Devotionals

Day 5 – Do It Today

“So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.” (James 4:17, ESV)

Here is where surrender could go wrong. Someone hears you are a mist and thinks, then nothing matters, so I will do nothing. James saw that coming. He ends the passage with a jab. Whoever knows the right thing to do and does not do it, for him it is sin.

Surrender is not sitting still. Letting go of tomorrow frees you to obey today.

Think about the good you already know to do. The call you keep putting off until you feel ready. The apology. The visit. The thing you keep filing under later. Here is the problem with later. Later is a tomorrow you do not own. You have this day. You were given this one.

So spend it on the good you can already see.

Today: Do the one good thing you have been putting off until you felt ready. Do it today. Maybe you never felt ready because you were waiting for a tomorrow that is not yours.

Day 4 – The Surrender

“Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.'” (James 4:15, ESV)

So what do you do with a plan you cannot guarantee? Throw it out? No. James does not say stop planning. He says change how you hold the plan.

If the Lord wills. Four words. And watch where James puts them. Not just if the Lord wills, we will do this or that. If the Lord wills, we will live, and then do this or that. Even your next breath is under the if.

This is not a magic phrase you tack onto the end of a sentence. You can say it a hundred times and still grip the plan with white knuckles. It is not about your words. It is about your hands.

Paul lived it. Read his letters and the man is always making plans, and always adding the same thing. I will come to you, if the Lord wills. Full calendar, open hand. Those two are not enemies. You can chase a good plan with everything you have and still leave the final say with God.

Today: Take one plan you have been gripping. Hold it up and say it and mean it. God, this is yours before it is mine.

Day 3 – The Reality

“…you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.” (James 4:14, ESV)

A mist. The Greek word is atmis. The little cloud of breath you can see on a cold morning. The steam off your coffee. And James makes the words play. The mist appears, and then it disappears. Before you finish looking at it, it is gone.

That is your life, he says. Be careful how you hear that. This is not James trying to depress you. A vapor is not worthless. A vapor is just short. He tells you the truth about it so you will stop trying to carry what you were never built to carry. A mist does not have to hold up the sky.

Remember Hezekiah. Isaiah walks in with the worst sentence a person can hear. Set your house in order. You are going to die. Hezekiah turns his face to the wall and weeps and prays. And God sends word back. I have heard you. I have seen your tears. I am adding fifteen years to your life.

His days were numbered, then shortened, then extended. And he held none of it. Fifteen years were his. He just never held them. God did. Your days are short. And they are held. Just not by you.

Today: Instead of bracing for tomorrow, receive today. Name one thing in the next 24 hours you will hold with an open hand.

Day 2 – The Illusion

“As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.” (James 4:16, ESV)

Boasting in your arrogance. That English is soft. The Greek word is alazoneia. In the ancient world it named a specific person. The traveling salesman. The quack. The man who rolls into town promising cures he cannot deliver, and sounds sure the whole time.

That is the word James picks for the confident planner. Not because planning is wrong. Because the confidence is a performance. He is selling a future he does not own.

Jesus told a story about a man like this. A rich farmer with a bumper crop. I will build bigger barns. I will store it all up. Soul, you have many years. Relax. Eat. Drink. Be merry. The most scripted plan in the Bible. And God says one sentence. Fool. This night your soul is required of you. He had the barns. He had the plan. He did not have the one thing he was sure of. Tomorrow.

Here is the good news hiding in it. If you never actually had control, you cannot lose it. Putting down the performance is not losing something. It is just stopping the pretending.

Today: Catch yourself performing control today. When you do, say it plain. A full calendar is not a held tomorrow.

Day 1 – Held

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.

Day 6 – We Come Home Together

Tomorrow we gather.

“Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.” (James 4:10, ESV)

We will open James 4:1 to 10 together, the war inside, and the God who gives more grace than any of us have a right to expect. Bring the thing you named on Monday. Bring the pride you called out on Tuesday. Bring the clean ask, the surrender, the step home.

And bring this. You do not come home alone. Some of you have walked with Jesus a long time. What you received this week, you were meant to reproduce. You learned to ask, now teach someone to ask. You came home, go get someone on the road. That is why we added a word this quarter. Accountability. We come home together, and we help each other stay near.

Do not leave tomorrow with a feeling. Leave with a move. Ask. Release. Return. Tell.

You go low. He lifts you up. That is the more grace.

Today: Find one person and tell them which one you are doing, ask, release, return, or tell. Then pray for someone you will see tomorrow.

Day 5 – Humility Draws Near

This is the promise the whole passage has been driving toward. You take one step, and you find He was already moving toward you.

“Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.” (James 4:8, ESV)

Jesus told a story about it. A son takes his father’s money, walks away, and burns through all of it. He ends up in a pig pen, so hungry he eyes the pig food. And he decides to go home. Not proud. Just desperate. He even rehearses a speech. Make me a servant.

But watch the father. While the son was still a long way off, the father saw him. Which means the father was watching the road. And he ran. In that world a grown man did not run. He ran anyway. He did not wait at the door with his arms crossed. He closed the distance himself.

That is your God. You take one step home and find He has been running toward you the whole time.

He is closer than you think.

Today: Take the one step. Confess the one thing you have been hiding, and come home. He is already on the road.

Day 4 – Humility Submits

Submit is a military word. It means take your place under. The proud will not get under anything. They run their own life and call it freedom.

“Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.” (James 4:7, ESV)

Naaman knew that freedom. A great man, commander of an army, a war hero. And a leper. He hears there is a prophet in Israel who can heal him, so he shows up with horses and gold, ready to be impressed. And Elisha does not even come out. He sends word: go wash in the Jordan seven times.

Naaman is furious. He came for a show and got a command. His pride almost sends him home still sick. That is submitting to self. My way. My dignity. My picture of how it should go.

Then he gets down off his high horse and goes down into the water. Once. Twice. Seven times. Nothing dignified about it. And his flesh came back clean.

The grace was never in the river. It opened the moment he stopped insisting on his own way.

Today: Name the one area you have been controlling. Get under God’s way with it, even the undignified part.

Day 3 – Humility Asks

The proud do not ask. Asking means admitting you are not the source, and pride cannot say that. So it grabs. The humble open their hands.

“You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.” (James 4:3, ESV)

There is a wrong way to ask. It is asking God to fund the very thing already at war inside you. So ask, and ask clean. Not give me what I crave, but make me who You want.

And if you think you have gone too far to ask at all, meet Manasseh. The worst king Judah ever had. Fifty-five years spent on evil. Idols in the temple. His own sons burned as an offering. If anyone was past the reach of grace, it was this man.

They dragged him to Babylon in chains. And there, in a foreign prison, he did the one thing pride never does. He humbled himself and prayed. And the text says God was moved, and heard him, and brought him home.

If God answered that prayer, from that man, you are not too far gone to ask.

Today: Ask for one thing. Then ask Him to change what you want, until the asking is clean.

Day 2 – More Grace

There are two kinds of pride, and only one of them looks like pride.

“But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, ‘God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.'” (James 4:6, ESV)

The first pride is loud. I do not need to ask. I am the answer. I can handle it. We all recognize that one.

The second is quieter. It sounds like this. I am not worthy to ask. He would not answer me anyway. Look at what I have done. That sounds like humility. It is not. It takes your own verdict on yourself and makes it final. It trusts your judgment over His grace. It is you sitting in God’s chair, ruling on a case that was never yours.

One says I am too big to need grace. The other says I am too far gone to get it. Both stop the ask.

And James answers both with three words. But he gives more grace. More than the fighting. More than the wanting. More than you have earned.

Today: Which pride is yours right now, too big or too far gone? Name it. Then say the three words back to it. More grace.