Presumption, Patience, and Plain Speech
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Read James 4:13–5:12 before proceeding. Keep your Bible open throughout this session.
Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord.
James 5:7
Living in the Meantime
This session covers a longer stretch of text than most in our study: the final verses of chapter four through the first twelve verses of chapter five. At first reading, the passage may seem to wander. James moves from business planning, to a severe warning against the rich, to an exhortation to patience, to a command to let our yes be yes and our no be no. Four apparently different topics. What ties them together?
The unifying thread is the time in which the Christian lives. We live in the meantime: the time between Christ’s first coming and His second, the time between our Baptism and our death, the time when the Lord has already accomplished our salvation but has not yet returned to consummate it. This is the time in which all the apparently different concerns of this passage find their place. How do we plan our business lives? As those awaiting the Lord. How do we handle wealth? As those who will give an account at His coming. How do we endure hardship? As those who know the Judge is at the door. How do we speak? As those whose words will be weighed by the One who is coming back.
So read this passage as a single unified teaching, not as four scattered warnings. James is teaching us what it looks like to live now, in light of the Lord who has come and is coming again. Every section of this passage is an application of that fundamental orientation to a specific area of life. And every section, once we see it, has something to say to us (to our planning, our finances, our endurance, our speech) this very week.
This is what theologians call eschatology, the doctrine of last things. For some Christians, eschatology is an abstract topic, a matter of charts and speculations about the end times. For James, eschatology is the shape of the ordinary Christian life. How we plan, spend, endure, and speak depends on whether we actually believe the Lord is coming back. If we do, everything changes. If we do not, we live like people who have nothing but this world, and we will treat our money, our plans, our suffering, and our words accordingly.
If the Lord Wills
James opens the passage with a pointed rebuke of a particular kind of speech. 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. The picture is clear: a businessman, or perhaps a small group of traders, confidently laying out a plan for the coming year. They know where they will go, how long they will stay, what they will do, and what the outcome will be. They speak with certainty about a future they do not actually control.
James’s reply cuts straight to the heart of the presumption. 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.
The Fragility of Life
The image of the mist is striking. A mist is visible. It is real. It is present for a moment. And then it is gone, dissolved in the sun, and there is no trace that it was ever there at all. This is what our lives are, James says. Not permanent fixtures of the world, not secure possessions, not certain continuations, but mists, briefly present, about to vanish.
This is one of the most consistent teachings in all of Scripture. The Psalms tell us our days are as grass, that we flourish in the morning and by evening we are cut down. Moses prays that God would teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom. Isaiah says all flesh is grass and its beauty like the flower of the field. The testimony of the Bible is unanimous: human life is fragile, brief, and utterly dependent on the God who gives it breath from moment to moment.
We live as if this were not true. We plan for decades. We assume tomorrow will come. We speak of what we will do next year as if it were already in our control. And most of the time, most of our plans unfold more or less as we expected, which reinforces the illusion. But the illusion is an illusion. Every one of us knows someone who did not wake up this morning. Every one of us knows families whose plans were shattered by a phone call, a diagnosis, an accident. Our plans are made in the mist, and the mist is always about to vanish.
Not a Prohibition of Planning
James is not forbidding us to plan. The Christian life is not a life of drift, waiting passively for the next providence to arrive. God has given us vocations, and our vocations require planning. A farmer plans his planting. A teacher plans her lessons. A pastor plans his sermons. A business owner plans his year. This is all good, and it is part of how God orders the world through the hands of His creatures.
What James is forbidding is the planning that makes no reference to God. The planning that speaks with confidence about tomorrow as if tomorrow were ours. The planning that imagines ourselves as the sovereign actors in our own story, rather than as creatures who live and breathe and plan under the hand of the one true Sovereign. This kind of planning is not merely unwise; James calls it boasting. It is a verbal assertion that we control what we do not control, that we own what belongs to Another, that our lives are our own when in fact they are His.
If the Lord Wills
The alternative James offers is simple. If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that. This is not a magical formula, and James is not requiring us to append the phrase to every sentence. Christians in later centuries often used the Latin abbreviation D.V. (Deo volente, God willing) in their correspondence, and faithful Christians have done the same in many languages since. But the phrase itself is less important than the posture it represents.
The posture is this: we plan, we work, we act, but always under God. We hold our plans loosely. We acknowledge that their fulfillment is His gift, not our achievement. We are willing to have them overturned, redirected, or set aside if the Lord’s will requires it. And we speak with the humility of creatures, not the certainty of sovereigns. This is the Christian approach to the future, and it is utterly different from the presumptuous planning James rebukes.
This has implications for how we speak about our plans, even to ourselves. A Christian who says, next year I will do this and this, is speaking carelessly. A Christian who says, if the Lord wills, I intend to do this and this, is speaking more truly. The difference is not a pious formula. The difference is whether our speech reflects the reality of our creatureliness or the illusion of our autonomy.
Sins of Omission
James closes this section with a short verse that can be easily overlooked. Whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.
This is a striking conclusion to the teaching about planning. Why does James put it here? Because the person who plans without reference to God, who lives his days assuming his own sovereignty, will inevitably fail to do the good he knows to do. He will have other things on his mind. He will be busy with his own projects. The orphan he could have visited, the neighbor he could have helped, the word he could have spoken — all of these will slip past him because his eye is on his own agenda.
The doctrine of sins of omission is easy to overlook, especially in traditions that emphasize sins of commission. We are quick to confess what we have done wrong; we are slow to confess what we have failed to do. But James says both are sin, and the failure to do the good we know is not a lesser failure. It is sin as fully as the acts we would more readily call sin. The Christian who plans his life around his own projects, and who therefore fails to do the good God has set before him, stands condemned by this verse as much as by any other.
Weep and Howl
James now turns, with startling intensity, to address the rich. Come now, you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. This is prophetic language, the language of Isaiah, Amos, Jeremiah denouncing the exploiters of Israel. James is not writing sweet pastoral counsel here. He is writing as a prophet, calling down woe on those who have built their wealth on the backs of the poor and are about to face the judgment of God.
This passage makes many modern readers uncomfortable, and it should. James is unsparing. He describes wealth that has rotted, garments moth-eaten, gold and silver corroded. He speaks of the wages of workers withheld, crying out against the rich to the Lord of hosts. He accuses the rich of living in luxury and self-indulgence while fattening themselves for the day of slaughter, and of condemning and murdering the righteous person who does not resist. This is some of the sharpest language in the New Testament.
Who Is Being Addressed?
A question immediately arises. Is James addressing Christians, or is he addressing unbelieving rich people outside the church? Commentators have argued both ways. The severity of the language, and the absence of any call to repentance, suggest that James may be speaking prophetically against unbelieving oppressors, in a way intended more to comfort his poor Christian readers (who were often victims of such oppression) than to warn the rich themselves.
But the passage also serves as a warning to any Christian reader who has wealth or aspires to it. The trajectory James describes (wealth accumulated without reference to God, workers exploited, luxury indulged without regard for the poor) is a trajectory that any human being, including a Christian, can fall into. The warning applies to us to the extent that we are sliding in that direction, and it invites us to examine ourselves honestly.
For American Christians in the twenty-first century, this passage is particularly pointed. We are, by any historical or global standard, extraordinarily wealthy. Even those of us who do not feel wealthy have access to resources, comforts, and opportunities that the vast majority of humans across history and around the world have never had. The question is not whether we are rich (by the standards James had in view, most of us are) but whether we hold our wealth rightly.
The Cries of the Harvesters
One image in this passage deserves particular attention. James writes that the wages of the laborers who mowed the fields, kept back by the rich by fraud, are crying out; and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts.
This is a picture with deep roots. In the Old Testament Law, the wages of a hired worker were not to be withheld overnight. To withhold them was to deprive the poor of what they needed to live that day. The Scriptures were clear: God hears the cry of the oppressed worker, and He acts in judgment against the oppressor.
James applies this directly to the wealth his original readers had seen with their own eyes. The rich landowners of first-century Palestine were often known for exploiting their laborers, paying them less than was just, withholding what was owed, using legal systems to their own advantage. And James tells his readers, do not think this oppression is invisible. The cries have reached the Lord. He has heard. And He will act.
This is, in its own way, a word of comfort for the oppressed. If you are in a situation of economic injustice (if you are underpaid, cheated, exploited) the Lord hears. He is not indifferent. He is not blind to the dealings of the powerful. Your cry is not lost in the void. It has reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. And judgment, though delayed, is coming.
A Warning, Not a Political Program
A word of caution is needed here. James is not offering a political program. He is not calling for specific economic policies, specific redistributions, specific systems of governance. The prophetic denunciation of oppressive wealth in Scripture has sometimes been conscripted into political causes on various sides, and the result has been distortion both of the text and of the political conversations.
What James is doing is issuing a prophetic warning. The rich who oppress will face the judgment of God. This is true in every age, under every economic system, in every political arrangement. The warning stands regardless of one’s political convictions about how best to order a society. And the application for the Christian is clear: do not be among those James is warning. Use what you have with an awareness of who gave it to you, how your neighbor is affected by your use of it, and to whom you will give account for it.
For a confessional Lutheran, this warning belongs to the general theology of vocation. Every Christian is called to serve the neighbor through the particular station God has placed them in. The wealthy Christian is called to serve his neighbor through the right use of his wealth: generosity, just dealing, honest wages, care for the poor. The Christian who fails in this calling is not merely failing a moral test; he is failing his vocation. And the judgment James describes is not a distant or abstract threat. Every one of us will give account at the return of the Lord, and our only refuge on that day is the same Christ who forgives the sins of rich and poor alike.
The Farmer Waits
After the prophetic severity of the woe to the rich, James turns to his suffering readers with words of comfort and exhortation. Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient about it, until it receives the early and the late rains.
This is one of the most pastoral passages in the letter. James’s audience is suffering: poor, oppressed, pressed by the very wealthy people James has just denounced. He has already told them that judgment is coming on their oppressors. Now he tells them what their posture should be in the meantime: patience. Not passive resignation, not bitter waiting, not explosive frustration, but the patience of the one who knows the Lord is coming and is willing to wait for Him.
The Image of the Farmer
James reaches for a farming image, and it is a beautiful one. The farmer plants the seed. He does not stand over the field demanding that the crop grow faster. He does not dig up the seed to check on its progress. He waits. And specifically, he waits for the early rains and the late rains: the autumn rains that cause the seed to germinate, and the spring rains that bring the crop to maturity. Between the early rains and the late rains, there is a long stretch of time in which the farmer does his work (weeding, watching, protecting) but in which the ultimate outcome is not in his hands.
For James’s original readers in the agricultural world of ancient Palestine, this image would have been immediately familiar. Every farmer knew the rhythm of the rains, knew the months of waiting, knew the patience required of the one who works in the cycle of seedtime and harvest. And James says, this is what your life in Christ is like. You have been planted, so to speak, in the soil of the Gospel. To carry the image one step further, we might say that the early rains have already come upon you in your Baptism and conversion. The late rains are still ahead: the consummation, the return of the Lord, the final harvest. And between the two, you wait. You work. You endure. And you trust the Lord of the harvest to bring what He has begun to its intended end.
This image will resonate with anyone who has lived in the agricultural world: anyone who has watched a field of corn stand quiet through July waiting for the August rains, anyone who has seen wheat heads swell in the wind as the summer draws toward harvest, anyone who has known the long patience of the farmer through seasons that cannot be rushed. James is writing to people who know how to wait, because their daily bread depends on waiting. He is telling them that the Christian life is the same kind of waiting, on a larger scale. The Lord of the harvest is at work. The harvest is coming. In the meantime, we wait with the patience that belongs to those who trust the One whose field they are.
Establish Your Hearts
James continues: You also, be patient. Establish your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is at hand. The word translated establish means to strengthen, to fix firmly, to make stable. It is the opposite of being tossed about by every trial or temptation. The patient Christian is the Christian whose heart is fixed on the coming of the Lord, not on the immediate shifts of circumstance.
This is a particular kind of patience. It is not stoic endurance, where we simply steel ourselves against whatever comes. It is not fatalistic resignation, where we give up on any better outcome. It is hopeful patience: patience grounded in the sure knowledge that the Lord is coming, that His coming is drawing near, and that everything we are enduring will be weighed, judged, and resolved at His appearing. This hope is what establishes the heart. Without it, we have only grim endurance. With it, we have the patient confidence of those who know how the story ends.
Do Not Grumble
James adds a specific warning: Do not grumble against one another, brothers, so that you may not be judged. Behold, the Judge is standing at the door.
This is a surprising turn. James has just told his readers to be patient under the oppression of the wealthy. And then he warns them not to grumble against one another. Why? Because the pressures of suffering often turn us not against our actual oppressors but against our fellow sufferers. The Christian who is being exploited by his employer comes home and snaps at his wife. The widow who has been ignored by the wealthy complains about her neighbor at church. The patience required of the Lord’s people is not only patience with the Lord’s timing; it is patience with one another in the meantime.
The image of the Judge standing at the door is striking. Judgment is not a distant prospect but an imminent one. The Lord who is coming is close, just outside. Our speech, including our speech against fellow believers, will be weighed by Him. The grumbling that seems so small, that feels so justified, that we hardly notice in ourselves — this too is speech for which we give account. Better to hold our tongues, James says, knowing the Judge is standing at the door.
The Prophets and Job as Examples
James names specific examples to illustrate the patience he commends. As an example of suffering and patience, brothers, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. Behold, we consider those blessed who remained steadfast. You have heard of the steadfastness of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful.
The prophets suffered greatly for their witness. Jeremiah was thrown into a cistern. Elijah fled for his life. Isaiah, according to tradition, was sawn in two. And yet they endured, speaking the Lord’s word, waiting for the Lord’s vindication. They are James’s examples of faithful patience under suffering.
Job is an even more pointed example. Job lost everything (his possessions, his children, his health) and he wrestled with God through chapter after chapter of questioning, complaint, and anguish. Job was not patient in the sense of quiet acceptance; he argued, he demanded, he cried out. But he remained in relationship with God through all of it, and at the end, the Lord blessed him more abundantly than at the beginning. James holds Job up as the example, saying, you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful.
This is important for any Christian who is suffering and who feels their prayers are too raw, their questions too sharp, their complaints too loud to be acceptable before God. Job’s prayers were very raw. Job’s complaints were very loud. And yet the Lord did not reject him. The patience James commends is not polished. It is the patience of those who remain: who cling to the Lord through the night, who do not abandon Him even in their grief, who wait for the morning however long the night is. This is the patience that produces the harvest of righteousness. And it is a patience that ordinary, struggling Christians can actually practice.
Let Your Yes Be Yes
James closes this passage with a seemingly sudden shift. But above all, my brothers, do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or by any other oath, but let your yes be yes and your no be no, so that you may not fall under condemnation.
This command echoes almost word for word the teaching of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. It is one of the clearest places where James shows his dependence on the teaching of his Brother. And it addresses a practice that was common in the ancient world: the use of oaths to reinforce the credibility of one’s speech.
The Culture of Oaths
In the ancient world, people swore by all sorts of things to confirm what they were saying. By heaven, by earth, by the temple, by the altar, by the life of the king. The Pharisees had developed elaborate distinctions about which oaths were binding and which were not, a subject Jesus addressed directly. If someone said, I swear by the gold of the temple, that was binding; but an oath by the temple itself was less so. The culture of oaths had become a culture of evasion, in which people used graded oaths to escape the commitments they were appearing to make.
Jesus and James both cut through this with a simple command. Do not swear at all. Let your yes be yes, and your no be no. The Christian does not need oaths to be credible. The Christian’s plain word, spoken honestly, carries its own weight. And if our plain word is not trusted, that is a scandal: it means we have been inconsistent enough in our honesty that people cannot take what we say at face value.
The Heart of the Matter
This is not primarily about the question of whether a Christian can take an oath in a court of law, though historically Christians have disagreed about that, with some traditions (like the Anabaptists) refusing all oaths and others (including Lutherans) permitting oaths in certain civil contexts. The deeper question is about ordinary speech. It is about whether our word is good without ornamentation. It is about whether we are honest enough in our daily communication that our plain statement is reliable, without the need for reinforcing oaths or emphatic declarations.
For modern Christians, the application might look like this. We do not need to say, I swear I’m telling the truth, to reinforce what we have just said. If we are telling the truth, our saying so should be enough. We do not need to say, honestly, or to tell you the truth, as verbal crutches that imply, without them, we might be saying something less than the truth. The Christian’s yes should be yes. The Christian’s no should be no. And the consistent pattern of our speech should make these simple statements reliable.
Why Here?
Why does James place this teaching here, at the end of a passage about living in the meantime? Because the time between the Lord’s first and second comings is a time of many pressures, and one of the pressures is to shade the truth in our speaking. To make our promises sound bigger than we intend. To cover our commitments with verbal escape hatches. To use words to create impressions we could not justify if the words were plain.
The Christian who is waiting for the Lord’s return should be the kind of person whose speech is plain. Who does not play verbal games. Whose commitments can be trusted without elaborate oaths. This simple integrity of speech is one of the most visible marks of the Christian life in an age when words have become so devalued that people assume speech is manipulation by default. The Christian can be, and should be, the rare person whose plain yes and plain no mean what they say.
Gathering the Threads
This long passage has held together because all four sections describe the same kind of life: the Christian life lived in the meantime, between the Lord’s first coming and His second. James gives us four windows into what eschatological faith looks like in the present. We plan under God rather than in presumption, because we know our lives are mists that vanish and our futures belong to Him. We hold our wealth rightly rather than in luxury that oppresses, because we know the Judge is coming who hears the cries of the harvesters. We endure patiently under suffering, like the farmer waiting for the early and late rains, because we know the harvest the Lord will bring. And we speak plainly, letting our yes be yes, because we know our words will be weighed by the One who is standing at the door.
These four marks are not a four-step program for spiritual maturity. They are the natural shape of a life that believes the Lord is coming back. A Christian who does not live with that conviction will not naturally hold his planning, his wealth, his suffering, or his speech in the way James describes. A Christian who does live with that conviction will, gradually, find these patterns growing in him, not by grinding effort, but by the deepening conviction that everything we do now is happening under the shadow of an imminent return.
For the Lutheran Christian, this is the shape of sanctification. Not a ladder we climb by our own effort, but a life that unfolds as the Gospel does its slow work in us. The farmer is a beautiful image for the Christian life. We wait. We work. We trust. And we know that the Lord of the harvest is faithful, that the harvest will come in its time, and that the patience we practice now is itself a form of the waiting that trusts Him.
The ground beneath all four sections is the same. The Lord is coming. He has not delayed. The Judge is at the door. And the life that knows this will be plain in its speech, patient in its suffering, restrained in its wealth, and humble in its planning. These are not virtues to manufacture. They are the marks of a faith that has reckoned seriously with the imminence of Christ’s return.
For Discussion
The following questions are for group discussion or personal reflection.
James reminds us that our lives are mists that vanish, and warns against planning as if we were sovereign over our own future. Where in your own life have you been making plans without meaningful reference to God? What would it look like to hold those plans more openly before Him?
The rebuke of the wealthy in chapter five is one of the sharpest in the New Testament. By the standards of James’s day (and by global and historical standards), most American Christians are rich. How does this passage apply to us? Without becoming politically partisan, what does it look like to hold wealth rightly as a Christian?
James uses the image of the farmer waiting for the early and late rains. For those in an agricultural context, this image is particularly vivid. How does the farmer’s patience differ from mere resignation? What does Christian patience look like in seasons of prolonged waiting?
Job is James’s example of steadfastness. Yet Job’s prayers were raw: full of questioning, argument, and even complaint. What does it mean that God commended Job as faithful? How does this free you to pray honestly in your own suffering?
James warns against grumbling against one another, against turning our frustrations against fellow believers when our real struggles are elsewhere. Where have you seen this pattern in your own life? Who have you grumbled against when the real issue was something larger?
“Let your yes be yes and your no be no.” What would change in your speech if you took this command seriously? Are there places where you use verbal reinforcements (“honestly,” “I swear,” “trust me”) because your plain word has not always been reliable?
Looking Ahead
Next week we come to the final session of our study. James 5:13–20 brings the letter to a close with a series of pastoral instructions about the life of the congregation: prayer in suffering, song in gladness, anointing and prayer for the sick, confession of sins to one another, and the ministry of reclaiming the wandering brother. It is a fitting close. After the diagnosis and the exhortation, after the severity and the grace, James ends his letter with his pastor’s heart, entrusting his people to one another and to the Lord who hears.
Before next session, read James 5:13–20 at least twice. Notice the pastoral warmth of the passage after so much Law and Gospel in the preceding chapters. And notice how James ends: not with a formal benediction, but with a word about bringing back the wandering. This is the last thing the pastor wants his people to remember. Hold the strayed. Go after them. Do not let them be lost.
Closing Prayer
Heavenly Father, we acknowledge that our lives are mists that appear for a moment and then vanish. Teach us to plan humbly, to hold our wealth rightly, to wait patiently, and to speak plainly. Establish our hearts as we wait for the coming of our Lord. When we are oppressed, hear our cry. When we are tempted to grumble against our brothers and sisters, bridle our tongues. When we are weary, give us the farmer’s patience, trusting You to bring the harvest in Your time. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who was, and is, and is to come. Amen.