Lowjack
Senior Member
Strife!
Turn over to James and read 4:1-6. This is the first part of the passage for tonight. Warning, this is a hard-hitting assessment of the initial source for interpersonal strife!
:1Where do wars and fightings among you come from? Don't they come from your pleasures that war in your members? 4:2You lust, and don't have. You kill, covet, and can't obtain. You fight and make war. You don't have, because you don't ask. 4:3You ask, and don't receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it for your pleasures. 4:4You adulterers and adulteresses, don't you know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. 4:5Or do you think that the Scripture says in vain, "The Spirit who lives in us yearns jealously"? 4:6But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, "God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble." 4:7Be subject therefore to God. But resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
What causes strife between people? It is the evil that has inhabited our hearts from the time of Adam. It is the envy that has raised its ugly head even since it did so in the heart of Cain. James pulls no punches whatsoever. He puts everything into painful perspective. A.T. Robertson said that “the origin of a war or of any quarrel is sometimes hard to find, but James touches the sore spot here [in verse 2].” Why do we quarrel? Why do we fight among ourselves? Is it God’s choice that we do so? Never! Quarrels and strife come from our sin-natures!
Our tendencies to snip away at each other and to cut each other down come from “desires that battle” inside us. What are these desires? They are the desires born of covetousness, the seemingly unquenchable desire to have what we do not have. We lust after each other’s gifts, each other’s capabilities, each other’s blessings, each other’s property, and each other’s abilities. When we cannot get them, or realize that we have not been blessed in the ways they have been, our hearts turn to hatred. Flip back a few pages and look at James 1:13-15. In 4:2, James gives the sin a name: murder. While not literal murder, hatred and envy in one’s heart is tantamount to murder in God’s eyes! Look at Matthew 5:21-23 and 1 John 3:15. If we look down upon our brethren instead of realizing that we all stand condemned of sin and saved by grace, we have killed our brother or sister in Christ!
What leads to such a radical outcome? Your (my) covetousness because “you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight.” Strife is born and serves no other purpose than to split us all apart.
Our selfishness goes deeper than just lusting after what we cannot get. We even stoop to trying to con God! Look at verses 2b-3. We pray for the things we want but attempt to disguise them in fancy wrappings to hide our true intentions! “Lord, please make me a millionaire so that I can give lots of money to do your work…” What, you have never prayed a prayer like that? Maybe not, but I am sure that somewhere and sometime you have been equally ludicrous. I know that I surely have been! We sometimes pray innocent-sounding prayers to advance our own lusts.
Sometimes, we even get to the point of attempting to synchronize our Christianity with the “ways of the world.” We reason that “God would not care if…” and live lives that are devoid of His character. How many people raised in Christianity, baptized and sanctified, washed in His blood, live amoral, sexually promiscuous lives and have the audacity to reason it all away. “God does not care about my sexual relationships when there are so many other problems in the world,” they say. It is to these people that James 4:4 speaks truthfully. One cannot straddle a fence with God. Either one is a friend of the world (and an enemy of God) or one is a friend of God (and an enemy of the world). Anything short of complete dedication to God is “adultery.”
What Does Strife Among Believers Achieve?
Well? The answer to this question depends upon whose perspective you prefer to take. Examine this question from Satan’s perspective. Here are some of the pluses that he chalks up when Christians fight:
Strife and quarrels keep people apart.
Strife makes people judgmental and shuts out grace.
Strife destroys fellowship.
Strife harms any Christian’s walk.
Strife serves to cut people away from God’s bountiful provision.
Strife kills Godly agape love.
Strife serves to bring people back into the world and away from godliness.
Strife between believers causes non-believers in the world to scoff at the Church and causes fellow believers to doubt God’s grace.
Strife focuses people on their selfishness and their self-centeredness.
Now, examine the effects of strife from God’s perspective. Here are the negatives that quarreling causes:
Strife between believers hurts His heart.
Strife between believers prevents His children from being One.
Strife and quarreling stunts Christian growth.
Strife causes a sin-rift between Him and His children.
Jesus Himself made some very important statements in His prayer in John 17. Look specifically at verses 9 through 16. He prayed that His followers would be one just as the Trinity is One. He also prayed that they (and indirectly, each of us) would be protected from Satan. Now look at verses 20-26. Did you catch the phrases?
“…that all of them may be one…” (v 21)
“May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” (v 21)
“May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. (v 23)
“…in order that the love you have for me may be in them…” (v 26)
This gives us an unparalleled glimpse into God’s will for His Church. For us. For you. For me.
Satan is the diabolos, the one who accuses and who slanders (literally “the one who throws at”). It is Satan who attempts to frustrate God’s plan, who attempts to tear apart God’s Church, who attempts to divide us, who attempts to cause you and me to quarrel and be anything other than ONE!
The Solution
Let us read the last half of our text for tonight. Look at James 4:7-12. God’s answer to the situation as outlined in these verses is a series of ten commands:
Submit yourselves to God.
Resist the devil.
Come near to God.
Wash your sinful hands.
Purify your hearts.
Grieve, mourn and wail.
Change your laughter into mourning.
Change your joy to gloom.
Humble yourselves before God.
Do not slander each other.
In the case of sin, one never can take it lightly. One must recognize the promptings of the Holy Spirit and understand sin to be what it is, S-I-N. When one does this, one begins by subjecting oneself to God (1), humbling oneself before Him (9), repenting (4,5,6), realizing the depth of one’s sin (7,8) and not making light of it, and donning the armor of God to stand firmly against Satan (2) (see Ephesians 6:10-18) and cause him to flee. Finally, one must not slander one another for by doing so, one negates the power of grace in their lives and actually negates it in one’s own life!
We must realize that God has saved each of us from our sinful state. We all deserve eternity in Edited to Remove Profanity ----Edited to Remove Profanity ----Edited to Remove Profanity ----Edited to Remove Profanity ---- for what we have done to God, and yet, mercifully, Jesus Christ died in our place to save us all. Not one of us is “better” than another. We are equally saved by His unparalleled grace!
We then must come to grips with the fact that God has equipped each of His children with His Spirit. The Holy Spirit is God IN us. When we despise another Christian, we despise God Himself! His Spirit chose to live in them just as He chose to live in us. It is His Spirit who gives us strength to overcome the wiles of Satan and it is He who is our living birth certificate who names us as God’s children.
We also must live lives filled with God’s grace. As bountifully as He gives it to us, so also we must reflect it into each other’s life. Both our fellow Christians and our unsaved acquaintances should see grace in every situation. It is that grace that is our unspoken witness of God’s indwelling Spirit!
We must petition God for His power and strength so that we can resist Satan. Satan will use every situation in and around our daily lives to throw us off-course. It is in these moments that we must recognize the source of strife as Satan, and then resist him in God’s power. It is in the name of Jesus and through His blood that defeated Satan at Calvary’s tree once and for all that we can resist the enemy. We must resist the temptations that he throws in front of us to drive wedges into our unity. Such wedges only seek to stunt our growth and to cause us to sin.
Finally, we must be humble and rest in God’s strength. We are not where we are because we are better than each other. We must serve each other and bear with each other’s weaknesses with Godly love (Ephesians 4:2,3). Thus we will indeed truly be one and our collective witness will be strong.
Christopher Laforet
Turn over to James and read 4:1-6. This is the first part of the passage for tonight. Warning, this is a hard-hitting assessment of the initial source for interpersonal strife!
:1Where do wars and fightings among you come from? Don't they come from your pleasures that war in your members? 4:2You lust, and don't have. You kill, covet, and can't obtain. You fight and make war. You don't have, because you don't ask. 4:3You ask, and don't receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it for your pleasures. 4:4You adulterers and adulteresses, don't you know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. 4:5Or do you think that the Scripture says in vain, "The Spirit who lives in us yearns jealously"? 4:6But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, "God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble." 4:7Be subject therefore to God. But resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
What causes strife between people? It is the evil that has inhabited our hearts from the time of Adam. It is the envy that has raised its ugly head even since it did so in the heart of Cain. James pulls no punches whatsoever. He puts everything into painful perspective. A.T. Robertson said that “the origin of a war or of any quarrel is sometimes hard to find, but James touches the sore spot here [in verse 2].” Why do we quarrel? Why do we fight among ourselves? Is it God’s choice that we do so? Never! Quarrels and strife come from our sin-natures!
Our tendencies to snip away at each other and to cut each other down come from “desires that battle” inside us. What are these desires? They are the desires born of covetousness, the seemingly unquenchable desire to have what we do not have. We lust after each other’s gifts, each other’s capabilities, each other’s blessings, each other’s property, and each other’s abilities. When we cannot get them, or realize that we have not been blessed in the ways they have been, our hearts turn to hatred. Flip back a few pages and look at James 1:13-15. In 4:2, James gives the sin a name: murder. While not literal murder, hatred and envy in one’s heart is tantamount to murder in God’s eyes! Look at Matthew 5:21-23 and 1 John 3:15. If we look down upon our brethren instead of realizing that we all stand condemned of sin and saved by grace, we have killed our brother or sister in Christ!
What leads to such a radical outcome? Your (my) covetousness because “you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight.” Strife is born and serves no other purpose than to split us all apart.
Our selfishness goes deeper than just lusting after what we cannot get. We even stoop to trying to con God! Look at verses 2b-3. We pray for the things we want but attempt to disguise them in fancy wrappings to hide our true intentions! “Lord, please make me a millionaire so that I can give lots of money to do your work…” What, you have never prayed a prayer like that? Maybe not, but I am sure that somewhere and sometime you have been equally ludicrous. I know that I surely have been! We sometimes pray innocent-sounding prayers to advance our own lusts.
Sometimes, we even get to the point of attempting to synchronize our Christianity with the “ways of the world.” We reason that “God would not care if…” and live lives that are devoid of His character. How many people raised in Christianity, baptized and sanctified, washed in His blood, live amoral, sexually promiscuous lives and have the audacity to reason it all away. “God does not care about my sexual relationships when there are so many other problems in the world,” they say. It is to these people that James 4:4 speaks truthfully. One cannot straddle a fence with God. Either one is a friend of the world (and an enemy of God) or one is a friend of God (and an enemy of the world). Anything short of complete dedication to God is “adultery.”
What Does Strife Among Believers Achieve?
Well? The answer to this question depends upon whose perspective you prefer to take. Examine this question from Satan’s perspective. Here are some of the pluses that he chalks up when Christians fight:
Strife and quarrels keep people apart.
Strife makes people judgmental and shuts out grace.
Strife destroys fellowship.
Strife harms any Christian’s walk.
Strife serves to cut people away from God’s bountiful provision.
Strife kills Godly agape love.
Strife serves to bring people back into the world and away from godliness.
Strife between believers causes non-believers in the world to scoff at the Church and causes fellow believers to doubt God’s grace.
Strife focuses people on their selfishness and their self-centeredness.
Now, examine the effects of strife from God’s perspective. Here are the negatives that quarreling causes:
Strife between believers hurts His heart.
Strife between believers prevents His children from being One.
Strife and quarreling stunts Christian growth.
Strife causes a sin-rift between Him and His children.
Jesus Himself made some very important statements in His prayer in John 17. Look specifically at verses 9 through 16. He prayed that His followers would be one just as the Trinity is One. He also prayed that they (and indirectly, each of us) would be protected from Satan. Now look at verses 20-26. Did you catch the phrases?
“…that all of them may be one…” (v 21)
“May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” (v 21)
“May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. (v 23)
“…in order that the love you have for me may be in them…” (v 26)
This gives us an unparalleled glimpse into God’s will for His Church. For us. For you. For me.
Satan is the diabolos, the one who accuses and who slanders (literally “the one who throws at”). It is Satan who attempts to frustrate God’s plan, who attempts to tear apart God’s Church, who attempts to divide us, who attempts to cause you and me to quarrel and be anything other than ONE!
The Solution
Let us read the last half of our text for tonight. Look at James 4:7-12. God’s answer to the situation as outlined in these verses is a series of ten commands:
Submit yourselves to God.
Resist the devil.
Come near to God.
Wash your sinful hands.
Purify your hearts.
Grieve, mourn and wail.
Change your laughter into mourning.
Change your joy to gloom.
Humble yourselves before God.
Do not slander each other.
In the case of sin, one never can take it lightly. One must recognize the promptings of the Holy Spirit and understand sin to be what it is, S-I-N. When one does this, one begins by subjecting oneself to God (1), humbling oneself before Him (9), repenting (4,5,6), realizing the depth of one’s sin (7,8) and not making light of it, and donning the armor of God to stand firmly against Satan (2) (see Ephesians 6:10-18) and cause him to flee. Finally, one must not slander one another for by doing so, one negates the power of grace in their lives and actually negates it in one’s own life!
We must realize that God has saved each of us from our sinful state. We all deserve eternity in Edited to Remove Profanity ----Edited to Remove Profanity ----Edited to Remove Profanity ----Edited to Remove Profanity ---- for what we have done to God, and yet, mercifully, Jesus Christ died in our place to save us all. Not one of us is “better” than another. We are equally saved by His unparalleled grace!
We then must come to grips with the fact that God has equipped each of His children with His Spirit. The Holy Spirit is God IN us. When we despise another Christian, we despise God Himself! His Spirit chose to live in them just as He chose to live in us. It is His Spirit who gives us strength to overcome the wiles of Satan and it is He who is our living birth certificate who names us as God’s children.
We also must live lives filled with God’s grace. As bountifully as He gives it to us, so also we must reflect it into each other’s life. Both our fellow Christians and our unsaved acquaintances should see grace in every situation. It is that grace that is our unspoken witness of God’s indwelling Spirit!
We must petition God for His power and strength so that we can resist Satan. Satan will use every situation in and around our daily lives to throw us off-course. It is in these moments that we must recognize the source of strife as Satan, and then resist him in God’s power. It is in the name of Jesus and through His blood that defeated Satan at Calvary’s tree once and for all that we can resist the enemy. We must resist the temptations that he throws in front of us to drive wedges into our unity. Such wedges only seek to stunt our growth and to cause us to sin.
Finally, we must be humble and rest in God’s strength. We are not where we are because we are better than each other. We must serve each other and bear with each other’s weaknesses with Godly love (Ephesians 4:2,3). Thus we will indeed truly be one and our collective witness will be strong.
Christopher Laforet
