What Tomorrow Will Bring: James 4:13-17 on God's Will
Short answer: James 4:13-17 addresses people who announce their plans with total confidence, as though tomorrow were theirs to command. James does not condemn planning, trade, or profit; he condemns the presumption that puts God out of the picture. His correction is a posture: say, if the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that. The passage ends with a warning about knowing the good we ought to do and not doing it, which ties the whole discussion to humble obedience rather than mere caution. Tomorrow is genuinely unknown to us; it is not unknown to God, and the wise response is to plan with open hands and to do the good that is already clear today.
Why James Picks a Business Trip as His Example
James 4:13 says, "Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow let's go into this city, and spend a year there, trade, and make a profit.'" The example is ordinary, not scandalous. These are merchants with a route, a timeline, and a revenue goal. Nothing in the plan is sinful in itself; commerce, travel, and provision for a household are legitimate. James chooses this example because it is the sort of plan most of us make constantly, and because its confidence is so easy to miss. The problem is not the itinerary. The problem is the tone: a year is scheduled, a profit is assumed, and God is never mentioned.
Notice the detail James includes. The merchants say they will spend a year there. A year is a substantial slice of a human life, and they speak of it as though it were a checked box. They will trade, a word that implies skill and effort, and they will make a profit, a word that implies a guaranteed outcome. Every clause leans on the future as if it were already settled. James is not mocking ambition; he is exposing a way of speaking that quietly assumes the speaker is the master of his own days. That assumption is what he calls out.
It helps to remember who James is writing to. His letter is full of practical wisdom for ordinary believers scattered among the nations, and he repeatedly addresses speech. Earlier he warns about the tongue and about quarrels that come from disordered desires. Here the tongue appears again, but in the form of confident forecasting. The way we talk about next year reveals what we actually believe about who runs the world. A boastful sentence about the future is not a small thing; it is a small window into the heart.
So the example is diagnostic, not exotic. Most of us will never book a year-long trading venture, but all of us make plans for tomorrow: a job, a move, a marriage, a treatment, a retirement. James takes one first-century scenario and makes it a mirror. The question the passage presses is not whether we make plans but whether our plans are spoken and held as if God had no say. The merchants are us, whenever we talk about tomorrow as though we owned it.
What the Passage Does Not Say About Planning
It is tempting to read James 4:13-17 as a blanket rejection of forward thinking, and some readers have done exactly that, concluding that a Christian should never plan, budget, or set a goal. That reading does not survive contact with the rest of Scripture. Proverbs is full of instruction to consider the ant, and the same James who writes this passage elsewhere commends wisdom that is practical and active. Planning is not the sin here; presumes to know the future is. James corrects the heart behind the plan, not the existence of the plan.
The correction itself proves the point. James does not tell the merchants to abandon trade. He tells them how to speak: say, if the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that. That instruction assumes they will still go, still trade, still make decisions. He is giving them a new way to hold their plans, not a command to stop making them. A farmer still plants, a builder still counts the cost, a parent still saves. What changes is the posture: the plan is submitted, not sovereign.
There is also no hint here that God is offended by profit or by ordinary work. James does not present poverty as more spiritual than trade. The problem is the word make a profit said with no awareness of dependence. A person can be poor and just as presumptuous about tomorrow as a merchant, and a person can be wealthy and genuinely humble about it. The issue runs deeper than money. It is whether we see our lives as a gift we receive or an estate we control.
Finally, the passage should not be turned into a formula that guarantees safety. Saying if the Lord wills does not immunise a business against loss or a body against illness. James himself, a few verses later, will write about suffering and patience. The phrase is not a charm; it is an honest acknowledgement. It does not tell us what tomorrow holds. It tells us who holds tomorrow, and it puts our speech in line with that truth.
Our Lives Are a Mist, and That Is Meant to Help Us
James 4:14 asks a blunt question, and the answer is the heart of the passage. He compares human life to a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. The image is not gloomy for its own sake; it is clarifying. A mist is real, but it is brief and it does not last. No one plans a year around a mist. James uses the picture to puncture the assumption that we are durable enough to schedule our own futures with certainty. We are not the permanent thing we imagine ourselves to be.
This is not a new theme in Scripture. Psalm 39:4-7 records a prayer that asks God to show the measure of human days and how frail we are. The psalmist does not ask for despair; he asks for perspective, because knowing how brief life is shapes how we live it. When we forget our frailty, we become both arrogant and foolish, spending ourselves on things that cannot last and treating people as though there were unlimited time. Remembering the mist is a mercy, not a threat.
Ecclesiastes 8:7 says plainly that a person does not know what will be, and who can tell him how it will be. That is simply true, and James builds on it. The uncertainty of tomorrow is not a flaw in the universe; it is a feature of being a creature rather than the Creator. We experience time from inside it, one day at a time, without a view of the end. God sees the whole. The gap between our knowledge and his is not a problem to solve but a reality to accept.
Accepting it changes the way we hold good things. If a season of health, work, or family is a mist, then it is also a gift to be received today rather than a possession to be defended forever. Parents hold children, workers hold jobs, and churches hold seasons of fruitfulness with open hands. This does not make us passive. It makes us grateful, attentive, and free from the anxiety that comes from trying to secure what was never in our keeping.
How if the Lord Wills Actually Works in Daily Speech
James gives a concrete alternative: instead of the confident forecast, say, if the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that. Two things are acknowledged in that sentence. First, we will only act if the Lord grants us life; the very breath to carry out the plan is dependent. Second, the doing itself falls under his will. This is not empty religious language tacked onto a plan. It is a compact confession that God is God and we are not, and it is meant to be spoken and meant, not merely recited.
Some Christians have turned the phrase into a verbal tic, attaching it to every sentence until it loses meaning. That is not what James is after. The point is not a magic formula but a genuine orientation of the heart, which the words then express. A person who truly holds tomorrow from God's hand can say if the Lord wills and mean it, and can also plan courageously without the phrase, because the humility is real either way. The words serve the posture; they do not replace it.
In practice, this affects how we make decisions. We can seek counsel, count costs, and set goals, and still hold them loosely. When a plan fails, we are not destroyed, because our identity was never in the plan's success. When a plan succeeds, we are not inflated, because we know who gave the breath and the year. This is the freedom James is protecting. Presumption is exhausting; it puts the weight of the future on shoulders that cannot carry it. Humble submission puts that weight where it belongs.
And this humility is not pessimism. The person who says if the Lord wills is not expecting the worst. James says we will live and do this or that, which is a positive expectation of continued life and action under God. The Christian looks at tomorrow with hope, not dread, because the One who holds it is good. We do not know what the day will bring, but we know the One who brings it. That is the ground on which a believer can plan, work, rest, and speak about the future without either boasting or fear.
The Sin James Names: Boasting in Our Confidence
James 4:16 calls the confident forecast boasting, and he says such boasting is evil. The word matters. This is not merely a mistake in estimation, like guessing the weather wrong. It is a moral posture, a taking of glory that belongs to God. Proverbs 27:1 says, "Don't boast about tomorrow; for you don't know what a day may bring." The proverb and the epistle agree: to speak of tomorrow as certain is to claim a knowledge and a control we do not have, and that claim dishonours the God who actually governs the days.
It is worth asking why boasting is so serious. Boasting is self-exaltation, and self-exaltation is the root of much sin. In this case it exalts the self over God, treating his providential rule as irrelevant to the plans of a creature who cannot guarantee even his next breath. The merchants in James's example would probably have been offended if accused of boasting; they were only talking business. But that is how boasting usually works. It hides in ordinary, reasonable-sounding speech, and it is recognised not by its volume but by its assumption.
James does not leave the matter at the level of speech, either. In verse 17 he writes that whoever knows the right thing to do and does not do it, for him it is sin. Some readers find this verse disconnected from the merchants, but it belongs. If you know that your plans should be held under God's will and you refuse to live that way, the knowledge itself becomes a charge against you. The passage moves from a wrong way of talking to a wrong way of living, and it closes the escape route of claiming ignorance.
This is a sobering ending, and it should be allowed to be sobering. James is not interested in producing anxious people who are afraid to make plans and never say anything about the future. He is interested in producing honest people who know who they are. The remedy for boasting is not silence about tomorrow but humility before God about tomorrow. The tongue that once claimed the year can instead thank God for it, and the life behind the tongue can be ordered accordingly.
What Jesus Says About Tomorrow and Anxiety
James is not alone in this teaching. Jesus addresses the same territory in Matthew 6:25-34, where he tells his followers not to be anxious about life, food, drink, and clothing. His argument is not that these things do not matter but that anxiety about them misunderstands our value to God and his care for us. The birds and the lilies are evidence that the Father provides. The disciples are told to seek first the kingdom, and the rest is promised rather than seized by worry.
Anxiety and presumption look like opposites but are close relatives. Both fixate on tomorrow. The presumptuous person assumes tomorrow will go his way; the anxious person fears it will not. Both are trying to control what is not theirs to control. Jesus's remedy is trust in a Father who already knows what we need. James's remedy is submission to a Lord who holds the days. The two are the same posture viewed from different angles: a creature resting in the God who provides and rules.
Jesus also tells a parable in Luke 12:16-21 about a rich man whose ground produced abundantly. The man plans bigger barns, stores up his goods, and speaks to his soul about many years of ease. God calls him a fool, because his soul is required of him that very night. The parable is a vivid illustration of the mist of James 4 and the boasting of Proverbs 27. The rich man's error is not that he farmed well or planned storage; it is that he planned as if he had secured tomorrow and as if his life consisted in his abundance.
Taken together, these passages give a full picture. Jesus forbids anxious grasping and foolish self-securing. James forbids confident boasting. Both point to the same alternative: a life lived before God in trust, planning as a steward rather than a sovereign, and doing the good that lies in front of us today. The New Testament does not ask us to stop thinking about tomorrow. It asks us to think about tomorrow in the presence of the God who holds it, and to live today in the light of that.
Planning Without Presumption: A Practical Shape
So what does it look like to plan without presumption? First, we plan, because God made us to work and to exercise stewardship over time, money, and gifts. The Proverbs 31 woman considers a field and buys it; the apostle Paul plans routes and intends to visit churches. Scripture is not anti-plan. The shape James gives is a plan made in dependence rather than a plan made in defiance or obliviousness. We count the cost, set the goal, and hold it with an open hand.
Second, we speak about our plans with humility and honesty. We do not have to repeat if the Lord wills like a mantra, but our speech should reflect the truth of it. We can say we intend to do something, because intention is not the same as certainty. We can also acknowledge openly that we do not know what will happen, which is simply true. Confident forecasting has a way of making us look foolish when it collapses, and more importantly it quietly robs God of the credit for the days he gives.
Third, we act on the good we already know. James 4:17 warns against knowing the right thing and not doing it. That verse keeps the passage from becoming mere philosophy about time. If you know a good thing to do today, do it, because today is the only day you have. Tomorrow's grand plans can become an excuse for neglecting today's clear duty. The person who holds tomorrow loosely is freed to obey fully in the present, where God has actually placed him.
Finally, we rest in the God who knows the end from the beginning. We will not always get this right; we will sometimes boast and sometimes fear. But the gospel does not leave us in our presumption or our anxiety. We are forgiven and taught, and we learn over a lifetime to say with the psalmist that our times are in God's hand. Tomorrow will bring what God wills. Our task is to live today before him, in the good works he has prepared, trusting his goodness for whatever the day may hold.
Biblical fidelity check
James 4:13-17 does establish that confident, God-ignoring speech about the future is wrong and that human life is brief and dependent. It does not establish that planning is sinful, that profit is inherently evil, or that believers should make no commitments beyond today. The passage explicitly directs the reader to keep acting while acknowledging God's will, which assumes action continues. It also does not promise that humble speech will produce the outcome we want; naming God's will is not a technique for getting a desired result. The teaching is about posture and honesty, not about formulas or guaranteed outcomes.
A common misreading treats the passage as a prohibition on all long-term planning and preparation, so that a Christian is made to feel guilty for saving, studying, or setting goals. That misreading confuses the sin of presumption with the virtue of stewardship. The merchants are corrected for assuming the year, not for travelling to the city. A second misreading treats if the Lord wills as a required verbal tag whose absence proves a lack of faith. Scripture does not make the phrase mandatory, and treating it as a test of spirituality turns a posture into a performance. Both errors miss James's aim, which is a heart that holds tomorrow from God's hand.
Other passages that speak to James 4
James's teaching on the future sits inside a wider biblical wisdom about time and mortality. What does Ecclesiastes 3 mean about a time for everything? explores the seasons God appoints and our inability to see the whole. What does James 1:5 mean about asking for wisdom? connects to James's practical concern here for wise living before God. James 2:14–26: Faith Without Works Is Dead shows the same epistle's insistence that knowledge must become action. And What does Luke 9:23 mean to take up your cross daily? presses the daily, self-denying shape of discipleship that James 4 assumes.
Frequently asked questions
Does James 4:13-17 forbid making plans?
No. James corrects the presumption behind the plans, not the planning itself. He tells the merchants to say that, if the Lord wills, they will live and do this or that, which assumes they will still act. Scripture elsewhere commends stewardship, preparation, and wise forethought. What James forbids is the confident claim on tomorrow that leaves God out. Plan carefully, work diligently, but hold your plans as a steward rather than as the owner of your days.
Do I have to say if the Lord wills before every plan?
James is describing a posture, not mandating a formula. Saying the words while trusting yourself is not what he commands, and planning carefully while humbly depending on God is. The phrase is a helpful expression of the heart, but it is not a charm or a spiritual test. The real question is whether you genuinely believe your life and your future are in God's hands, and whether your speech reflects that reality rather than boasting.
How is this different from just being anxious about the future?
They are opposite errors with the same root. Presumption assumes tomorrow will go my way; anxiety fears it will not. Both try to control what we cannot control. James calls for humility before a God who actually rules the days, and Jesus in Matthew 6 calls for trust in a Father who provides. The alternative to both is a settled confidence that God is good and sovereign, freeing us to plan, work, and rest without boasting or dread.
