Prayer Meeting 20/9/2022

The Sin Of Omission is The Sin We Commission

Well I do hope your finding the prayers cards helpful, which I think by doing this, helps us take, as I spoke on Sunday, our mind off ourselves, as we can be consumed by our own battles and circumstances.

Well this evening I would like to speak for a little bit of time from the book of James chapter 4. Let me read the verses.

James 4:13-17

¹³ Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit”; ¹⁴ whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. ¹⁵ Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.” ¹⁶ But now you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. ¹⁷ Therefore, to him who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is sin.

John Macarthur brilliantly puts it this way both in his study bible and adds a tiny bit to that in his commentary, when he says:

Sins of omission are rarely isolated from sins of commission.

In other words, when we don’t do what we know we ought to, we will almost always be on our way to be doing what we ought not to do, or as I said on Sunday:

The moment we stop including Christ in our every thought and action, we start the journey of commissioning our sin and allowing our flesh to call the shots and guide us.

As believers, there are really no excuses from excluding Christ from our processes, when we know He was the one, and the only one who could rescue us and set us free. James is writing to believers, people who ought to know better. Which brings me to this evening’s prayer, from the ‘Valley Of Vision’, page 6, entitled God the source of all good.

If you have the paperback version it’s on page 5:

O Lord God, who inhabitest eternity, The heavens declare thy glory, The earth thy riches, The universe is thy temple; Thy presence fills immensity, Yet thou hast of thy pleasure created life, and communicated happiness; Thou hast made me what I am, and given me what I have; In thee I live and move and have my being; Thy providence has set the bounds of my habitation, and wisely administers all my affairs. I thank thee for thy riches to me in Jesus, for the unclouded revelation of him in thy Word, where I behold his Person, character, grace, glory, humiliation, sufferings, death, and resurrection; Give me to feel a need of his continual saviourhood, and cry with Job, 'I am vile', with Peter, 'I perish', with the publican, 'Be merciful to me, a sinner'. Subdue in me the love of sin, Let me know the need of renovation as well as of forgiveness, in order to serve and enjoy thee for ever. I come to thee in the all-prevailing name of Jesus, with nothing of my own to plead, no works, no worthiness, no promises. I am often straying, often knowingly opposing thy authority, often abusing thy goodness; Much of my guilt arises from my religious privileges, my low estimation of them, my failure to use them to my advantage, But I am not careless of thy favour or regardless of thy glory; Impress me deeply with a sense of thine omnipresence, that thou art about my path, my ways, my lying down, my end. 

If we contribute nothing to our salvation, or as Jonathan Edwards puts it:

We contributed nothing to our salvation except the sin that made it necessary.

Then why would we think we had the ability to make holy, God-honouring choices out-with our seeking Him in all we do? Isn’t it true what the prayer says, that we at times ‘knowingly oppose his authority and abuse his goodness’, and is it not also true that much of our guilt and problems come from having too low an estimation of their value? Surely we have got to accept our great need for Him in all our decisions?

If our salvation solely rests in Him, why then does not all we do also rest on Him? (As He is able to do all these things). Surely the one who brought us from death to life, ought to be whom we look to in how we live on a daily basis. If it took Jesus to open our blind eyes, is He not the one who will continue to give us clear sight? Surely the incentive to seek Him is that He is the one who gives us life, sight, meaning , freedom and peace that goes beyond our understanding.

Calvin talks in his ‘Institutes’ of ‘The Incentives To Prayer’ by outlining those incentives, in line with all I’ve said so far. Calvin writes:

It therefore remains for us to seek from him what we know to be in him, and to ask him for it in prayer and supplication. For to know God as our master, author and dispenser of all good things… …not to turn to him or to ask him of anything, would get us nowhere. We would be like a man, who learning of a buried treasure, scorned it and left it hidden in the ground.

How crazy indeed is it that we have that treasure in relationship with Christ, yet keep Him locked out of our daily planning, our battles, our struggles, our fears, and simply our life. How weak were we, how pathetic were we when we had not Christ? Isn’t it foolish to think we are strong and sound now, without fully engaging and seeking Him?

Calvin calls it:

The arrogance of forgetting our own weakness.

How weak and unable were we before He rescued us, yet we seem to forget that? How weak are we when we omit Christ from our processes? Yes, when we start out, as I said on Sunday, we may not recognise either the absurdity, or the inevitable impending failure that will come - but come it will.

How often do we get to the end of the pursuit, or the drama, or the problem, or battle, and once again come undone, and come to the conclusion that you sought not God, or prayer before you set off on that pursuit, or journey of being guided by our feelings, or flesh. How often does it not end well because we never stopped to ask, Thy will be done, Lord show me your ways, help me honour you? How little did you line up your pain, your struggle, your battle, your desire with that of God’s Word? How many times do we need to say: I never sought God until all was falling apart? We can all say, what did you expect? Calvin reminds us that we ought at all times carefully consider: ‘If it will please the Lord’, or ‘if the Lord permits’.

Ask yourself this question, if you carefully considered ‘if it pleases the Lord’ in every decision and situation you found yourself in, would you have avoided a whole lot of pain, and not had so many dramas? I’m sure the answer is yes, yes and yes.

John MacArthur says:

A constant disregard for, or disinterest in God’s will is a certain mark of pride.

He adds:

To disregard God’s will is tantamount to saying “I’m the sovereign ruler of my own life”.

Note the words ‘come now’ in verse 13:

James 4:13

¹³ Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit”;

These words: ‘come now’ are words that let us know that this is not a one-off thing, these are words that tell us it’s not only not a one-off. They are also words that say, you ought to know better by now. You ought to, as believers, know you can’t make your own plans and choices and think it won’t cost you. You ought now to know there will be no profit in that pursuit but loss.

Interestingly, James uses the example of prosperity, of being able to prosper our own life by our own means; making plans for our life, making plans for our future, making plans that we have no idea of the outcomes. Omitting God does not just cause us to make plans, but it causes us to dictate outcomes. How many of us have already decided the outcome we want and start that journey, that plan, and yet we have not sought God at all for His will? Surely the outcome we ought to desire must be that we become more like Christ? Yet we, without seeking Him in the morning and all we do, seek outcomes that are not about us doing His will, but our ideas becoming successful, our wants getting met, people doing as we want - our plan, our pursuit, hoping for an outcome that favours our desires. Yet in that, we have sought not His will be done, make me more like you, You are the Author and Finisher of my faith.

Again look at verse 13, it’s a ‘we will do this’, ‘we will do that’. That may not be the language we use, but when we do not seek Him first all our thoughts and actions go towards: I will do this, I will do that, I will get this result, I will gain this; all without a pause, we head into the abyss of sin. Wild horses aren’t stopping you. You’re so fixed on your ideas, your wants, that as Lenski puts it:

What is true at the start is also true of the entire project. It’s all fixed and settled.

When we allow our flesh to be unharnessed, when we don’t take our thoughts captive, when we don’t seek Him in all we do, when we don’t ask ‘Thy will be done’, ‘if it pleases you Lord’, we are missing the key. There is the key: Does this please you Lord? And due to who we are, we already have the answer. How wonderful really is it, that He has given us that answer that lands in such a deep place for us? ‘Thy will be done’ is strong but ‘does it please you Lord’ really hits us personally. And if we don’t do so, we are, as John MacArthur says ‘commissioning sin’.

We are so weak without Him. It’s as Calvin says, we are: ‘…arrogant to forget that weakness’. And worse, it’s always going to lead to deeper despair in the end.

And thank goodness it does, but oh Lord remind us of that despair we once had, that we never omit you from all we do.

Amen.