““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.” (James 4:13–15) This is one of the clearest texts on the sovereignty of God. If we make it to the grocery store this afternoon, according to James, the Lord willed it. If we live to be a hundred, the Lord willed it. If we live to be only forty-five, the Lord willed it. We don’t have to say “If the Lord wills” after every sentence, but it must be in our heads and hearts. We must live our lives believing that all of our plans and strategies are subject to the immutable will of God. Therefore, we should be humble in looking to the future because we don’t control it; God does. And we should be hopeful in looking to the future because God controls it, not us. This brings us back to anxiety, our tendency to live out the future before it arrives. We must renounce our sinful desire to know the future and to be in control. We are not gods. We walk by faith, not by sight. We risk because God does not risk. We walk into the future in God-glorifying confidence, not because the future is known to us but because it is known to God. And that’s all we need to know. Worry about the future is not simply a character tic, it is the sin of unbelief, an indication that our hearts are not resting in the promises of God.””
