To Encourage You

James 4:13-14 “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’— yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring . . . Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.’ As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.” 

Titus 2:11-13 “For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ.”

The Bible has a lot to say to us about the future and how we should live in light of it.  It tells us that many live their lives as if they know things about the future that they do not.  Conversely, it warns us about some things that are absolutely certain about the future, and because those things are so sure, our thinking and actions should continually take those things into account. 

So, to the first point, in the verses above from James 4 we are told that when people so casually say that they are going to do thus and so either today, tomorrow, or the next day, week, or month, they are making an unwise statement.  We have absolutely no idea what the future holds.  Therefore, when we say that we will do something in the future, we should always couch that statement with “if the Lord wills.”  Ultimately God is in sovereign control of our lives, and anything we do in the future will only be done within the confines of the Lord’s will.  That includes sin, by the way.  As God warned Adam and Eve, disobedience brings divine judgment, and although God is often incredibly patient and merciful with sinners, He would be perfectly just to judge any sin the very moment we commit the act.   To think that we can go on living however we want without consideration of God’s will is the height of arrogance and a sin in and of itself.  It is the wise person that has God’s will always in view and that keeps that person from living a life of foolish arrogance about the future they know nothing about. 

But then there are other things about the future that we can know because they are an absolute certainty based on the Word of God. That’s the view in the passage from Titus 2 above. Titus tells us that there is coming a time when Jesus will appear. For some, that appearance will be at the moment they die. For others, it will be at the second coming of Christ.  Either way, the Christian lives in the blessed hope of this certainty.  It is at that meeting that we will give an account of our lives (Romans 14:12), so we should live as if that moment could be today.  As the vast majority go on merrily as if that day will never come, the believer is called to “live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age” as we await this blessed hope. 

So, how do you see your future? Do you realize that you have absolutely no control over it? This very day any one of us could meet the Lord.  Are we living as if this is, indeed, true?  Are we ready to meet Him at this very moment, or are we going along as if we know (or worse, have some control over) the future, when the future is only known to One?