Yesterday we started the last stretch of James. He walks up to the person with the fullest calendar. The one with the plan. And he is not against the plan. He is after something underneath it. Control.
“Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit’—” (James 4:13, ESV)
On Sunday we opened James 4:13 to 17 together. Held. This week we walk back through it, one thought a day. A sermon names the truth once. The week is where you live in it.
Here is the line the whole sermon was built on. Control is the one thing you feel and never actually hold. You feel it when the week is mapped and the boxes are checked. You feel it at 2am, running tomorrow’s conversation over and over, like thinking hard enough will bolt it down.
But feeling in control and being in control are not the same thing. A researcher named Ellen Langer found that people will pay four times as much for a lottery ticket they picked themselves. Same random odds. The only difference was they chose it. Choosing it felt like control. It was not.
We do the same with our lives. We pick the city. We map the year. And the picking makes us feel like we are holding tomorrow. We are not.
Today: Name the one thing you have been gripping this week. Say it out loud to God. You cannot open a hand you will not admit is closed.