The Vanishing Life, Part 2

The words of Paul to the Corinthian church in 2nd Corinthians chapter 6 verse 2, Today is the day of salvation.

You don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. Today you've got breath in your lungs. Today, come to Jesus Christ, repenting of your sin, offering yourself to Him.

He'll give you this gift of forgiveness. Do it today. Today is the day of salvation. You can't guarantee tomorrow. If you haven't settled eternity today, I wouldn't leave.

You may not make it home. I think we all recognize that what Stephen just said is true, but we don't always live that way. Even though life is fleeting and we have no way of knowing when the end will come, we live as if we have all the time in the world. Welcome to Wisdom for the Heart. Your Bible teacher is Stephen Davey. Stephen is the president of Wisdom International. Today he continues through his series entitled, Satisfied, with this lesson he's calling, The Vanishing Life. You know, it's important that we live with the end in mind and Stephen will help you with that next.

Keep listening. James is holding the mirror of the Word up to the believer with this startling revelation that a practical atheist doesn't do bad things. He just chooses to do the things he chooses to do on his own timetable. Secondly, he chooses his own destination. James writes, today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city. This is where we're going to live. This is where we're going to move. Have you ever prayed about where you're going to live? Have you ever prayed about where you're going to move?

Well, why bother? It's a great place to live. It fits our budget.

It's a nice neighborhood. Well, why would God do anything other than just stamp, you know, approved, approved, approved, approved, approved. Third, he chooses his own tenure. James describes them saying in verse 13, we're going to spend a year there.

Literally, the language says we're going to do a year. These men, women perhaps, along with them, couples, families, we don't know, they've got it all mapped out. And as far as they're concerned, it is all up to them. Don't overlook forthly. They're choosing their own occupation.

Do you notice that? He adds at the end of verse 13, they were going to engage in business. The word business is the word emporusamatha, which gives us our transliterated word emporium. And emporium is a center of trade. It's a place that provides opportunities for buying and selling and conducting a business. We consider New York City to be one of the world's great emporiums. It's a city of business. These Jewish believers are savvy. They've chosen a trade center. They figured out all of the details on building their business.

They've analyzed the right time to launch the marketing plan, when to show up, where to live, how to engage in that business. James never says any of that is wrong. However, what he's leading us to understand is that they are presuming that it's all their own thinking, choosing, deciding. They're also presuming one more thing.

Did you notice? They're choosing their own outcome. Verse 13 says, we will engage in business and make a profit. That is their ultimate goal, the final outcome of their enterprise.

We're going to succeed. And by the way, there's nothing wrong with that either. See, these are the five assumptions of practical atheists.

Someone who has placed his trust in Christ, but at some point in life, maybe for a month, a year, a moment, has chosen not to care to include him in any of his plans. You see, the practicing atheists out there, that's how they live. That's how they move. That's how they think.

That's how they decide. We would expect them to because they deny the existence of God. Why would they ever include God? They don't believe he exists.

We say we do believe. And James isn't describing them. He's describing those in the assembly who can live and plan and act in practical terms as if there is no God.

Now, again, don't misunderstand. God is not against planning. In fact, he is against not planning. Paul wrote to the Ephesians, be careful how you walk, making the most of your time. Ephesians 5 15. He wrote to the Thessalonians that work is honorable. If a person can work and they refuse to work, that is dishonorable.

Second Thessalonians three. James is not rebuking these merchants for their plans. In fact, he's not even condemning their desire to make a profit, which is a good thing to do when you're in business. He is rebuking them not for their occupation, not for their anticipation. He's rebuking them for their secularization of mind and heart. They're living just like a worldling without any acknowledgement of God.

Just like the world. They're all about buying. They're all about selling. They're all about marketing. They're all about commerce. They're all about moving. They're all about setting things up. They're all about everything that God would certainly say those are things you ought to be thinking about.

It's just they've left him out. That's practical atheism. Are you a practical atheist today? Now, having described how a practical atheist thinks, James is going to describe for us what the practical atheist overlooks. He's going to give us two realities overlooked by these individuals. The first reality is this so simple that, of course, we would say we understand that and believe it.

But we overlook it. Number one, that life is entirely unpredictable. Life is entirely unpredictable.

Look at verse 14. You do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. Have you overlooked that? Have you forgotten that? You don't know what will happen to you tomorrow.

I love the way Eugene Peterson paraphrased it. You don't know the first thing about tomorrow. And that's true. We plan, but we must not presume that March 11th earthquake that we've been reading about, creating those tsunami waves that hit the Northeast coast, literally wiping out towns and villages. Four trains, including one passenger train, just disappeared. Japan has one of the world's most sophisticated warning systems because of their location.

And it worked perfectly. The residents of Sendai, the town hit hardest, received the warning and had, get this, 15 minutes to run. I don't know about you, but I went online and I watched the footage taken from an airplane that watched it, that captured, it was utterly terrifying and moving as you watch that wall of water sweeping in over farmland, gobbling up villages, moving ships and carrying houses and boats as if they were toys.

But what was really, really eerie from that vantage point was to look ahead at the camera angle and see a little village as the water of war moved toward them, to see little cars slowly moving down the street, to see a man on a motorcycle with no idea of how unpredictable life was. You don't know what your life will be like tomorrow. All it takes is an accident, an earthquake, a tornado, a reversal, a downturn, a pink slip. And we're left with the recognition that in spite of all of our planning, we overlooked bringing God into it to develop our character, to prepare us for the inevitability that life is unpredictable. No wonder Solomon wrote it this way, Don't boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring forth.

Proverbs 27. Ladies and gentlemen, the emergency rooms today in Wake County are filled with people who had different plans. Nobody got up this morning and said, I think I'll break my leg today and spend an afternoon in the emergency room in pain while they ignore me.

Nobody. Nobody decides to do that. That's not their plan. The emergency rooms are filled with people who had plans. So is the cemetery. So you don't go there when you run out of plans.

You're not put in there because, well, I didn't have any plans. Leads me to the next thing practical atheism overlooks. Not only is life entirely unpredictable, secondly, life is physically unsustainable. James puts it this way. The back end of verse 14, where he says, You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. You can't capture vapor.

You can't get a grip on it. You can't handle the mist of life and sustain it. It evaporates into thin air. We all live here in these bodies, a vanishing life. Some of us are going to vanish quicker than others.

We don't know. But we all live within these bodies as vanishing life. You cannot bottle life.

You can't keep it from slipping out, escaping and continually moving until it finally, as we know it now, runs out. Here's a poem that goes, When I was a child, I laughed and wept. Time crept. When as a youth I dreamed and talked, time walked. When I became a full-grown man, time ran. When older still I daily grew, time flew.

Soon I shall be traveling on, time gone. If it were not true that even believers overlook this fact, James would never have to remind us, which is a great opportunity, by the way, for me to tell those of you who don't know Christ personally the words of Paul to the Corinthian church in 2 Corinthians chapter 6, verse 2, Today is the day of salvation. Today. Why would he say today? Because you don't own tomorrow.

You don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. Today you've got breath in your lungs. Today come to Jesus Christ, repenting of your sin, offering yourself to him. He'll give you this gift of forgiveness.

Have you done that? Do it today. Today is the day of salvation. You can't guarantee tomorrow. If you haven't settled eternity today, I wouldn't leave.

You may not make it home. I read recently of the author whose book just kind of swept the publishing industry a few years ago. The book is entitled 100 Things, 100 Things to Do Before You Die.

Sort of spawned a publishing genre. Just a few months ago at the age of 47 years of age, he fell inside his home, struck his head and died. The subtitle to the newspaper article that I clipped recorded the words, he was halfway through the 100 things to do before you die. Halfway. He was 47.

Some of you young people think, well, he lived a full life. What's the problem with that? No. Just wait. I clipped another article just this past week from USA Today. Told the story of an undefeated high school basketball team. It was playing its last season regularly. Regular season game. They had gone undefeated. It was quite a year. Their star player at 6'2", 215 pounds.

Well toned. Also played the position of quarterback for his high school. Just a star athlete. It was overtime.

They were down by one just before the buzzer sounds. This star has the ball. He puts up the shot. He sinks it. They win. Perfect season.

They hoist him up on their shoulders and he's grinning ear to ear. Seconds later he falls to the court dead of a heart attack. A high school senior. Physical life as we know it is unsustainable at any age. Not one of us knows if we're going to see the light of tomorrow.

Practical atheism would say I've got all my tomorrows planned out and I'm going to live, every one of them, and I'm sure the Lord would approve. And so why bring him into it? And we're overlooking some things. One of the things James is reminding us of is that life is a vapor. The word vapor could be translated breath mist. Like breathing on a cold morning. It just appears and then it's gone.

Or steam coming up from a pot of water boiling on the fire. Now let me just do a little sidebar quickly because people will use this text as a proof text for annihilationism. The belief that if you're an unbeliever you go to hell but you're extinguished. You won't exist.

And this is proof. James is not saying that we exist and then we cease to exist. In fact he's using the same root verb twice meaning to appear.

One positively, one negatively. What James is saying is that we appear for a moment and then we disappear. We are visible for a moment and then we are invisible. We don't cease to exist. We just change form like vapor. It still exists just in a form we can no longer see. Your life is a vapor.

You see it now but quickly you will not see it. So if you're going to plan anything James is applying, plan on a short life. Don't overlook the unpredictable nature of life and don't overlook the brevity of life. In fact businessmen during the days of James and on into the second and third century would often write the words memento mori into the first page of their accounting ledgers. Memento mori means consider, remember your mortality.

Isn't that an interesting thing to put at the beginning of your accounting ledger? Remember your mortality. In other words don't get so busy that you come away with the presumption that you're going to have that job and that life forever. So Philip of Macedon the father of Alexander the Great was reading just recently had a staff member who it was his job every morning to stand before him and say Philip one day you will die. Unlike Louis the 15th who banished the word death from his court.

You were never allowed to say that word. Whether you banish it or you have somebody remind you, God intends the remembering of mortality, the thought of death, to be something that does not escape our thoughts. In fact the scriptures repeat will remind us of it. Our lives Isaiah wrote are like the flowers of a field.

They bloom now and then in a few hours, days they're gone. Job said our lives are like leaves in the wind. We're like a shadow passing. Moses who wrote the psalm recorded as number 90 in our psalm book at verse 12 said to number our days to prepare or present a heart of wisdom to God.

Literally number them. Now if that kind of exercise does not lead to godly wisdom, if it just leads to some kind of morbid fascination, we wouldn't be encouraged to do it. Instead it actually leads to a heart of wisdom. And James will tell us to think about it. It is the cure among others to practical atheism. So how wise are you?

You answer that by answering the question how recently have you considered that you're not going to live like you are right now for very long. This is a good exercise. So let's do it together, okay?

I'll lead you in it. Let's assume that we're going to live to the average age of Americans today, which is right at 77 years. Inching up, but right about 77.

So let's assume the best of health and vitality, which wouldn't include me, but let's just throw me in there with it and maybe you too, okay? How many days do you have left? Well, if you're 15 years old, you have 22,630 days left.

You're probably going, sweet, that's a long time. Okay, well let's recalculate that in terms of months. If you're 15 years old, you have 744 months left if you live to the age of 77. If you're 25 years old, you have 624 months left. If you're 35 years old, you have right at 500 months left. If you're 45, you have 384 months left. If you're 55, you have 264 months left. If you're 65 years old, you have 144 months left. If you're 75 years old, you have 24 months left. If you're 80 years old, you can sit there and just smile because you beat the curve. May God give you many more months. You can be like Charles Ryrie, retired seminary professor, taught here at Shepherd's too for a while. He said he's so old he won't even buy green bananas anymore. Love that statement. Five years ago, I brought this vase to church.

I thought I'd bring it back. This is my little exercise. This vase is filled with little green marbles. Each one represents a month that I have left to live. If I live to be the age of 77 at the end of the month, I remember I pull one out and throw it away. That's all I've got left. The incentive behind this is not some kind of morbid foreboding. It actually reminds me of the brevity of life. Think about it.

That's it. You know what it also reminds me? That my life now as I know it is nothing compared to eternity.

Nothing. The unpredictability of life reminds us that we're short-sighted, so we need the direction of God. The brevity of life reminds us that we're short-lived, so we need the wisdom of God. Now James will go on to give us two activities. We'll cover them very quickly. We'll call them, long title here if you're taking notes, we'll call these exercises Practical Atheism Resisting Activities for Practicing Believers. Okay?

Number one. Verbalize your submission to God, to the will of God. Look at verse 15.

He's told us what we're saying if we're living as practical atheists. Now he says, instead, you ought to be saying this, if the Lord wills, then we will live and also do this or that. In other words, you no longer talk like you're the sovereign, verse 13.

I'm going to do this and I'm going to live there and I'm going to do that and for how long and then I'm going to determine my own success. James says you need to stop talking like you're the sovereign and you need to be talking like you're the slave. We have no will other than what we present to his will. Lord, is it your will?

And so we learn to say, Lord willing, which is a wonderful thing to practice saying. It's another way of saying whatever the Lord wants, let me ask the Lord about it. Let me check with the Lord. Let me talk to my sovereign master first.

This isn't my life. I have no decision to make apart from what his will might be. Anything less, as James writes in verse 16, than evil, arrogant, boasting. So verbalize your submission to your Lord.

This is how the Apostle Paul talked. I will come to you soon if the Lord wills. 1 Corinthians 4 19. I hope to remain with you for some time if the Lord permits. 1 Corinthians 16 7. Perhaps now by the will of God I'll be able to come to you.

Romans 1 verse 10. Verbalize your submission to the sovereign plan of God. I will go there, Lord willing. I will go to that college, Lord willing. I'll marry that person, Lord willing. I'll have children, Lord willing. I'll spend my days doing this or that, Lord willing. I'll make plans to accomplish some task tomorrow, Lord willing. I'll get that job. I'll start that career. I'll move into that occupation, Lord willing.

I'll move into that apartment or that home or I'll move out of that apartment or home into that apartment or home, Lord willing. I'll see you tomorrow, Lord willing. I'll be back here to preach next Lord's day, Lord willing.

You'll be here, Lord willing. The Puritans loved this biblical command and they used it often in the Latin form, Deo Valente, God willing. Deo Valente, God willing. Deo Valente filled their speeches, their correspondence.

They get to the end of a letter and they'd signed the initials DV, Deo Valente. Everything I just wrote, I'm submitting to him if it's his will. God willing, everything is cast in the light of the will of God. Nothing is attempted or desired apart from the will of God. His will is sought above everything and for everything. It was more, James is not suggesting this is a cliche.

We know the church doesn't need more of those. Okay, this isn't just, oh yeah, Lord willing. Mean it, mean it. It's a passion, it's a life. Verbalize submission to the will of God. Secondly, mobilize your agreement to the will of God. James writes in verse 17, Therefore to one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sinning. It's sin. Now that text is often used to define what we call sins of omission. In other words, sin is not only doing what we shouldn't do, it's not doing what we should do. That's a good definition of sin. But the context of this verse looks back to the previous command. You notice how the verse begins. Therefore, therefore, in light of what I've said, the command I've just delivered, therefore you know it's right to surrender your life to the will of God now that is therefore on that basis, do it.

Mobilize your life in that direction. Don't just say, Lord willing. Do what you know the Lord wants you to do. But you might say, well, I don't know everything about the will of God for my life. I think if James were here, he'd say, well, of course not.

Who does? In fact, he's not even interested in that. Notice again verse 17, he's interested in the person who knows the right thing to do and does not do it. To him it is sin. What is it that you know is God's will?

Do it. That's what James is after. A practicing, growing, progressing disciple of Christ desires to live and to think and decide in a way that continually says, Lord, this is your business. Everything about my life is your business.

The practical atheist, though he would never say it and he would certainly never say it in church and he may never even consciously think it but he lives it, he's effectively saying, Lord, this is none of your business. It's all mine. I'll plan it. I'll think it. I'll decide it.

I'll do it. And I'll determine the outcome. May God give us a deeper desire to long for his good pleasure as he reveals it. One day at a time, one moment at a time and to have DV written across our hearts, Dea Valente, God willing. One author put it this way and with this I close. Life is a gift from God. What we do with it is our gift back to him. That's a great thought to end on today. Even though our life is fleeting, it's God's gift to us.

We honor God by the way we live out the time he gives us. This is Wisdom for the Heart. We have an app that you can install on your phone. That app contains the complete library of Stephen's sermons. This program called Wisdom for the Heart and Stephen's second daily program called the Wisdom Journey. The Wisdom Journey is a three-year journey through all 66 books of the Bible. On our app, you can watch the video version. In addition, you can read Stephen's articles, read our daily devotional and much more. Install the Wisdom International app today then join us again next time. you