Fights and Quarrels (Part 1 of 2)

Welcome to Truth for Life. Today we begin a study in the book of James. This is a letter that was written to provide believers with practical instruction for how to live godly lives in an ungodly world. For example, in chapter 4, James deals with conflict. Throughout the New Testament, Jesus promised peace and called his followers to live at peace with one another. But James raises the question, why are there still so many fights and quarrels even within the church?

Alistair Begg explores the answer to that question today. We're going to read from the Bible in James chapter 4 in the New Testament. James chapter 4, and reading from verse 1. What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don't they come from your desires that battle within you? You want something, but don't get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight, you do not have, because you do not ask God.

When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. You adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world is hatred towards God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. Or do you think Scripture says without reason that the Spirit he caused to live in us envies intensely, but he gives us more grace?

That is why Scripture says God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Amen. Just a brief prayer together. As we turn to the Bible, we pray, O God, that you will help us to love what you command and to desire what you promise for the sake of your Son Jesus, in whose name we pray.

Amen. Well, if you've kept your Bible open, you know that we are continuing our studies here in this letter of James. This last two or three studies has focused on the distinction between the wisdom which comes from heaven, which is heavenly, obviously, and is displayed with a humble heart and in the quality of life, and contrasted with the wisdom in verse 15, which is described as being earthly and unspiritual and of the devil. That wisdom, as we saw last time, reveals itself in envy and in selfish ambition, and the upshot of it is that where that is prevalent, then you find disorder and every evil practice. He finishes chapter 3 in the eighteenth verse, describing a wonderful harvest of righteousness that is the experience of peacemakers who sow in peace—peacemakers being the wise ones who go on quietly sowing a harvest of righteousness, first in their own lives by God's enabling and then in the lives of other people. And I think it is the closing verse of 13—although we recognize that there are no chapter breaks in the original—but it is the closing verse of verse 18 that makes the opening verses of chapter 4 quite striking, I think you would agree. Peacemakers sowing in peace, a harvest of righteousness, and then immediately the next sentence, what causes fights and quarrels among you. Has James launched off in an entirely different direction? Did he go away for breakfast, as it were, and come back later in the morning and decide to take another tank entirely?

No, I don't think so. I think it follows directly and fairly obviously peace. The kind of peace that is represented in verse 18 is far from what is described in the opening parts of chapter 4.

And indeed, the distinction is so very, very clear. He's essentially saying that the events that I'm now about to address with you—coveting and quarreling and misplaced affections and wrongful desires—they certainly do not fit category 1. They are not an embodiment of the wisdom that comes down from heaven.

But rather, the picture that he gives to us is the antithesis of that. It is a description of lives that are marked by unfulfilled desires and by a restlessness that is liable at any time and in any place to break out in fighting and in feuding. In fact, I think the humility factor, which runs really through the whole book of James, may actually be far more of a key to understanding it than I've even given any consideration to. The notion that humility coming from wisdom in verse 13 works itself out in a certain way, and the absence of that and the presence of pride in another, it seems to make just a melodic line that runs through at least a significant number of these verses. Because it is the humble individual who recognizes that Father knows best. It is the proud individual that says, God didn't give me this, and I'm going to have to go and get it for myself. It is the humble individual who says, My life is very brief, as we read in the Old Testament psalm, and as James reminds us here in the second half of chapter 4, you don't know what will happen tomorrow.

You're amiss that appears for a little while. The humble person recognizes that. The proud person says, No, I'm actually in charge of my destiny and in charge of my life, and tomorrow I'm going to go and do this, and I'll spend a year here or there, and I will get profit, and I will carry on business, and I will make money for myself. Not that the making of money is in itself wrong, but a preoccupation with money and with self-aggrandizement is representative of earthly wisdom and not heavenly wisdom. And so, James, as he comes from this little section that we know as the end of chapter 3 into chapter 4, he's making it clear to his readers, in the words of John Lennon, that life is very short and there is no time for fussing and fighting, my friends.

That's what he's saying, really, isn't it? I need to talk to you about fussing and fighting. I need to talk to you about feuding and quarreling. And I want you to know that life is going by very, very quickly, and there's no time for this kind of foolishness.

It's not unique to James. You find Paul doing the same thing at the beginning of 1 Corinthians, in the third chapter, where he says, By this time I should be addressing you as adults. I have to address you as babies, because you're worldly. How do I know that you're worldly?

Because there is still fighting and feuding among you, and this just gives me the indication that all is wrong with you. He does the same thing as he gets to the end of his second letter in chapter 12 of 2 Corinthians, and identifies these individuals as living just like men of the world. Well, you say, has he then, in chapter 4, identified a new audience? Is he addressing people different from those whom he has been addressing in chapter 3 and 2 and 1?

And the answer is clearly no. His target is still, according to verse 18 of chapter 1, those who are believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, those who are followers of Jesus, those who, according to God's purpose, he chose to give us birth through the Word of truth, the story of the gospel as revealed in Jesus, so that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created. Those are the recipients of the letter. It's not written to a place. It's a more general letter than that which would be written to the believers in Corinth or whatever it might be. And indeed, it is the very generic nature of it which helps us to understand just how applicable it is to each of us this morning. No, the person he's addressing here in chapter 4 is the believer who has been making an attempt to sit on the fence, the individual who's trying to have it both ways—the person who wants to love God and to love himself, the girl who wants to pay attention to what the Bible has to say but only in selected areas of life.

And the fence-sitter is about to discover that this fence is actually shaky, it's wobbly, it's painful, and inevitably one will come down on one side or on the other. If their hearts are humble, then they will acknowledge that God knows and he knows what's best for his children. If the heart is not humble and fails to accept what God the Father in his sovereign purposes is doing, then in the pursuit of pleasure or in the pursuit of profit, these individuals will discover that solid joy and lasting treasure is actually beyond their reach. It is this preoccupation with the desires from within. Now, what I'd like to do is simply suggest to you that we can look at verses 1–3 under the heading The Problem of Conflicting Passions. The Problem of Conflicting Passions. Because that is what he's referencing in these desires.

The word here for desire, as we have it in the NIV, which may be lust if you have an older English translation, is the word hedon in Greek, hedon, which gives us our English word hedonism. And it is the internal, selfish orientation towards that which is apart from God and distinct from him. James makes this clear by beginning with two rhetorical questions. What about these feuds and struggles, he says, or these fights and quarrels? Where do you suppose they come from? And then, rhetorically, can't you see that they come from inside?

Don't they come from your desires that battle within you? The heart of man is desperately wicked. That's what the Bible says.

It's not a politically correct statement, and it is challenged on multiple fronts on a daily basis. Explanations for the condition of humanity are offered to us consistently from all quarters, many of them failing to pay any attention at all to the idea of man being warped from the inside and, indeed, from the very outset of his existence, choosing his own selfish way rather than God's. When a person comes to trust in Jesus, discovers Jesus to be a Savior and a friend, that sinful propensity has its status changed, so that sin no longer reigns in the life of a believer, of a Christian, but it remains in the life. It is not that its presence is eradicated, but it is that its status is altered. And this is of vital importance if we're going to understand what is happening in our lives when we seek to follow Jesus.

If we think that in becoming a follower of Jesus we have joined a house party or a tranquil experience or we're going to just enjoy some easy existence for the rest of our lives, then, of course, we have been sold a bill of goods that has nothing at all to do with the Bible. We immediately discover that the Westminster Confession of Faith is of great help to us when it announces the fact that the Christian is involved in a continual and irreconcilable war. A continual and irreconcilable war. My wife and I have been watching programs from Britain now for a few weeks called Foyles War, and I can recommend them to you.

You can watch them with impunity. They're detective stories set in the context of Hastings in the south coast of England in the framework of the Second World War between 1941 and following. And one of the recurring themes in it is, of course, the fact that there is a war on, so that when somebody says something about deprivation or about the absence of eggs or the inability to get butter, somebody will say, But don't you know there's a war on? And it is because the war is on that these things are part and parcel. We need to understand, if we are Christians today, that there's a war on. That the same grace that reconciles us to God antagonizes us to the evil one. And the war is waged, the Bible tells us, on three fronts—against the world, against the flesh, and against the devil. The external elements are clearly the world and the devil, and the internal factor is our flesh—or, if you like, our sinful nature. And it is on account of our propensity to sin that the devil is able, by means of all kinds of attractive propositions, to woo us away from our professed affection for Jesus and our professed desire to love God with all our heart and all our soul and all our mind and all our strength. Why, says somebody, is it so difficult to do this?

Answer, because there is a war on. And we fight a royal battle daily and consistently by the enabling of God's Spirit, through the instruction of God's Word, to be free of the clutches of our own sinful nature. And John, in 1 John chapter 2, puts it in this way, Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes, and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever. Now, of course, it would be very possible for us to push this out to an extreme and to adopt a posture which sought to isolate us from the very world in which we've been set. But Jesus cleared that up, didn't he, in John 17, where in his high priestly prayer he says, Father, I don't pray that you take them out of the world but that you keep them from the evil one. What James is saying and what John is saying here about worldliness is not a call for some kind of isolated experience whereby we are not engaged with the nature of the world in which we live or whereby we have no friends of those who do not share our view of the world and so on.

No, it's not that at all. But it is that we face the continuing presence of indwelling sin, which is a base of operation which is a quisling in the human heart. Every sin is an inside job. Every sin is an inside job.

We cannot take the Tom Sawyer out. The devil made me do it, Aunt Polly. The answer is, no, he didn't.

No, he didn't. If you are a Christian, the Holy Spirit who lives in you is greater than he who is in the world. And although he may make so very appealing and alluring to us attitudes and activities that would drive us away from God, every time we go that road, every time we make that choice, every time we take that path, we take it.

We take it. And it is by means of our own sinful desires. Now, that is important to understand. Otherwise, we're not going to really get what he's saying here concerning these conflicting passions. And the conflicting passions come out very straightforwardly.

The punctuation is difficult throughout all of these verses that I've just read, and not least of all, verse 1b and 2. Let me translate it for you the way I think is best. You desire and do not have, so you kill. You covet and cannot obtain, so you quarrel and fight. You desire and do not have, so you kill.

If looks could kill. The earthly, unspiritual, devilish wisdom, which is revealed in envy and selfish ambition, which creates disorder in every evil practice, is well familiar with the murderous gaze, with the glint in the eye that says, I would never physically do it to you, because I don't have the guts, but I wish you were dead. You desire and do not have, and so you kill.

You want stuff and you cannot obtain, so you quarrel and fight. It's very painful, isn't it? I mean, surely was a prophetic word when we began James 1-1, and I said, This is probably going to be one of the more painful journeys that we've taken as a church family. Every Sunday after Sunday is the most uncomfortable experience to turn again and again to the Bible. And here we find that a dissatisfied heart is never at peace with God, with itself, or with its fellow man. A dissatisfied heart is never at peace with God or with itself. And it won't be at peace with his spouse. And if you have somebody who is constantly disruptive and detrimental, divisive, who flies off the handle at the slightest provocation, who comes in on a Monday morning to the office, and she or he is just totally and already out of control, animosity abounds from them, then you can safely assume that there is something that is going on in private and that is unseen, that has produced what is now obvious and reveals itself in the community experience.

And that is exactly what James is saying. The issue is not circumstantial. The issue is the desire of my heart. When the desire of my heart is wrong, then that which flows from my heart will be equally wrong and will produce this kind of animosity.

Well, so somebody, I can answer that. I think all you have to do is pray. Surely prayer is the answer. Well, prayer may be the answer, but it doesn't appear to be the answer according to James here, does it? In verse 3, you don't have, because you don't ask God. In some instances, you don't even pray about it at all. But when you do ask, you don't receive, because you ask with wrong motives.

So James actually goes right to the level of motivation, and he says, You wouldn't be thinking of just asking God for this, would you? And why not? Because you know you'd be asking for what you have no right to. For your asking is in the wrong spirit.

You only want to satisfy your own desires. Now, think about this for just a moment. It is not an unfamiliar experience for me to be told by members of the congregation and people that I meet that the issue that they're tackling they've prayed about, and absolutely nothing has happened. As if somehow or another, by the reciting of certain words and phrases, they can make it all go away or everything will be fixed. And James is pointing out that unless prayer is a genuine expression of submission to God, then it frankly is irrelevant. Because God hears prayers—Psalm 145—he hears the prayers of those who call upon him in truth. God will do what God does according to his revealed will and purposes. And if we are smart enough to know what God has said in his Word about certain things, and we're actually coming to ask him to do something that runs contrary to his Word, then it's a complete waste of time. It's an exercise in complete futility. Because we ask not in order that we might receive, but in order that we might receive, in order we might do what we want, and since God knows that's what we want, he says, Turn channel three off.

Turn channel three off. Begs on again. He's on with the same thing, but I know his heart. I know he has a stony heart. You're listening to Truth for Life, that is Alistair Begg, with an appropriate warning about how we can't love the world and God simultaneously.

We'll hear more tomorrow. As Alistair mentioned in today's message, the instruction found in the book of James is challenging. And we thought, as a way to supplement this series, we would recommend to you a book called Radically Whole, Gospel Healing for the Divided Heart. This is a book that examines the entire letter of James, section by section, highlighting God's grace and teaching us how to think and speak and behave in a more godly manner. As you read this book, you'll learn how to recognize division in your own heart and in your church. You'll work through questions at the end of each chapter, and you'll learn how God gives you strength in those moments of weakness, when your inclination is to serve your will and not God's will. Request your copy of Radically Whole when you give a donation to support the teaching ministry of Truth for Life.

You can donate through the mobile app or online at truthforlife.org slash donate, or give us a call at 888-588-7884. In addition to our ongoing study in the book of James, I want to tell you about another series we produced. This is a foundational study from Truth for Life.

It's been made new. It was nearly 40 years ago that Alistair preached a series on faithfulness and what we can learn from the life of Abraham. Recently, our team retrieved this series from the archives, and we have completely remastered the audio. So if you enjoy vintage teaching from Alistair, let me invite you to listen to the 12-message series titled Venturing in Faith. You'll find it on our website at truthforlife.org slash Abraham.

And go along with this classic series. We've put together a new corresponding study guide. If your Bible study group is looking for something to go through together this fall, this will take you through a 12-week deep dive into the life of Abraham. Together you can explore both the pitfalls and the new beginnings that marked both Abraham's and our own journey of faith. Download the study guide for free or you can purchase the booklet at our cost. Again, you'll find the series and the study guide at truthforlife.org slash Abraham.

I'm Bob Lapine. Thanks for listening today. Loving the world isn't simply a minor slight to God. He thinks of it as spiritual adultery. Tomorrow we'll find out how to break the bonds of earthly passions. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life where the Learning is for Living.