Fights and Quarrels

What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions (James 4:1-3).

There are several interesting points in this passage that we don’t often notice that need to be taken seriously. First is the assumption that fights and quarrels are common. Have there ever been a people, a church, or a nation among whom fights and quarrels are not common? Have you ever gone even for a whole day without coming into conflict with at least one person? (Okay, so you work alone, but don’t you quarrel or fight with God?) Everyone fights and quarrels with others, but each of us is tempted to let himself off the hook by saying, “What’s the big deal, everyone does it. If everyone fights, then it can’t be so bad. It must be part of my being human.” However, this ignores the fact that while mankind is innately sinful, God does not allow sin to remain. God sent his son to die so that sin would not remain the master over men. It is important to God that we not fight and quarrel with one another, and what is important to God should be important to us. We need to get it through our heads that fights and quarrels, while part of sinful human makeup, are not okay and are not allowed.

If then fighting and quarrelling are a part of what it means to be human, and God does not allow them, how can we live the way he requires? How do we do what God tells us to do when we by nature do the opposite? To answer this question, we need to look at the reason this passage gives for why we live the way we do. Why do we fight with one another? According to James, we fight, quarrel, and even murder because we have passions and desires within us that drag us off and entice us to reach out, demand, and take what is not ours (cf. Jas 1:13-17), what God has not given to us. Notice that it tells us in verse 3 that we “covet and cannot obtain.” Does this word ‘covet’ ring any bells in your mind? Yes, the 10th commandment tells us to not covet, “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s” (Exodus 20:17). You see that your neighbor has something, you want one too, can’t get it, so you envy him, and soon a fight breaks out.

Here is a sample situation: Suppose the guy next door makes a lot of money (much more than you) and buys a boat, but doesn’t take you out in it. So, you think to yourself, “I’ll get back at him,” and you don’t give him any slack on his leaves blowing in your yard. Then that begins to irritate you, and now you hate him for his leaves. Then, when he asks to borrow your leaf blower, you blow up at him. It started with you feeling ripped off because he has a job he enjoys, which pays well, has a prettier wife, nicer kids, is more spiritual, has better and bigger toys, etc. and it ends with you grumbling about him and not talking any more because his wife “looked” at your wife funny at the neighborhood picnic. What started out to be the “innocent” envy of your neighbor’s boat turned into a lifelong blood feud with your neighbor.

Okay, the fights and quarrels are a normal part of life, but we’re not supposed to have them. They happen because we break the 10th commandment and covet one another’s’ stuff. We envy, lust, have lively passions. How can we stop it? What’s the solution?

First, you need to know (know in your bones) that you aren’t the center of the universe, that that position is already filled by God, that life is not about you and what you want or who you are, but it is about God and who he is and what he wants. You exist for his glory, not yours.

Second, you need to know (again, in your bones) that you exist in order to live in relationship with God, who created you, who sent his son to pay the penalty of your sin, to redeem you from sin, to set you free from sin, to change you from the inside out so that you might have a holy, sanctified, relationship with him. You exist for God’s good pleasure and for your relationship with him. Everything in your life is about your relationship with him and his with you.

Third, this all means that since life is not about you and you are here to live in community with God, you don’t have time (or the right) to have passions and desires that ruin or destroy your relationship with God.

Fourth, since this life is not about you or your desires and passions, living a holy life is also not about your strength or will. It is true that the Bible tells us to obey the commands of God, but it also says that it is God working in us that brings about his will in our lives. What this means is that living in communion with God is about our obedience, but this is more about our faith than about our will power. James basically says that you ask, but do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives (v. 3); you want to receive so that you can feed your passions. But the Bible also says that if you ask anything in the Name of Jesus, you will receive it (Jn 15:16). “In the name of Jesus” means asking in accord with his will, with right motives, for God’s kingdom and for God’s glory.

How this works out practically is this: suppose you’ve been a Christian for several years and you discover a church in another part of the country that is doing things the way you think Christian things ought to be done. So you decide to pack up your family and move to where that church is so you can participate in their life with God. Suppose when you get there that you discover that the leadership in the new church are all much older than you and they tell you that in order to become a leader, you’ve got to live in the community for several years and by your life and ministry show yourself to be qualified to lead. Suppose that you agree to that, even though you think you have the gifts and abilities far above most of the current leaders. Now suppose 10 years have passed and the leaders don’t seem to be noticing your godliness in the way you think they ought and so you begin to ask God to have them notice you. In what appears to be an answer to your prayers, the church leaders ask you to write a few things and to begin attending their leadership training school. Then, however, another 2 years go by, and still they don’t mention you for an actual leadership position.

Notice in my example there are several places where a man might be tempted to protest, to go it his own way, to rise up and demand that others notice him. But what does the man of God do? How can a man live by faith in God in this situation? Know this: another word for faith is trust. If you have faith in God, you will trust him. If you ask and he doesn’t give you what you ask for, your faith will cause you to say, “I trust God and will assume that if he didn’t give me what I asked for, he is either saying, ‘Wait, you’re not ready,’ or ‘No, this isn’t for you,’ or ‘No, I have something else in mind for you.’” The one living by faith says, “I trust God for what I have and am receiving and will praise him for it.” If a person has strong desires for something that God says ‘no’ about, the one having faith in God says, “I submit my desires to your will and will rejoice in what you have given me rather than get disappointed in what you haven’t given me.”

In the situation above, the worldly way to respond would be to get bitter, increase in envy, criticize the leadership (maybe even in public), run away, cause a stink. This is not of faith. It is exactly what James was talking about: what causes wars and quarrels among you? Your unbridled lusts which rule your life, cause you to do things that are antithetical to the Gospel of love and peace with God and consequently with your fellow man. This is sin and is a travesty to the Kingdom of God. The fortunate thing is that James had to spell it out for the first century Christian and therefore he has also spelled it out for the 21st century Christian for the same reasons. The sinful, quarrelsome man thinks he is in the right. He might even think God is happy with him. Unless the hand of God comes down hard upon him, he believes that he is the victim because “those other guys wouldn’t recognize my intellectual abilities and godliness and now I’m showing them.” But what he’s really showing them and all the world is that he was motivated from the beginning by his own passions and desires to be noticed by man rather than God.

In this example, the godly way to respond would be to continue to walk with God, trusting that the Father was giving what he deemed best for the man and his family. If he thought the elders were overlooking him, he would ask God to help in the situation and he would continue to shine like a light in the midst of the congregation and let his good deeds show his godly qualities. He would love his wife, love his children, get along with the church leadership, and he would glorify God in every way he could while waiting for God to give him what God wanted to give. Walking by faith means trusting that what God has given you is what God wants for you to have, and that makes you happy and content.

First published April, 2006