Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
This automated analysis scores the text on the likely presence of emotional, language, and social tones. There are no right or wrong scores; this is just an indication of tones readers or listeners may pick up from the text.
A score of 0.5 or higher indicates the tone is likely present.
Emotion Tone
Anger
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Disgust
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Fear
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Joy
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Sadness
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Language Tone
Analytical
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Confident
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Tentative
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Social Tone
Openness
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Conscientiousness
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Extraversion
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Agreeableness
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Emotional Range
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Tone of specific sentences
Tones
Emotion
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Anger
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(v.13) - Go to a city (in the future) and do business
(v.14)
- no knowledge of what tomorrow will bring.
We are by nature weak and transitory
(v.15) - If it is the Lord’s Sovereign will we will live and do business
(v.16)
- Living Life w/o Reference to God is boasting and arrogant and it is evil.
(v.17) - So, plan and work, with knowledge that God is in control of all things.
If not you sin.
(sin of omission)
(A) We can’t possibly know the future - we are fleeting.
We are creatures.
We don’t have an omniscient or omnipotent point of reference.
Job said - remember that my life is a breath.
How have you felt the reality of our here today; gone tomorrow life in ministry?
(B) But just recognizing that we are passing through isn’t even religious necessarily.
We must recognize that the whole of our lives are in the hands of a sovereign God.
Nothing will happens that doesn’t first go through the hands of God.
We must plan in reference to God in everything we do.
What hope does God’s certain sovereignty over all your future plans bring to your life?
(C) When we live without reference to our sovereign God - we boast.
That’s the root of planning your calendar without reference to God.
Arrogance that you know - what is coming and what will happen.
James says this is bragging and it’s evil.
So we must plan, but we must do it in reference to God.
What are some practical ways we can do this in our family and ministry life?
(D) Sins of Omission - tied to planning in this context.
What good things have fallen through the cracks of your life, left undone, that you may need to repent of?
So all of this could be preached in a temple
5. How is this passage explicitly Christian?
How would you preach it from a Christ- centered perspective?
“I need the grace of God, and I am dependent on the will of God in every facet of my life.”
]What a humbling reminder this is: not one of us is guaranteed that we will be alive tonight to lay our head on our pillow.
Platt, David.
Exalting Jesus In James (Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary) (Kindle Location 1801).
B&H Publishing Group.
Kindle Edition.
Platt, David.
Exalting Jesus In James (Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary) (Kindle Locations 1809-1810).
B&H Publishing Group.
Kindle Edition.
(v.13)
As the following verses make clear, James is not rebuking these merchants for their plans or even for their desire to make a profit.
He rebukes them rather for the this-worldly self-confidence that they exhibit in pursuing these goals—a danger, it must be said, to which businesspeople are particularly susceptible.
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And we should guard here against another kind of misinterpretation: the idea that James is forbidding Christians from all forms of planning or of concern for the future.
Taking out life insurance and saving for retirement, for instance, are not condemned by James; these may very well be a form of wise stewardship.
What James rebukes here, as v. 16 will make clear, is any kind of planning for the future that stems from human arrogance in our ability to determine the course of future events.
(v.15)
This is what we often call the sovereignty of God.
Everything that happens in the world comes from him.
He is the one who sends rain, thunder, and lightning (Pss.
65:9–11; 135:6–7; 147:15–18).
He makes things freeze, then melts the ice.
The smallest details of nature are under his control: the falling of a sparrow, the number of hairs on your head (Matt.
6:26–30; 10:29–30).
And the events that we call random, that we ascribe to chance, are really God at work.
Look at Proverbs 16:33: “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the LORD.”
Just roll dice.
Whether you get a six or an eight or a twelve, the number comes from God; it’s God’s decision.
God rules not only the little things but the big things, too.
How could it be otherwise, since the big things are combinations of little things?
He determines what nations will dwell in which territory (Acts 17:26).
He decides what king is to rule, when, and where (Isa.
44:28).
He decides whether the purpose of a nation will stand or fall (Ps.
33:10–11).
And he decided, once, that wicked people would take the life of his own dear Son, so that we, we sinners, might live (Acts 2:23–24).
God rules not only the important events of human history but also the lives of individual people like you and me.
He knits us together in our mothers’ wombs (Ps.
139:13–16).
He decides whether we will travel or stay home (James 4:13–17).
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(v.14)
James is asking, in effect: How can you, being the kind of creatures that you are, presume to dictate the course of future events?
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But whichever word we choose, the point is clear enough: human life is insubstantial and transitory, here one minute and gone the next.
Illness, accidental death, or the return of Christ could cut short our lives just as quickly as the morning sun dissipates the mist or as a shift in wind direction blows away smoke.
and
Psalm 39:
and
Example:
(v.15)
It is not enough, James suggests, to recognize that one’s own life is uncertain and transitory (v.
14).
Such a recognition, after all, is not even specifically religious.
What these merchants need to go on to reckon with is that their lives are also in the hands of God.
This world is not a closed system; what appears to our senses to be the totality of existence is in fact only part of the whole.
This life cannot properly be understood without considering the spiritual realm, a realm that impinges on and ultimately determines the material realm in which we live day to day.
(v.15)
Appropriately in the light of James’s reminder that our lives are a “mist” (v.
14), James thus makes the continuance of life itself contingent on the will of the Lord.
But he also, in light of v. 13, reminds us that our plans must also be subject to the same condition.
(v.15)
And, more significant yet for James’s background, Jesus himself exhibited the same submission to the Lord’s will at the great crisis of his own life in Gethsemane.
However, as Calvin pertinently observes, Jesus, Paul, and the other apostles do not always state this condition when they plan for the future.
What was important is not the verbalization but that “they had it as a principle fixed in their minds, that they would do nothing without the permission of God.”
(v.16)
But the problem, as James now makes clear, is the attitude underlying this planning.
As it is (Gk.
nyn, “now”) brings us back to James’s own present and to the problem that he is addressing.
And the root problem is arrogance: you boast and brag.
(v.16)
Boast -
It combines the ideas of “put confidence in” and “rejoice in,” with the slightly archaic “boast” still probably the best single English equivalent.
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