James 4:13-17                                                                  19 October, 2008
 
 “Whose Life Is It, Anyway?”
 
The word of God has a wonderful way of putting a wholly different
frame around the way we look at our personal life.  We live in an era
and a culture that all but commands us to take charge of our life.  So
that is what we set out to do.  We buy our day-planners and fill out the
calendar for months in advance.  We write our own mission
statements.  With a rainbow of different colored felt-tip markers we
develop organizational flow-charts and five-year plans.  Time
management experts train us in how to take control of every minute of
every day.  Self-help books coach us on how to assert our will and get
what we want.  We don’t have to put up with anything.  Not even our
bodies or the process of aging.  Convincing “before” and “after”
photographs prove that we can have the bodies we want, and that we
can stop the aging process, even reverse it.  If we save up the money,
we can buy the body we want to have.  We can even change genders.
(You know that a man with a beard gave birth earlier this year?  You
know that, right?)  We can pre-screen babies in the womb to make
sure they will meet our standards and expectations.  With a little help

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from e-harmony.com we can select the perfect mate, and if we live in
Oregon, we can even choose the day we are going to die.  We have
even taken the liberty of dispensing with the Ten Commandments and
replaced them with just one all-purpose, and in every circumstance
rule, and that is: You need to do what feels right to you.  If the
question is, “Whose life is this, anyway?”, the answer is, “It’s mine.  
And I’ll do with it what I please.  And no one has the right to tell me
otherwise.  I’m going to live life my way, on my terms.”  To quote a
Jimmy Webb song from my teenage years, “I will have the things that
I desire.”  You see, in our era, we don’t have to stop believing in God;
we just become our own god.  Does that sound like an exaggeration?  
How else would you describe our promethean project of determining
to create ourselves in our own image, of being sovereign over every
element of our life, of determining who qualifies for birth, of setting
our own ethical standards, and demanding to right to decide when
and how we will die?  We haven’t so much gotten rid of God as we
have engineered a hostile take over.
 
I’m saying that life, as it is designed and promoted by our secular
culture, is an artificial construct.  And it is easy to buy into it, until,
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that is, life happens.  The stuff we didn’t expect or want or plan on,
suddenly happens.  And at that moment, our illusion of being in
control of our personal universe begins to unravel.  An Episcopal
priest friend of mine said he figured he was always (and happily) in
charge of his life, until the day he checked into a hospital.  And
suddenly, he wasn’t in charge of anything.  And he had no control
over how things would turn out.  Or whether he would even leave the
hospital alive.  Think of the representative modern man played by
Tom Hanks in “Cast Away”.  He is a micro-managing efficiency expert
for Fed-Ex, until a plane he’s on crashes in the Pacific and he spends
seven years on an otherwise uninhabited island.  That plane crash
represents all the stuff that happens, in our life, over which we have
no control, and for which we never plan.
 
And that’s what God wants us to take a look at in our text from James
this morning.  If we are ever going to get in touch with reality, we are
going to have to start by getting over our god-complex.  We are not
God.  And we are not in control of this universe.  As a Christian
counselor friend of mine once said, “About the only thing we have
any control over at all is ourselves; and the evidence would indicate
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that most of the time we don’t appear to have much control over that,
either.”  In other words, we need to wake up from the stupor our
culture lulls us into, and get over our illusion of being in control.  That
is nothing but a presumption and prideful arrogance.  And a Christian
worldview forces us to deal with the data of reality.  If you don’t want
to be a realist, you better not be a Christian.  Christians are trained to
deal with life the way it is in a fallen world, not the way we wish it was,
or imagine we can force it to be.
 
So what do we learn from James?  Let me suggest three learning’s
that emerge from our text.  First of all, I think James is telling us to
have done with the spiritual arrogance of deciding what we are going
to do with our life without reference to God.  The only way we can
justify that kind of willful self-government is by imagining that part of
our life (let’s say the Sunday morning part) belongs to God and the
rest belongs to me.  The truth is, all our life belongs to God, and what
God teaches us on Sunday morning has no practical application if it
doesn’t govern the way we live on the other six and a half days we
live outside of church.  You see the reason our self-government is so
sinful is that at it’s core it is a rejection of God’s authority over our
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life.  In the Mitford books, Father Tim often refers to “the prayer that
never fails.”  You know what it is?  It’s “Thy will be done.”  And the
reason it never fails is because God is in charge and we are not.
 
Secondly, James wants us to remember and recognize the fleeting
and fragile nature of our life.  He says, “What is your life?  You are a
mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.”  Forget the
junior league Napoleons and little Caesars who strut around like
banty roosters.  Even among relatively mature Christians, it is so easy
to get so full of ourselves, that we develop an exaggerated sense of
our own importance.  We fight over turf.  We demand to get credit.  
We bust a gut to make a name for ourselves.  We build our own little
empires.  And then one day, in the space of an hour, it’s over.  And
before long, the place that knew us, knows us no more.  And the
question to ask before it’s too late is, “Who was I living for?”  And if
the answer is, “me”, it’s the wrong answer.  The pseudo-immortality
of getting our name on a building or the spine of a book disappears
when the building crumbles and the book goes out of print.
 
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Thirdly, and finally, the good news is that while I am not in charge,
that doesn’t mean the world is left ungoverned, a random chaos of
happenstance, a meaningless tumble of the dice.  In point of fact, our
lives are in God’s hands.  They always have been.  They always will
be.  And that is very good news indeed.  Because God has only and
ever had our very best interest at heart.  We can qualify all our plans
by saying, “Lord willing” (or “if the Lord wills”) because in the end we
trust God.  And we can trust his will to be wise and perfect and good:
even when we don’t understand it.  We entrust our life to him because
he laid down his life for us.  Whose life is it anyway?  Our life belongs
to him.  Thanks be to God.  Amen?  Amen.