Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow, we shall 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 shall live and also do this or that.” But as it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil. Therefore, to one who knows the right thing to do, and does not do it, to him it is sin. — James 4:13-17, NASB
Boasting is arrogant and evil, which means it’s not the right thing to do. If you know the right thing to do (i.e. not boast arrogantly about the future) and don’t do it, it’s sin.
From my perspective, any sales letter for any product (especially work at home and Internet marketing products) that claim that you can make a certain amount of money from a system is wrong.
Based on this, saying, “I made $279 in four days with this system” is OK as long as you tell all of the factors involved. If you did it with a mailing list of 1,000 people, and I don’t have a list, then I’m not going to be able to duplicate your system, am I? Including all pertinent facts will help people make intelligent choices.
I started thinking about this when the new FTC rules were announced, and when I read this passage yesterday, it really hit home. I don’t even know how much money I’ll make today from my Internet marketing business today (although I have an idea), much less next week, next month, or next year. If I don’t know, then nobody else does, either do they? We can guess, we can project earnings, we can do a lot of stuff — but nobody really knows what the future holds, and anybody who claims that they do is practicing something that God considers evil.
There’s nothing wrong with planning, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with putting your plans in writing and even telling others about them. Saying something like, “I plan on using System XYZ to help me reach my income goal of $2.97 for the year” is great. The above passage talks about “if the Lord wills”, and I think that this is a great practical application of this principle. But saying that I WILL make $2.97 with System XYZ starts to cross the line from planning over to evil.
I therefore recommend that you stay away from this Internet marketing / work from home “evil” of future income claims and simply ignore any product that claims you can use it to earn a specific amount of money. Telling you how much was made with the system in the past is OK as long as all factors are spelled out (and they often aren’t), but making a future claim, according to this passage of scripture, is “evil”. And you don’t really want to base your business on evil, do you? You will never build a business based on integrity if you learn from unscrupulous sources. It’s taken me five years to come to this conclusion; hopefully I can save you some of the trouble that I encountered.
