James No.11 Two Serious Sins

The Gospel of Luke and chapter 12, just a short parable, and yet a very humble one which our Saviour told. Luke 12 and verse 13, I'm reading from the New International Version of the Bible. Someone in the crowd said to the Lord Jesus, Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.

Jesus replied, Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you? And then he said to them, Watch out, be on your guard against all kinds of greed. A man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions. He told them this parable.

The God of a certain man, a certain rich man, produced a good crop. He thought to himself, What shall I do? I have no place to secure myself. Then he said, This is what I'll do.

I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones. I'll store all my grain and my goods. I'll say to myself, You have plenty of good things laid up for many years.

Take life easily. Eat, drink, and be merry. But God said to him, You fools, this very night your life will be demanded from you.

Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself? This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich towards God. James chapter 4. One reading from the Authorized Version of the Bible and the 13th verse. Go to now ye that say today or tomorrow, and ye go a year and buy and get grain.

Whereas ye know not what it is even a vapour that appears for a little time and then vanisheth away. For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live and do this or that. But now ye rejoice in your boastings, and such rejoicing is evil.

Therefore, for him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, for him it is good. We come to our eleventh message from the Epistle of James. Let me open our study by suggesting this to you, that many of us have passages of sin.

I mean by that our own theology of sin. The way that we slot into the first division such obvious nasty things as stealing and killing and taking somebody else's wife. And then simply because James tells us that these are important, in the second division we perhaps put prejudice, assuming one person better than another person, or the misuse of our tongues, scandal, gossip, and every means thereby we hurt other people by an improper communication.

But as far as James is concerned, there are other sins also besides these that I just mentioned, in which he too makes some comment on. There are sins which for the majority of us don't even come into our thinking in our theology of sin. There's a very interesting expression in the Epistle of Paul to the Romans, in which he talks in the seventh chapter of the exceeding sinfulness of sin.

And I remember when I was back in Bible college some years ago, one of our lady lecturers often getting up at our Middle East fair meetings and asking that the Lord would make us, and the faculty for that matter, very aware of the sinful nature of sin. Now that seems tautology, it seems to be like judging in your qualification what is already in the Word itself. The exceeding sinfulness of sin, well, sin is always terrible, by very definition.

But why does he need to mention, why does Paul need to mention the exceeding sinfulness of sin? Because one little thing, a few excursions, I'll simply put it, has a whole hell in capsules in it. Matthew Henry, who's a great historian, speaks on one occasion in terms of sin by using the strong terminology to describe an undisciplined child. And he says, sin is a breath that no man contains.

A breath that no man contains. And it seems to me that in these verses, referring to the 17th of James 4, reference is made to two breaths, two sins. And they are most serious because for the majority of us, we don't even recognize their existence.

They are the sins of presumption, and the sins of omission. Listen to James. Go to it.

You that say today or tomorrow, we will go into such a city and continue there with you, and buy and sell and get gold. Here is presumption, as I shall show you in a moment as well. The assumption that certain things will happen tomorrow, and the day after, and the year after, because they've always happened.

Verse 17. For him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, for him it is sin. Here is omission.

Having a situation in which you know there are certain things that you ought to do, but you don't engage in them, and you can sin by default. And that's an incredible statement of Scripture, because most of us, when we think of sin, we think actively about what we do. And yet the Bible says it's possible to do nothing and still sin.

I wonder if you feel on this in your theology of understanding sin. Now both these two, draft, presumption, and omission, are so linked together. They're so interrelated that the drafts become twins.

And if one is affecting you, then the other will affect you. If you're guilty of the sin of presumption, then you will be guilty of the sin of omission. If you presume that you've got time in the future, and you've no right to make that assumption, then it's probably the case that you think in the future there are certain things that you will do, so you omit to do them now.

You see, how right Matthew Henley is, and perhaps how appropriate it is for me to ask you, perhaps, to take your language and to project it as an illustration to grasp hold of your mind right now, after the most of these two things, drafts, which offend you. Dangerous things, because in the theological reasoning of most of us, we don't even think that they're any problem at all. The sin of presumption, the sin of omission.

Now, James is a tender-hearted man. You may remember that from my teaching on this official from two months ago. He's a brother of our Lord.

He's the pastor of the church at Jerusalem, and in this letter, probably the earliest that was ever written of the New Testament collection of books. He flipped from one topic to another, steering them on as though they were bees, on a method, if you remember the illustration that I gave you some months back now. And when James introduces his teaching on these two sins, he uses an expression that's almost unique in the 13th verse, found only again in the first verse of the first chapter.

He says, Go to now. And that is, in the original language, an expression that is employed to waken somebody up. Here are people who have a lazy understanding of the nature of presumption and omission, of being sinned.

So James hates them. He hates them. Just as Isaiah, when he said in the prophecy that bears his name, he comes and let us weave them together, says the Lord.

So here says James, Come now, let me speak to you. Let me indicate to you that these two sins are highly important. They bring the credit to those for indulging in them.

Let's consider them. The first one actually occupies verses 13 to 16. And then the second sin is 13 just in the 17th verse.

The sin of presumption. We're still on the 13th verse and I'm overflowing into the following. And here is a picture that is very easy for us to grasp.

It's a picture of merchantmen, of businessmen, if you like, just to update it. But let's really be extravagant in our language. Here is the thought of tycoons.

Men who are very successful. Men who've got the directorate in front of them. They're called a board of a management.

And they decide on some commercial enterprises, the policy of their business. There are markets that are yet to be penetrated. So today or tomorrow, we'll go there.

We'll go to those markets. We'll get off to Tokyo. We'll go to Guanabari.

We'll go around the world. And we'll stay perhaps for a year. We'll set up more connections.

We'll buy. We'll sell. We'll get going.

Nothing wrong with that, is there? I mean, isn't this the sort of language that would really mesmerize the people in Downing Street, London? So here is private enterprise at its best. Men using the military. Men determining that they will create employment by having successful businesses.

Nothing wrong with that. That's the problem with its interpretation, you see. There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with it at face value.

It's just when you start to analyze it theologically that it's difficult to stop us. Today. Tomorrow.

Next year. We'll do this. We'll do that.

We'll do the other. Although next year is guaranteed. Although our ability to live is something that's in-built within the human race.

Although we have a right to make a choice in every situation. And everything we do is restricted as any other force that may be prevailing in this world will bring its own material reward. Although God has abandoned His power, and rather Him is glory to God, or rather glory to man in the house.

Those self-empathized from whom all blessings flow. That's presumption. Presumption.

And it's dangerous. It's dangerous to the Christian. Let's forget about the non-Christian.

James is speaking to Christian mercantilists. Or Jewish people who have confessed Jesus as Savior. There's nothing wrong with their secular enterprise.

Nothing wrong with wanting to make profit provided profit is gained fairly and the monies acquired are used rightfully. But for a Christian businessman to presume that he can engage in activities without any reference to God. That's a problem.

This is the presumption. You see there are three assumptions built into this inaccurate philosophy. There is the assumption of life tomorrow.

There is the assumption of choice. We will go in perspective with this. There is the assumption of ability that it will be used to its best advantage.

And these three inbuilt assumptions with no reference to God are criticized by Pastor James. And so in the fourteenth verse he analyzes it. He takes it apart and he says you're absolutely, absolutely wrong.

You don't know. But not so much you don't know what you'll do tomorrow. You can't even know whether there'll be a tomorrow.

Because time is in the hands of God. He analyzes their assumption of life. And he finds them wanting it.

And then what about the presumption of their health? What is your life? It is negated. It appears for a little time and then vanishes away. The human brain has inbuilt within it its own destruction.

That is nothing for which you are directly to be blamed. No more than at any rate the whole human race is responsible for sin. We inherit a corrupt body.

It's a vile body. At some stage in our lives, physically, everyone will be for everyone at the end. Something will drop.

The cells reproduce in a disorderly fashion and we get tons of stroke. A blood clot comes along and the body can't cope with the blood as it congeals until you get a stroke. There is no guarantee.

No guarantee that I can finish this address. I'm not being dramatic. Those of us who are aware of the situations we've been living in, more than knowledgeable of one of our dear brother pastors who died in the very course of teaching while I've been away in this class, there's no guarantee.

What is your life? It's like a venter. It's like the mist that hovers over Palestine in the early morning. It seems so dense.

But when the sun rises to its position in the sky, and when the heat rays just burn on the soil, when all the vapour of the mist is dissolved, on that day comes about life. The man who presumes on tomorrow, the man who feels that he can make a choice in every situation, the man who believes that he's got inbuilt success, the man attending his life, is like the fool in the parable that the Sergius taught. Do you remember? Who built bigger barns, so that he'll have a greater return, more money, sufficient capital to be able to do whatever he wanted to do.

And that is about the most contemptuous parable that the Lord Jesus ever taught, because you see it today. Take a trip to London tomorrow. Watch the men as they're going to discuss exchange.

How many of them will read the text that's around the walls of that exchange? The answers are large and the fullness thereof. A daily, constant reminder as to the plurality of life, the feebleness of the human body, presumptuously, but one independently of God, from exercise of one's own affairs. For those of us who've got no guarantee of tomorrow, dear old John Wesley was so concerned to use his time aright, realizing that he only had a limited consequence, that you can read in his journal how he split his days at not just into hours but into periods of twenty minutes, and he ensured that every twenty minutes was spent profitably for the Lord.

George Whitfield, one of my heroes from history, it said of him that he wouldn't even go to bed, which perhaps seems to you quite trite and unimportant, but I feel it highly significant. He wouldn't go to bed unless he needed his blood being fed, so that if he died in his sleep, nobody could ever have accused George Whitfield of being untidy in any area of his life, because he couldn't presume upon tomorrow to clear up the mess. And how many of us do that, not as far as our gloves are concerned, but even in more important areas of life, we're presuming upon tomorrow.

I'm just wondering what would happen to me if I die right now and my wife comes back and finds that I haven't washed the dishes for the breakfast day. Confession is good for the soul. There were reasons.

But I wouldn't be around to explain them. I'd have to believe that she'd trust me that there were reasons. That's why I haven't done it.

She doesn't. Most of us presume. Presume upon tomorrow.

Presume upon next week. Presume upon next month. Presume upon next year.

It's then, Lord, that I'll set my household in order. It's then that I'll look after my children properly and keep strength for things of the living God. It's then that I'll communicate the gospel to my neighbours.

We all claim the present as though we had an in-built guarantee and a future and we come in it. And that's what makes this thing that much more tribunical because all of us indulge in massive doses of presumption. They set it off.

So James, we should recognize that life is a frail thing. Punish it. And I'll tell you very quickly.

Does that mean, James, because you're frightening us that God has left everything to succeed, to some proficient force in the world that we take over our lives, that we have got no say at all? No, uncle James. It's not that there's a proficient force. It's that there's God.

A God who redeems everything. The Lord, the Sovereign, Jehovah, who reigns omnipotently, reigns over your life, reigns over the affairs of the best midst of man. Don't you realize that God has not abdicated His authority in this world? He has not divorced from the human being? The more reasonable, the more rational, James, is the Lord will recognize you're the good and you're the other and outside of God's will you're not at all, whether you're a Christian person or a non-Christian person.

Sometimes I tell you the only thing that keeps me sane by reading through some of our political journals, for which I confess to have been abbot, is the thought of the Sovereign Jesus. I was reading and reading and rereading time magazine and news, which to me very strikes, I have a, I'm very beguiled. And I was amazed at what the Russians are doing in terms of armed build-up.

And I'm equally amazed when I was reading the English language paper in Argentina that the Americans are spending one million dollars a minute, one million dollars a minute, on so-called defense, which can become a method of one world success. When we think of what the newspaper headlines were carrying this week concerning our own difficulties in this country and our defense planning and so on and so forth, we know it was sensible, but the majority of the abbots are not always sensible. But life is on a knife edge.

There are no inbuilt guarantees on the human level that prayer is done for the will of the Lord and the fact that He works out His purpose. So when I approach my life and you approach your life and decisions that you have to make as a businessman, as a mother in the home, whatever your situation may be, you can, yes, but with the qualification, if the Lord wills, if the Lord wills, on that erratic earth He wants you. You say the sin isn't a very serious one? Well, look at verse 16.

It says, James, you rejoice in your boastings, you foolish businessmen, who believe that you can plan this and plan the other. You bring glory to yourself, having declared you the eye. Here is the sin of Eden all over again.

Here is the sin of Lucifer. It's the pride of life. Man thinking that he can control his own affairs, here is Joseph, your boss.

There's almost cynicism here in James. Look at these men. They're planning for next year like us, James.

You can't even plan for tomorrow. They're planning for what they're going to do months ahead because, James, you don't even know that you'll have the health to do it. You're boasting in all the possibilities that are in front of you, not recognising that if there are any potentials at all, if there is any potential at all, it will be because of this providence almighty God.

You see, my dear friend, there is only one thing in which you can boast in this world. Only one thing. There is, the psalmist has to tell us, when he talks about boasting in the Lord, my soul shall make a boast in the Lord.

It says there, the apostle Paul in that mighty theological argument in Romans chapter 1 and 3, he says that the Jewish world and the Gentile world, he proves that the whole of humanity is condemned before God. He evaluates the so-called successors of man, he finds that they're all at zero level, if not sub-zero, and this is where he boasts in this. He says, you men, you people who believe in your Greek academies, you folks at Rome who believe in your political arenas, if you have been able to harness the power of that, look at your societies, look at your Greeks, look at your Romans, and with cynicism and fraud, typical of old Isaiah, he shows us the grasshopper level of man's real achievement compared with the infinity of God.

This is what he says. There is only one thing in which to boast, and that is in the cross of Jesus Christ, says the apostle, that God forgave that I should be lowly, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified for me, and I for the world. So there is no reason for boasting in human endeavour, there is no reason to be presumptuous, because presumption is a sin.

But you remember there is one other thing that I have to say, that these sins run in pairs. There is a sin. This brat presumption is linked to the equally diabolical brat of omniscience.

The man who feels that he's got life years ahead of him is a man who will be guilty of self-fascination, which is a second name for omniscience. Therefore for him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, the sin is his sin. Again, what does he mean? Well, let's imagine indeed, there is no imagination required, let's be quite factual, there are people who come here into the tabernacle on a Sunday morning who've heard sermons by this partner.

Some of you have done me the honour of listening to teachings from this pulpit for many a year, and you know full well that we are not right before God. It is a sin of omission, you know the Gospel of Jesus Christ, you know the theology of salvation perhaps even more than I know it. You'll put yourself right some other time.

There'll be the possibility next month or next year or next birthday, is that so? That's presumption, and what does presumption mean? It means omission. The idea that you can leave it until tomorrow, you can leave it for another month, you can't do that, that is no guarantee, no guarantee at all. And then to ask your Christians, what about the omission in our lives? You remember how Samuel on one occasion said to the people, God forbid that I should commit sin by omission to pray for you.

How many of us say that we'll spend time in prayer when we reach the years of our maturity, when we reach the years of our seniority, when we'll retire? How many of us feel that we will make our financial obligations to the Lord balanced in some future day, some more prosperous occasion, when we can go to the bank and pay our debts? Having rendered unto people the things of a Jesus, we say we'll render unto God the things of a God when there is a more convenient home, which will not omit us. You see these things? My family's gone, I wish I had another 20 minutes to expound them further than I've got. They're dangerous, they're dangerous because they're not obvious, and it takes pastor James and his sensitivity to flat out them in front of them and to use strong language, prompt that reason, let me say to you about this, you've been presumptive for too long, you're guaranteed nothing, as far as life is concerned, only death, you're only guaranteed if you're a Christian ultimately, your future enjoyment of salvation from heaven, and therefore, if you get to the stillness presumption, the brunt of omission is also following you, is also causing you to overlook work that you should have enjoyed then, then make a corrective, and make it immediately.

I speak with language similar to Matthew, Henry, though I don't know whether you ever teach somebody's text to that, when I say that those who do that will last people to hell eventually, they will last people to hell, strong language, that I can think of none other that does more justice to the parable of the rich fool. Have you remembered the parable of the rich man and how the rich man wanted Abraham to send some messenger to his brothers to warn them of the fate that was in front of them if they continued heedlessly of God and His commandments as their older brother had done? He was a man who was languishing with the consequences of the sin of omission. Yes, you can have your lead if you like, your lead of sins, and you can put in the first division of adultery, and murder, and the other, that are of such great category the majority of us here at least are in action with all the circumstances.

And then you can have your second division, the sin of using your tongue wrongly, the sin of prejudice that so often blights Christian scholarship. And you can completely bypass these other two things of seduction and omission. And I tell you that the whole system of your theology of sin is completely inaccurate among the Christians.

All sin is justice. All sin is God's office. And God wants the eradication of the whole, smelly, stinking blood from our eyes.

The only way to know that is by constant communion with our blessed Savior, the instilling of His Spirit in us, purifying agency that the Holy Ghost brings to our personalities in a state by keeping short the time for Christ, and having repose for the Christ, and praying for strength, for forgiveness, and forgiveness, and for an eradication of presumption and omission in all our lives. May God bless this good word to you. Amen.

Amen.