This will be a multi-week discussion through our passage, but also a multi-week sermon. What I mean is that we won’t get through the entire sermon today. There are points that I should have said in one setting that I’m splitting into at least two.
4 What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? 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. 3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. 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. 5 Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us”? 6 But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” 7 Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8 Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. 9 Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. 10 Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.
In our passage we’re given some insight into “Strife.”
- A psychological diagnosis – Disordered desires
- A spiritual diagnosis – Covenant Unfaithfulness to God
- A remedy – Humble yourselves
When you find yourself at odds with someone – perhaps your spouse and you have been fighting, or you and your neighbor are involved in a long-running feud, or there’s someone at church you have given up on ever being friends with – when you find yourself at odds with someone, consider that it’s because you have desires that are at war within you. There’s the first insight offered by Pastor James or by the Spirit through Pastor James: irritation, altercations, skirmishes – often these are related to desires gone wrong.
Passions…desires aren’t bad. This is a difference between Christianity and some other religions/worldviews. Christianity doesn’t think that desires are wrong in themselves. Including erotic desire, pangs of appetite, ambition. But good desires go wrong all the time…and one of the consequences of below the surface desires going wrong is hostility or chill above ground.
There are at least four ways of misgoverning desires. #1: Allowing good desires to become cancerous. Like a cancer they’ve started with good material but have grown into something twisted. For example, the desire for friendship and shared connection crosses the border into something illicitly sexual. The desire for peace – good – turns into a base desire for relaxation through substance abuse – bad. The desire for camaraderie – good – turns into political collectivism, where no individual owns anything – New York City in the future?
Important point: All bad ideas even those expressed in the worst of behaviors are twisted good desires. Evil has no substance of its own but is goodness gone bad. That might seem like an obscure philosophical point but it can be put to practical use. When there’s strife, look for good desires gone wrong and then try to isolate where it went off the rails.
#2: Second category of mismanaging passions: Desires out of order. Desires are fighting against desires, seeking to gain dominance. Eventually certain desires are not aligned under God’s authority and have become disordered. Often the problem is NOT the something you want… but that you want something more than other things you should desire, your desires are not in the right order. But don’t forsake wanting the lesser something…just put it back in the right order.
When desires are out of order the less important desires can become stronger than they should and at the same time the more important desires atrophy. If someone allows his desire for frosted sugar cookies too much leash, soon the prospect of smoked salmon and blueberries become less appealing. You lose touch with what is excellent and begin to prefer what is exciting, immediately stimulating.
Desires in disarray. And out of that, strife. Perhaps you get hyped up reading about the possibilities of beautiful Christian community – and you start to long for beautiful Christian community of deep connections, stimulating conversations, scenes of smoking pipes and discussing theology around the fireplace wearing your tweed jacket… And then you come into an actual church and over time discover it filled with boring people, awkward conversationalists, ignoramuses…and so you find yourself constantly disappointed, then annoyed.
So you murder. Perhaps with this phrase James had some thuggish congregation in mind who literally routinely bumped off each other. Or, more likely, he means that – when your desires are out of whack – you take steps so that certain people are eliminated from your life. You don’t want these people – the real people you actually meet among the congregation – you want the kind of people you find in the books. So you get them out of your life.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with the desire to worship among/ be covenanted with a congregation of interesting, lovely people…but when that desire overtakes the desire to love the people who are actually there – – now we have a problem.
Desire out of order breed disappointment with reality which breeds conflict with reality which breeds elimination of reality.
So, order your desires. Manage your desires. Be careful what you wish for, is the old proverb. Behind that proverb lies an older, heavenly sourced proverb – pretty sure we’ve brought up this one before: When you sit down to eat with a ruler/ observe carefully what is before you and put a knife to your throat if you are given to delicacies. Do not desire his delicacies, for they are deceptive food. Proverbs 23: 1-3
When you enter into a situation or atmosphere of some kind of wealth, then is the time to concentrate! Focus. Don’t let yourself become so enamored of what you’re seeing, experiencing, tasting… but put a knife to your throat so that you don’t start wanting – or rather, wanting out of order – that which will likely always remain out of your grasp!
You are married to a nice enough person but one day you come across a person who sparkles, who is full of cleverness, who puts a spring in your step. If you don’t put a knife to your throat, you could live the rest of your days pining for that man or that woman. Why can’t I be married to her? Why is my husband so humdrum? Where’s the magic?
Listen carefully: the problem is not that you have found that man or woman appealing. If you can appreciate the interaction with this sparkling man/woman the same as you would visiting the Grand Canyon or a Heidelberg Castle – just something lovely and unexpected dropped into your days that adds something to your life…and you’re grateful for the interaction… but move on – good. Your desires are still in order. But how easily desires get out of order, and we allow ourselves to pine for what we can’t have… or shouldn’t have. And then, with desires stymied, we start to magnify our spouse’s bad breath, their dull predictability, and now out comes a caustic comment here and there…and battle is engaged.
James wrote these mediations to congregations containing people who for the most part throughout their entire lives wouldn’t travel more than a few miles away from their home. Who weren’t in possession of picture books. Who never saw moving pictures. Who didn’t read newspaper articles or browse the webs. In short, their exposure to various kinds of wealth – material affluence, splendid scenery, unusually charismatic or beautiful people – was nothing compared to ours. So, beware, brothers and sisters.
Especially young people can’t learn fast enough the proverb: Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life. You are surrounded by stories – true and fictional – of people doing extraordinary things and attaining a wealth of renown or stuff or whatever. In ways too subtle and too multitudinous to keep track of, you’re being targeted by skillful marketers who know how to press your wanting buttons. You’ll need to constantly put a knife to your throat lest you’ll spend your days with desires out of order: wanting the big, the extra-ordinary. And not wanting what you should in the order you should.
I appeal to you with the word of the Lord. Actually two words: Let your eyes look directly forward. Guard your heart by keeping your eyes trained on what is in front of you. Focusing. Not being preoccupied by too many things, not being engrossed in things far away: faraway places or faraway times. Guard your heart by keeping your concerns narrow, your focus limited, your life small. For every glance at your big picture dreams and goals for your life (and those aren’t bad to have), look 100 times at what’s right in front of you, the next reasonable thing to do. Do your tires need air?
Second word of the Lord to help you order your desires: Associate with the humble. That is, be this guy: who routinely sidles up to the old lady at church and naturally and easily engages her in conversation…easily because you know generally the shape of her week because you’ve had many such conversations with her. Be the woman who in her heart are the highways to Zion, that is, you know where the widows live and how to navigate their driveways. Men and women who know the schedule of the games of the young people in your congregation. I recall Friday nights under the lights with Ben playing football and looking down the row of the stands we were sitting in and seeing people within the church. Now, high schoolers think they’re a big deal, but we all understand that they’re actually creatures quite low. But here’s the thing: associate with the humble. Enjoy them.
Put a knife to your throat… Keep your heart…. Let your eyes look directly forward…. Associate with the humble… We could cautiously extrapolate: always start with as local and small as possible in your thoughts. These are all ways of ordering your passions, of keeping your desires in line. Or, to use the language further down in the passage, of humbling yourself before the Lord, and waiting on him to exalt you or your children or whomever has become part of you.
Our desires are at war. They have grown wicked out of what is good. They are misaligned, out of order. We want some things too much…we should want other things more than we want some things. Sometimes we want things we can’t have. But here are two important extra details about desires, and our final two ways of mismanaging desires. Some things we want and don’t have – and that lack aggravates us inside and disturbs relationships outside. But here’s the thing: we shouldn’t lack some of these things we want…we just didn’t ask for them. We don’t have because we didn’t ask God for them. That’s the third way of mis-governing our desires: we haven’t taken them to God.
Whoa! The Buddha says the problem is that we desire things and the solution is to rid ourselves of all desire. (Although in Buddhism it’s a little more complicated than that but that’s how desire is popularly dealt with.) But the Ancient Spirit of Sheer Life says desires are fine but should be in order. And many…maybe most…maybe all desires are to be taken to God as requests.
God, I ask for physical strength. God, I ask for children who are strong, productive, wise. God, I ask for a house that is beautiful, a renovated kitchen, a home that is at peace, a heart that is patient. God, give me better grades. God, I find this subject so boring or so complicated -help. God, I’d like some land.
Some of your strife, stress can be traced to prayer-less-ness. You want things you don’t have, and you should want those things you don’t have, yet you’re unconvinced that there’s a God who will answer prayers. So you don’t pray.
And then here’s the other important detail, the final way of mismanaging desires. Your life could be a series of skirmishes because of desires at war, out of whack. Desires for things you don’t have. You could be desiring something you don’t have and should have and you’re asking God for it. But you might be asking wrongly – asking God for that which will only prolong the war among your desires, increase stress and strife. Wanting God to strengthen the life unsubmitted to Him. Come on, God, I’m struggling here, I want this to happen so I can go back to my God-ignoring, ungrateful status quo…so hurry up and act against your will!
Do you hear the profound difference in these prayers: God, give me a spouse so that I don’t have to keep feeling bad as my friends are getting married off. Or, God, eradicate our national debt so that we can continue to live selfishly without any sense of impending doom.
Versus:
Richard Baxter: Lord, whatever you want, wherever you want it, and whenever you want it, that’s what I want.
Very practically, if you’re asking God for something wondering if you’re asking for selfish purposes, I’d say keep praying…and ask God to align your desires in the right order.
Ok, these three short verses are valuable in that they let us know that – maybe not all – but a lot of strife occurs not because of what people are doing out there but because of disordered desires in here. This, of course, can be true on an individual level, but also coveting can show up at the heart of a church’s or a town’s culture.
Whenever there’s strife, do a desire diagnosis:
- There’s possibly a good desire that’s been twisted into the bad.
- There’s possibly desires that need to be re-ordered – you’ll need to make that case and then install routines and accountability to place the higher desire back where it should be.
- Consider prayerlessness as a simple fix.
- Prayer should come from a stance of having presented your body to God as a living sacrifice
I want to encourage you parents to shepherd your kids because much of God’s shepherding them will be through you. And when your kids go through spells of being angry, out of sorts with family members, punching holes in walls, etc – – – of course you’ll want to look below the surface of things. Consider the strong possibility that their passions are at war. So, even while you hold him/her accountable for outbursts of anger/aggression – e.g., you make him pay for the drywall fix…go below the surface of anger and look for desires out of whack.
And so, run through the list: there’s likely a good desire that has gone bad…and you need to help him identify where he took a wrong turn. He could use your help in resisting the devil and bring him back to a submission to the original God-given desires.
Are her desires out of order and you need to help her see the reasonableness and peace of humbling herself and aligning desires under God’s order.
Or, is prayerlessness, a lack of routinely bringing supplications and requests to God the problem? You’re frustrated by not having friends…have you taken that to God? And perhaps after taking that to God you’re given the insight that I don’t have a friend because I’m kinda boring or an ugly character…and then you take that to God. Frustrated desires are not to drive us away from God but gifts of grace to impel us to draw near to Him.
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Next sermon James will take us a little deeper and we’ll discover that below our strife and then below our mutinous desires is an unfaithfulness to God. I bring that up now to make the point that there’s a lot wrong with us, and the wrongness goes deep. We are unfaithful reflectors of God, which is what we’re for. Our whole wanting equipment is uncalibrated. Just think about that phrase: put a knife to your throat. As if we are threatened by…ourselves. The most dangerous person I know is the enemy within.
From passages like these we sense that any remedy can’t be superficial but – to start with – we’ll need to start over. The type of creature we are is fundamentally flawed; we’re of a race that has discovered this code in us: that when we want to do good, evil lies close at hand.
To be taken out of the First Adam and be joined to a Second Adam.
To be taken out of the First Adam and be placed in Christ.
That’s the first thing to do with this passage: not tinker around with our desires and make a few corrections here and there. No – the more we try to escape evil desires the more self-interest shows up. Give up! Give up on yourself, son of the first Adam. There is only an endless spiral of deceitful desires. Believe in Jesus Christ. Die with him. Eat his flesh and drink his blood. Consider yourself in Him. Give up on yourself…don’t look into yourself… and wait for his appearing to discover who you are.
In Christ, as this paraphrase of Colossians 3 says, Your old life is dead. Your new life, which is your real life—even though invisible to spectators—is with Christ in God. He is your life. When Christ (your real life, remember) shows up again on this earth, you’ll show up, too—the real you, the glorious you.
Believe on Jesus Christ. Be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ and the Spirit joins you to His Body. And come to His Table and eat the flesh and drink the blood. Remember, encounter, be grateful…believe.
Friends, this is the Table of the Lord Jesus Christ. If you are a baptized Christian accountable to some local church, even if it’s not this local church you’re invited to this meal. If these are not true of you please remain in your seats as we eat and drink, and take the time for prayer and reflection.
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