James 4

This Sunday, Mr. Weiss really laid it down, calling us to actually practice the word found in James 4:

...James 4:13ff ("ff" means "...and following")
James 4:13ff
"Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit"; whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.
Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that."
But now you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil"

man, james is a hard man.

Seriously? Seriously?

Is there a time limit? lIke, can I say "Next week I'm going to such and such a place..."? "Next Month...?" "...year..."? Oh. year.
No. you see all the "seriously" and "time limit" stuff is the flesh rebelling and looking for yet another answer to that age-old question, "What is the least that I can do and still get by..."

James is attacking, nay, Jesus is attacking our very hearts here... but with a knife of LOVE, in the prison yard of LIFE...

...wait.
...cancel that last analogy.
...too much Prison Break.

Jesus isn't attacking us.
Not with a knife of Love
although some might offer the Prison Yard as a proper image of earthly life.
Maybe we can use the Prison Yard image somewhere else...

What IS going on here in James, and what Mr. Weiss challenged us to practise, is an implementation of the word in Proverbs 3:5ff (remember "ff"? it means "...and the following verses".)
I'm talking about v.6 in Proverbs 3 (Prov. 3:6), where it says, "In all your ways acknowledge Him..." and there is a promise attached to it, not just the prison shiv that James is attacking us with... oh yeah. we dropped the shank-imagery. God's not trying to shank you... drop YOUR shank...
shank you very much...

(My gosh it's like Michael Scott from the Office here in my head. This is 445 am and a press-pot teaching you from the word, here. Completely un-publish-able. Thanks be for the blogosphere!)

But what IS going on here is that WE are called to actually employ our MOUTHS in physically, verbally SAYING, out loud in this WORLD, what we believe about our situation... As believers it is a good, proper, right, and helpful thing to yourself, and to your hearers, to acknowledge that you really aren't sure that you'll be in this world next year, but if you are, cool, I'll meet you on the Eiffel Tower and we'll have crepes on the Champs-Elysees. You dig?

now I know you may find this challenging, and cumbersome, expressing faith in a generation without time or taste for such morbid flourishes of speech, but it is GOOD FOR YOU, and it is GOOD FOR THEM, TOO!

Do you know that proberb that says, "The power of life and of death are in the tongue..."?
do you know the other half of it?
It says, "the one who loves it will eat it's fruit."

Eat the fruit of your tongue? Eew, first of all. That just sounds weird. Well, welcome to Hebrew Poetry 101. These dudes spoke from the guts of life. But do you sense the PROMISE in this? Not just a warning against speaking wrong, but a promise that speaking truly will lead to life and life and life... like maybe by our choices to speak from the Truth (who is a person living in and with you. His name is... Jesus!)

...like maybe our choices to actually process it through and make it into words will help us out! And help others out.

Think of the effects of the most stumbling and bumbling attempt to say this! Think of what the hearer is hearing: a proclamation of our earthly lives' brevity.

When I'm talking skateboarding stuff with someone in my business, I always end up spilling this stuff out and saying some, "dude, if God lets me live and keeps me unhurt enough, I'll totally do 540's when I'm fifty..." type of phrase. Does that fit my skateboarding community life? Does that affirm the status quo of my listener? Does that get received well?

Well first off, most people are kind of stoked to meet a God-lover whose head isn't fully inserted in some wack money-church trip. And second, Yeah. People are really interested in thoughts like these. I'm just pointing out the elephant in the room in a way that is totally weird and yet, not "hellfire and brimstoney". Yet in that moment of "Dude, I'm a wicked believer and I totally don't even know if God's gonna have me on EARTH next year, let alone doing business over there..." is a gentle, but sure proclamation of the Matthew 10 call to fear...

Think of the gentleness of this "If the Lord wills..." type of proclamation of the "bad news" that we all die. It's an acknowledgement of that difficult reality in regard to nobody but myself! Imagine how it would be if James were telling us to make sure other people knew that THEY WERE GOING TO DIE.

Imagine James 4:13 reading like, "...and make sure to say to anyone who seems arrogant, 'Hey, you're gonna die, man. Don't get a big head'..." Because that's what a lot of Christian religion DOES, instead of living from and speaking from a confession of truth. man, we're not pointing fingers at unbelievers, but we are confessing that we aren't going to be here long, especially in the service of the Murdered Man, unkillable evermore!

This is super-sober stuff. Chew on it. There aren't bones here, though. This is mother's milk for us. Let's get it straight, because disciples Do and Say what the Master has trained... For those who've been holding this stuff down for years and live the peculiar life--rock it hard and keep tender! For those not in christ who read here and wonder what the hell has got hold of us, We're just believers, man. We won't say that the water's fine, but the tide is rising. A hard rain's gonna fall and the times they are a changing and on and on, man. I'd take dark waters on this side in swap for the fires of the next... and if that just ticks you off, deal with it brah. those are the breaks when you're created by the only One who wasn't.

So rock this verse in your daily kit and keep it close to heart that we are hidden up with Christ (colossians 3) and that we're going to be revealed one day (romans 8, 1 john 3) and that we'll be changed in a twinkle (1 Cor. 15), so we should look up (Mt. 24) and look to what's coming, as we handle what's passing away (1 cor. 7:29-31).

You may or may not be used to hearing this stuff, but this is the way it's put down, and put down in my heart... chew it.