If The Lord Wills

“Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.’ Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.’ But as it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil. Therefore, to one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, to him it is sin.” (James 4:13-17 NASB1995)

Now, there is nothing wrong with making plans. For some things we have to plan in advance so that we are prepared and so that other people who are part of those plans are informed, and so that we can set a date, and put it on our calendars. What is wrong is when we exclude God from our plans, i.e. when we don’t inquire of him first to make certain these are his plans or that they do not contradict with his plans, and/or when we presume that we have the right to chart our own course and to go our own way, absent of God.

And what do I mean by that? Well, God made us, and he has a plan for our lives, and as those who profess faith in Jesus Christ, we are to be those who are following his plan for our lives. We are not to be deciding our own course, going our own way, making all our own decisions, presuming that whatever we have planned is under our control, and that life is going to go the way that we decide, and that God is going to be okay with that. That shows arrogance on our part and that we are not surrendered to God.

We need to pray often, “Nevertheless, not my will, but Thine be done.” We need to learn to inquire of the Lord to make certain that our plans are in line with his plans. And even if we have plans, we must make room in our minds and hearts for the reality that life doesn’t always go the way that we have planned, but life can be unpredictable, and we need to be able to go with that when life as we know it changes directions. And I have learned to say more often, “Lord willing, we will do this or that,” thus resting in my Lord.

When we see our lives as those who are followers of Jesus Christ, and we see that he is our shepherd, and that we are to be following his leading, it helps us to keep in perspective that he should be the one running our lives, and not us. And so we should be inquiring of him as to what direction he would have us go next, and then we should be going wherever he sends us in doing what he has for us to do, and in saying whatever he gives us to say. For this is what it means to be a follower of Christ, with him in the lead.

[Matthew 7:13-14,21-23; Luke 9:23-26; Romans 6:1-23; Romans 8:1-14; Galatians 5:16-24; Ephesians 2:8-10; Ephesians 4:17-32; Ephesians 5:3-6; Titus 2:11-14; 1 John 1:1-10; 1 John 2:1-6; 1 John 3:4-10; Acts 26:18] 

An Original Work / January 26, 2026

Christ’s Free Servant, Sue J Love