The Source of Conflicts
This week's message explores James 4:1-5, delving into the sources of conflict within our community and our own hearts. John McGowan emphasizes that while community can be challenging, understanding the root causes of our conflicts is crucial for spiritual growth. The message highlights how our internal struggles, unfulfilled desires, and spiritual infidelity contribute to relational tensions, urging us to look inward and deepen our relationship with God as the primary means of resolving conflicts.
TRANSCRIPT:
All right, well, I don't know about you, but I cannot imagine a more inspiring passage to launch us into a whole new season of community groups here at Restoration City Church.
If you didn't get the subtext of verses one through five, the synopsis would be, hey, welcome to church, right? We got a couple of wars and fights brewing in the congregation, and we can't wait for you to join us.
Pick a side and enter the fray, because that certainly seems like what's going on here in the life of the early church. But I don't feel like we have to be so glass half empty about it.
If nothing else, no matter what happens in your community group this entire year, you now have a text to come back to and be like, wait, it could be so much worse. So many more problems.
And although I am trying to make light of the text, it obviously calls us to wrestle with some significant questions. And it puts some significant reminders in front of us.
It is this idea that life in community, although infinitely better than the alternative, life in community can be extraordinarily challenging. Community can be difficult. Community can be messy.
We want to pretend that as you step into biblical community, whether that's being here on a Sunday morning, or joining a community group, or a ministry team, or intentionally prioritizing time with a close friend, as you step closer to biblical
community, it's always going to look and feel like Acts 2, verse 45 to 47, which so many of us have heard so many different times. It is this near utopian vision of what the local church could look like.
They sold their possessions and property and distributed the proceeds to all, as any had need. Every day, they devoted themselves to meeting together in the temple. Not just a Saturday or a Sunday kind of deal, but a daily kind of deal.
And when they were done with the big group meeting, and they'd encountered God, and they'd worshiped and they'd done all that stuff, then it was time to go home and break bread from house to house.
They had large gatherings and they had community groups. They ate their food with joyful and sincere hearts. They're praising God.
Look at this. They're enjoying the favor of all people. Every day, the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.
And we want to contend for that. We're not giving up on the vision of Acts chapter 2. That is what God desires for his people.
But sometimes, the road to Acts 2 looks like James chapter 4, verse 1. What is the source of wars and fights among you? And you're like, oh man.
That doesn't feel like a constructive contribution to the Acts 2 vision that can so easily move our hearts.
It's one of the things that I trust about Scripture, is that it is unflinchingly willing to deal with the difficulties of the human soul, the difficulties of human relationships. The Bible doesn't over promise and under deliver.
If anything, the Bible is enormously realistic about the challenges that we will face as we pursue the vision that God calls us to. But here's what I want you to see for today.
That James is entering this conversation with an extraordinarily specific goal in mind. Go back to James 4 verse 1. What is the source of wars and fights among you?
He doesn't wade into the fray, whatever that is in this early church, we'll talk about that in a minute. But he doesn't wade into this fray and just say, alright y'all, you gotta knock it off.
Right, it is time for you to grow up, get your act together, and try to act like the people of God for crying out loud, like you're embarrassing yourselves, you're embarrassing Jesus, you're embarrassing me as a leader in the church, would you just
grow up? Like, you don't even have to act like saints, just like, you know, reasonable adults. Like, he doesn't just unload on them in this belief that if he can kinda smack them hard enough, they'll get back in line.
He's like, actually, no, no, hang on, hang on, hang on. There's some stuff going on in your community that you know it shouldn't be part of life among the people of God. You know that.
You don't even need me to point that out. You need me to lead the conversation of, hey, what's the source of that? Like, where's that coming from?
How is it that even when you get a bunch of people together in the same room who love Jesus, the community can get so twisted around and it can go so sideways so easily, right? He's not interested in just rebukeing the behavior.
He wants them to understand the source, right? And that's extraordinarily significant. When I was a little kid, my family lived in a ranch house in upstate New York.
And to put it mildly, the basement, which was kind of a finished live-in basement sort of deal, had some water issues.
And it's just like so funny how your perspective on things as a kid can be diametrically opposed to your perspective on things as adults.
My brothers and sisters and I grew up knowing that every once in a while, with the right combination of rain and other factors that were actually harder to pin down, we would wake up in the morning and the basement would have water all over the
floor. And for us, that was so exciting, right? It was like a treasure hunt, an indoor swimming pool. It was going to get interesting.
So we would like literally sometimes go to the basement, check, and then come like gleefully running up the stairs and be like, guys, there's water, the water's back.
And now from my perspective, I'm like, I don't know how my parents kept it together. Because I'm like, this is nowhere near good news for them. And they're like, great, fantastic.
The basement is flooded. We can't afford to figure out what's going on and deal with it. So here you go, kids.
Here's a bunch of towels. Go down there and mop it up. Which by the way, the kids, we thought was awesome.
We're like, man, it is before breakfast. And we are downstairs with water, towels. We're gonna get all wet.
Somehow the thing's gonna get dried up. And somehow, by the grace of God, mom is going to keep her cool during the entire thing. Right?
So exciting as a kid. Really devastating as a parent. I would not be in a good mood if my kids came running up tomorrow morning and they're like, hey, there's water in the basement, dad.
I'm like, oh Lord, what in the world is going on? Why are you allowing this to happen? Break out a verse on trials and travails.
Not like, woo, I've always wanted a swimming pool. Now here's why I'm bringing it up. We existed in mop up the water mode for years.
Right? Probably, truth be told, saving up the money to figure out what was going on and deal with the source. Some of us when it comes to conflict in our life, you have spent years mopping up the same old water.
Oh, it's back. Here's a big old mess. All right, we'll clean it up.
We'll deal with it. But the question that we've been avoiding in our lives is when are we going to do the difficult work to figure out the source? Where's this coming from?
When are we going to deal with the root? Or do we just want to spend another 10 years? We want to just spend another 20 years mopping up water.
By the way, the reason that I'm so excited to lead us through this passage is if James is after the source, which he is, it means what he's teaching us is enormously transferable.
Yes, in this passage, he is talking to the communal life of a local church. He uses the word you all the time, and it is plural every single time that he uses it in verses one through five, right? He's talking to the life of the local church.
And if you're brand new, I'll just let you in on a little bit of a secret here. We're relatively drama free as a congregation.
Like, I really don't think there's any wars and fights, and if there are, y'all are doing a really good job hiding it from me and, you know, for this week, robbing me of really good sermon illustrations.
So, I think we are, as a church, a relatively low drama environment, but I don't know that we would, if we're also being honest, say the same thing about our marriages, or our parenting, or our relationships with our parents, or our co-workers, or
our neighbors, right? We've all got some water on the floor of our basement.
James is going to talk about community, and we're going to figure out some things that are going to enable us to get to the source of relational conflict wherever we find it in life, which gets us to the heart of what the passage is trying to
communicate. What is the source of relational conflict? And he starts in a little bit of an unexpected direction.
Rather than trying to get the details of the conflict out in the open, and sort of, let's get everything on the table, and see if we can apply scripture to what's going on, and come up with who's right and who's wrong.
He seems to have very little interest in litigating the details of the conflict. In fact, if you read through James, you get a vague sense of some of what the issues could be.
You understand that there is certainly some factions that have developed, there's some divisions in the church, there's a decent amount of gossip, there's a decent amount of backstabbing, there's some things going on.
Seems like some of it may or may not be driven by varying levels of income inequality. We understand that there's a lot of pressure on this church because they are living as a persecuted minority.
These are Jewish believers in Jesus who are living in Gentile territory, so they've been sort of economically disenfranchised.
We can get a bunch of stuff and kind of begin to develop a picture, but James conspicuously doesn't tell us the heart of the issue.
He doesn't specifically say, all right, here's what y'all are fighting about, and I'm gonna bring some clarity real fast. Here's who's right, here's who's wrong.
Instead of doing that, he says, actually, we're gonna pivot and we're gonna start the conversation by looking inside of us. We're gonna start the conversation by looking at the conflicting desires within our own soul.
What is the source of wars and fights among you? Don't they come from your passions that wage war within you? Passions here is a translation of the Greek word hedone, which is the word we would get hedonism from.
It is the same word that is translated pleasures in verse 3. And one of the things that you just need to know is that in our day and age, we use this word passions in usually a very positive context. You're passionate about education.
You're passionate about health and fitness. You're passionate about youth literacy. That's great.
Like, passions that change the world, passions that reflect God's agenda for the world, passions that are a part of bringing about the coming of the kingdom of God. That's fabulous. I'm not even trying to change the way you use the word today.
You just have to know that in the New Testament, it always carried with it a negative connotation.
Either that these passions were in and of themselves out of line with the will of God, there was something inherently flawed with them, or something about the way they were being lived out, something about the way they were showing up in our lives,
was creating, to borrow language from last week's text, disorder in every evil practice. So James is already trying to put attention on some of these passions that are waging war within our own souls, right?
The prophet Jeremiah actually has a really clear understanding of what these conflicting desires would feel like.
Jeremiah chapter 17 verse 9, one of the most frequently misunderstood verses in the entire Bible, I believe, Jeremiah 17 nine says this, the heart is more deceitful than anything else and incurable. Who can understand it?
And the reason I say that it's misunderstood is way too many pastors and preachers and teachers take this verse and assume that the intent is to trample on your heart and to ignore your emotions. And that's not at all what Jeremiah is trying to do.
Jeremiah is offering an honest reflection on the at times confusing reality of our hearts, right? That our heart is confused because we're not always clear on what it is that we want, right? And we could give so many different examples, right?
I want to be in great shape, but I also want to lay on the couch and eat nachos all day. Like, I want to be a great husband, but I also just want to sit here and watch a three-hour movie and not talk to anybody, right?
I just want to be a great dad who's totally present at youth sports. But it's 92 and humid, and if I miss one soccer game, like, come on, don't cue the therapist just for that.
Like, I mean, there's all of these different things that are inside of us, right? I want to go to church. Oh, it's rainy.
Ugh, I don't know. I could melt. I, where, all, like, all of, all of these things, that don't make sense.
The point is they, they don't make sense. But James is beginning to paint a picture where he says, hey, let's be honest. Even if you're just sitting by yourself, there can be a whole storm of confusion inside your heart.
Right?
I want to be a great employee, but I want to be a great mom, but I want to be a great wife, but I want to be a great daughter, but I just want five minutes for myself and trying to figure out, great, what, what does that mean for Thursday at 730
p.m.? What am I supposed to do in this moment? Now, if you're a follower of Jesus, that storm gets taken up a notch, right?
Paul says this in Galatians 5 verse 17, for the flesh desires what is against the spirit, and the spirit what is against the flesh. These are opposed to each other so that you don't do what you want.
So not only are we at times confused about what it is that we actually want, but even when we have some level of clarity, it feels like there's this tug of war going on inside of us between the corrupted desires of the flesh and the renewed desires
of the spirit. And part of what James is saying is, hey, if that's what's going on, if there's a storm inside of you when you're in a room all by yourself, it's not hard to envision why when we put other men and women in close proximity who also have
storms going on inside of them that are every bit as intense as what's happening inside of you that you're gonna get a certain amount of relational conflict. And it's fascinating to me that James' first move, he says, hey, whenever you've got water
in the basement, whenever you feel that tension increasing, whenever that conflict is starting to brew, rather than getting your argument ready where you can blame it on your spouse, blame it on your kids, blame it on your boss, before you start to
create that argument in your head, what if we learn to pivot and look inside of our own souls and to begin to ask the question of, hey, what's going on inside of me? And how would scripture begin to quiet the storm inside of my heart? Psalm 86 verse
11, super well-known passage, teach me your way, Lord, that I may rely on your faithfulness. Give me an undivided heart that I may fear your name. Quiet the storm. Start to align my desires with your desire, God.
Start to have my agenda come in conformity with your agenda. Hey, God, take me back one more time in the quiet of my own soul through the story of the gospel. Remind me that I have lived as an alien and stranger.
Remind me that I have lived as a rebel against you. Remind me that Jesus went and offered his life in my place.
I didn't deserve it, but he goes and offers himself so that I could be adopted into your family, so that I could be holy, blameless, beyond reproach. Remind me that when I was at my worst, you gave me grace.
When I was more messed up than I could fathom, you came to me with a steadfast love that endures forever. Could you take me to that place in my soul? Can I just get there?
And then could I pivot and be like, oh, okay, sweetheart, so about the laundry, seems like you didn't fold it. Or all the other stuff that can so easily put a ton of water in the basement. And James is like, uh-huh, yeah.
Sometimes laundry doesn't get folded. But if your heart can stay a little more centered on God, man, we can keep a lot of water from leaking in to the basement. A lot of this is going to be about what happens in our souls.
A lot of it's going to be about our relationship with God, because he's going to continue to build the argument. And he says, hey, not only is part of the problem conflicting desires, but let's be honest, there are also unfulfilled desires.
James 4 verse 2, you desire and do not have. You have these unfulfilled desires. You murder and covet and cannot obtain.
You fight and wage war. And this is where it feels like the whole passage goes off the rails, because you're like, look, I get it.
You're trying to make this argument about conflict resolution, but if you don't address the elephant in the room, I am out of here. Are you really telling me that they're killing each other in the early church?
I mean, is that really what you're trying to, is that really what James is saying? Is that really how messed up things got in the first generation of Jesus followers? That whatever's going on, they're killing each other over it?
I'll save you some time. If you go and read a whole lot of different commentaries on this, you will find different answers to that question. There are some that are going to say, yeah, man, it's the inerrant word of God.
And when the word of God says you're murdering one another, guess what that means? It means you're murdering one another. And yeah, this is a picture of how bad things can get.
And this is a cautionary tale and all that kind of stuff. And I'm not unsympathetic to that. But I would also say that believing in the inerrancy of the Bible doesn't mean that you need to check your brain at the door.
To me, it begins to stretch the bounds of credibility, to say that they're literally killing each other in the church. And James gives that one verse worth of attention, and he doesn't get there until chapter 4.
I mean, we just did 10 verses on the tongue a couple weeks ago, right? Watch what you're saying, you either give life or bring destruction. 10 verses on the tongue, and then he's like, oh, PS., the murder, yeah, not a good look, stop that.
Like, no, that's not in my opinion, we can disagree on this one, but I do not believe they're literally killing each other.
I believe that James is building on what he would have heard from his older half-brother, Jesus, who in the Sermon on the Mount says this in Matthew chapter 5, you have heard that it was said to our ancestors, do not murder, and whoever murders will
be subject to judgment, but I tell you, everyone who is angry with his brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Whoever insults his brother or sister will be subject to the court. Whoever says you fool will be subject to hellfire.
Sure, there's a way that James is saying, if you let this anger fester, you let it fester unchecked, who in the world can control where this thing goes? But he's saying, you're doing plenty of violence to each other as it is.
And the heart condition that leads to murder is the same heart condition that leads to telling your spouse off or unloading on your kids in a bunch of fury. He's saying, you're playing a dangerous game with all of this conflict.
But you're doing it, because the deepest longings of your soul haven't been met, right? You're doing it because no matter how old you are, you've heard some version of you two singing, I still haven't found what I'm looking for, right?
Because we understand the honest reflections of somebody who would say, I believe the gospel of Jesus Christ. I believe in this story of an atoning Savior. Yet my heart can be so empty at times.
Yet there are these longings that I have, and they haven't been fulfilled. And so much of the conflict that breaks out in our life is either an illegitimate attempt to fulfill a legitimate desire, or it's the overflow of frustration. I'm so tired.
I'm so exhausted. I'm so at the end of my rope, and I just can't get a break. I can't get some space to breathe.
And when you feel that way, it's easy to start throwing elbows and be like, well, if I just tell one of the kids off, I'll get some space tonight. If I just push everybody away, if I just whatever.
And what we're doing in that moment, is we're forgetting the words of a Savior who said, come to me, all you who are weary, and I will give you rest.
If we look first to the inner landscape of our souls, what James says second is, why don't you look to your relationship with God?
Is it possible that you have so many unfulfilled desires because you have either abandoned or corrupted the practice of prayer, right? There is this beautiful invitation embedded in a pretty devastating critique in verses two and three.
You do not have because you do not ask, right? Think of the number of things in our lives that we desperately want, that we believe are critically important, that we think could shape the future of our family or shape the future of our career.
Yet oddly enough, we never get around to praying about it. Oddly enough, we think we're going to do a better job of finding the answer than God will do of providing the answer.
He's saying maybe part of the reason you guys are sniping at each other is because you don't pray together anymore.
You don't have, because you don't ask, an abandoned prayer practice, but maybe even more common and more devastating is a corrupted prayer practice.
You ask, you're praying, and you don't receive, because you ask with wrong motives so that you may spend it on your pleasures.
It's not saying that there's a secret technique to prayer, and that if you've prayed for a sick family member and she didn't get better, that it's because you were just being selfish about that prayer, and God saw right through it.
But let me ask you this, there's a difference between earnestly pleading for the health of a family member and somehow trying to manipulate God into giving you enough cash to get the upgraded car, right?
There are places where, oh sure, we're coming to God, but we're not giving him free reign to shape the desires of our soul. We're saying, oh no, I've already decided what I want. It doesn't look very different than what my non-Christian friends want.
I'm just expecting you, Jesus, to give it to me and to kind of give it to me on demand and to give it to me easier than my non-Christian friends do. So, you know, get busy. Bless what I'm telling you to bless.
That we want to appeal to the Almighty, yet make ourselves ultimate in the equation. Basically, he's saying, guys, some of your prayer is just a fancy attempt to manipulate God. And don't be surprised when God is able to see through this.
So he's saying, hey, what's going on in your soul? And what's going on between you and God? Now, there's one more move that he's going to make that's closely related to what we just did in number two, in terms of unfulfilled desires.
But it builds on the theme a little bit, because in many ways, this is what he's been building up to. He's been building up to the idea that this early church, in ways that will remind each one of us of ourselves, that they are spiritual adulterers.
Verse four, you adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world is hostility to God? So whoever wants to be the friend of the world becomes the enemy of God.
Or do you think it's without reason that the scripture says, the spirit he made to dwell in us, he envies intensely?
There's been a lot of confusion in the history of the church around the sentence that says, don't you know what friendship with the world is hostility to God?
Preachers like to take that verse and then go on a rant against whatever their worldly sin of choice is.
This is the reason you better not smoke or drink or listen to secular music or watch PG rated movies or drive certain kind of cars or go on certain kind of vacations or fly first class or vote a certain way or whatever you want to do in terms of
like, oh, that's just friendship with the world. You gotta say it that way too. If it's gonna work, you gotta be like, you're just worldly. That's not what James is talking about, right?
What James is saying is you're looking to the world to get you the things that God ultimately desires to give you, right? It's closely related to these unfulfilled desires, right?
It is this idea that we're looking to the world for what we should get from God, which at the end of the day is the essence of adultery. Our culture focuses on the specific physical act of adultery.
But isn't the heart of the issue looking to somebody else for that which you should be getting from your spouse?
Whether that's sexual intimacy or emotional connection, relational connection, somebody that tells you you look beautiful, somebody that wants to listen to you, whatever it is.
The core of adultery is like, yeah, you're supposed to be getting that from your spouse. You're supposed to find that at home. Well, I'm not interested in that.
I'm going to look over here. Or that's not happening. So I'm going to see if I can find the same thing over here.
That's what James is after. He's saying, sure, you're not praying. And you're praying with corrupted motives.
But in a sense, even worse, you are looking to the world for things that you should be able to get from God. Back to Jeremiah, who has this incredible insight into the human soul. Right?
And a reminder that the human condition has not changed all that much in thousands of years. Jeremiah chapter 2, verse 13, For my people have committed a double evil.
They have abandoned me, the fountain of living water, and dug cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that cannot hold water. That's the issue with spiritual adultery. That's this issue with being friends with the world.
Maybe that is the underlying issue in all of our souls. Because we are called into a union with Christ that is best compared to a marriage, that we are called to live in that kind of covenant relationship with Jesus.
And as anybody who has been married for any period of time can tell you, there are moments where that will be incredibly hard.
And there are moments where it will feel tempting to go look somewhere else for what you know you should be finding in that one relationship. But you also find people that are able to say, yeah, but you want to know when marriage gets really good?
It gets really good when you make that decision to stay. It gets really good when you make that decision to work on the relationship.
Rather than abandoning that relationship for whatever the new fad is, or whatever the new trend, or whatever you think you're going to find over here, you just say, no, I'm going to stay, and I'm going to put down roots, and we're going to work on
this thing together. It sounds a lot like the spiritual life. It sounds like what Eugene Peterson said over and over again, that discipleship to Jesus is a long obedience in the same direction. Right?
Part of the way that we minimize conflict with one another is by maximizing fidelity to our spiritual spouse, by going really deep with Jesus. Because as we go really deep with Him, we become more like Him.
We become more like what we read last week, James 3, 17 and 18. The wisdom from above is first pure, then peace-loving, gentle, compliant, full of mercy and good fruits, unwavering, without pretense.
And the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who cultivate peace.
Look, if we're building our life on the foundation of Jesus, and we're becoming people who are increasingly pure and peace-loving, gentle and compliant, full of mercy and good fruits, I don't think you need me to spend a lot of time connecting the
dots between becoming that kind of person and, man, conflict really getting ramped down in our lives, right? Conflict is inevitable, right? If you stay in any one local church long enough, it's inevitable within a local church.
It's inevitable within a marriage. It's inevitable within a friendship. It's inevitable within family, right?
We are all perpetually in need of grace. I can't make it go away. Scripture can't make it go away this side of heaven.
But James is showing us a fundamentally different way to engage with it. Instead of blaming and litigating and arguing, who's stronger and who's powerful, say, you know what? What if I started by looking inside myself?
What's happening in my own soul? Where am I with God? And is there any way, is there any way that I'm trying to get from the world what I should be getting from God?
Am I willing to get up one more day and do the work of becoming the person that Jesus is calling me to be? Water still gets in the basement, but it can be a whole lot less.
And that frees you up to do a whole lot for the sake of the glory of God in a city. Let's pray.
Father in heaven, I want to come to you now on behalf of all of us who are in this room, because there is not one of us that is a stranger to relational conflict. And God, the first thing I want to ask is that you would remind us of the grace of the gospel. Because I'm sure each one of us would not struggle to recall the ways in which our sin has resulted in relational conflict this week. And God, I'm asking that you would give us the courage to name that sin specifically in the quiet of our heart. And you would remind us that that's why Jesus went to the cross. That we're forgiven. Jesus, I want to ask that you speak to each one of us. What are you calling us to? For some of us, Lord, it's a renewed commitment to prayer. For some of us, it's a renewed humility and prayer. Some of us, it's reanimating a spiritual journey. Jesus, just thank you that you don't give up on us, you don't give up on your church. Would you lead us and guide us, I pray. In Christ's name.