Day-timers and Doing Wisdom From-Above

As many of you know I have a Day-Timer. Recently I asked, “Have you seen my lost Day-Timer?” I found it and put my February calendar in it. The heading on the first page is To Be Done in February 2024 –Number Each Item. On Feb. 1 the heading is To Be Done Today. Apparently, that business-man depicted in James 4:13-17 had a “Day-Timer.” His had a page for the coming year: “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit.” But James says to that arrogant boaster your Day-Timer is defective. It needs a page with the heading, If the Lord Wills, We Will Do: Number Each Item.

What should that fellow put on that page? “Whatever” will not do, nor will a vague reference to “providence.” In James it is a matter of doing what is heard. Reading backward through James, one sees many things. There are two lists in the preceding paragraphs. One lists things to do (4:6-10): 1. Submit to God, 2. Resist the devil, 3. Draw near to God. The other lists things not to do (4:11-12): 1. Do not speak evil against one another, 2. Do not judge your brother/neighbor. Reading back to the royal law (2;8) Love your neighbor as yourself and further back to 1:27 pure religion: 1. Visit widows and orphans and 2. Keep unstained from the world. Finally, we come to a specific statement of God’s will -- be brought forth by the word of truth (1:18). Quite a list. It may take two pages.

James’ admonition is to live and do. His Jewish readers would catch the full meaning of the statement you are a mist. It is from the same root word for vanity used repeatedly in Ecclesiastes (Eccl. 1:2). Not every life is vanity. A doer who acts is blessed in his doing. But for that arrogant boaster whose life is ruled by the bottom line $$$ it is a mist. Or as James puts it to know the right thing to do and not do it, it is sin. So let us all put that extra page in our Day-Timers.

—Tom Yoakum