faith in action

James 4:13-16

Go to now, ye that say, To day or to morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain: Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that. But now ye rejoice in your boastings: all such rejoicing is evil.

Read all of James Chapter 4 here

It almost seems as if James has taken a change of direction here, as he moves on to another subject. Now the subject is the audacity of a group of men and their plan making without considering the plans and wishes of God in those plans.

A case can be made that this section still bears a substantial relationship to some of the previous discussions. The linkage here is pride. We can see from earlier writings in this chapter the things pride and a desire to operate our lives independent from God causes. In the first part of Chapter 4 we saw how this has made us love the things of the world rather than God. We saw later how this has made us think we can be the judge of our brethren instead of God.

Finally, we see here that James’ readers just had to seize one more opportunity to use their pride as a reason to shake their fists in God’s face and go their own direction. We will explore in the next day or two exactly what these men were about to do, as they put together their own plans with no regard for God’s desires.

But, let’s chase a rabbit for a bit first and recap some things we know about pride so that we can truly understand the seriousness of this issue. We tend to treat our pride as somewhat of a minor issue, when in fact a case could be made that pride is actually the driving force behind every other sin.

It was pride that made Lucifer fall and take one third of God’s angels from heaven with him. We can read how Lucifer started out as one of God’s most beautiful creations and chose to rebel in Ezekiel 28.  We can read of Satan’s five “I Wills” and how his pride caused his fall in Isaiah 14.

Of course, we all know the story of Adam and Eve’s Fall in the Garden of Eden as described in Genesis Chapter 3. The Apostle John later tells us that the “Pride of life” is one of the things which places us in the world rather than in God. 1 John 2:16

So, is pride serious? Of course, it is. Is it the most serious? Maybe so.