The Letter of James can easily be seen as a tool by which shock therapy is performed just to make sure we are paying attention to what God is saying to us. We read in 4.13-17: 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.’ Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. Now there’s a shaking from God!
This is clearly rational behavior therapy from the God of heaven. We do not even know how to keep living life let alone just keeping ourselves alive: What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. What we know as life is but a fleeting moment to our Lord, and he wants us to begin to view things from his perspective. It’s imperative that we adopt God’s view of what it is to really live.
The singular most important thing about living life in God’s presence is that we give him authority to control who we are and who we will become in him: Instead, you ought to say, ‘If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.’ It is the Lord’s will which ought to make a difference to us rather than what we wish for, dream about or hope will come to pass. God will shake us awake to his will if we fail to hear him.
Not to properly relate to our Father God in the living of our lives becomes a matter of sin: As it is, you boast and brag. All such boasting is evil. Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins. And it matters not whether we choose to do what is not acceptable to God, or if we opt not to do what is right—both lead to sin. Let’s allow the Lord to shake us into his reality for our lives. YES!