James 4:1–6 - What Causes Quarrels and Conflict? (Session 12)

In this episode of Reasoning Through the Bible, James 4:1–6 is examined verse by verse to uncover the real source of quarrels, conflicts, and spiritual battles among believers. This study explains how James traces outward conflict back to inward sinful desires, selfish pleasures, envy, wrong motives, and friendship with the world. The passage also addresses why some prayers go unanswered and why pride, worldliness, and fleshly desires create turmoil both within the individual believer and within the church.

This Bible study is especially helpful for listeners searching for teaching on James 4, church conflict, Christian quarrels, wrong motives in prayer, friendship with the world, spiritual warfare, and practical Christian living. James continues to speak with direct clarity, showing how God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.

Transcript

Glenn 0:15

There's been very few times in human history when there's not been a war going on somewhere in the world at any given time. While it's good to avoid war, it's especially good to avoid war when the war goes on close to home. It's a war that may be in your church or even inside of us. That's the war that's going to be talked about today in the book of James and Steve. In James, chapter four, James takes a very hard turn with his tone and he gets very direct, very blunt.

Steve 0:46

While he takes a hard turn with his tone, it's congruent with what he just talked about in chapter three of Don't Be Causing Chaos and Sewing Seeds of Chaos within the Church or the congregation.

Glenn 0:59

If you have your copy of the Word of God. Turn to James, chapter four. We're going to be starting in verse one. A little bit of review for a context those of you that may be starting at this point in our study. We've been working our way through James.

Glenn 1:12

In James chapter one, we found that he told us to be doers of the word and not hearers. Only James is focused on behavior. Chapter two he told us to beware of personal favoritism. He talked about show me your faith. And there is, of course, the somewhat famous passage about being dead in faith. We learned in chapter two that faith without works is dead merely means that a person's faith is dead if it's not helping other people. Doesn't say that a person with no works is not saved. That's not what he's talking about there in chapter two. Then in chapter three he talks about the damage that's done by the tongue and how the tongue can be compared to the rudder of a ship, to where, if we can control that small rudder of the ship, we can control the whole ship. Likewise, if we can control our tongue, we can control our entire life.

Glenn 2:09

Up to now in the book of James he's been talking to my brethren and he had a more conciliatory tone. Well, here in chapter four he gets very direct because there's some issues apparently in the congregations that James is writing to and he's going to be dealing with some of these issues very direct. In chapter four he talks about how to have a factual prayer, he talks about to be humble before God and he talks about not judging other people. At the beginning of this he talks about war. We're going to learn that. First. Let's read in James.

Conflict and Quarrels in Churches

Glenn 2:45

Chapter four, starting in verse one, says this what is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you? Is not the source your pleasures that wage war in your members. You lust and do not have, so you commit murder. You are envious and cannot obtain, so you fight in quarrel. You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives so that you may spend it on your pleasures. You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility towards God? Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you think that the scripture speaks to no purpose? He jealously desires the spirit which he has made to dwell in us, but he gives a greater grace. Therefore it says God is opposed to the proud but gives grace to the humble.

Glenn 3:39

Steve, this passage here, as is most things in the Word of God, are just jam-packed. It's quite dense with meaning, but it's also quite simple and direct. James has this way of making these short sentences that are just so clear but they're so profound. Let's go ahead and look at part of this and go through this passage verse by verse. Verse one speaks about where wars or some of the translations say quarrels or battles come from. Where does it say they come from?

Steve 4:09

It says it comes from within them. It comes from them themselves. That that's what causes this war. That's waging is from inside of them. I think it refers back again into chapter three, when he talked a little bit about that. The source once again is us.

Glenn 4:26

Notice again. Throughout this book he has been mentioning my brethren, but here he doesn't. He just starts out in verse one what is the source of quarrels? He opens up, doesn't say my brothers. He's changed his tone. Here he's talking about quarrels and Steve, he's writing to Christians. He's writing to Christians in local congregations. Is it possible that there will be fights and quarrels, even spiritual wars, in churches?

Steve 4:57

Always, and sometimes they go away After there's been a great conflict that has come about and people have a lot of bruises, so to speak, from it and a lot of egos are tamed down, but yet they still went through those conflicts. I think this could be true of any church. Why? Because you have people that are in those churches and we're always at war with the world. We have this conflict within ourselves and our nature is is to do some of these things. We're changing when we become a Christian. We have the Holy Spirit that indwells us and that helps to change us. Paul tells us put on Christ every day. That's something that we have to do in the previous verse that ended chapter three, verse 18. He said go out there and make peace. It's an action word. It's something that you have to go do. It's not something that you passively do.

Glenn 5:56

If you've ever been in a church that's had a major quarrel. It's quite painful. These are people that your family members and people you love and it's about subjects that you care about. Therefore, when there is a quarrel, when there is a battle, when there is a fight turns into a war, it's very damaging, it's very painful, very scarring emotionally.

Glenn 6:18

One of the benefits I think of James is because he is so direct. He gives us the exact cause of these quarrels. Look at verse one again. He asked a question what's the source of quarrels and conflicts among you? Then he tells you exactly what it is. Is it not the source? Your pleasures that wage war? This word here for pleasures, the original word, is a negative sense. It's always given in a personal, sensual sense of pleasure. It's the original word that, the Greek word that we ultimately get the English word hedonism from. These are hedonistic pleasures, these are selfish pleasures. These aren't just like a good sense of pleasure, it's a bad sense of pleasure. What he's saying here is that the source of quarrels are this hedonistic pleasure that's in the members, and that's what is the source of these quarrels and fights.

Steve 7:15

What's the characteristic of somebody that falls for these hedonistic pleasures? It means, by the word implies, that you just go off and do it. You follow your lusts and you do it While you might be, at the time, be thinking this really isn't something I should be doing. I'll deal with it, though after the fact, I'm going to follow these hedonistic pleasures and see where they go, because I'm enjoying them at the time. James, in short, is just saying is that where do these quarrels come from you? The problem is you, and that's what James, bluntly, is telling them.

Glenn 7:51

He says here where is the source of quarrels? Among you? And some of the translations there say in your members. And I think there's two senses here of this. He's saying among you, in the sense of your congregation, and I think he's also saying within an individual person. You know, the apostle Paul uses that same word, members, in some of his writings.

Glenn 8:16

He talks over in Romans about our members warring with each other. There's two senses of this fight. There's the sense of a group of people in a congregation that might be quarreling, but it's also in the sense of the quarrel going on inside of an individual Christian. There's this struggle between the old nature and the new nature that's going on. Why is the source? It's not the new nature, it's the old nature with the old pleasures. That's what's causing the fight and the war. There's a war that can go on inside of a Christian and it can spill out into the rest of the congregation and it can get quite painful. Verse one says there's this war going on. The origin of the war is our desires and the battleground is within us. That is so apt that these words written so long ago are so profound and so applicable to our everyday life today. Because this is exactly where we live Now. If we move on, he is writing to Christians in churches saying that there's battles and quarrels and wars going on.

Glenn 9:21

I find, steve, every now and then you will bump into Christians that say, oh, we want to get back to how the first century church was. All these modern churches, they don't have it right. We want to get back before. The modern era messed it all up. We want to get back to the first century church.

Glenn 9:36

Well, the New Testament paints a rather spotty picture of this first century church. I mean here James 4 says they had fights going on in the churches and this was early. We made a big point. The Book of James was written very early after Christ rose from the dead. The Corinthian church was suing each other in 1 Corinthians 6. The Galatian church was warned not to quote, bite and devour one another in Galatians 515. Paul had to warn the Ephesians church to walk in unity in Ephesians 4. Two women in the Philippian church were fighting with each other in Philippians 4. Many of the churches had false teachers. They were already warning them about that in 2 Peter 2 and in Jude 12. Some in the Corinthian church were getting drunk at the meals and not helping with the congregation. That's in 1 Corinthians 11. Steve, do we want to get back to the first century church?

Steve 10:35

Those all sound like lovely churches that I'd like to join.

Steve 10:38

Yeah, and they're the same things. Let me give you an example, as I'm sitting here thinking of how a conflict can come up that can cause problems. Many times conflicts come up around finances. You have a person that is giving to the church and there are people that on the outset they say I'm giving to God, so I'm going to give this money. They do that. They give it to God through the church that they attend, which they should. There's salaries and utilities that need to be paid for and such. That's good.

Steve 11:09

Then there's a decision that comes about color of the carpet, what type of chairs, whatever it might be. Extend the building, don't extend the building. Now there's this war that starts inside of you because maybe the decision they're making on the color of the carpet you don't like and you don't agree with. What happens is this person then comes to and says well, I gave the money. Therefore, that gives me a voice on the decision of what to do, because I gave the money to the church. That starts a conflict where in the beginning they said I'm giving this money to God through the church.

Steve 11:48

Now there's a conflict here. I don't agree with it. It's something that doesn't have to do with doctrine or theology. I want my voice heard. Why? Because I gave money. Therefore I have a voice. Guess what Some of the people that give them more money think they should have a proportionally sized voice. I gave a lot of money. My voice is going to be bigger than your voice because I gave four or five times more than what you gave. Therefore, my voice is bigger and my say should be bigger. Those are things that start out as internal conflicts within somebody and then it spreads out and causes conflict and wars within the church itself.

Glenn 12:32

Another reason why there's squabbles in churches and this is what I've seen a good number of times in churches is the inability to tell the difference between major doctrinal issues and minor doctrinal issues, the inability to discern between them. There are indeed some major doctrinal things that we should split churches over. If people are heretics, then they need to be removed from the church. If the leaders are heretics, we need to remove ourselves from the church. Paul tells us this and God tells us this. But then there's also minor doctrinal issues.

Glenn 13:07

I submit, steve, most of the church arguments I've ever seen are people that are taking minor doctrinal issues and making them major issues. The scriptural precedence for this is Romans, chapter 14, where he picks two issues the keeping of days, sabbath keeping and eating of foods. He says even though people are wrong, don't split a church over. We'll deal with that when we get to Romans 14. But the inability to recognize that I don't agree with you on this minor issue, but we're still going to stay in fellowship that inability is one of the reasons for fights and quarrels.

Steve 13:43

And that is something that has been lost. I don't necessarily think that James is talking about discussions that take place among Christians. You and I have discussions on things all the time, but we don't let it destroy our friendship and then we don't go out and start causing problems with other people. No, there's none of that. There are times, though, it's lost that people can have discussions and can have agreements, but yet we're still family members, we're still brothers in Christ together, but some people take it to the point of they just have to be right. If they can't get the other person to see what they believe in, I'm going to go out and go to other people and try and destroy the person's character. There are things that can be talked and discussed about that aren't actually wars or quarrels. That are civil things between people.

Steve 14:36

Disagreements James is talking about when it gets to a point that it causes problems in the church, and I want to just finish this thought here In the example that I gave before, how do you contain it? James has given everything before you hold your tongue. You're slow to speak. You think about. If I say something, it can be a spark that causes a great big forest fire All the things that he's been talking about up to this. You have to learn how to contain these things within yourself and then take it to God, ask for wisdom from God on how to handle it, what to do, and work it out with God, between you and him, rather than just immediately taking it out to other people. That's the earthly wisdom versus the godly wisdom that he spoke about in chapter 3.

Glenn 15:27

Don't contribute by gossiping in the church. Let's take the second type of issue that he mentioned here. The second sense of this word, war is a war that goes on inside of us, between our members, our individual members as individual people. The first question is have we ever been in a position where there's a battle going on inside of me? I know I've been there. If I ask the next question, it's why? Well, he answers it here. It's the same reason.

Exploring Sin, Prayer, and Practicality

Glenn 15:54

It's because of these pleasurable desires, these hedonistic desires inside of us that struggle between the old nature and the new nature, the old self and the new self. That's what causes the battle, is this fight that goes on because of the temptations of the old nature. That's what we talked about earlier. Was that if we just renew ourselves through the washing of the word of God and it'll change our desires, the temptation will always be out there. But if it doesn't have any effect on me because I'm a regenerated person, then now the war is gone. It's my fleshly motivations that cause the war. If I let God change that and renew me, then even though whatever it was that was causing the temptation is still out there. It has no effect on me Because now I'm a new person, I'm a new creature. That's what I think. Here's the other kind of sense of that. Let's move on in the passage. What are the sins that James says are in the church?

Steve 16:57

In verse two. Well, he says lust and you have that. Therefore you commit murder. Your envious of things you can't obtain. Then you start fights, you quarrel, you don't have things because you don't ask for them. Of course, the things we should be asking are godly things, but when he uses this term here, that you lust and you don't have, so you commit murder. I think, glenn, that he's referring back to Jesus is sermon on the mount. I don't think people were actually going out and killing other church members. But what did Jesus say in Matthew, chapter five, and the sermon on the mount? He said you've heard that you shouldn't commit murder, but I'm telling you, if you have hatred in your heart for someone, you're committing murder. I think that that's what James is directly referring to here. And the hatred in somebody's heart, you're committing murder. And he's saying you'd lust and you don't have. Therefore, you're having hatred for other people, which equates to, spiritually, to the equivalent of sinning from the point of murder.

Glenn 17:58

I think you're exactly right. He's paralleling ideas here that Jesus presented in the sermon on the mount. In verse two he calls the murderers and in verse four he calls them adulteresses. Well, if we go back to Matthew, chapter five, verses 21 and 27, no less than our Lord Jesus tells us that lust is adultery and anger is murder. That's the idea here, that that's the biblical way of looking at sin is that these desires produce this effect.

Glenn 18:31

And what Jesus was saying in the sermon on the mount, he was speaking against these Jewish leaders that were very legalistic and they said I've never taken a knife or a sword and actually spilled somebody's blood. But Jesus said you're still guilty because you've got anger in your heart. If you go so much as call somebody a fool, then you're guilty. If you just look at a woman with lust in your heart, then you've committed adultery.

Glenn 18:57

The word of God, speaking through James, is telling us he calls his congregation murderers and adulteresses because they still had these desires in them. He's being very, very direct with his people, steve, I think here I mean again, look at the tone. He calls his congregation or, if you will, that he's writing to murderers in verse two, adulteresses in verse four, how many pastors do we see nowadays Steve stand up in a pulpit and church leaders and say, okay, everybody in the room here is guilty, and kind of goes down the list of all the sins they did and kind of as blunt as what James did. Do we have a lot of that going on today?

Steve 19:35

Not many. Usually, if they do approach these topics, they spend five to ten minutes working up to it because they want to be sensitive to the people that are out there. Now there's the opposite side of that, where you have a pastor that comes in and every single Sunday he's pounding his congregation over and over again with these same things. That's to the other extreme. But yes, I think these things need to be brought up. James is addressing them. Those are people, just like we're people 2000 years ago. Our natures don't change. It needs to be addressed and talked about in today's congregations as well.

Glenn 20:12

What I find interesting here, steve, is that in this passage that we just read James 4, verses 1 through 6 and 7, he talks about this war going on, and then he gives the three main areas that are always the source of quarrels and temptations, which are the world, the flesh and the devil. If we look at verse 4, he says friendship with the world is enmity with God. That's the world. Verse 6, he talks about the flesh. Verse 7, he talks about the devil. The world, the flesh and the devil are really the causes of the war that goes inside of each individual Christian and in the churches. Those are the sources. James is so plain, so direct. Now there's another wise point here, at the end of verse 2 into verse 3. He says here he gives two reasons why we don't get what we pray for.

Steve 21:07

What are the two reasons he says you don't ask for them and you don't receive? Because when you do ask, you ask with wrong motives. You're not doing it with the right motives in mind.

Glenn 21:17

Let's talk about this prayer asking God for things. Help me out, because I've heard people say all kinds of things. There's these faith preachers that say, well, if you just say things with all faith and confidence, then it's going to happen. Well, here James is saying look, there's been prayers that you've made that you didn't get because you asked with wrong motives. It wasn't the amount of faith they had in it, it was the motive behind what you ask for what is a good prayer and what's a bad prayer and what's the limits. When I pray four things, why is it that I don't get?

Steve 21:52

them. If you go back into chapter 1, james gives illustrations of what good is it that if you see a poor person and you don't actually help them out, what good is the faith that you have? You know, show me the faith here he says. In verse 3, he says you ask with the wrong motives so that you spend it on your pleasures Same word, hedonistic, pleasures is what you're spending it on, these things that you're getting and you're asking for, is you're asking for your own self pleasures. You're not doing it and taking it over and helping the poor and helping others with it. All these things that you ask for are not for motivations of what God wants to help the greater congregation. It's all for yourself.

Glenn 22:43

I'm going to say something here, steve, that I think cuts against the grain of what is taught in our day a lot. First of all, I think God does indeed and I would agree give good gifts to His children. God is a good God and he gives good gifts to his children. But what I think we get it wrong, or a lot of people get wrong in our day, is that God is not here for the main purpose of maximizing my pleasure and maximizing the pleasure in my life. James here is speaking against these worldly pleasures and he talks against worldliness.

Glenn 23:19

Well, a lot of times, what we're praying for is for my pleasure, my ease. It's painful for me in whatever my situation is. I'm praying for God to take away this pain, or I've got this problem. Well, my friend, god's primary purpose is not to make your life more easy. That's not what God's here for. Yes, he's a good God. He will give gracious gifts, but we're here for his purpose. We're here to glorify him. He's not here to make my life easy. He's here to make my life beneficial to him and beneficial to him in the afterlife. I'm here to glorify him. He's going to shape me in a way that's going to increase his glory and not necessarily maximize my pleasure. A lot of times what we're asking for is because I'm uncomfortable. Because I'm uncomfortable, I think God's obligated to make me more comfortable. That's not God's primary purpose in life and I think a lot of Christian teachers miss that today.

Steve 24:19

I also want to point out that James here, as he has gone through all of these chapters and verses, he has asked rhetorical questions for his audience, for his readers of the letter that's going out to them. And here, same thing. When he addresses the people here, it's not necessarily to every single church member that he's writing to. What he's saying is there's problems, there's quarrels. Here's the reasons why they're quarrels because they're earthly wisdom versus godly wisdom. Here's how you take care of it. He's continuing on his conversation. These people that cause problems it's because of selfish reasons. Here's some examples of what the selfish reasons are. So it's the same for us today and for our audience. When we're talking about this, I don't want our audience to think that we're pointing all these things specifically to the people that are listening here.

Steve 25:18

It's rhetorical. If you're causing chaos in your church or with other Christian members, then yes, this is applying to you. But if you're out making peace, then no, this isn't applying to you. But you can take from these things in order to try and understand why some people might be out there causing chaos in their congregations. Steve, is James a practical book? It's very much a practical book. It's very down to earth and it's down to where the rubber meets the road. Is it needed?

Steve 25:50

today, in our lives and in our churches, it is needed if there's a lot of chaos and problems in a church. I think that James should be pulled out and that this would be great for the pastor to go through if a church is going through some turmoil.

Glenn 26:05

This is so practical, so wise and so clear. There's passages in the scriptures that are kind of profound and they're complex and three-dimensional. We have to mentally wrestle with what they mean, but there's really no doubt what James is talking about here. It's very clear of direct and it's so helpful to all of us. We're going to continue to reason through the Bible. Next time we're going to talk about what is adultery. There's a spiritual adultery that is usually more important than the physical adultery, so we're going to learn about that next time as we reason through the Bible.

Steve 26:39

Thank you for watching and listening. May God bless you.