James 4:13-17
May 24, 2020
preached by Pastor Doug Cooper
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Guide for Home Worship

Time of Reflection Quotations

“You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire”

“You live as if you were destined to live forever, no thought of your frailty ever enters your head, of how much time has already gone by you take no heed. You squander time as if you drew from a full and abundant supply, though all the while that day which you bestow on some person or thing is perhaps your last.”

~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC-AD 65), Roman philosopher, statesman, dramatist

“The things that I loved were very frail. Very fragile. I didn’t know that. I thought they were indestructible. They weren’t.”

~ Cormac McCarthy (1933-present), American novelist, an excerpt from The Sunset Limited

“Thou Great I AM
Fill my mind with elevation and grandeur at
the thought of a Being
with whom one day is as a thousand years,
and a thousand years as one day,
A mighty God, who, amidst the lapse of worlds,
and the revolutions of empires,
feels no variableness,
but is glorious in immortality.
May I rejoice that, while men die, the Lord lives;
that, while all creatures are broken reeds,
empty cisterns,
fading flowers,
withering grass,
he is the Rock of Ages, the Fountain
of living waters.
Turn my heart from vanity,
from dissatisfactions,
from uncertainties of the present state,
to an eternal interest in Christ.”

~ excerpt from an anonymous Puritan prayer

Sermon Passage

James 4:13-17 (ESV)

¹³ 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”— ¹⁴ 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. ¹⁵ Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” ¹⁶ As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. ¹⁷ So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.