Make the Most of Your Mist

Today on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Pastor of the Summit Church in Raleigh, Durham, North Carolina.

As always, I'm your host, Molly Vitovich. OK, quick question. How many of you would consider yourself a planner? You've got all the I's dotted and the T's crossed on your calendar. You've always got an eye on the stock market. You finish your Christmas shopping before most of us had even given it a thought, right?

The truth is, whether that describes you or not, we all make plans of some sort, whether they concern what we will do the next hour, the next day or in the coming years. And while the Bible acknowledges that it is certainly wise to plan, it also recognizes that the posture behind our planning is crucial. In today's teaching from the Book of James, Pastor J.D. shows us how to make the most of the short time that God has given to each of us. Remember, if you have missed any of this brand new teaching series through the Book of James, you can catch up at jdgreer.com. But for now, let's jump right in.

Here's Pastor J.D. James Chapter four, I'm reminded of the story of the of the small plane that had four people on board, a mother, two grown men and a 14 year old boy, when both engines suddenly went out and the plane sputtered and started to spiral toward the ground. To their dismay, these four passengers discovered that there were only three parachutes. So they all stared at the parachutes for a minute. And then the woman said, listen, I'm a mother of five and my kids need me. And she grabbed a parachute. And before anybody could say anything, she jumped. Then one of the two men said, well, I'm a brain surgeon and I'm literally one of the smartest people in the world.

My patients, my community, shoot, my whole country needs me. So he grabbed the second parachute before anybody could object. He jumped. The third was an old elderly pastor, and he said to the 14 year old boy, he said, son, I'm old, I'm frail. Why don't you take the last parachute? To which the boy said, sir, that's all right. There are still two parachutes left, one for each of us.

The smartest man in the world just jumped out with my backpack. I share that because at the end of Chapter four and beginning of Chapter five, it's not a true story, by the way, in case you want to email me. James, at the end of four, beginning of five, James aims to show the insanity of two groups whom society typically regards as wise and together. And I'm going to call them the competent and the wealthy. James attempts to reason with both groups. He begins his address to each of them with the admonition, come now. Look at verse 13 of Chapter four where we're going to start. Look, you see the words come now? And then verse one of Chapter five, you'll see you'll see that again.

Both sections start the same way. Come now. Come now. Verse 13, you who say today or tomorrow, we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there and we will trade and we will make a profit. Let's go here and let's do this because I think that's a good market. I think we can make a profit there. Most of us would call this planning and we would consider it a wise thing to do.

And it would be. In fact, in many places in your Bibles, planning is commended. The Book of Proverbs says, in fact, that not to plan is foolish and lazy.

The problem, James says, is not with the planning per se, it's with the posture behind the planning. You see, verse 14, you do not know what tomorrow will bring. For what is your life? You're a mist that appears for a little time and then it vanishes. Instead, what you ought to say is, if the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that. As it is, verse 16, you boast in your arrogance all such boasting is evil.

The problem with the posture, the problem with the boastful posture behind your planning is that it assumes a God-like confidence, assuming that A, you're guaranteed tomorrow, and B, that you've got the ability to create your own future. But your life, James says, is as fleeting and as fragile and as insubstantial, verse 14, as the mist. Mist is the Greek word atmos, from which we get our word atmosphere. Some translations say vapor, but don't think of the fog that hangs out for a couple of hours in the morning. It's not that kind of vapor. Think of it more like the steam that forms on your mirror if you blow on it in the morning.

Seconds later, after you do that, it's gone with no trace that it was ever even there to begin with. That's what your life is like, James says. Three words. Three words, James says. Describe our lives. Number one, fleeting.

The mist is just there for a moment and then it's gone. Listen, life feels so long when you're in it, especially when you're young. But as you get older, I've heard one of the disturbing things is how fast it all seems to have gone and how much quicker it goes every year.

Older people, can I get a witness on that? I've heard it said that when you're a child, time crawls. When you're in college, time walks.

When you're a new parent, time runs. When you're older, time flies. And when you hit retirement, time vanishes. Life is like a roll of toilet paper. Every revolution gets faster and faster, it seems.

So to all of you college students and you young professionals, enjoy your flexibility, enjoy your vision. It ain't gonna last long. Here's your second word, forgettable. It's fragile, it's forgettable.

The mist vanishes with no trace that it was ever even there. We are forgettable. We don't remember much of what came before us. You know, James' other analogy for this in chapter one was the grasses of the field. Look out over a grassy field and ask yourself, how many cycles of grass have actually grown there? Every season, a new batch comes in. Some of the blades of grass and that particular batch grew tall, some stayed short.

Some were pretty with flowers, some of it was stubby and ugly. But all of it is now gone with no memory and a new crop that comes in every season. Kind of like when you walk back onto your old high school campus. You ever think that when you go back there, you're like, I used to rule here.

Now nobody has any idea who I am and kids are like, who is the creepy old guy? Your lives are like that. In fact, can I prove it to you real quick? Answer this question. Okay, be totally honest. Raise your hands right now if you could right now say the names of all four of your great grandfathers. Raise your hand. Y'all, that is merely four generations and that's your very own blood.

And you don't even know their names. We are, humanly speaking, forgettable. I heard this point made by none other than that great philosopher, Kevin Durant. If you don't know, KD is one of the greatest NBA players of all time. He is a four-time NBA scoring champion, a two-time finals MVP, and an 11-time All-Star.

He is one of those players whose decisions about where he's gonna play made some franchises wealthy and almost bankrupted whoever he left. Here's what he said in a recent interview. He said, the world is bigger than my little box and I'm not going to be playing this game forever. Then he said, he took his hands like this and he said, this is the KD box.

Who gives a, and I'm not gonna say what he said, who gives a expletive? There have been billions of people on this earth, he said, and my little box doesn't really amount to much of anything from a universe perspective. That's a pretty wise thing to say. And that brings me to the third word, fragile. Fragile, you can take a vapor and just wave it away with your hand. Our lives are fragile. The prophet Isaiah makes this point in a rather colorful way. He says, Isaiah 2 22, of what a countless man whose life is in his nose. I love that. In other words, you can kill anybody. You can kill the toughest Navy seal just by clogging up his airways. James says, all your confident planning about tomorrow is arrogant because the smallest thing, one little bacteria entering your body could change everything.

Or imagine this, it's a bright cloudless morning. As a man looks out the window of his skyscraper office over one of the best views of New York City. He's an investor for Cantor Fitzgerald, which if you don't know, is one of New York City's most prestigious investment firms.

In his hand, he holds a paper. His returns for the quarter have just come back three times bigger than what he'd hoped. His two twin sons have just started their freshman year at different Ivy League schools, both of them on full scholarships, one academic and one athletic. He's in great health. He just finished in the top 10 of the New York City triathlon, over 40 division.

He is happily married. The cloudless horizon that he looks out over seems almost a metaphor for his future. Tomorrow, he thinks, I'm going to invest in a new market and I'm going to spend a year making a profit.

Nothing but blue skies. The only problem is the date is September 11th, 2001. It's 8 a.m. and his 105th story office is in one World Trade Center. Life is fragile and there's a whole host of things that can bring it down. Listen, your whole life could change with one unexpected phone call this afternoon. This is the highway patrol. You need to come down to the hospital immediately.

Your wife has been in an accident or some unexpected things have showed up on your scans. And honestly, I know that's hard for some of you even to hear because you've received a call exactly like one of those before. But James just wants to remind you that your life is fragile. So what is James' counsel? In light of all this, James says, in light of your life being fleeting, forgettable and fragile, they said your life should be characterized by these three things.

If you're taking notes, write down, number one, humility. You need to live with the awareness of how much your life owes to God. Only the fool looks at his past and fails to see God's hand of grace in his successes. You know, it's interesting. I find it interesting that even a growing number of secular thinkers seem to recognize this now. They don't attribute it to God, but they recognize that the idea of the truly self-made man or truly self-made woman is a myth. Some of you may have read Malcolm Gladwell's great little book called Outliers.

Malcolm Gladwell is a secular intellectual. But in that book, he points out how much of our successes are ultimately outside of our control. Yes, your hard work contributed. But for you to be successful, you had to be in the right circumstances.

Timing was huge. Your upbringing and your social networks also played a huge role, as have many other things that were outside of your control. Don't boast about your past successes. Failing to realize God's hand of grace in it. James says it is evil. That's what God struck down Nebuchadnezzar for in the book of Daniel. Nebuchadnezzar walked out one day and looked out over his kingdom and he thought, look at what I've built.

And it was impressive. But he failed to acknowledge God's role in his success or to give God glory. He saw his accomplishments as a testament to his greatness. He boasted about them and God said, all right, we'll see about that.

And with the flick of his finger, he made Nebuchadnezzar go insane and eat grass like a cow for seven years. Only the fool looks at his past and fails to see God's hand of grace in it. Even worse, only a fool looks at the future and thinks that it is under his or her control. God enables, God raises up, God empowers. And so James says, rather than boastfully saying tomorrow, I'm going to do this or that. Verse 15, instead you ought to say, if the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that. Reject even in your speech, he is saying. The arrogant assumption that you really are in control of your lives.

Don't make God do something to prove that to you. You're listening to Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Find out more about this ministry by visiting jdgreer.com. You know, you hear it often from us here, but one of our goals in providing this daily program is to equip everyone who listens to Summit Life to be disciple making disciples.

And developing healthy spiritual disciplines is an important part of that. And the discipline we chose to focus on this month is memorizing God's word. We've created a pack of memory verse cards to help you learn and recall God's word in a fresh way this year.

It's sort of like a nice deck of cards. And with 52 of them, it's designed for you to learn a new verse each week of 2024. Imagine getting to the end of this year and having that many scriptures committed to your mind. Memorizing scripture can help you encourage others in their time of need, fight temptation, renew your mind and conform more to the person of Christ. Such rich benefits to hiding God's word in your heart.

So give us a call today at 866-335-5220 or go online to jdgreer.com to reserve your set. But for now, let's return to our teaching. Once again, here's Pastor JD.

Honestly, this is so unnatural for us Americans. We love the sense that we are the masters of our fates and the captains of our souls at the end of the Back to the Future series. Doc Brown says to Marty McFly after all of his flying DeLorean adventures, Marty is trying to figure out what to do with the rest of his life and Doc Brown says the future is whatever you make it. So make it a good one, Marty.

And as Americans, we're all like, yeah, we love that. The future is mine to create. Don't provoke God.

The three most dangerous words in the English language might be, I got this, I got this. No, you don't. Not necessarily. God determines that. By the way, I think we should take James literally here. We ought to say often when talking about our future, if the Lord wills. I don't think James is trying to impose some legalistic rule that you're going to now blow the whistle every time somebody talks about the future and doesn't say these words. But he's saying that we should acknowledge to ourselves and to others that ultimately we're not in charge of our lives.

God is. It's how the apostle Paul talked. In Acts 18, 21, when Paul left Ephesus, he said, I will return to you again if God wills. In 1 Corinthians 4, 19, he writes, I will come to you soon if the Lord wills. Paul didn't know if when he went to a new town, it would end in revival or execution.

Maybe both. You were equally uncertain about your future and you should often acknowledge that. I've found, by the way, that just saying those words cultivates humility in me. Here's a second word that should define a fleeting, forgettable, fragile life. Eternity. Eternity. Humility, eternity. If your life is a mist, then you need to actually think about what actually matters.

If you think about how short your life is compared to eternity. Several years ago, I saw a guy do an illustration that really gripped me. I've never forgotten it. He said, pulled out something like this, and he said, let this rope right here, let this represent your life. This tiny red part, this is your life.

I don't know if you can see real close, but let's start right here. This is your birth. This is where you graduated high school, this little mark here. Then over here, that's when you started to have kids.

It was a great season. Then if you make it this long, you've got this long one right here that gets all the way over to your retirement. Let's just assume that this is when you die. I don't know where you are in this. I'm somewhere in this area.

Maybe you're over here. Feels like a long time, doesn't it? Those of you that are in this stage, you're looking over here like, how old are you? Then he said, but this, this is actually, this is just the first few days of eternity. I could go on and on. He said, you know, if you look at this right here and you say, well, maybe, maybe if I eat kale salad and do all the right things, maybe use a standing desk, avoid wheat preservatives, rub myself down with unicorn oil or whatever else is trendy right now.

Maybe you can add another couple of millimeters to this red, but bottom line, you're headed for this right here. How foolish is it to live for just that? I mean, just look at it. I mean, people love to say YOLO. You know, you only live once.

Pack everything into this that you can. I've told you, that's dumb. If you want something to tattoo on your wrist or put on as a bracelet, do YALF. You actually live forever.

Somebody's got their YOLO, you'd be like, YALF, not YOLO, YALF. One of my favorite verses, Psalm 90, verse 12. Lord, teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts to learn wisdom. Martin Luther translated that verse as teach us to think about death, that we might learn how to live only by pondering the inevitability of death and its relative eminence.

Will you ever begin to live wisely? If you've heard me tell my story about what brought me to Christ as a teenager, instrumental in that was the death of a friend in a car wreck. It was particularly gruesome. As I stood there beside his closed casket, the illusion of my 16 year old immortality was shattered. Death comes for us all. The question is, are you going to be ready for it? Do you know that you know that you know that you're saved?

If you died this afternoon and you stood before God tonight, would you be ready? How is that not the most important question in your life? You're so busy working toward this or that or trying to accomplish this and build that and earn this over here and get your kid into this or that school. Do you ever stop and ask what difference is any of that going to make in eternity? Parents, some of you are so focused on getting your kids all the advantages, doing what it takes to get them into the right schools. Do you know that your kids know and that they love Jesus?

Are you more focused on where they go to school than where they spend eternity? Jesus said, what's it profit a man to gain the whole world of that little red portion of your life if everything went right there and then you lost your soul for eternity? What would it profit you? I always illustrate that in high school students, like they did it recently by asking them, I'm like, okay, how many of you, how many of you, if I had a mountain of cash up on this stage, I mean like 10, let's think $10 million in cold hard cash and I offered it. I'll give it to anybody in this audience right now. If you will come up here on stage, put your hand on this table, let this person come out in the back, he's going to have a butcher knife, he's going to cut off your pinky and you walk home with $10 million, how many of you do it? It's always interesting. It's about maybe 60% of the audience are like, I'd do that for $10 million.

Disproportionally guys over girls every time. I'm like, all right, let's up the stakes a little bit. Let's just not say it's your left pinky, let's say it's your left arm up to your elbow. About a third of the hands go down. I'm like, let's raise the stakes one more time. Let's go up now to your shoulder. We're going to cut off your shoulder, but you go home with $10 million.

Starts getting little by little. Let's say 20% of the hands are still up. I'm like, all right, last offer. $10 million, but we're going to cut off both arms, both legs.

We're going to poke out your eyes, cut out your tongue, stop up your nose. But you go home with $10 million. How many of you in? Not a single hand. Except for one, there's always one guy.

I don't know why it is, but one guy. I'm like, put down your hand. Because most people would say, what good is $10 million if you have no faculties with which to enjoy it? And Jesus said, right. And some of you are giving away far, far more to gain far, far less. Are you prepared for eternity and you live in for the things that matter? James' whole point is, make the most of your midst. Like Amy Carmichael, the single missionary to India said, we will have all of eternity to celebrate the victories, but only a few hours before sunset to win them.

Or what my dad always told me. Only one life to live, it will soon be past, only what's done for Christ will last. You know, my dad would always say to me, son, only two things in life last forever. You understand this?

The Word of God and the souls of people. So build your life around both of those. By the way, he's living that out even now. Many of you know my dad is an active member here at the Summit Church. He's an elder at the Capitol Hills campus.

After my mom passed away last year, I mean, he misses her terribly, but he's not sitting around playing golf all the time or traveling the world. His schedule is filled up with people that he's meeting with. Some of them are investigating faith. Some of them he met right down here at the altar. Some of them are exploring a call to ministry. Yo, listen, he is busier than I am, and that is not a joke.

I have a harder time getting on his schedule than he does on mine. And that's because he believes that only two things in life last forever, and it's not golf clubs or sports cars or Tahiti vacations. Only two things in life last eternally, and that is the Word of God and the souls of people.

So build every chapter of your life on them. Which, if you'll give me a minute, always makes me think about the people around the world who've yet to hear the gospel. Whole people groups with no access at all in light of eternity. Is there anything more urgent for us to focus on? Anything more important for us to do with our money and our time?

Ten seconds into eternity will we have thought anything else was more important. to help others integrate the truth of the Bible into their everyday lives. Can you tell us about our latest resource?

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It's a way that will affect your speech, what you say to others. You become a vessel of faith that is speaking God's word to others. So don't wait another minute. Go right now to jdgrid.com and you'll find a way that you can reserve your set of these memory cards right there. So head on over there and let's impact our world with the timeless wisdom and truth and the explosive power of God's word. Ask for your set of the 2024 scripture memory cards by calling 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220.

Or request them when you give online or when you make your first gift as a monthly gospel partner at jdgrid.com. I'm Molly Vidovitch and I am so glad that you joined us today and come back tomorrow as we continue this teaching called Making the Most of our Mist. See you Thursday for Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.