2024-10-20 - Covenant CRC-sermon only - Joel Kok

 So again, our reading is from James chapter four. This is the second to the last of our Sundays in this series from James. This will be an interesting and brief reading that we will tie to other sections of the scriptures. We will begin with James 4, verse 13, and then read through verse 17. So here is the word of the Lord. James writes:

Now, listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow, we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” Why you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist. that appears for a little while and then vanishes.

Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast and brag. All such boasting is evil. Anyone then who knows the good he ought to do and doesn't do it, sins.

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Friends, please know that our Lord is giving us good news in our worship for today. Our Lord is at work through our reading and everything happening here in our worship today. Our Lord is giving us good news regarding our Lord's will for our everlasting lives. In our reading, as we just heard, James speaks to us about our current lives in a way that can raise some questions for us.

James teaches us to connect our current lives to our Lord's will and make that connection, which is important for the life God wants for us. James speaks to us with wisdom in the form we call a warning. And the warning he's giving us here is to think that we control our lives.

And so he warns us against planning our lives as if we are in such total control. And he reminds us, look, you really aren't in control enough to know even what will happen tomorrow. And then he goes on, he makes that provocative saying. He says, you know what your life is? You are a mist. And what that means is you're like a little breath of air that appears briefly. Maybe on a cold day, when we breathe, we briefly see a little breath of air, and then it disappears. James is saying that's what your life is like. You're a tiny cloud of vapor or smoke that appears briefly and then disappears.

And then, as he speaks to us that warning, he goes on to say here's the point: I need you to connect your life to the Lord's will. And so friends, please know that the Lord's will through these words, the Lord's purpose through these words, is to connect us more and more to Jesus Christ so that we can get it a little bit more true as to what life means, what life is like. James is a wisdom teacher here, warning us and pointing us to Jesus as the ultimate purpose of life.

Wisdom teacher who can give us the life that God really wants for us. And then implicitly, James also points us to another wisdom teacher, a wisdom teacher who some of you may know has the name Kohelet. And the name Kohelet is a Hebrew word that means teacher. James is pointing us to another teacher. We can say his name is Teacher Kohelet. He is pointing us to Kohelet so that, with Kohelet and James together, we can go more and more to Jesus. Because when we do that, we're going to get the kind of life in which we're going to be—perfect the way Jesus is commanding us to be, and further related teachings.

So maybe you know how to hear from this teacher, Kohelet. Do you know what book of the Bible we turn to? We turn to what's called the Book of Ecclesiastes. Because, again, there are lots of debates. When was it written? Who wrote it? And all these kinds of things. But to hear God's Word, we can simply just recognize that the teacher there, we can call that teacher Kohelet.

And as we listen to some of the things that he says to us in Ecclesiastes, we can listen more to James, and we can listen to them both, helping us hear from Jesus and follow him. So here's a connection between our reading from James and the book of Ecclesiastes. A connection, quite a strong connection, that James wants us to make is when he says, your life is a mist, which again means a brief breath, something like a vapor, like a little cloud of smoke for a tiny time.

James is echoing a major theme in that Kohelet speaks to us in the book of Ecclesiastes. In Ecclesiastes, Kohelet emphasizes that we are a mist by saying again and again, from the beginning of his book to the end, Kohelet keeps saying Hevel, everything is Hevel, and that Greek word, Hevel, again, can be translated as mist, or vapor, or mere breath, or smoke.

And that's the point. When we are on our own and ignoring God, our lives are like a hevel, a mist. And when James says that, he wants us to think about Kohelet, emphasizing that in the book of Ecclesiastes because that will be another wisdom warning. that will turn us more and more to Jesus.

So again, let's just ponder that truth. It's related to all kinds of other truths. It can be complicated, but at least we can think about how when we plan our lives, when we try to live our lives without giving much attention to God, when we drift apart from God, then our lives are hell.

Other translations take that Greek word, hevel, mist, and the breath of air, and they bring out a side of it that's the traditional one—vanity of vanities. Everything is vanity. Again, that's a translation of hevel. That's just saying your life apart from God, it's vain. It's going nowhere. Or the NIV says meaningless.

Your life is hevel, meaningless apart from God. And that is what Kohelet and James warn about to bring us to the life we can get in Jesus. So, at this point, we can pause and ask when Kohelet and James want us to connect our lives more and more to Jesus. They both wind up emphasizing we need to pay attention to the will of God.

We need to listen to and do the will of God. Let's just ask ourselves here: To what extent can every one of us ask, and to what extent do I focus my plans for life on the will of God? To what extent do I think, first and foremost, not first and foremost, what do I want? What's my will? Do I think, first and foremost, what is the will of God?

Again, that's what James says when he says, "If you're thinking about what I'm going to do in my work and business over the next year, it's so wise to think if it is the will of God, I can go here or there and do this or that." And the connection to Jesus here is, do you remember what Jesus wants us to pray every single day?

We've prayed it a little bit together, and Jesus wants us to pray it personally. He wants us to pray daily: May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Father in heaven, Amen. May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And I think when we hear this emphasis on if it is the will of God, your will be done, Father, I think most of us would say, certainly I can say I do give that some thought.

I do want to pray that and live that. But on the other hand, I can certainly, and I think all of us can certainly grow further in that direction of the priority of the will of God. Your will will be done, Father. We can grow further in that life-saving direction. And to do that, we can work a little more with Kohelet and Ecclesiastes.

We can think about how James says earlier in his epistle, "You really need the wisdom from above." There, too, he's thinking about Kohelet and Ecclesiastes, who keep talking about what life is like under the sun. This is what life is like when we're not as aware of God and his will and power as we need to be.

And so to just stick a little bit longer with Kohelet and Ecclesiastes, When Kohelet is describing what he calls life under the sun, when he's describing what is a life that is less aware of God and heaven and everywhere than it can be. What he is doing there, he winds up saying, one scholar said 38 times, another scholar said 39 times, but many times he just says hevel, a mist, a breeze.

That's the brief breath we're in. That's what happens. If we think we're in control of our lives. And then, Kohelet emphasizes this, again, as a loving warning. He's saying to people, to all of us, he's saying, Look, if you think you're in control of your life, here's the kind of things that will happen in your life that you'll need to wrestle with.

First of all, your life is going to be brief. Even if you live into your 90s or 100, compare it to the mountain and the oceans we were singing about earlier. Compare it to the whole universe or the earth and its things. Our long lives, in our terms, are really just a brief breath of air compared to that.

So your life is going to be brief. And then you are going to die, Kohelet says. And as you go through that brief life, heading towards death, you know what you'll see and experience a lot? You're going to see all kinds of injustice. You're going to see people who live very righteous lives dying and getting ignored, while people who have been oppressors and sinful can get celebrated when they die, and that kind of injustice can happen.

Frustration can happen. Disappointment after disappointment can happen until it comes to death. That is what Kohelet means. is observing, and he wants to bring that out. So people who, like Job's friends, think we know exactly what God is doing all the time. Job, we know that if you're sick, you must be a sinner.

There's this arrogance that James warns us against, and Kohelet also warns us against: Don't think you know exactly everything God is doing and don't think you know exactly everything that is going to happen. James and Kohelet warn us against that false wisdom where we think we understand everything because they want to protect us from a false hope that will go nowhere.

And they do that not to get us to throw away all hope. But again, they want to lead us out of the false hope into the true hope that comes from with Christ. And so that's what we can do. Having heard both James and Kohelet and Ecclesiastes warning us about life under the sun, about life when we ignore the will of the Lord, we can turn to the Bible now.

We live in a life where we look to the heavenly wisdom we need that comes to us through Christ. Kohelet could point us in that way, even though he lived a long time before Christ. Now, even longer than James did, we are living in Christ 2,000 years after his death and resurrection. So, in the light of Christ, let's move from life as hevel, life as just this brief breath, into the everlasting life that Jesus wants for us.

To begin to experience more and more of that everlasting life, we'll move from that hevel-mist emphasis in James. We'll move to him talking about the Lord's will. If it is the Lord's will, these things will happen. Father, your will be done. We pray every day. That doesn't make us passive. That doesn't mean we don't do any planning. It just means that as we plan, work, and do everything, we are thinking, praying, and trying to live according to the will of the Lord, which is our Father's will to be done on earth as it is done in heaven. Now, here as we move to this second point, I guess we could call it about the will of the Lord; I think all of us would agree when we talk about, think about, and pray about the will of the Lord, we get all kinds of questions, all kinds of things that we don't fully understand.

Is it the will of the Lord that the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East just go on and on? Is it the will of the Lord that all kinds of terrible things happen? What is going on regarding the will of the Lord? There's a mystery there that we just never fully understand. But I did find some wisdom teachers in our own time who can help us pray and live by the will of the Lord by giving us what we call three lenses or three angles to think about the will of the Lord and I'll name the three and then briefly describe them.

So when Jesus tells us to pray, "Father, you will be done," that's what the three angles are for us to understand, as there's the intentional will of God, which is the way Jesus wants us to live, or the Lord intends for us to live this way.

Then there's God's circumstantial will, which deals with all the complicated circumstances in our world.

And then there is the ultimate will of God, which is what our Lord is at work to will and to bring about in the final righteousness that he will bring. So that's the three angles we can take when we think, if the Lord wills, I'll do this tomorrow, this upcoming year, et cetera.

And father, your will. So, let's talk about the intentional will of God, how our Father and our Lord intend for us and wills for us to live. And when I put it out there, I think all of you can think very quickly that our Lord describes his intentional will by giving us, for example, the Ten Commandments. And beyond that, our Lord also speaks to us in prayers like Psalms.

So like, when we read and pray Psalm 133, how good and pleasant it is when brothers and sisters dwell together in unity, we can know that it's the intentional will of the Lord that we dwell together in unity. And let's just think, how well is that going? When it comes to the Ten Commandments, how well did it go for Israel when they first received that with great joy?

They broke the first commandment almost instantly. They fell into idolatry. And that struggle with idolatry as opposed to the one true Lord continues among us today. How about the Lord's intentional will for us to have unity as brothers and sisters in Christ? How's that going these days? Not perfectly well, is it? And then do we think things aren't going perfectly well, we can think about the intentional will of our Lord in one more term. And that's the term that our wisdom teacher Jesus gives us in the Sermon on the Mount. So after Jesus talks about what you've heard, do not commit murder.

And he gives us deeper commands. He does that in various ways. And then he has this sort of culmination of that section where he's talking about the intentional will of God. Do you know what Jesus intends for you to do? Do you know how Jesus intends for you to live? He wants you to be perfect. Jesus says, be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect.

When it comes to loving enemies and all creation, be perfect. And there are 10 commandments. It's unity, being perfect. All of us will quickly recognize that we fall short of that in all kinds of ways. We confess very quickly that we are not living up to God's intentional will.

Thank God, through our confession, our Lord leads us to that second lens, which is the circumstantial will of God. Because that's the thing: We have a Father in heaven, a triune God who knows so much better than we do how many ways we're falling short, sinning, and not doing His intentional will. And what does our Lord do in circumstances where things go wrong in all kinds of ways? He keeps working with us. His will is our will. is to keep working with us, even in the worst circumstances in our own lives and in the world around us. And so we, when we think of the circumstantial will of God, again, we can think of some biblical passages, we can think of some things going on in our world today.

One classical story about the circumstantial will of God would be the story of Joseph way back in Genesis. So you remember the will of God for Joseph, which was that he would lead and save all kinds of lives. What were the circumstances in which God worked for that? Did he and his brothers get along real well? Joseph's brothers thought, maybe we should murder this guy. No, let's have the mercy that we sell him into slavery. He goes into slavery; he winds up in prison. These are the circumstances in which Joseph is living. And what does God do in those circumstances? God continues to work with Joseph. God continues to find amazing ways to bring him back in connection with his brothers and to lead him to a position in society in which he can arrange for the saving of countless lives by using a time of prosperity to protect people during a time of poverty. So that is the kind of Lord we have that we can trust in Jesus.

No matter what the circumstances are, we don't fully understand. What is the Lord doing again in the Middle East? What's he doing in Eastern Europe? What's he doing in our own country in this crazy time? We don't really fully understand, but we can trust that in all circumstances, he is working for his will to be done.

And here is the, for me, the ultimate expression of that, not quite the ultimate will yet, but the deepest expression of how we keep relying on the will of God in all circumstances. When did Jesus pray most passionately, Father, will your will be done? I think your minds go to the Garden of Gethsemane. So Jesus has been living in the circumstances of a fallen world because he loves everyone.

Almost everyone starts to hate him in various ways. Some rival teachers have arranged for him to be killed and crucified. And he knows that. So in those circumstances, which Jesus describes as the hour of darkness, about as bad as things can get, what does he pray? Abba, Father, if it's possible, spare me from the cross. I would love to be spared from the torture and the torment that I'm about to suffer. And yet Jesus prays, Father, not my will, but your will be done. And Jesus prays that three times, the Gospel tells us. In the Bible, when you pray something three times as Paul prayed about the thorn in his flesh three times, that means you pray about it as intensely and fully as you can.

And so in the worst circumstances in human history and his own life, in the hour of darkness, Jesus is not only our Savior, Jesus is also our example. By praying, Father, not my will, but your will be done. And having prayed that, he can take his suffering love all the way to the cross, because that does lead to the ultimate will of God, the intentional, the circumstantial, as Jesus prays your will be done.

He is raised from the dead. His glory is already shining on the cross as he's drawing all people to himself with that suffering love. And then he raises to start a whole new creation where the ultimate will of God will be. For all of us to be able to come to the point where when we hear Jesus say, be perfect, because he's so gracious, because he gives us his Holy Spirit, because his will is so compassionate and transforming, we will come to a time when we are perfect.

When we are sharing in Jesus glory. When, as we sang earlier, we're joining every creature and people from every tribe, nation, and tongue, glorifying God in this perfect, wonderful way. That is the ultimate. Will of God. And that's what James wants us to turn to more and more as we think about life apart from that.

That's what Jesus exemplifies for us by praying, Your will be done, Father. Your will be done, Father. Your will be done, Father. So I would just urge you. Please know that in the worst times in your life, you may be going through a really hard time right now, or maybe you think back to one or maybe there's one still coming your way.

Please know that a major action of faith, hope and love that you can exercise in that kind of time is to pray in a way that you're also going to live. Father, your will be done. And then like Jesus, we can say, Father, your will be done. I would love it if you spared this or if you did that. But then with humility and faith and hope and love, we say, Father, your will be done.

Because you know what the ultimate will of God is? Again, it's this whole new creation. And that's where we can call on one more Bible passage, Ephesians 1, verses 9 and 10. Where Paul says, the mystery of God's will, which we've all been recognizing, it's been made known to us. In Christ Jesus, because in Christ Jesus, in a Christ who in the worst conditions, circumstances in life, loved us enough to die for us so he could rise, in Christ Jesus, what is the ultimate will of God?

To bring all things together, to make all things add up in the right way, to make us and everything perfect in the glory of the Lord, that is what we are praying for and striding toward. When we pray and live out the prayer, father, your will be done. So let's join in a brief version of that prayer right now.

Let's join in prayer. I'll put the words, we invite you to pray them all from your hearts. Gracious God, we thank you so much for making the mystery of your will known to us in Christ Jesus. who had, in some ways, a brief life, but has, in the ultimate way, an ultimate true life that he shares with us. And gracious God, we thank you that in Christ, you tell us and teach us how to pray and live for such a life.

And so no matter what the circumstances are in our personal lives and amid all the circumstances in our whole world, we pray, Father in Heaven, may your will be done. May your will be done. May your will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven. Amen. We offer this prayer in Jesus name and in the inspiration of his spirit.

Amen.