Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit"-- yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that." As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.
-- James 4:13-16 (ESV)
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity:
For Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense. It was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.
John Piper, Desiring God:
It is arrogant not to believe in the heart and confess with the lips that how long you live and what you accomplish are ultimately in the hands of God. The root problem is arrogance or pride, and the expression of that arrogance is boasting. And all they said was, "Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city." That's all they said. And James calls it boasting, and says it's rooted in arrogance.
Chrysostom, preaching on the epistle of James, pressed his congregation to see the merchants of chapter 4 not as distant figures but as mirrors. He argued that the sin is not in planning--the farmer who plants and the merchant who trades both exercise stewardship--but in the silent assumption that the plan's success belongs to the planner. "If the Lord wills" is not a talisman to be tacked onto the end of a sentence. It is a posture of the heart: the recognition that every breath you draw is borrowed, every profit is permission, and every tomorrow is a gift you have not yet been given. The ancient church saw presumption not as optimism but as atheism wearing a business suit.
Never be completely unoccupied, but read or write or pray or meditate or do something for the common good. Bodily discipline, however, must be undertaken with discretion and is not to be practiced indiscriminately by everyone.
-- Thomas à Kempis, *The Imitation of Christ*, Book I, Chapter 19
What plan are you executing today that assumes tomorrow is guaranteed--and would you execute it differently if you believed it wasn't?
You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.
-- Marcus Aurelius, *Meditations* II.11
St. Clair, MI: -- Overcast and humid this morning, 69°F, 94% humidity, winds SE 5 mph. Clearing through midday to mostly sunny. High 85°F, low 61°F. Sunrise 6:01 AM, sunset 9:10 PM. Good conditions for outdoor work after noon.