For additional notes and resources check out Douglas’ website.

James 4:13-17

• The brevity of life: we are mists.
• If it is the Lord’s will – adding “we shall live…”  This is much more than “inshállah.”
• Verse 17 is about how we go about making our plans. It’s not simply a passage about acting against our conscience.
• We can identify several social groups in the community James addresses. The poor include subsistence farmers. There are rich landowners, and quite possibly absentee landlords. There are entrepreneurs—who hope to become wealthy.
• Entrepreneurs should not necessarily assume they will still be alive next year!
• An ancient prayer for Yom Kippur asked the Lord for a year of low prices, a year of plenty, and a year of business dealings (Yoma 5:2). But it’s not commerce or even wealth that is condemned. It’s the spiritually nonchalant desire to become rich. In their complacency their thinking was secular, not godly.
• That’s the issue. Like the rich man in the Parable of the Rich Fool (Luke 12:13-21).

Next: through the whole book of James in the CSB

• Boasting in our plans—failing to include God in our equation.