Seize the Moment – Day 322
Open Hands Demonstrate a Humble Heart!
Good morning! This is Pastor Jerry Ingalls from New Castle First Baptist Church and today is Tuesday, February 2.
Do you hold your life and your plans tightly, as with closed fists, or do you hold your life and your plans loosely, as with open hands?
James speaks into all of our shared experiences and collective circumstance of our last 11 months grappling with the novel Covid-19 international pandemic in James 4:13-15,
Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.” Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.”
This is not actually about Covid-19, this is our reality all the time, as some many have experienced before all of this, whether through a medical incident or work accident or heart break. Life as we know it can change today.
While it is honest to say that we intellectually know this, but it is also honest to acknowledge that until we experience it we do not really live with this posture of humility towards our lives and our plans or life ambitions. We keep making plans and assume they will happen!
We hold everything tightly until we don’t because we realize we can’t. This is when the deepest decision of our lives is made: to truly trust God and His goodness and grace over our lives or keeping fighting for control and our ability to make life work out the way we want it to.
Did you know that this passage is an application of verse 10, when James write, “Humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord, and He will exalt you”?
Seize the moment and open your hands to God today. Because He loves you and you can trust Him!