Why does James write this? What is the “right thing to do” in this passage?

 

While it is not wrong to think, “The right thing to do is to submit our plans to the Lord and His will,” I want to take this further. I want to suggest that every component of this passage is important if we are to sense and understand the gravity of the words, “The Lord willing.”

 

Consider, “Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow.” We are taught, “Those who fail to plan, plan to fail.” This is the American way. We are all about having control over our lives, and when we don’t have control we have meltdown. There are those right now who are saying with their words and actions, “I’ll risk getting sick, I’ll risk dying, I want control over what I do.” The Apostle James tells his readers that they are arrogant. How many times have I been arrogant? How many days have I lived in arrogance? What about you?

 

James isn’t saying that we shouldn’t plan, any more than he would suggest that a farmer not prepare his soil and sow his seed, but he is saying that we ought to be careful how we plan, that it ought to be in an awareness of God’s sovereignty, that God is God and that we are not – and He is Lord, which means that our lives ought to be subject to His direction and control.

 

Do we really know what our lives will be like tomorrow? How often, on December 31 of a given year, can we look back over the year and see that life went exactly as we planned?

 

Many of us have had jobs in which the unexpected occurred just about every day, and our success in those jobs was based, in part, on a combination of both planning, and responding to the unexpected. Just as our plans should be submitted to the will of God, so should the unexpected – it all passes through His hands.

 

Then James adds another element:

 

“You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.” We can respond to this truth in at least two ways, one is with the attitude, “Let us eat and drink and be merry today, for tomorrow we may die.” As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15, if we don’t believe in the resurrection we may as well live like this. Or, living in the light of eternity, we can live under the lordship of Jesus Christ today, endeavoring, by His grace, to love God with all that we have and all that we are, and to love others as ourselves.

 

Realizing that our lives are short can lead us to either live recklessly or to live thoughtfully. In the West most of us think and live as if we’ll be here forever. Elsewhere in the world death is ever present. In the West we are focused on being young forever, rather than growing in wisdom and understanding. We promote perpetual childhood with myriad toys and diversions and our attention spans at age 80 are about what they were at age 2…and we call this progress.

 

What is “the right thing to do” in this passage? It is to live under the lordship of Jesus Christ, in an awareness that we don’t know what tomorrow may bring, with an understanding that our lives, in an earthly sense, are like a vapor that is here one moment and gone the next. “The right thing to do” is to live with the words, “The Lord willing”, woven into our hearts and minds; to live with those words as part of the fabric of our speech and testimony.

 

Our lives were as a vapor before the pandemic. Before the pandemic we didn’t know what tomorrow would bring. The pandemic did not change these realities, but perhaps  we can learn these realities afresh through the present distress – especially those of us in the West – isolated and insulated as most of us are from the suffering in the world.

 

For the follower of Jesus, perhaps we can be gripped by the gravity of the words, “The Lord willing”; remembering that, “Therefore, to one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sin.”