Fights and Quarrels (Part 2 of 2)

The book of James addresses fence straddlers, people who want to have it both ways.

People who want to love God and pursue what the world has to offer. James makes it clear that loving the world isn't simply a minor slight to God. He thinks of it as spiritual adultery. Today on Truth for Life we'll learn how we break the bonds of earthly passions.

Alistair Begg is teaching from the opening verses in James chapter 4. It simply suggests to you that we can look at verses 1–3, under the heading The Problem of Conflicting Passions. 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, it 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.

It's every Sunday after Sunday. It's 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, 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. 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.

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! Begs on again. He's on with the same thing. But I know his heart. I know he has a stony heart. The Lord hears the cries of the penitent. He hears the cries of the penitent. So if I don't have a penitent heart, he doesn't hear my cry. If I pray like the Pharisee—who was praying, remember, on the street corner with the tax collector beside him—if I pray like the Pharisee, then I might as well just stand up and say, Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the clock. The clock struck one.

It's irrelevant. I thank you that I'm not his other man, and certainly not like this fellow that's here, God. This guy, he does nothing.

I do everything. I pray, I fast twice a week, I give my stuff away, I thank you. And the publican wouldn't even look up to heaven, and he smote his breast, and he said, God, be merciful to me, the sinner. And what did Jesus say?

He said, This man went down to his house justified. Why? Because God hears the prayers of the penitent. What causes fights and feuds among you? Why all this animosity? Comes from inside. Why don't you pray about it? Well, I should. Well, you'd better not pray about it, he says, unless you mean what you're saying.

Because you can't have it both ways. See, James is addressing, essentially, the backslider here. James is addressing the individual who has stepped out on the road to follow Jesus, and a great affirmation of faith has accompanied him.

I'm going to be the man that lives for Christ. And along the road, gradually, surreptitiously, it has begun to eat away. His conviction has been eroded a little. I don't think this matters as much as I once did.

I don't think it really matters about really listening to the Bible or listening to all of the Bible or paying attention to all of these things and so on. Before the person knows where he is, he's in Bipathmeadow, or he's in Douter's Castle, or he's definitely at war with Apollyon. This is all pilgrim's progress. He's worldly wise man. He's talkative.

He's backslider. And God who searches the hearts knows. You see, the conflicting passions here have to do not simply with our processes or our application but with our motivation. And so we don't bring our lives before God to have him sort them out, because we don't really want them sorted out.

And God knows that. You go to the doctor, the doctor does the diagnosis. You tell him, This is the problem here. He says, That may be the presenting problem, but I'll tell you what the problem really is.

And let me tell you what's going to be involved in fixing this. And then he lays out the treatment plan. The person says, I don't like the treatment plan. You say, Well, do you want to be cured, or do you want to live with it?

I think I'll just live with it. Then the surgeon says, Go live with it and die with it. We come before God, asking him to fix things and sort things, and God knows our hearts. I often say my prayers, but do I really pray?

And do the feelings of my heart go with the words I say? I might as well bow down and pray to gods of stone, as offer to the living God a prayer of words alone. That's why we began by praying, Help me, O God, to love what you command and to desire what you promise.

Help me to love what you command and to desire what you promise. Because otherwise, I'm stuck here in verses 1–3 in the realm of conflicting passions. Verses 4–6, the problem of divided affection. The problem of divided affection. What a striking beginning to verse 4. You adulterous people—or you adulterers and adulteresses—don't you know that friendship with the world is hatred towards God? What is he talking about here? He's talking about disloyalty. In the Old Testament, the picture of God's people is that of his betrothed.

He has loved them. And he sends his prophets to them again and again to say, You shouldn't wander away from me. You shouldn't have affections with other gods.

You shouldn't bow down at these little shrines. You belong to me. And so the prophets come and confront the people routinely in the realm of their spiritual adultery. You have been betrothed to God.

Therefore, for you to do this is for you to be disloyal and adulterous. As Christians, the same is true. We belong to the Lord Jesus Christ. We have been united with the Lord Jesus Christ.

That's what's happened to us. We haven't adopted a program—you can adopt a program and not be united to Jesus—we haven't just decided to sing a certain bunch of songs as opposed to other songs we used to sing. What has happened to us is that we have been organically woven into the very fabric of Godhead in the Lord Jesus Christ. We have, in our baptism, expressed this. We were buried with him in baptism, and we were raised with him to newness of life. And in our baptismal service, as it will follow this evening, we were declaring that Jesus Christ is Lord, that he is Lord of all. He's not Lord of part.

He's Lord of the totality. All my money, all my hopes, all my dreams, all my future, all my sexuality—everything belongs to him. And therefore, for us to engage in activity or to adopt attitudes which mar that relationship is to be guilty of spiritual adultery.

And that's what makes it so telling. Peter says, In your hearts, set apart Christ as Lord. What does that mean? Well, it means this—that I have no freedom to believe about anything, anything other than what my Lord has given me to believe. I have no right to determine where I belong apart from where my Lord says, You belong. And I have no right to behave in any way that I choose, because the Lord Jesus is the one who determines my behavior. And all of this on the basis of friendship. Friendship! Remember, Jesus says, I call you my friends. You adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world is hatred towards God? We have become the friends of God. We weren't God's friends. God's wrath was revealed against all the wickedness and godlessness of men. He was opposed to us, and we were opposed to him.

How could we ever get together? Because of Jesus! So that when he dies upon the cross, he bears God's righteous judgment against sin, which is the meeting out of his wrath, and he pays the penalty for our sin, as only he who as a man could do and only he who as God could provide. It's an amazing and wonderful truth. And because he has gone to such extent to make us his friends, isn't it painful to see your face under the heading, you adulterous people?

What do you think you're doing, he says? When I allow self and my own selfish desires to take the place of my submission to God, I make myself inevitably a friend of the world, and therefore an enemy of God. I have, if you like, walked out of the armies of the living God and walked over into the enemy's camp. And I may even be tempted to wear some of their uniform. So that like the sixties on the King's Road in Chelsea, people who by that time were in their fifties and sixties had the strange experience of seeing the trendsetters in the hippie years wearing their old clothes, wearing stuff that they had got rid of a long time ago. And now, in this strange paradox, the hipp were in the old stuff. But isn't that from the old days? Oh, yes.

But it works quite well with the new days. Isn't that language from the old days? Yeah.

Isn't that animosity and envy from the old days? Isn't that some of your old clothes? Isn't that some of the wardrobe you used to have before you knew Christ? Yes.

Well then, why are you wearing it now? Do you think Jesus likes to walk out with you, wearing such an ugly outfit? Do you really think it is possible to combine all that is represented in Galatians 5 in terms of the works of the flesh with all of the beauty of the fruit of the Spirit and dress yourself up like some strange, ugly person and walk out into the community and not confuse the world about what it means to be a follower of Jesus? James is saying you can't do it, because ipso facto, you cannot be both the friend of God and the friend of the world simultaneously.

Jesus said it. You cannot love God and money. Either you will love the one and hate the other, or you will cling to the one and desert the other. But you can't love them both. Somebody wins.

Dylan got it right, didn't he? You gotta serve somebody. And James is saying here, you adulterous people, do you honestly think that you can be a turncoat? Do you honestly think that you could choose to adopt a spirit of opposition to God, that you can cultivate attitudes which are opposed to God, that you can engage in activities which are clearly contrary to his will and not become his enemy?

It can't be done. Where something is clearly revealed in the Bible as wrong, it is wrong, wrong, always wrong. And when I willfully look that in the Scriptures and turn my back on it and do my own thing, I choose to make myself an enemy of God.

Isn't that what James is saying? You adulterous people, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. It's spiritual adultery. It's like breaking your marriage vows. It doesn't mean necessarily the end of your marriage, but it sure makes a royal mess.

It sure changes everything. All of the intimacy and the friendship that was wrapped up in that wonderful relationship has now been fractured. I spent the last week reading a book that I started, so I decided to finish it, but my wife told me, she said, I've never seen you so depressed reading a book in my life. And I was reading a book written by the girl who was married in the sixties at one time to George Harrison and then to Eric Clapton and then to someone else. One of the saddest books—I don't recommend it to you at all, you may be depressed along with me—one of the saddest books you could ever read, because it is the story of profligacy and adultery and absolute mayhem. And underneath all of the superficial rock and roll jamboree is the brokenness and the wretchedness and the tornness and the disappointment and the sadness and the emptiness of life lived contrary to the purposes of God.

We cannot have it both ways. But listen—and listen carefully, and with this we finish—why is all of this so very important? Because of the nature of God's love for his children. He doesn't abandon those, one eighteen, to whom he has chosen to give birth through the word of his truth in order that he might make them a firstfruits of all that he has created. He's going to persevere with us and enable us to persevere. And how does he do this?

Well, he gives more grace. And the very difficult verse, 5, means perhaps this—that we should look into verse 5 and see God longing, if you like, by his Spirit with a passionate jealousy that we might be all his, that we might be his alone, so that when he sees us linked with an affection for ourselves or for our stuff or for our earthly passions and our feeble pleasures, then he doesn't say, Well, I'm done with him, because after all, look what he's done, look what she's done. No, he yearns after us.

He is jealous for us to be all his. He pursues us. He comes after us. He drops the portcullis to make it as if we will never meet him or hear from him again, so that in that sense of lostness and in that sense of emptiness, we may cry out for him.

Do you understand? He doesn't come immediately to make us feel good about our predicament, to make us feel good in our sin, so that we might say, Oh, I love it in the pigsty. This is quite a nice place to live. I'm sure maybe more people would like to live in the pigsty. No, he brings us to the pigsty in order that we might say, Oh, this is ridiculous.

This is absurd. How could someone who had loved me to such an extent look at me in this mess? I will go back to him, and I will say, I've sinned against heaven, and in your sight. And the Father says, Come on, that's exactly what I'm talking about.

And how does that happen? Because he gives more grace. He yearns for us. He'll do all that it will take in order to persevere with us, in order that we might become the very firstfruits of all he has created. Loved with everlasting love, led by grace, that love to know, Spirit breathing from above, you have taught me it is so. Oh, what perfect peace!

Oh, what grandeur all divine! Since I know as now I know, I am his and he is mine. And because I know that I am his and he is mine, it is absurd and ridiculous that I should be involved in these fights and squabbles. And I know why it is, because in my own heart I'm trying to sit on the fence, and I haven't been praying about it, because I don't want him to fix it, but I'm going to have to go to him and say what the prodigal said. And when you do, transformation—absolute transformation, not necessarily instantaneously, but begun and will be completed. Because, you see, the future comes in at the rate of sixty seconds a minute. And this kind of issue is not resolved once in your life.

It is constantly, constantly the issue. When I was small, and they taught me all my choruses, for which I remain always grateful, they taught me, just saying, I met Jesus at the crossroads. You remember this one? Where the two ways meet. And Satan too was standing there, and he said, Hey, come this way. Lots and lots of pleasures I will give to you today. Well, when I was six and I learned that, you know, what would that be? I don't know.

Satan was standing there, and he offered me lots of pleasures. You know, like, forty-four packets of Starburst. I don't know what it would be. When you're seventeen, you've got a better grasp. When you're twenty-seven, it comes out in different ways. When you're fifty-five, it's still the same crossroads. It's still the same question.

It's still the same come on. Hey, come here. You don't have to stay there. You don't have to obey that.

You don't have to pay attention to this. Come here. Satan too was standing there, and he said, Come this way.

Lots and lots of pleasures I will give to you today. But then we had to move over to the other side of the room. But I said, No. There's Jesus here.

That's it. I said, No, there's Jesus here. Do you realize that Jesus sits in the pews? Sits in every single pew. Here's our singing. Knows our hearts. There's Jesus here.

Just see what he offers me. Down here my sin's forgiven, and up there there's a home in heaven. That's it.

That's the way for me. And indeed, the continual irreconcilable war into which we have been plunged as a result of God's grace, uniting us to his Son, is a sore trial. Because any dead fish can go downstream. But it takes a live fish, enlivened by God's truth, enabled by God's Spirit. The pathway is the pathway of humility, and the process he describes in verses 7, 8, and 9.

And if God spares us, then we will look at verses 7, 8, and 9 next time. You're listening to Alistair Begg on Truth for Life. Alistair will be back in just a minute.

Alistair spoke today about our ongoing battle with conflicting passions and divided affections. That's the subject of a book we want to recommend to you today. It's called Radically Whole, Gospel Healing for the Divided Heart. This is a book that will help you think through and apply the practical teaching found in the New Testament book of James. Ask for your copy of Radically Whole today when you give a donation online at truthforlife.org slash donate or call us at 888-588-7884. By the way, there are just a few days left for you to request your free download of Alistair's audiobook, Brave by Faith, God-Sized Confidence in a Post-Christian World. Alistair draws from the book of Daniel to highlight the similarities between the world in which Daniel lived and our world today. As you listen to the book, you'll be challenged to trust God to provide the courage you need to remain faithful in an increasingly unbelieving culture. You'll also gain confidence to proclaim Jesus even when others don't understand or welcome the message. The Brave by Faith audiobook is available to download free of charge but only until the end of August, so don't miss out.

Visit truthforlife.org slash brave, and do it today. Now here's Alistair to close with prayer. Father, thank you for the Bible. Thank you for your amazing grace, which not only saves but keeps us, despite our stumblings and our bumblings. Forgive us our contradictions and our backslidings. Thank you for that wonderful phrase, reminding us that you give more grace. And to become a recipient of your grace is in part at least to bow down in the awareness that we don't deserve it. Amazing grace. Grace that is greater than all our sins. May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God our Father, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, rest and remain with all who believe now and forevermore. Amen.

I'm Bob Lapine. There's a world of difference between outward grudging conformity to rules and genuine joyful submission to God. Tomorrow we'll hear how God responds to each of those. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.