James 4:1-6
James 4:1
What causes conflicts and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from the passions at war within you?
By: Rev. Aaron Sprock
James 4:1-6
(1) What causes conflicts and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from the passions at war within you?
(2) You crave what you do not have; you kill and covet, but are unable to obtain it. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask.
(3) And when you do ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may squander it on your pleasures.
(4) You adulteresses! Do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore, whoever chooses to be a friend of the world renders himself an enemy of God.
(5) Or do you think the Scripture says without reason that the Spirit He caused to dwell in us yearns with envy?
(6) But He gives us more grace. This is why it says:
“God opposes the proud,
but gives grace to the humble.”
What is the Heart of Your Desires?
I have two older brothers. I do not have to tell you that for most of my early life there was a lot of fun in our household, but there was also a lot of fighting. In fact, there were many times where it went from fun to fighting and back to fun within the span of just a few seconds. In the midst of those times my mom would come on find us and she would ask us a question “Why are you fighting?” To tell you the truth most of the time my brothers and I did not have a good answer to that question. In this passage of scripture, James calls us to look in our own self and answer the same question “Why are you fighting?” His answer is clear, we don’t understand our own desires and as a result, we care about the things that we shouldn’t.
James asks us to diagnose the root cause of our quarrels with one another. The first question he wants us to ask is this what are your unmet desires? He then reveals to us that when you have those unmet desires you do not look internally but you start to covet and blame other people for the things that you do not have. A wise approach for each of us would be to ask this question when we are angry or upset with another person. What am I missing? What do I feel like I should have but don’t? When we find the answer to that question we can see that one of the reasons we are angry with others around us is that we feel that they have something we don’t.
James not only gives us the ability to diagnose the problem, but he also gives us the solution. The solution is prayer. If we do not have something then we need to ask God for it. When we do this it helps us realize whether the thing that we are asking for is truly important or not. Are we asking for things that fit the passions of God or are we asking for things that would only satisfy our worldly desires? I can remember a few times in my youth praying that God would allow my favorite football team(either the Chicago Bears or the Huskers) to win a football game. I can see now that that is an example of praying for God to meet my passions. While that may be a silly example we do need to understand what we are bringing before the throne of God and whether or not it is something that is a part of the kingdom of God or a part of the worldly kingdom.
What I love about how this passage ends is that it shows what God continues to give us, which is grace upon grace. God wants to see in our lives a passion for Him not the world . God wants us to be able to seek after the kingdom of God and pray that we can see that He has placed us in a community, neighborhood and family to proclaim that they can experience the wisdom and provision of God in their own lives each day.
By: Rev. Aaron Sprock
Pastor @ FBC Chadron
Region Minister