Verse 1
What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?
James begins chapter 4 with a rhetorical question that he then answers. And he quickly answers it because he knows what our natural response often is: it is the other persons’ fault. But James wants to go beyond the typical surface response and get to heart of what causes fighting and quarrelling among people. What is the true origin that causes someone to initial a dispute with someone.
When he says among you he could be referring to any dispute or conflict that his audience has had with someone else. He could be referring to someone at their work, in the their neighborhood, within their family. And I do think those relationships would apply to what he is going to say about fighting and quarreling. But James is writing to Jewish Christians and I think the primary idea behind the phrase among you is the relationships that we have within the body of Christ, the church.
What is causing the disputes that you are having within the church family?
And so James answers the question with another question. He writes, “Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?” James is saying, ‘the issue isn’t the external things or circumstances in our life that create fighting, but the cause of the quarreling is what is happening inside of you.’
Your conflict with someone else begins because you have conflict within yourself. Your outward battle is the result of an inward battle.
That word passion in verse 1 literally means pleasure, which is often used in the context of sensual or physical pleasures–the things we lust after whether it is possessions, wealth, sex, power. Other translations say “evil desires” instead of “passions” recognizing these passions are not good passions but rather selfish passions, selfish desires.
And so James is essentially saying that evil desires that are in you, that is the starting point of your outward battles.
Galatians 5:17 says, “For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do.”
1 Peter 2:11 says, “Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul.”
There is a battle between the flesh and the Spirit. And James is saying we enter into fights and quarrels with other people when we give into the flesh, when we give into our sinful desires.
Verse 2
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.
Now I don’t believe James was addressing an issue of people actually murdering each other within the church. When James mentions murder, I think James is referring to what the author John mentions in 1 John 3:15 when he writes “Anyone who hates another brother or sister is really a murderer at heart.”
When John talks about brother or sister he is talking about a fellow brother in Christ or sister in Christ. He is talking about intense disputes within the body of Christ. Two people can enter into a disagreement or fight with each other and it becomes so intense that they can begin to hate each other taking on the same heart as a murderer. In verse 2, I believe James is speaking of acting in a way that we want to destroy someone in order to get want we want.
I was recently reading a book on marriage that was specifically written to the husband and in one passage in which the author was dealing with conflict and arguments in a marriage, this passage here in James 4 was used as the primary text.
And the author, a man himself, was writing to husbands about why some men initiate, and continue to engage in fighting with their wives. And he used this text here in James to make the point that the issue isn’t with your wife, but rather the issue is the battle that is going on within you. Your selfish desires want something and you are not able to get it.
And the author makes the argument that the motivation of the husband is often control. And when he cannot have control, when he cannot control his wife to get what he wants that in some cases that desire can lead him to lash out. He can attack with his words, he can attack physically, he can intimidate, and frighten. The author said when a husband gives in to this desire to control, it can then lead to a desire to destroy – his wife, his marriage, his family.
This is what James is saying. When there is something that we want that we cannot have, our sin nature can actually lead us to a point that we kill, murder, and destroy. And maybe it is not a literal physical life that we are taking but we can begin to destroy the very heart and soul of a person. We can destroy a relationship, we can even destroy a church family.
And so James writes in verse 2, “You do not have, because you do not ask.”
I believe this is the heart behind every conflict within Christian relationships. When James says you do not have because you do not ask, he is saying you are not bringing this desire before God and then listening to God. You are trying to satisfy this desire on your own in your own strength and in your own wisdom.
From my experience, too many people seek to satisfy their own desires without ever going before God asking him, “God, how would you desire for me to respond in this situation?”
Our family is reading through the book of Acts and we just read a couple nights ago in Acts 15 where we see the dispute between Paul and Barnabas that caused them to separate. And one of my sons said, “I am surprised there would ever be that kind of dispute between two Christians.” And then he said, “It seems like they didn’t ask God.”
I think that is a good first response when in a dispute with another Christian or really with anyone. God, am I bringing this before you. God, how do you want me to respond in a way that honors you.
Now just a side note: in the case between Paul and Barnabas, even though it is not stated in Scripture, I believe they did ask God. I believe that this was a healthy separation in which they maintained relationship with each other. Even in their dispute, they didn’t seek to destroy each other but they recognized this may be a time to separate.
Verse 3
You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.
James knows that some people might say, “Well, I did ask God and God hasn’t give me what I wanted. I am still in a place of unresolved conflict with this person and they haven’t changed yet.
Have you ever prayed: God, I am in this dispute, would you change the other person?
And James says, “you are asking from wrong motivates, you are not asking out of a desire to please God, to build up the body, you are asking out of a desire to please yourself, to get what you want.”
One of the challenges of a church family is that we are regularly having to lay down our own desires for the sake of the greater church family. And that can be hard sometimes. Especially if we have strong convictions about what we think we should be doing as a church and how we handle the organization of the church.
And sometimes our conviction can be so strong that we feel like we need to fight for it. And you can have two people or two groups in a church fighting for what they believe are biblical truths.
And James says you may have entered into a dispute and you are asking God to give you resolution to this dispute but you are not getting what you want because you are simply trying to satisfy your own desires and you might be disguising it as a righteous dispute but in reality it is a selfish dispute. James says that you don’t want the will of God, you ask not asking according to the will of God. You simply want what you want.
And this leads James to make one of his strongest rebukes in the whole letter.
Verse 4
You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.
“You adulterous people.” Where did this come from? Why such a strong statement about those who are quarrelling within the church?
James says when you are seeking your own desires and you are starting to dispute and quarrel within the church family that you have turned your heart away from God. You are seeking to be fulfilled and satisfied apart from God. Like a husband who is unfaithful to his wife, you have become unfaithful to God.
When he calls them a friend of the world, he is saying you are aligning your heart with the desires of this world rather than aligning your heart with the desires of God. As believers in Jesus Christ, we don’t fight each other.
When given the choice between your sinful nature (your passions) and the Spirit, you are choosing your sinful nature, James writes. This is the spiritual adultery that James is writing about. You are choosing self over God.
What makes these words so challenging is James is writing to people within the church and he is writing about the heart attitudes of people within the church. These are not people who would view themselves as people who are unfaithful. In fact, these are people who would view themselves as faithful to God.
And yet as James said, they are seeking to satisfy their own desires rather than seeking to please God. And the evidence is made known because they are fighting with each other and quarreling with each other. And the cause of this, James says, is not because of the other person but because they want what they want for their own pleasure. And when they can’t get what they want, they attack, they fight, they quarrel.
And James says this is revealing a heart that is not seeking the things of God but the things of this world. And when we do that verse 4 says, we make ourselves an enemy of God.
These are challenging words to read.
Think about what James is saying. We can actually be believers in Jesus Christ within a church community and develop an hostility toward each other in which we become enemies of God through our behavior while at the same time going through the motions of worshipping and serving God.