Come now, you who say,
“Today or tomorrow we shall go into such and such a town,
spend a year there doing business, and make a profit”–
you have no idea what your life will be like tomorrow.
It is altogether easy, natural on a human level, to live our daily lives without acknowledging our dependence on God. When we pause to reflect we recognize that everything does depend more on whether the Lord wills it than on our own decisions. But when we are actually making plans do we pause to discern God's will? As we make plans do we at least recognize their contingent nature? It would seem that we do not, and here it why: When our plans are interrupted or frustrated we become surprised, angry, and upset. We do not simply experience ourselves as being redirected by God to different, ultimately better options, as we would have had we fully surrendered our plans to God in the first place.
All such boasting is evil.
Simply to live in a human way, making decisions with only ourselves as our frame of reference is ultimately prideful boasting. It does not acknowledge the truth that everything finally depends on God himself.
The heart of man plans his way, but the LORD establishes his steps (see Proverbs 16:9).
Without reference to God in our initial understanding of our decisions we also fail to acknowledge him when those plans succeed, as they occasionally do. We are like the nine lepers who are cured but simply take that cure for granted and go back to business as usual.
We are meant to be involved with God even in the ordinary and mundane aspects of our lives. We are not to hold any sphere of our activities as so insignificant or insubstantial that we ought not bother God about it. He desires to have our whole hearts and to be actively involved in every part of even the most quotidian tasks. It is in fact only when we involve him early on and often that we are really able to rely on him in the more dramatic or dire of circumstances.
So for one who knows the right thing to do
and does not do it, it is a sin.
We know that we ought to involve God more in our lives, to rely on him, and to thank him for his help. This is so important that to omit it could be a sin of omission and a sin of boasting simultaneously.
We know, on some level, what we ought to do. Much of what we are missing is not something too abstract or complicated for us. It is rather something that has been heretofore too obvious and simple for us to bother much about it. Let us know that right thing to do but also do it, early and often, so that when more significant trials come our resolve will be tested and our good habits will be firmly established.
“Teacher, we saw someone driving out demons in your name,
and we tried to prevent him because he does not follow us.”
The disciples desired to be able to credit for this individual who drove out demons in the name of Jesus. It wasn't that he didn't follow Jesus, for clearly he did. It was rather that he did not follow the disciples, who were still in the midst of learning lessons about servant leadership, still struggling against their own prideful need to be in the first place. They ought to have understood that this man was an implicit all., Rather than stopping him out of pride they should have welcomed him as a potential contributor. Their own need to shine and take center stage potentially risked stopping legitimate good fruit from being produced by someone else. The disciples needed to discover an attitude more like that which James recommended, where the Lord's will would take precedence over their own plans and where the centrality of Jesus himself would supersede their own desire to boast in any fruit that was going to be produced.
For whoever is not against us is for us.
Are we able to receive blessings from others? Or does it make us uncomfortable not to be in charge ourselves? When others are doing legitimate good in the world, good in accord with the name of Jesus and his Kingdom, let us learn to celebrate this fruit and even be open and to receiving it in humility ourselves. The simple lesson we need to learn is to stop asking so much what we ourselves will or do not will and to start asking what the Lord wills. If there is good fruit it is likely that he does will it. If we can escape the prison of our own self will we will discover much to celebrate, much that had somehow previously gone unnoticed.
Blessed are the poor in spirit; the Kingdom of heaven is theirs!
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