Sermon Transcript
We were thinking, as many of our students are heading back to school tomorrow— I’m sorry, had to be the one to just say that— some of you are heading back to school tomorrow, later on this week, or perhaps next week, or in the coming days. Some of our college students are here for the last bit before they head on back. That it’d be good to hear from one of our own young people who’s come through the ministry here, and that is Brian Rikimaru. Some of you know Brian and his family, parents Scott and Susan. Brian first came to the church a little over 11 years ago, and he was here the latter part of his elementary years and all during his middle school years and all during his high school years as well.
And a couple years ago, Brian began college at Azusa Pacific where he’s pursuing— yeah, pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in Youth Ministry. And one of the reasons why we asked Brian to share is just because God has a calling on his life. Has— he has a calling on all of our lives, but Brian has a special just desire to serve God, and I just love this guy’s heart. Last summer he was one of our summer interns, and he did very, very well at that and learned so much that he is also spending this summer— he just finished summer working with a day camp that’s at Zephyr Cove in Lake Tahoe. And so I’m just thrilled about what God is doing in Brian’s life.
Would you help me to welcome Brian this morning? Brian, come on up, buddy.
And we’re gonna pray for Brian. How about that? Brian, would you like us to pray for you? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’d be good. Lord, thank you so much for this young man, and I know my faith is strengthened when I see someone, Lord, who I consider to be like a young Timothy in Scripture.
Lord, who says that he’s not going to let anyone look down on him even though, Lord, he’s young, but with his speech and his life and his faith, Lord, his hope and his purity, Lord, that he is in all of his ways acknowledging you, Lord. I pray that you would direct his steps. And we thank you, God, that we have the opportunity, Lord, to hear from what, Lord, you’ve spoken to him, Lord. Your Spirit is at work in him, and we’re excited about that, Lord. Open our eyes, open our ears, open our hearts, Lord, to what you want to say to us today from the book of James.
Lord. We say, Lord, to God be the glory, and we pray in your name. Amen. It’s all you, buddy.
Well, thank you so much. Good morning. It’s so awesome to be back at my home church, just not worrying about day campers running around all over the place. It’s pretty exhausting. But I invite you to open up to James 4:13-17.
That’s where we’ll be this morning.
Yeah, so James 4:13-17.
Come now, you who say, today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there doing business and making money. Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life if you are a mist that appears for a little while and and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, if the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that. As it is, you boast in your arrogance.
All such boasting is evil. Anyone then who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it commits sin. Would you pray with me? Dear Heavenly Father, I pray that this morning you would speak through me, that everything that I have, that would be emptied and that you would fill me up, and that your truth would be spoken today, God. I pray that you would illuminate your word and just resonate here, God.
In your name we pray, amen.
One life, don’t waste it. That was the title of the summer camp’s message going into my 6th grade year. On the same passage, actually. Brian Scholl, the youth pastor that I’d had for 6 years, and I think a lot of people here have had, he would give a message like this just about every year that I had him. And for me, it was a message that I actually always needed more of.
It always struck a nerve with me. He would say, the worst thing I can imagine for you students is to be on your deathbed many years down the road and to think back on your years of life And to just think, I’ve wasted it. I’ve wasted it. I think this is so impactful to me and others in the youth group because a lot of younger Christians think, I’ll be a real Christian when I’m older. I’ll take my faith seriously after college or something along those lines.
And I think the secret goal of a lot of young Christians is to live— ooh, there it goes. I think the secret goal goal or temptation for young Christians is to want to live a life of self-indulgence through college and then repent of those ways. The urgency of this passage of comparing one’s life to a mere vapor, it always connected with me. Now I think what’s more relevant to me and what might be more relevant to you guys is what I think the overall passage is getting at a bit more, which is overplanning or prideful planning. I had a friend in middle school, she would wear a University of Oregon sweatshirt, and being in only 8th grade, I assumed maybe one of her parents had gone there.
And one day I asked her, like, oh, did your parents go to that college? And she kind of quickly replied, no, I’m going there.
And it was 8th grade, and she was absolutely dead set on University of Oregon, and it honestly actually surprised me how much of the planning she had done. She had actually looked into it, and she thought that she had complete control over the situation back then. She’s at TCU, by the way, now.
But she had it all figured out to little 8th grade me, and I think on a middle school level, maybe, maybe she did. But the fact of the matter is we don’t know the future. We don’t know what tomorrow will hold, much less 5, 10, 15 years down the road. I procrastinated in high school more than I’m sure my parents would like to be reminded of, but it was because I knew when the deadline was, and so I knew exactly how much time I had left. And maybe with school there’s an amount of consistency to that, but that consistency, I’m afraid, is not something that’s shared in life as a whole.
Being younger, my plan, so to speak, with my relatives was to grow closer to them as I grew up more, And there’s kind of, I guess, a legitimate reason behind that, because the older you get, the more they’re not taking care of you, and then you can just talk and be people. And that’s just kind of the way I assumed it would go.
My junior year of high school, my grandfather on my mom’s side passed away. It was sudden and unexpected, very much so, one moment here, the next gone. And for me, this was the first time that I had really encountered death, understood what it meant to know what that means for someone to be taken away, with someone that I was close to. And as one of the younger people in the room, I’m sure that I’m not alone in knowing what that’s like. The reality is that we don’t know what our future holds, and yet we all make plans for it.
Something doesn’t seem to line up with this, to be people that must contend with the future. And yet have no grasp of it. And I think beyond the sense of urgency that my youth pastor spoke from in James 4, there’s also an answer to this dilemma. The title of my message is A Humble Perspective for Planning, which I think is not just a good perspective, I think it’s the biblical perspective. So what does that entail?
The first part comes in verse 14 where James writes, What is your life if you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes? And while our lives are not literally 2-second blips, we know that, James here is trying to force us to see our lives differently. Normally our lives are all that we see, and when that’s the entire picture, there’s a lot to look at within one’s life. But what James is doing is he’s zooming out the focus, he’s zooming out the picture so that What used to be the entire picture is now just a piece of the background. It’s not gone, but in comparison to everything else that’s there now, it’s insignificant.
G.K. Chesterton, a writer and theologian at the turn of the 20th century, he once said, the essence of every picture is the frame. The initial picture, it’s still there, it’s the same thing, if you can imagine, but even the part that’s still there after you’ve zoomed out, it looks different because you’re comparing it to an entirely different frame. There’s a video from a sermon that Francis Chan gave where I think he illustrates this point pretty well. I’d like to take a look. What you’re seeing right now, first of all, this is the Earth, okay?
You’re taking off from the Earth, from Southern California, and we’re gonna We’re gonna rise up a little bit here. Okay, we’re gonna pull away from it. We’re gonna pull higher. Now this is at about 10 kilometers. Like if you climb Mount Everest, this is what you’d see.
You’d see the curvature of the Earth from that distance. Now you’re gonna— we’re gonna climb up even higher. This is at 100 kilometers, and you’re a fourth of the way to the space station now. This is what you’d see. If you get to this level, you’re considered an astronaut.
Just if you ever get there. Okay, now we’re going 100,000 kilometers. 100,000 kilometers from the Earth, you’re a fourth of the way to the moon. That’s what the Earth would look like. Now we’re gonna pull away to a million kilometers.
At a million kilometers, there’s the moon. Okay, there’s the moon. You can barely see the Earth. You’re at a million kilometers now. You’re past the, past the moon.
And now we’re gonna go to 100 million kilometers. 100 million kilometers, you’re still not to the Sun. The Sun’s 93 million miles away. But now we’re gonna go to 10 trillion kilometers. There’s the Sun.
Okay, you just passed the Sun. Now you would see all of the planets at 10 trillion kilometers. And now we’re at 10 to the 15th power. That means 10 with 15 zeros. I don’t know what that number is, 15 zeros.
And And the sun is just like a bright dot amidst other stars. And now we’re going to 10 light-years away. At 10 light-years away— come on, let’s go zoom— there you go. 10 light-years away. Now you just see the sun with like 11 other stars that are kind of its neighbors.
You know, that’s our sun. And now we’re gonna go 1,000 light-years away. At 1,000 light-years away, you wouldn’t even see our sun anymore. These are just a bunch of stars close to it in this cluster inside the Milky Way. Now we’re gonna zoom out even further, and that’s the Milky Way we live in.
See that cluster of stars? Those are about 100,000 stars that are closest to our sun. You can’t see our sun anymore at this point. Now this is our Milky Way galaxy, and forget about the Earth. Okay, there’s our Milky Way galaxy that we live in.
And we’re just buried in there somewhere. And we’re gonna pull out even further, and you’ll see that our galaxy is actually— it’s a big galaxy, and all those other things you’re seeing now are galaxies. And we’re gonna pull away 10 million light-years now. His next scene is 10 million light-years. Those are all galaxies you see amidst our Milky Way, several hundred galaxies.
Now we’re going to go 100 million light-years away. This is the last one. We’re going to zoom out to 100 million light-years. Those are all clusters of galaxies. Galaxies and clusters of galaxies.
You won’t even see our Milky Way galaxy anymore amidst that. We don’t have telescopes that go beyond that little sphere there.
It’s kind of crazy, huh? Just how much you can keep zooming back. It’s like, I always forget how many of them he has. It just keeps on going back and back. Remember the mountains, the very first slide?
Just last week, I hiked Mount Tallac with my staff at the day camp. It’s the tallest mountain in the Tahoe area, and let me tell you, mountains are pretty darn impressive. One of the most jaw-dropping, just incredible things, but that was his first slide and then he went bigger. So what are the mountains in comparison to the universe? What is your life?
I think it speaks for itself, that line, when you have an understanding of what you’re comparing your life to. So the first point is that a humble perspective for planning requires a realization of one’s finitude. A realization of one’s finitude. You need to see the bigger picture. While at Zephyr Point, while at that conference center this summer, I was in charge of the 6-year-olds one week, the chickadees we called them.
And of course, being at Lake Tahoe, every day we had a bit of swim time. Pretty nice. And for the 6-year-olds, only 1 out of 8 of my chickadees could swim. So swim time at the lake was not a very restful time when you have the chickadees And what they did though, they like to play under this dock, and there are some rocks under it, and that’s where you catch the crawdad, so of course that’s where you are. And I had a— so most of my campers were down there, and there was one camper who was climbing behind another one of my girls, Ellie, and the guy, he was climbing behind Ellie, and I guess he stumbled, or I don’t know, lost his balance a little bit, and so he kind of like reached out his hand to kind of like brace himself, And Ellie wasn’t really in a good position to be supporting someone like that.
She was not really stable, I guess. And so he reaches out his hand to brace himself and actually pushes her into the lake. It’s about 5 feet, but for a 6-year-old, might as well be 15. Falls into the lake, and she starts screaming before she hits the water. She’s immediately just up in arms about it.
And her twin brother happens to be right there, so he’s screaming immediately that ‘Cause they’re really close, and all the other day campers, they hear screaming, they run over, they’re screaming, and, you know, just normal things with 6-year-olds. And needless to say, I mean, I hopped in, I picked her up, brought her out, and ended up spending the rest of my swim time calming down Ellie and her twin brother. And I think it was so hard to calm them down afterward, because they had gotten a real glimpse into the perspective that I think James is trying to illustrate in these verses. In a moment, her life could have been gone, a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. They had a realization of their finitude.
They were totally fine, but it’s not every day that you think to yourself that you may not have tomorrow. And I think that’s the type of mindset that James is suggesting that we have. So still, what’s the solution to the problem that we don’t know the future, we barely have a future, and we’re still trying to plan it out? James is honestly, he’s painting a pretty bleak picture at this point, but thankfully he doesn’t leave it there. James continues in the passage in verse 15, instead you ought to say, if the Lord wishes, we will do this or that.
There’s a very clear comparison being made between verses 15 and 13, and the clear difference between them is that one is involving God and one isn’t. It’s obvious that we should involve God. You don’t need a sermon to hear that. But we plan all the time without him. Happens to me all the time.
The question that I’m most often asked as a college student is, what’s your major? And then from there it’s, what are you planning to do with your major? And for most college students, the answer’s gonna be somewhere along the lines of trying to get an internship out of college, maybe during senior year, that’d be cool, and maybe it’ll turn into a paid position, or maybe possibilities will open up, kind of connecting, networking. That type of thing. It’s not a strange answer to have, and it’s the answer that people are very much expecting and hoping to hear.
And I think the issue with college sometimes is that it’s so individualistic, it’s so about what am I gonna do with my life and all this. And I think that perspective is even shared with churches sometimes. So often it’s, do I connect with the worship? Is the sermon style, the preaching style, something that resonates with me? Are the service times convenient for me?
And never is it, does God have a spot for me here, is how can I serve this church?
I think JFK actually had the right mindset in saying, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country. And last I checked, Christians are supposed to be living for Christ, not themselves. When I was with the Chickadee group, again, I was with 5-year-olds this time, so Chickadee group is 5 and 6-year-olds, I was sharing my testimony. We do Bible lessons every day, and so the first 4 days are gonna be kinda normal Bible lessons, and then the 5th day is a testimony. You get to share your real name.
We do camp names normally, so that’s always fun. And one of the first things I said in my testimony was, in about 2nd grade, I gave my life to Christ, and kinda quickly realized that they probably don’t know what I mean by that, and it’s kind of vague for them. I realized that I don’t think I quite knew what I meant by that. It was just one of those phrases that people say, and so I kinda thought about it a little bit, and it’s kind of amazing what 5-year-olds can teach you, huh? But what I explained to them was that giving your life to Christ, that means that all of the desires I have, every urge from wanting to jump into the lake to when we’re gonna eat lunch and complaining about that, or how I talk to my classmates, All of these things I would run by God first.
The first thing I would do is check to see if it’s something that I think God would want me to do. And that’s what I think James is saying. He’s saying don’t get so caught up in your plans that you forget to run your plans by God, that you forget that you’ve given your life to him. The second point is that a humble perspective for planning requires giving your plans to God. That doesn’t mean not making plans though, don’t get me wrong.
It isn’t giving your ability to make plans to God, it’s— ’cause he’s already given you that as a gift. It’s about showing God that you’re going to honor him with that gift he has given you to make plans. And so please keep on making plans. James doesn’t leave out the plans in his instead he ought to say bit. It’s instead he ought to say, if the Lord wishes, we will do this or that.
Section there is talking about still making plans.
But the key point of all that is still, if the Lord wishes, that’s the central message. And it’s also important to note that this passage isn’t about a magic phrase that guarantees that your plans are gonna work or that it justifies your plans. At base, this passage is about acknowledging God in your plans, but it’s more than that. ‘Cause it’s giving, about giving God the ultimate authority with your plans. So how do we actually follow through with this?
What do we do? How do you make sure that you’re doing the Lord’s will? How do you figure out what his will is? And I think the answer in part is in these last couple verses, although the connection is, I think, a bit harder to see. James continues in verse 16, As it is, you boast in your arrogance.
As it is is referring to the way in verse 13, leaving out God, planning without God. So as it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. Here James is laying out the problem a little bit differently. Before, what he was doing, he was laying out the problem in terms of, in human terms, of our limited perspective, of our inability to see the future and how that’s that’s an issue.
But James here, he’s relaying out the problem as a problem of the heart. To plan without God, he’s saying, is to arrogantly assume that we can plan without him. It’s to assume that we’re good enough to act without informing God, almost that we don’t need God. As in many issues of the heart, the root problem is pride. And this pride of elevating one’s abilities to essentially determine the future It’s evil.
In the entirety of James chapter 4, this is kind of the core issue that he’s writing about, pride. In chapter 4, verse 6, James quotes a proverb that says, God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble, and then continues saying, submit yourselves therefore to God. The whole chapter is about pride and how that stops you from giving absolute, just absolutely everything to God. In this case, it’s talking about plans, how you can give your plans completely to God, how you can submit yourself with humility to God. And so the conclusion that this pride, it leads James to, is in the last verse.
Verse 17 says, anyone then who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it commits sin. And honestly, the first time I wrote it, I was reading through and I was taking notes verse by verse. And I got to this one and I looked back at my notes and I had literally written down, seems like an unrelated statement. I didn’t, I couldn’t figure out how they connected. I knew it did though, because the very first words are anyone then, or some translations might say, therefore anyone.
It’s clear that it’s his conclusion based off of the passage. And I think the way that it relates is that the pride that’s involved in verse 16, the, you boast in your arrogance, That pride is the same thing that would drive someone to choose not to do the right thing that they know they should do. The idea coined sins of omission is from this verse. To leave out something, although not actively doing something wrong, that you shouldn’t be leaving out. In the same way that someone can lie by purposely leaving out details, called a lie of omission.
We too can sin by purposefully leaving out God. The pride or the arrogance to think that we can do it without God, it drives us to omit God, to leave him out. We know the right thing we ought to do. The letter of James is written to Christians, it’s written to people who know they need God, they get it, and yet in their plans they want to do it themselves. We want to do it ourselves.
We say that we’ve given our life to Christ, But we can’t even lend our ears to him in planning our future. I think of times that I’ve sat with a friend for like an hour just in silence because I know there’s something that they wanna say. I know that there’s something on their heart, and just sitting there knowing that eventually they’re gonna talk about something, and I can’t think of the last time I’ve done that with God. I can’t think of the last time I’ve found a really secluded spot with no distractions and just said, God, I’m here, what is it you wanna tell me? What is it that you wanna place on my heart?
Having given your life to Christ isn’t supposed to, it’s not supposed to remain a past tense decision. It’s, I think the better way to say it instead of I’ve given my life to Christ is I’m giving my life to Christ. Not that I gave my life to Christ in 2nd grade, but That’s when I started giving my life to Christ. It’s something I’m still doing. People say that when you love someone, there’s kind of a point where loving them doesn’t come naturally in the same way.
It’s not that kind of raw emotion or feeling. There’s something more to it. It’s a point where you choose to love that person every day. And I think it’s the same way with giving one’s life to Christ. It’s this dance of time, bringing you the next bit of your life, and you, hour by hour, second by second, just giving it to him, giving your life to Christ.
The Greek word that’s used for the good you ought to do, or the right thing you ought to do, that word good, it’s the word kalon, and it’s also the Greek word for beautiful. Classical aesthetics, they always place beautiful and good in very much the same sphere, same realm. And so I think it’s fitting that this word kalon, good, beautiful, that that’s the word that is being used here, ’cause it’s not about a strict moral code of a certain action that has to be done so that you won’t face certain consequences. It’s rather that you have this opportunity to engage in this kalon dance, this beautiful dance between time and Jesus Christ, and that to be so prideful, us to not wanna dance, to not create this beauty, is just wrong. And so as we’re here at the kind of end of summer, I know, bittersweet, but as we’re here at the end of summer, or maybe kind of the start of a new season of your life, or just kind of as there’s a lot before you, have a humble perspective when it comes to your planning.
Realize your finitude, realize that You’re a vapor in something so much bigger than you, but it doesn’t end there, because finite as you are, you have a relationship with the infinite. You have a relationship with God. And so to overcome the problem of your seeming insignificance, you can give your plans to God fully and utterly. You can humble yourself as Jesus modeled and plan with God for God. Would you pray with me?
Dear God, thank you so much for this time that we have to be meditating on your word, to be praying over it, thinking through it, and I wanna thank you for your presence here in this building. As we look at the universe, it’s so easy to think that we’re insignificant, that we don’t matter, but God, you are so big, You didn’t create the universe in your image, God. You created us in your image, and you love us, and you died for us. And my prayer is that that love that you have for us would, that it would motivate us to love as well others, but that it would motivate us to love you, to motivate us to serve you, to humble ourselves to your authority, God. I pray that as we’re looking forward to plans, small or big, that we would remember that, that it is your will that ought to be done.
God, thank you so much for this time. In your name we pray. Amen.
Well, if you were encouraged, can we let Brian know today? Great job, buddy. Praise God.
I, I think there’s a theme going through this service today, and one of which is we were hearing the ladies from Italy share and we’re having Brian share. It reminded me of a message that Pastor Dave shared a couple years ago that you may remember, you may not, and it’s simply this: that we make plans with open hands. Let’s make plans with open hands. When we do that, we recognize that God holds our time in his hands. So students, as you start school this week, make plans with open hands.
Parents, as you think about what the school year holds, make plans with open hands. All of us, let’s make our plans with open hands, realizing that God holds it all together. And there’s something in a passage like that that leads me to just kind of wonder, where, you know, what I’m supposed to do with that. And yet I want to encourage us to think about Jesus and his life itself. What was Jesus’ will?
What was Jesus’ goal? What was Jesus’ purpose as he lived his life? Jesus said his will was to do what? Was to do the will of the Father. Was to do the will of the Father.
And what if that was your will and my will as well? To say, God, with open hands, my will is to do your will. When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, they said, teach us how to pray. One of the things he taught them to pray is, it’s not my will, but God, thine be done. And when Jesus was in the garden praying, what did he pray?
God, if it’s any way possible for this cup to pass from me, any way possible for me to not go to the cross, then let it be, but not my will, your will be done. What if we started off this new season and said that? Lord, not my will, but yours be done. Because here’s the really cool thing, here’s the gospel, don’t miss this. You and I are able to do the will of God and to be obedient to him because Jesus was completely obedient to the Father.
Had Jesus stumbled at one point, we could not have a relationship with God. That’s the gospel. That’s the good news of Jesus. Be encouraged by that today. We can have a relationship with God because Jesus was 100% obedient to the will of the Father.
That’s good news. Well, I invite you after today to come on by and just say thanks to Brian and say thanks to Jocelyn and to Abby. And I’m gonna be over here on the side if you have a need that I can pray for with you today. I’d love to do so. Please don’t leave here with a need going unprayed for.
I’ll just be over here on the side. But Lord, may the words of our mouth, may the meditations of our heart this week be acceptable and pleasing to you. Lord, may we live life and make plans with open hands. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
You’re dismissed.
