Planning With the Big “IF” in Mind
Draw Near
Part of DNA Guides
August 8, 2021

Be Real Together:

Take a few minutes to catch up, tell stories, and laugh together. Trust and friendship take time to build. If you’re launching a new DNA, one person should tell their story — what do we need to know about you? Next week, have another person in your DNA share their story.


Read Together:

James 4:13-17 CSB
13 Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money.” 14 Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. 15 Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.” 16 As it is, you boast in your arrogant schemes. All such boasting is evil. 17 If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn’t do it, it is sin for them.


Grow Together: Observe and Apply

Many people live as if they were the final authority in their life. “We have a right to decide our own destiny and choose what is best for us”…so the line goes. In the Christian community of believers, sometimes our actions and attitudes are not much different. Take the businessperson, for instance, as a representative of us all. How should a Christian businessperson’s life differ from his non-Christian counterpart? In James 4:13-17, we find some words addressed to the merchants of the first century (and us, too).

1. To PLAN with the big “IF” in mind

When planning their future trips, a businessperson has to focus on location, time, activity, and their desired results. But rather that determining it for themselves, James tells them to listen. We all need to listen if we are making decisions about the location, time, activity, or results we desire to achieve.

What factors determine the plans you make? Do you think God cares about those factors, too?

2. To KNOW and BOAST in the Lord

The problem being pointed out here is subtle, but James is telling us he wants us to avoid presumptuous or arrogant planning. James is saying it’s a sin when our underlying attitude is, “I’m in control of my destiny” (see v. 13). In fact, if in the important, every day decisions of our lives, it sometimes doesn’t even occur to us that God should be asked what His will is, then we need to listen up, too!

Are you quicker to ask God for his will to be done, or go ahead with planning your own path?

3. To KNOW the good we’re to do

The positive solution is simple: conditional planning. To plan with a Big “IF” in Mind, we must live in active and joyful surrender by: praying, searching the Scriptures, doing what is already commanded, getting counsel and mentoring from godly men and women, beginning to serve, watching out for open and closed doors, and listening to the inner witness of the Holy Spirit.

Which of those seven acts of joyful surrender do you have the most difficulty with and why?

4. To DO good

The potential temptation, after knowing all these things is to sin by doing our own life planning as if we have a sufficient knowledge of our lifespan or an adequate perception of future events. Because we have neither, the course of sin is to walk the paths we set our for ourselves. But to walk with God means to trust God for the future.

Is it hard for you to trust God with your future?


Pray Together:

Thank you, Lord, for you desire to lead us. Father, as we go about our day-to-day routines or spend time planning for our futures, help us to trust in you. In Jesus’ name. Amen.