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So much of our trouble in the Christian life involves the use of possessive pronouns. J.C. Ryle wrote in his Expository Thoughts on Mark: “The life of Christianity . . . consists in possessive pronouns. It is one thing to say ‘Christ is a Savior.’ It is quite another to say ‘He is my Savior and my Lord.’” In other words, everything we need for the Christian life is found in being able to speak about Jesus with possessive pronouns. But at the same time, we also get ourselves into trouble when we use possessive pronouns in other ways. We talk about my plans and my time and my rights, and we set ourselves up for disappointment and dissatisfaction when things don’t go our way. It is the problem of presumption, and at the heart of it is the old, stubborn struggle against pride.
Presumption is not a new problem. When the Apostle James wrote to Christians living in the first century, he warned them about dangers that continue to plague Christians in the twenty-first century—dangers such as a sharp tongue and a materialistic lifestyle and boasting about the future. James wrote:
Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”—yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. (James 4:13–16)
How many times do we find ourselves falling into the same trap? How many times have we been guilty of charting out what we think the future holds, and then we obsess or worry about everything going according to plan? But isn’t that a matter of thinking that we know what tomorrow brings and living according to our desires rather than submitting to God’s will?
It’s a perennial problem, and surely none of us are immune from letting our imaginations get the best of us. So what can we do about it? And how does God’s grace counteract our tendencies toward presumption? Here are three things to consider.
the brevity of life
You may have read some of the statistics about how quickly the time spent with our families passes by. Several years ago, a blogger drew up a projection of the time he might have left with his parents, and he said, “It turns out that when I graduated from high school, I had already used up 93 percent of my in-person parent time.” You don’t have to experience a tragedy or have a morbid sense of mortality to recognize that life is fleeting—it is “a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.”
the certainty of change
Someone recently commented on one of the ways that technology has changed over the last few decades. He said, “One day, each of us burned a CD for the last time, not knowing it was the last time.” In other words, one day you’re listening to music on a CD and the next day it’s obsolete, and then it’s not long before people don’t even remember what a CD was in the first place. Change is happening around us all the time, and it often happens in ways that we don’t see coming. We “do not know what tomorrow will bring,” and so our plans should be made with humility and held loosely.
the god who gives grace
Grace turns boasting upside down. When we live according to God’s grace (and especially according to His gift of salvation in Christ), we recognize that
- everything we have is a gift from God (1 Cor. 4:7);
- we can do nothing on our own (John 15:5);
- weakness is the way of strength (2 Cor. 12:10);
- all things work together for good for those who love God (Rom. 8:28);
- we live by faith and not by sight (2 Cor. 5:7); and
- whatever we do, we do for the glory of God (1 Cor. 10:31).
Therefore, whatever comes to us and whatever happens with our plans, good or bad, we accept as coming not by our own wisdom and power and not by chance but by God’s fatherly hand.