James 4:13-17 Go to now, you that say, To day or to morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain:… There are some of us who, with vain hopes and faithless terrors, peer into the future, as well as some who, with unavailing regret, brood upon the past. What are the evils that we are to do most to avoid as respects our future? I think they are three-fold; they may be roughly defined as shadowy hopes, needless anticipations, and procrastinated repentance. 1. Shadowy hopes! When the poet says "Man never is, but always to be, blest," while he thus describes our imagined bliss as a floating upon the future, as a fragment of a rainbow that always flies as we advance. How many of you, if you will confess the truth, are looking for happiness, not from anything which is in your lives, but for something which you hope will be before you die. Well, if we are doing so, we are not wise: there is a three-fold error and folly in wasting and making miserable our present life by these shadowy hopes. It is foolish, first, because the day which we are thus looking to, and hoping for, may, and very likely will, never come at all. We cannot thus rely upon to-morrow, and we know not what a day may bring forth, and what is our life? Death does not care for men's disappointments, he does not take into account men's plans. Death! It is a folly to postpone your happiness to a time which you may never see, and it is consequently a folly thus to live only in the future, because most probably even when your end is attained, even if you get the thing you are now wishing for, these hopes, being earthly hopes, and therefore in their very nature illusory, may bring you just no happiness at all. You may be happier, in the present, if you only knew it, than in the future, even if you get what you hope for. A man gains rest only to find that rest is weariness, and rank only to find that he has touched a bubble, riches only to find that the path of the rich man is strewn with thorns. And the third, and perhaps the most important reason why a life wasted in shadowy hopes is a folly, is, that thereby we lose what we might perhaps have had of present happiness. When St. Bernard was travelling, he was so absorbed in his own thoughts, that after riding all day along the shores of the lake of Geneva, he asked in the evening where the lake was. Even so we, by looking forward to some time that may never come, lose many a bright scene, many a golden moment, many a sweet wayside flower. Our only real chance of happiness is to get such happiness out of the present, as the present, almost always in some sense or other, has to give to the humble and the good, and if it has none to give, then at least we feel that life has other things besides happiness, and that it is no great matter. 2. And then there is a worse form of this folly of living in the future, perhaps equally common, although exactly opposite in character; it is to destroy all chances of present happiness, not by those vain shadowy hopes, but by equally shadowy fears. Rich men have been known to starve themselves, and even to have committed suicide in the mere dread of future poverty. The worst of evils, says a French proverb, are those which never happen. At any rate, it is absurd for us in any case to suffer them twice over, and sometimes they are more in anticipation than in reality. I have been speaking, for the most part, with immediate reference to this life, but I will extend it to the world beyond. Whatever may await the sinner in the next life, God clearly did not mean this life to be devastated by anticipated horror. As for heaven, you can go there as often as you will. If you do not do so now, you will never be able to do so hereafter. If the angels never sing songs to you now, how can they do so when you come to die? I said, like Richard Baxter, to go to heaven every day. We enter heaven most when we do our duty best and most simply. 3. I can but touch briefly on the one other error about the future — but that is the deadliest, i.e., procrastinated repentance, reliance on the future to mend the wilful sins of the present. For these other follies of which I have spoken are hurtful, but this is absolutely ruinous. It ruins the present by encouraging continuance in sin, by rendering recovery from sin more and more impossible. It ruins the past whatever it may have been. You will repent in the future. But how if you have no future? I say nothing of the terrible impiety of thus bidding God bide your time before you choose to obey His laws, nothing of the shame of thus turning God's mercies into an engine against your soul — nothing of the insolence of declaring that He has not meant anything by His anger. But this I know, there is no known sin so near the sin that is past praying for, so akin to the sin against the Holy Ghost, as this wilful predetermination to postpone repentance that you may enjoy now the depravity of sin. (Archdeacon Farrar.) Parallel Verses KJV: Go to now, ye that say, To day or to morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain: |
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