THE END OF WARS

THE END OF WARS James 4:1-5 February 27, 2011 Given by: Pastor Rich Bersett [Index of Past Messages] Introduction For those who are newly joining us or have been away for awhile, we are 70% of the way through a series of teachings in the extraordinary New Testament book of James. Chapter three ended a discourse of the two kinds of wisdom, worldly and heavenly, coming down decidedly on the side of the heavenly, and ending with these words: But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure, then peace loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. Peacemakers who sow in peace raise a harvest of righteousness. Commentators can’t resist the conclusion that James was setting up his next theme by exalting the qualities of peacefulness, purity and peacemaking in order to contrast them with the ugliness of quarreling and fighting. Text of James 4:1-5 – What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. Or do you think Scripture says without reason that the spirit he caused to live in us tends toward envy… Have you ever heard of “The War of the Whiskers”? This is the sarcastic name for the long conflict between medieval France and England. It started when Louis VII of France refused to shave his beard while fighting in the Crusades. His wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, demanded that he shave the beard and when he made it clear he would not shave it off, she had their marriage annulled and went off and married Henry II of England. Eventually the dispute grew until the two nations began warring over English territory in France. In all, the conflict lasted over 300 years. Of course there was also what many call the wackiest war in history, “The War of Jenkins’ Ear.” This war between Spain and Great Britain began when the captain of a British merchant ship, Robert Jenkins, brought his severed ear before the Parliament in 1731. He complained that it was cut off by members of the Spanish coast guard who had illegally boarded his ship during a confrontation at sea. That sparked the War of Jenkins’ Ear. But maybe there was another war that topped that one on the official chart of the ridiculous. When a group of soldiers from the northern Italian city of Modena invaded nearby Bologna to steal a brown oak bucket. From this prankish beginning, the situation heated until thousands of citizens were killed. Bologna reacted with anger and went to war with Modena to take back their bucket and restore their pride. The two cities fought for 12 years with thousands more dying. Modena won the war eventually, and the people of Bologna never did get their bucket back. It’s crazy, isn’t it, the reasons nations and individuals battle with one another? In these first five verses of the fourth chapter, James deals with four wars that seem never-ending in the lives of people, even Christians, and he gives us divine direction on how to put an end to the wars. 1. War With Others In verse one he asks the question, What causes fights and quarrels among you? We get the idea that things were not always well among the believers in the scattered churches to whom James wrote. Though we should not take the terms literally, he uses some very strong language in verses 1-2: fights and quarrels, kill and covet. And later, in verses 11-12, he specifically addresses the issues of slander and judgmentalism. Brothers, do not slander one another. Anyone who speaks against his brother or judges him speaks against the law and judges it. When you judge the law, you are not keeping it, but sitting in judgment on it. There is only one Lawgiver and Judge, the one who is able to save and destroy. But you—who are you to judge your neighbor? James uses the vocabulary of war to describe skirmishes among the believers. Does that seem a bit strong to you? The point is, he is trying to express the horror of such bickering so that we might start seeing church relationships as God sees them. We aren’t comfortable using such strong terms to describe the small and petty disagreements we have on occasion with one another. But God, the Holy Spirit, writing through the hand of James, wants us to know that’s how strong He sees it. You simply cannot read the New Testament without coming away with the clear notion that anything—anything that disrupts healthy relationships in the churches, that threatens the unity of the body of Christ, is grievously offensive to God. We must come to terms with the reality that things we simply dismiss as nothing are often extremely important to God. It was He, after all, who referred to hating others as murder, swearing as blasphemy and causing a child to stumble as worthy of the fires of hell. Now, I don’t think we are to believe the Christians were always feuding, any more than we could say that Christians today always fight and feud, but there was enough of a problem to grab the attention of the leader of the Jerusalem church. Paul saw it in Corinth, in Rome and in Ephesus, and had to bring a corrective word. James has also received broad reports of such behavior in the churches. And he writes with one purpose in mind—to command the Christians to understand that such behavior at any level displeases the Lord, and they are to stop fighting. His approach is predictably straightforward. He says you are quarreling because you are more concerned for yourselves than you are for others. In a word, you’re selfish! You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. Even grown-ups can be such babies. The answer to war is this: to cultivate such a deep devotion to the things of God that you stop being covetous and self-centered. Let God teach you how to love others and consider their needs as more important than your own. If your first thought on hearing that statement is Well, that’s no fair or That’s no fun! then your commitment to Christ is till outweighed by your commitment to yourself. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests but also to the interests of others. Phil 2:3-4 2. War With God The real explanation of our battles with one another is that we are actually warring with God. If my commitment to myself and what I want outweighs my commitment to God and His will, I am either not truly converted to Christ, or I am rebellious and unrepentant. When genuine conversion takes place in a person’s heart, that person’s “self” is put to death. When I continue to sin, that’s me trying to resurrect the old dead man. Every time I pay more attention to my personal will than the will of God I must be reminded that I have a new life, and that sinful man I am trying to be is dead—that I’m trying to resurrect the dead man that I was before I met Christ. James says our selfishness is evidence we’re not right with God. And he points out another evidence that things are not right vertically. He says while you’re warring with one another to get what you want, you’re ignoring the best way to get what you want: ask God! He says, You do not have, because you do not ask God. (2) Catch this: Why is the self-centered person not asking God, but is trying to wrest what he wants from others? Why would he rather try to compete with others to get what he wants instead of just asking God? Two things: first, he is out of fellowship with God. That is why he’d rather fight than pray. Every time we get out of whack with God, our relationships with others get out of whack! Secondly, when I am being self-centered instead of God-centered the things I want would not honor God even if I did get them. Verse 3: [Even] when you do ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. So there’s this inner conspiracy going on: I know in my inner man that the things I desire right now are not God-honoring and they’re not others-oriented, but they are, very honestly, selfish. And I know better than to go and ask God for things that simply satisfy my self-absorption and will drive this wedge between me and Him even deeper. So, I’m not about to go to God for those things, I’ll fight on a carnal level to get them. Meanwhile I’ll steer clear of God and maybe He won’t notice. But all the while we know better about God. He wants us to pray to Him all the time, about everything. He invites us, even commands us to pray. God always hears and answers prayer. James never says God does not hear our prayer, but that when our motives are wrong we do not receive. Prayer is always defiled by the insistently self-centered heart. One Christian leader said: “We need to either cleanse our hearts or stop our prayers.” When our hearts are not right, even prayer is fouled. In the movie, Bruce Almighty, Bruce Nolan is a mediocre news reporter in midlife crisis. He complains to his girlfriends that God does a poor job of running His world, and that he could do better than God. So God shows up in his life and gives him the chance. But Bruce does poorly and, after wrecking his life and his relationship with his girlfriend (interestingly named Grace), he starts to genuinely and humbly ask God for help. The turning point comes when God helps him cut through all the pretense about prayer and teaches him how to pray for the really important issues in his life. DVD, scene 18, 1:26:53 to 1:29:04 All this convoluted thinking about prayer (for Bruce and for us) points to exactly what verse one says: these things like fights and quarrels and the sense of alienation from God come from your desires that battle within you. (1) And, really, that’s war #3. 3. War With Ourselves Two phrases out of verse 2 capture the essence of the problem for the quarrelsome and rebellious Christian: You want something but don’t get it… and you cannot have what you want… The battle within you. Whether it is prayer or any other area of our lives in Christ, what God is saying to us is this: “Nothing, nothing is more important than my relationship with you. And I will not settle for second place.” He has revealed, resounded and reiterated to us His singular calling: Love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all of your mind and with all of your soul. Anything that falls short of complete devotion to Him leaves us vulnerable to the desires that battle within us, and the pull toward self-centeredness. Self-centered people are always unhappy people precisely because they are not free to live for something bigger than themselves and their own appetites. Warren Wiersbe said, “They never enjoy [real] life. Instead of being thankful for the blessings they do have, they complain about the blessings they do not have. They cannot get along with other people because they are always envying others for what they have and do. They are always looking for the ‘magic something’ that will change their lives, when the real problem is within their own hearts.” We’ve all lived from time to time in that misery. Some have made their home there. But God says we all can rise above the war within us to a place of abundant life and genuine joy in Him. His counsel is to love Him, to seek Him, to let Him save you and keep on saving you from your self. His promise to you today is that if you will seek Him wholeheartedly you will find Him. And when you do He will begin to heal the sicknesses of twisted, selfish desires within you and distorted and complicated relationships with others. Do everything without complaining or arguing, so that you may become flameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation, in which you shine like starts in the universe as you hold out the word of life… (Phil. 2:14-15) Live such good lives among the pagans that, though they accuse you of doing wrong, they may see your good deeds and glorify God… (1 Peter 2:12) When that happens, the body of Christ, the church, begins to experience greater degrees of love and unity, fellowship and community. Our witness to a watching world improves as people no longer see fights and quarrels, but changed lives and healthy relationships. This is God’s will for His church, for this church, and for every church family. And it begins within each of us. 4. War With the World The other war that is touched on in this passage, and one that we cannot ignore, is the war with the world around us. Every page of the New Testament scriptures is alive with the reminder that we who follow Christ will always be a minority and we will always be at war with the forces of darkness around us. And we have the promises of the Word of God that we are equipped to deal with this battle victoriously through faith, through the armor of God we wear, through the power of the Holy Spirit living in us and through determination to live as servants of Christ. James takes this warfare a little farther and a little more personal as he warns us that friendship with the world is the same as forsaking Christ. He uses two metaphors to imprint on our hearts and minds how serious this is: adultery and betrayal. In verse 4, James chides the church: You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Why does he use such strong language as to call believers adulterers? Two reasons: first, this is a familiar theme in the prophets of the Old Testament. They were often instructed by the Lord to tell His people who were wandering off to serve other Gods that they were actually whoring, committed adultery and unfaithfulness to the God they were in covenant relationship with. Likewise, James is now saying to the church, If you cozy up to the gods of this world, the principles and philosophies of this world and the behaviors common in this world, you are in fact sleeping around on God, committing adultery. If you will love the ways of the world more than you will love the ways of God—and if you will prove it by following the ways of worldly carnality in your thinking and your behavior, you will be guilty of spiritual adultery. You will have broken the marriage covenant with God. The second metaphor James uses is one of betrayal. If you choose to befriend the world, you are in fact deciding to hate God and become His enemy. Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. Just as surely as Judas loved the plans he thought best for Jesus, and opted for thirty pieces of silver instead of complete submission to Jesus, we become betrayers of the Lord when we turn our back on Him. You may say, But when I wander off in sin I don’t really mean to destroy my relationship with Jesus—I’m just having a little fun. I know it’s wrong, but I never mean to be unfaithful; I’m not really leaving Him forever. But, James tells us, that’s exactly how God sees it. We’re only kidding ourselves if we think otherwise, and offending the God of our salvation in our unfaithfulness. C.S. Lewis: “Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to one state or the other.” Mere Christianity Conclusion People in our cultural see themselves as multi-taskers. They’re so busy and important that they think they have to. Texting while driving? No problem. Watching television and reading the Bible? No problem. Checking your email while listening to a spouse, a child, or a friend? No problem. Researchers at Stanford University found out what we already know is true: multi-tasking causes big problems. Their conclusion: "Attention, multitaskers (if you can pay attention, that is): Your brain may be in trouble." The researchers originally set out to discover what gave multitaskers their special ability to multi-focus. Instead, they were surprised to discover that in many ways multitasking actually impairs performance. So while many people think they're effective at juggling multiple tasks, they're actually pretty lousy at it. For instance, heavy multitaskers are suckers for distraction and for irrelevancy. According to one of the researchers, "Everything distracts them." Multitaskers were also more unorganized in their ability to keep and retrieve information. They were even worse at the main thing that defines multitasking: switching from one task to the next. Heavy multitaskers underperformed in almost every area of the study, and got worse the more they tried multi-tasking. The article based on the study concluded with this advice: "By doing less, you might accomplish more. That’s not far from the message of James: Love and serve God first and foremost and exclusively, and He will end the wars in your life.     [ Back to Top]