09: How to Stop Quarreling

Today's reading is from James chapter four, verses one through twelve.

It says, What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you?

Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?

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.

You ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly to spend it on your own passions.

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.

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?

But he gives more grace.

Therefore, it says, God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.

Submit yourselves, therefore, to God, resist the devil, and he will flee from you.

Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.

Cleanse your hands, you sinners, purify your hearts, you double-minded, be wretched and mourn and weep.

Let your laughter be turned to mourning, and your joy to gloom.

Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.

Do not speak evil against one another, brothers.

The one who speaks against a brother or judges his brother speaks evil against the law and judges the law.

But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law, but a judge.

There is only one lawgiver and judge.

He who is able to save and to destroy.

But who are you to judge your neighbor?

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Thank you for joining us this morning.

My name is James Rathman.

I'm the pastor here.

Thanks for uh joining us on the live stream.

The camera's in a new place, so it's a different angle.

We have a stage.

We got a stage this week, which is pretty exciting.

Yeah.

It's fun.

Um things are things are coming together.

Um this is uh an exciting week.

We've got a couple of things going on.

First, on Wednesday, our fall Bible studies begins uh with our kickoff dinner.

Studies called Your Place in the Story of Redemption.

And there's still a couple of spaces to sign up.

We're getting pretty full.

Um uh but that'll start this Wednesday evening, and it will go every other Wednesday uh uh and we'll meet four times altogether.

Uh and there's child care and food provided at each one.

So that's pretty cool.

Uh so if you are um I think this this study will be uh really good if you're feeling kind of disoriented uh in the world today.

This is a very grounding study as we look at what the overarching narrative of scripture is, and then we see how our stories fit into that bigger story.

We find our context and purpose as people.

So sign up for that.

You can sign up for that in our app.

Um just download the Redemption Church Denver app at your app store of choice, however contested it may be.

Um and uh you'll be able to uh sign up there on registrations.

Also, uh this week we uh have hosted in the past a um nine-month-long program called the Gotham Fellowship, which is um a discipleship intensive that uh helps people understand how their faith and their work are to be integrated.

Uh this past year, of course, that was wildly interrupted, and so we weren't able to finish the program, have our final meeting together, anything like that.

So a week uh or next weekend, we're going to be gathering together with that group uh to close out that program.

So uh those folks have put in so much work and it's been uh so much uh effort on their part.

So consider them in your prayers.

They've had to read so many people, it's miserable.

Uh so let's go ahead and pray.

And today we're going to discuss how to stop quarreling.

So in about 40 minutes, you'll know, and it will be done.

No more quarreling.

Holy Father, we thank you for the practicality and the groundedness of your word.

Lord, we ask that you would use your word to uh uh convict and bring humility and bring truth into our lives this morning.

Lord, would you show us where our lives are not grounded in you?

And would you show us the grace that you offer to pull us out that we might see you more clearly, Lord, uh, and uh be more shaped into the image of your son.

Father, your word can do this.

We ask that you would do that for us this morning in Jesus' name, amen.

So today's sermon is about quarreling.

And so I went to the person that I know who breaks up more fights than anyone else that I know, uh, which is my wife, because she's a kindergarten teacher.

And that's the whole job.

And so I was looking for a place to start the sermon, and I called Megan and I was like, okay, can you just give me like a standard script of what kindergarten chorals sound like?

Um, so here's a standard script.

There two people are fighting, and then my wife, Megan, says, Why are you fighting?

And then the student says, Because this mean kid over here, Bart Harley Jarvis, is being mean.

And then teacher says, Well, what does being mean look like?

And then the student says, Well, I was trying to play with this stick, and then he took it from me.

Now he has the stick and I want it back.

Alright, so fighting because one kid has something the other kid wants.

Don't worry, we outgrow it.

This is why we quarrel.

We quarrel because somebody has something we want.

Our passions rage within us, and we try and conquer that person so that we can get what they have.

Today we're gonna look at why we quarrel, why it matters that we quarrel at a heart level, and how to stop it.

We're gonna look at today.

So let's begin.

Why you quarrel.

James uh chapter four, verses one through the first part of verse two.

It says, What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you?

Is it not this that your passions are at war within you?

You desire and do not have, so you murder.

You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel.

If you were to ask the kid, hey, why are you fighting?

It'd say it was because they took my stick.

But where James begins is not with the person who took your stick.

James begins with your passions that are at war within you.

There's something taking place in you and in your heart that makes you desire to fight the person who took from you.

And that word passions that's used there is the word hedon, where we get hedonist.

It's it's about pleasure.

There's a personal pleasure that we feel is threatened when we see somebody take from us something that we feel we deserve.

And so there's the this hedonist pleasure in our own hearts, then we start to confuse for justice.

And we start to think you know, what's really been violated here is justice.

And because I'm not receiving what I want, I have to stand up for justice, but it isn't justice.

It's our own desire for pleasure that's warring in our hearts.

We gotta look at the strength of James's language here.

He's using language that relates to war.

You know, this it's quarreling, it's fighting.

He says, you covet and so you murder.

This is about as strong of language as there could possibly be.

But you can see it when scarcity starts to creep into our lives, and we start to look at someone else and the things that they have and consider that it their having it means me not having it, and so I need to conquer them.

Or this person is standing in the way of the reputation that I desire to preserve.

And so I need to tear down their reputation in order to preserve mine.

Then we begin to see that this language in those experiences, we can feel the language of war start to well up in us.

This person has to be conquered and removed in order for the pleasure that feels so threatened in me to no longer be threatened.

Now, James is uh not so shallow as to let us think that the real problem in our hearts uh is simply that we don't have what we want.

Instead, he actually goes a step further and he says there's a reason that you don't have what you want.

And the reason is prayer.

He goes to prayer.

How many of you, when you are considering it this longing in your heart that drives you towards war over a coveted thing or a coveted reputation or whatever it may be, how many of you would consider it that, oh, you know what, this is a problem of prayerlessness?

I wouldn't.

It felt like a strange place for James to go, but here's what he said in James 4, 2 uh verses 3.

He says, You do not, you do not have because you do not ask.

You ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly to spend it on your passions.

All right, so he gives two examples there.

It's like, why don't you have what you want?

You're looking, it's like, man, I wish I had that reputation.

I'm gonna tear down their reputation.

Now, why do you not have it?

It's because you're not praying.

Weird, right?

That's option one.

It's you're just not praying.

I think there's two reasons we wouldn't pray for something that we coveted.

Reason one is God is is not a factor in our world.

You know, it would it would feel silly or strange to pray to God to ask for something that we truly desired or truly wanted in our lives.

I think that's one reason that we wouldn't pray.

God's just not a factor.

Second reason that I think we wouldn't pray for something that we desired to have is because just in the act of praying it, our hearts become revealed to God.

And just in the act of holding something before God, uh it we sort of gain this clarity of, you know what, this is not a thing that I should really be desiring.

This this war that's taking place in my heart that feels like a battle for justice because I've been wronged is really just me expressing my covetousness.

And in holding that before the Lord, I think we would be too ashamed.

But there's a third example that James gives, and that's you do ask.

Uh you shamelessly do say, like, God, you know, take this person down, uh, give me what I want.

But we don't receive it.

That's because when we're praying to God, we're not praying to a genie where we rub the lamp the right way, then we receive whatever we ask for.

We don't receive it because God knows, look, you're just praying for this to spend it on your own passions.

And so the options that we have here are in one case, it's a denial of God, either actively, you know, he well, I guess we could say either passively, you know, because we just think, ah, he's not there, so I wouldn't consider praying for him in the first place, or actively, in the case where it's like, I'm gonna hide from him because I know he is there, or we are denying God like this, where we're saying, God, you are the one who can give to me, but you are not the one who can ask anything of me.

God, you are ultimately here to do my bidding.

And what purpose does God serve in my life?

He is the the master-servant relationship has been inverted.

Because we see, look, there are things that I want in my life.

If God doesn't give them to me, then he must not love me.

He must not care about me.

That's how we're using God for him to spend on our own passions.

We're not truly submitting to God.

See, this is what's beneath our quarreling.

This is what becomes beneath those situations in your in your life where all of a sudden this relationship that you really felt was there, it's just can't work anymore.

It's always head-to-head.

What's beneath this type of quarreling is the war of our own passions.

That we look at the world and we define justice by our own desire for pleasure and our own desire to have.

So, why does it matter?

Well, here's where James goes for why our quarreling matters so much.

He says in James 4, 4, he says, 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.

Okay, so James, after establishing what quarreling looks like, that it comes from your own desire for pleasure, he shows that this choosing of something else in the world to give you pleasure, that that is adultery from God.

He says, look, you're quarreling, do you know what that shows of you?

It shows that your allegiances are not tied, they're not connected to the Lord and to what he says is right, into what he says is good.

Instead, they're just connected to what you think will satisfy your own pleasure.

That's why James uses this strong language of you're quarreling, why does it matter?

Because it's pointing towards adultery.

It's pointing towards your cheating on God.

Because what you're saying is, you know, actually, if I if I actually gain what I want, if I gain my power over this person, or if I'm able to take down their reputation, then that will truly satisfy me.

And it denies the only one who can truly satisfy.

We do it with all sorts of things, and we can see it when those things get threatened.

I keep saying reputation all the time because I'm I'm obsessed with my reputation confession.

It's something that I have to work on and fight, something that I have to make a practice of, you know what, I'm going to I'm going to be intentional.

Uh, there'll be conversations that I'll need to go in with people.

And part of this job is I have to have a lot of difficult conversations with people.

And I'll I'll know before I go into that conversation, you know what?

I need to take a deep breath.

And I need to remember who I belong to, belong to God, remember who I'm here to serve, I'm here to serve Him.

And that means I need to be honest with the person that I'm talking to and use my words to communicate truth rather than use my words to try and just win this person over.

See, that's friendship with the world.

And it almost always results in quarreling.

Our quarreling points towards a friendship with the world.

Okay, but uh before we go further on this, I want to point out really quick uh what James didn't say, because this is really important.

Uh I had a professor one time who taught an art history class, and I was in that art history class, that's how I knew she taught it.

And uh she was teaching us how to look at art, which I didn't know how to do.

Uh, and one of the tools that she gave us was imagine if something in the piece of art that you're looking at was different.

You know, what if the boat was blue instead of red?

And how would that change the composition?

And what would that mean?

And so that's been one of the she didn't know it.

That was like one of the most helpful Bible study tools I've ever been given.

When you're reading it and it's like, oh wow, it when reading James, it's like, oh, he chose this word.

Imagine how it would have been different if he chose this word, and it kind of helps to highlight the word that he actually chose.

So in this instance, we need to, I found it helpful to look at, okay, what did James not say?

When you look at what he didn't say, it helps to, it helps us to see what he's describing here is not what our natural tendency would be in the way of seeing why our quarreling matters.

I don't think we would tend to think the problem that's driving this quarreling is God isn't the object of our affections, and instead something else in the world is the object of our affections.

What we tend to do is to think our ultimate problem is our affections themselves, or the sense of desire that we have itself.

And I think there are two typical approaches that we take to our own desire.

We either try to idolize our desire or we try to demonize our desire.

So, first consider how we demonize our desire.

Now, I think that this would be a more typically Eastern approach or a stoic type of approach, where we would demonize the fact that we have this desire.

What we say is, you know what?

The reason I'm quarreling is because I desired too much.

And in my desire, I created this attachment, and in that attachment, uh, I was unable to distance myself from the world in a meaningful way.

Uh, and I overly identified with something in the world.

And so I need to, I need to realize that, you know, depending on your worldview, that, well, there's nothing, if it's not in my control, then it's just not worth desiring, would be the stoic option.

Or if uh uh this is all an illusion uh and ultimately this all goes away anyway, and we're all one anyway, then to be desiring anything is to be false.

You know, the the second of the four noble truths is uh the elimination of desire.

If all is pain and we desire things in the world, then we need to stop desiring in order to remove the pain from our lives.

That's a way that we demonize desire.

Now, what happens when we start to demonize desire is we also have to crush things with it.

We have to crush things like hope.

And we have to crush things like, you know, things may be bad now, but uh but I need to squash the part of me that desires for them to be better.

And once that part is squashed, then I won't feel this pain anymore.

So the pain may be removed, but hope must be removed with it.

Now, the more uh I think uh Western approach, and this is it's important in our culture because it's uh it's the psychoanalytic approach.

Um and that's where we idolize our desire.

And we say that any bad experience that we have, any sort of pathology that develops in us, is because of a desire that isn't allowing itself to be fully met or to be fully expressed in the world.

And so what becomes good then is the full expression of whatever desires we happen to be experiencing.

And what becomes bad is whatever oppresses or suppresses those desires from fully fleshing themselves out.

So the guy who taught us all this is Sigmund Freud.

And here's why he did enough cocaine to kill a small horse.

That's from what's that from?

What movie is that from?

Oh, okay, never mind.

Maybe it's not from a movie.

Goodwill hunting.

It's from Goodwill Hunting.

Man.

Sorry to put you through that.

Here's what Freud says in Civilization and Its Discontents.

He says, happiness, in the reduced sense in which we recognize it as possible, is a problem of the economics of the individual's libido.

There is no golden rule which applies to everyone.

Every man must find out for himself in what particular fashion he can be saved.

Do you hear what's being said there?

What is salvation?

What do you do with desire?

You figure out what is the economics of my wants.

What do I really desire?

If society wasn't telling me how to act, if my religion or culture wasn't telling me how to act, what really comes out of me?

And then, so long as I'm able to see those things satisfied, then I will be saved.

We see that both of These are completely centered on the individual, in that we hold our desire and we say, I can do with my desire as I please.

I will either kill it or I will see to its full expression.

In both of those, we are saying that God is not God over me.

I am God over me.

Here's why neither of those processes work.

It's because we weren't designed to kill our desire, nor were we designed to just express whatever desire we happened to find in our hearts at that point.

Instead, we were designed to find our ultimate satisfaction, the clearest expression of our hopes and desires in God alone.

Here's the way James puts it.

Chapter 4, verse 5.

Says, 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?

Consider what that means.

God himself, your creator, put a spirit in you.

And I can tell it's there now because you're all alive looking back at me.

And that spirit that's in you, God himself created to jealously yearn over.

Says, what will be the object of that spirit's affections?

When God looks at it, he says, Me.

Me alone.

I will be the highest and most ultimate object of that spirit's affections.

That's the way I will design that spirit to be satisfied.

And if anything threatens, God himself, if anything threatens, is God would say, me being the highest expression of those affections, then I will be jealous over it.

I will try and crush it and stamp it out and remove it.

What takes place in the human heart that makes something else other than God?

God is jealous over.

Now, this we can hear like jealous God, and it can feel kind of viscerally repulsive.

Remember hearing a quote from Oprah talking about God is a jealous God.

That was my Oprah.

Talking about how repulsive it is that a God would be described or describe himself as jealous, and just saying this isn't something that we would consider.

God isn't jealous.

And I think her intuition is pointing towards something true, which is that if any of us acted jealously or overly jealous towards something, that then we would say, like, no, look, there's you're imposing yourself on a place that you shouldn't be imposed.

You're taking control in a place that you shouldn't be taking control.

But God isn't us.

In one of Plato's dialogues, he engages with a person named Euthyphro, and it's described as the Euthyphro dilemma.

What Euthyphro asks is, are the gods good because they, or are the where where does goodness come from?

Is goodness good because the gods say it is good?

Or do the gods act good because they see goodness?

Question is, are is the goodness above the gods telling them what to do, or are the gods above the goodness telling goodness what to be?

Our God does not fit into those questions.

The answer for us and for our God is God is goodness.

It is his very nature.

It is not above him telling him what to do, it is not below him as though he could change it.

It flows out of his very nature.

He is good.

God is the essence of all that is good.

He is the fount of every blessing.

And so when God is saying, don't love anything other than me, he's always calling his people back towards what is ultimately good, what is ultimately satisfying.

He's saying, don't quarrel and tear yourselves apart over these things that don't even satisfy.

That's friendship with the world and it's enmity with me.

Instead, come back to who I am.

He is God.

See, that's why our quarreling matters.

Because in our quarreling, when we tear each other apart to try and get things from each other, what we're saying is my ultimate satisfaction isn't in God.

It's in this other thing.

And whatever stands in the way of that, I am very willing to violate God's command to love my neighbor as myself, to love my enemies in order to have it.

Friendship with the world is enmity with God.

So, how do we stop?

In James 4, 6, this is what he says.

But he gives more grace.

Therefore, it says, God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.

How does our pride manifest?

Not in having desires.

Our pride manifests when we say, I know what will ultimately satisfy me, and it isn't God.

What do we need?

Humility.

He gives grace that whenever we would come to him and say, you know what, God, what I need here is you.

What I need here to relieve this quarreling, otherwise I will just be caught in chasing it until I destroy my relationships.

Lord, what I need is you to satisfy my heart, because only you can.

That's what he gives us grace to do.

He gives us grace to approach him, to approach God with just our need.

That's all he asks of us.

He asks us to approach him with need.

You know, if there's something you want and you don't have it, you know what that shows?

Shows you have need.

A lot of times we teach ourselves to curse that need or to quarrel until we get it.

God says, I give you grace to come to me and just tell me what you need.

He knows what it is before we ask.

This is the option before us.

That we tear each other apart, or that we trust that God is good to graciously give to us all that we need.

James 4, 7 through 8.

Submit yourselves, therefore, to God.

Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.

Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.

Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.

Let's walk through it.

Submit to God.

No longer tossed about by trying to kill your desire and shut down the hope of your need.

And no longer be tossed about by trying to fulfill your desire.

Don't submit to those things outside of God.

Submit to God.

Find your steadiness in Him.

Resist the devil.

Don't listen to the lies from Satan that tell you that the hope is in killing your desire because God could never satisfy it anyway.

And don't listen to the lie from Satan that says the only way to have your desire truly satisfied is to ignore God because He's just here to take from you.

Those are the things that keep us, those are the lies that keep us from drawing near to God, which is our next thing.

Draw near to God.

Do not act as one who shamefully hides your need as though you need to get it worked out before you're able to come to him.

That's exactly what he asks you to bring.

God asks you to come in your humility.

When you find yourself quarreling, and I think that there's a difference between just a quarrel and trying to reason together with one another.

We can reason together with one another from a place of humility, from a place of trying to discover what others have to say.

But in our quarreling, where we're just trying to get out of someone, something, then that's the difference.

It's probably something I should have worked out earlier, between quarreling and just helpful conversation.

But in our drawing near to God, let's return immediately to him, knowing that he promises to draw near to us in power.

We draw near to him in humility.

Cleanse your hands.

Put down the weapons that you use to tear each other apart.

You can hear it in the words.

You can hear it in our gossip towards one another.

Zach and I got in an argument a couple weeks ago.

Our wives were so stressed.

And I was too.

I hate arguing with Zach.

Zach's worship musician, if I don't know if he said his name.

He said sucks though earlier.

We'll get in another argument about that.

Just kidding.

Um the uh um and what we realized we were doing is we were flattening one another into a stereotype.

It was like, well, I I don't know if I want to share who had the stereotype, but I trust you guys.

Zach was like, you're just like spouting off these conservative talking points.

And I'm like, you're you sound like the editor of the New York Times op-ed.

And you know what the reality is?

Neither of us are those things.

We're trying to work this out, this complicated world out in our hearts.

And we're we're trying to do that together in a way that's gracious and open-handed.

But in our quarreling, it was like, you know what?

This is only gonna work if you say what I say.

And until you say what I say, I know you're the enemy.

So we quarreled to guard our reputations.

Cleanse your hands.

Put down the weapons you use to tear each other down.

Bring your need to God.

Purify your hearts.

An impure heart in scripture means we're double-minded.

That means we're seeking two things at once.

We're trying to accommodate God and we're trying to get whatever it else it is that we think will truly satisfy.

Purify your hearts means come to God and say, I trust you when you say that you alone satisfy.

And when we realize that that isn't how we've been living, when we realize that our quarreling has not been for justice, as much as we might have convinced ourselves of that, but it has been to just try and take from someone else who seemed to stand in our way and become an obstacle.

How should we respond?

James says this.

Humble yourselves before the Lord.

It doesn't end there.

And he will exalt you.

In our quarreling, we're trying to exalt ourselves, to lift ourselves up by pulling somebody else down.

But we trust that when we humble ourselves before the Lord, it is not like humbling ourselves before an enemy, where if we did, we'd be crushed.

But it's precisely the opposite.

When we come to the Lord and we realize, Lord, I've been wretched and I've chased after all sorts of things that aren't you, as though they were God, as though they could ultimately satisfy, when we come to Him, He exalts us.

How do we know this?

We know.

Because unlike whatever it is you're trying to get, unlike the stick that your friend has that you think will bring you so much life, the stick never died for you.

The stick never humbled itself for you.

That way you might be lifted up.

What confidence do we have that we can lay ourselves down before God and not be crushed but be lifted up?

That we can come to him with the clear description of our need and that it will be met, that we can come to him even as wretched sinners that have made friends with the world and abandoned him as enemies.

What can give us confidence that we can do that?

Christ humbled himself by taking on the form of a man, by being born unto a woman, by being crucified on a cross, humbled himself to the point of death that we might be exalted, that we might be brought in.

That is the God that we're coming to.

That's what might change our hearts to where we realize that type of God actually, I think would be truly satisfying.

That type of love towards me does make all of this quarreling look petty, and that speaks to the needs of my heart in a legitimate way that allows me to extend love towards my enemies, that allows me to have true love with my neighbors, even as wretched as I am.

James is never one to take his feet too far off the ground.

And so he closes with this.

In 11 through 12, he says, Don't speak evil against one another, brothers.

The one who speaks against a brother or judges his brother speaks evil against the law and judges the law.

But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law, but a judge.

There's one lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy.

But who are you to judge your neighbor?

You know, he takes us through this path of quarreling.

Then he shows us how there it shows us that we make ourselves God when we're quarreling.

Then he says, now remember your relationships again.

Those people that you're judging and that you're writing off because you've compressed them into some stereotype so you don't have to engage with them.

You can no longer do that.

You can no longer judge one another in that way.

God himself is the dividing line.

Let him hold our affections.