Books of James & Jude - Quarrels and conflicts - James 4:1-4

It's good to spend some time in prayer together. It's always good to have an opportunity to bear one another's burdens in that way. I think that's a really interesting perspective in that We're going to be talking about that through some of these verses today. It's going to hit right on asking the Lord and talking to the Lord through prayer and the different aspects of doing that in a way that is the right way and one that is motivated by evil. So we're going to look at that today.

But in a larger perspective, we're talking about quarrels and conflicts, James chapter 4, and I chose to do verses 1 through 3 just because they seem to go better together in terms of the whole kind of package for today. And then next week we'll, you know, we'll look at the following verses and then Jeremy will pick up with the last several verses through verse 10. So we've got 10 verses that we're going to be looking at over the next three weeks. And so I'll cover the first three today.

So Quarrels and Conflicts, I'll go ahead and read and you can read it up here with me if you want or along in your Bible. So, we've got some parallelism going on here. James has got two kind of simultaneous or parallel thoughts, rather, that run together. We're going to look at those, and then some rhetorical questions, and obviously, as I mentioned, we've got some issues with regards to prayer.

Just as far as a little bit of an outline as to what I'm going to try to cover and maybe frame it up a little bit for Jeremy if he so chose to go at it this way in a couple of weeks here, but we're talking about the attitude of worldliness in these ten verses. I believe this was Macaulay's outline. We're looking at its source in the first verse. So the source of worldliness, or that attitude of worldliness, where does it come from? What are the results of it? So we're going to look at that in verses 2 through 3. It results in a life of continual frustration. It results in a life of wrongly motivated prayer.

So those are the aspects of worldliness that we're going to look at today. And then next week, we'll look at its description and move on from there. So just to kind of give you a little bit of context of where we're looking at today and where we're moving on in the next week. And a week after that, verses 6-10, if we were to look at the different issues of responsibility towards God to actually overcome the worldliness that James was challenging the believers to deal with.

So just as a reminder, and I bring this slide up almost every time that I teach, James is about doing. If you want to know what you're supposed to be doing, James is the right book for you. If you want to know how you're supposed to do the doing, Paul's writing is going to be more in line with how one does the doing. James is not concerned, at this point, being early on in church history, being really on the fringe, as we're going to talk about in a minute. James is really looking at the matter of fact, black and white, what these believers are responsible for doing. And Paul is the one who, when we want to know, okay, this is what we're doing, how are we getting that done? How is the Lord living his life through us so that we are empowered, energized, and able to do these things that James talks about doing?

So there's a lot of lists. And if you just run into James without knowing this, you're going to come out with a big, huge laundry list of things that you have to keep and try to live up to and accomplish. But Paul talks about how those things are accomplished.

So just to make that clarification. I also wanted to read a bit of a quote here by Heirich. This is the transition from Chapter 3 where we've been to now Chapter 4. So I'll just read and follow along here. The sudden transition from the beautiful picture in Chapter 3 of a life governed by heavenly wisdom to the appalling picture in the opening verses of Chapter 4 is startling, but it demonstrates effectively the need for the vigorous rebuke now administered to the spirit of worldliness.

The spirit of worldliness has always been a problem for the church. It manifests itself in varied and often subtle ways. James discusses its manifestation in the lives of believers in four different areas. So we've got the selfish strife, and that's part of what we'll be dealing with today. in an attitude of presumptuous self-sufficiency in business planning, in wrong reactions to experiences of injustice, and the use of self-serving oaths. So we've got these three different aspects of worldliness that James is going to be hitting on in the next several chapters and on into five.

And so this transition from the wisdom, and again that beautiful picture, to now really getting down to the nitty-gritty of what's going on. We titled this lesson Quarrels and Conflicts, and that's exactly what Paul's getting into. So let's talk a little bit about the background of what's going on with these guys. Why the fighting? Why all the quarrels?

So first of all, they're some of the first Jewish believers to enter the church. So these guys are really carving what is unknown to the church. They're on the very fringe, remember? So we've got these Jewish believers who are first generation, maybe second generation, very fringe believers.

They've known what it was like to live under the Jewish law, right? So these are believers that know law, and now they're under grace, and they're dealing with a whole different worldview, right? And we know that too. We have all come from some other world system, namely unbelief to belief. So it's not that they are radically different, but having been under the very Jewish system that even Jesus taught under, now transitioning over to the ministry of what happened in Acts chapter 2 there and following.

So these guys are the result of Pentecost. They are the result of having been dispersed. So that's the second point there. They're diaspora Jews, meaning that they were scattered outside the land of Israel. So they were persecuted by the Jews, the very Jews that they were in... fellowship earlier on in their life are now being persecuted by those same groups of people.

So that would have been Paul and other Roman officials that required Roman emperor worship. So here, when they were under this system, willingly, and now not under this system, on the fringe of a church that is now leaving out from Jerusalem, and you've got this spiral effect of the gospel going out to all the land outside of Israel and to the ends, okay? And so, these guys are on the very outside of Jerusalem, and they're moving out towards Ephesus, and out towards these very, very Gentile lands, but they still think very Jewish, right? I mean, that's what they knew. they would have been persecuted, and they were on the fringe.

And third, they used to live in a Jewish world where they were sheltered from the rampant paganism of the Gentile world, so they didn't have to see all the things that they now see. They're experiencing a lot of different Gentile perspectives and philosophy.

And fourth and finally here, I think Satan is extremely busy trying to thwart the Acts chapter 1 verse 8 truth that these believers are being on the very fringe and a part of. You've got to imagine, Satan, in fact we're going to talk specifically about Satan in upcoming verses here. He gets mentioned by name in one of the more specific verses in the New Testament about Satan. But I kind of wondered why that was happening, and thinking about the background here, Satan's plan was really in upheaval right after the resurrection. And especially after the ascension, he would have thought that there was some kind of level of not necessarily victory because the death didn't stick that he had planned for Jesus, but nonetheless he would have expected that he would somehow be able to attack individually the very those that have the truth and prevent them from being able to share it. And so if Jesus wasn't here, if he was ascended, his focus would be on mankind.

And so where is Satan's focus at this particular point in time through the young Jewish believers that are beginning to share the truth of the gospel? I mean, he is a limited creature, right? But where would he be focusing his efforts at that particular point in time? You think he would have been focusing his efforts on these young believing churches? Because that was where the gospel would continue to expand upon. And so, if he's going to focus anywhere, that's where he's at, right?

Thought? I think it's interesting. As you mentioned, Satan is a limited creature. But I think everything in scripture says he's very intelligent and certainly very conniving. I think what's important to understand is, so he has access to the prophecies, he has access to the scripture, so anything that people on earth could know, he probably has a strong knowledge of.

Yet what's fascinating is how deep his self-deception goes. I think the indication from scripture is that he could act by actually having Christ crucified. That that was going to put an end to something, like you say, the ascension. I think even though he knows the ultimate outcome, there's such a self-deception there that he acts with the understanding that he can still stop God's plan. Even though he knows the outcome, he can read the scripture. That, I think, is a very important thing to understand about the world system. When we're not accepting God's wisdom, but the world's wisdom, there's so much self-deception that goes on there, to think that we can make it without these things. Satan still thinks he can defeat Christ, even though he knows the outcome.

There's still that motivation there. So yeah, certainly he's acting to these young Christians, and whatever he can do, taking the Jewish believers, and it doesn't have to, I've talked about it before, it doesn't have to completely take away the scripture, it's just, all you need to do is add in circumcision, all you need to do is add in this little part of the law, and if he can get us to accept just a little less of grace, if he can get these Jewish believers to still keep a little bit of that law, even though it's no longer valid in this time. Well, he's won a big victory there. I think you're right.

And these verses are going to hit self-deception very heavily. And so, knowing that it's rooted in Satan himself, and he is the ultimate self-deceiver, it makes very much sense that we too act in similar patterns. And I think that's what James is going to hit on here.

But I think that having some of this background in mind just gives us a little bit more clarity of how just how likely and stressful the situation could have been in this church. I mean, we don't have that going on right now. We have our own issues, nonetheless, not to minimize the things that we're dealing with. But these guys were going through a persecution that was very real and it was very new, and they didn't have a pattern to look at. This was all very new for them. And so, again, kind of setting that stressful tone for this young church in a pagan world, a very pagan and hedonistic world, as we'll find out here.

So let's deal with this term, quarrels and conflicts. So this is the source. We're talking about chapter 4, verse 1, and this is the first part of that verse. So we're looking at quarrels and conflicts. The fact that there is a conflict among these saints shouldn't come as a surprise. I mean, really, we talk about there being a stressful situation there for them, but truth is, there's always been quarrels and conflicts, no matter which group of people, whether they be believers or unbelievers, you're going to find quarrels and conflicts no matter the case. And we find the disciples arguing among themselves in the Gospels about who was the greatest.

And that's interesting here, and I thought to myself a little bit, and having done a little reading here, what were they potentially fighting about? Having come from the Jewish Judaism system, what were the likely things that these men were very frustrated about or could quarrel against one another? One commentator I read suggested that leadership was a very high high mark for a Jewish person. To be able to attain to a rabbi state was to have power, to have respect, to have money, to have privileges that no other person would have access to. And so now that they've got a different system, it's very likely that they were still wanting to attain to the role of teachers, and so wanting to have this kind of power in their own way potentially could have resulted in a lot of conflict.

From a Jewish perspective, quarreling is a commonplace, right? I mean, that's just their nature. They argue as if that was the normal case and state of being. And so, this is what's going on here, and we see this kind of division and frustration amongst the Jews early and often throughout the scripture, and even more recently as we get closer to the time that James was written.

But you've got divisions and even lawsuits among the Corinthian believers with one another. So there was no shortage of quarrels and conflicts in any group or in any body of believers. We're talking about Philippi being such a great church there. We recently have gone through Philippians, but there's two women that were at odds with one another in that book. But the difference here is that James tells us that this particular conflict even led to murder, and we're going to talk about that in a moment. So this is a serious kind of worldliness that has resulted in conflicts and quarrels.

So what about the word pleasures here? The word pleasures is the Greek word harona, from which in our English word we get hedonism. You've heard that term. It's a philosophical term and it's an approach to life that says the highest good is self-gratification. And really, more literally, we could say desire for self-gratification. It would be a good translation.

And you think about it, self-gratification has its root in self-deception, right? You have to deceive yourself in order to gratify yourself continually because you have to realign reality so as to gratify yourself ultimately. And in order to do that, you have to deceive yourself about what is right and what is wrong. So these pleasures that the Jewish believers were dealing with are literally a desire for self-gratification.

And they waged war in the members. So our personal desires are part of our human nature, right? We all have them. And they're not all bad. They're not all good. But we have these desires that we each deal with. And we're never going to escape them. They're going to continue to pull. These desires that we have are going to pull in our hearts for as long as we have these bodies. And it's interesting because we each have different kinds of desires and different kinds of pulls and tugs. But nevertheless, they're not designed as for the believer to dominate. They're designed to provide opportunity for trust now.

So the self-gratification personal desires that you struggle with are your unique needs. You know how we talk about you need your needs? And that's exactly right because your needs are different than mine. And you have a different set of needs and those needs are going to strike at the very deep-rooted human nature desires that you have that are unique to you.

And so, these desires were waging war in the mind of these believers. It's a picture, it's a battle. You've got a personal desire raging war against another personal desire in the mind of a believer. say our culture glorifies the satisfaction of personal desire, right?

I mean, there's just no end. No need to go through all the examples of what that looks like, right? So, let's look at, Roger, if you don't mind, if you look at Relations 517, and I just want to kind of add some color to this waging war in our members. So this is an internal thing that's going on.

And I think Galatians 5.17 really hits that hard. Is that it? I mean, that says it, right?

You've got the desires of the flesh and the desires of the spirit, and they're at war with one another. So what's interesting is that when these Jewish believers became believers, their personal desires were now being conflicted with the spiritual desires that the Lord had given them. And it's the same for us. This is no different. And the text calls it a war, a battle. Literally, there's something very intense going on.

And this chart has really helped me think about this. And I don't know why, for some reason it just became a little bit clearer in my mind yesterday when I was looking through this a little bit further. But this is a chart that Vernon's used for the spiritual anatomy of a believer. So you've got the whole person being represented here.

And on the left side you've got the physical realm being the body and the brain, and then on the right side you've got the spiritual realm represented by the spirit and the soul. And so you've got these parallel perspectives that match up to one another, but they're governed by different sources, right? So on the spiritual realm, you've got the believer soul and spirit where God dwells, and so the desires come from the source of God himself. And on the other side, you've got the body and the brain.

So on the physical realm, you've got all of the evil desires that we've been talking about here in chapter 4 verse 1. That's where those desires are sourced out of. And why are they in conflict? because there's the spiritual realm that wages war on their members with them. So it's interesting that our evil... I keep saying evil. It's coming up, but it hasn't come up yet.

But the desires themselves, the pleasures as the verse calls it, are sourced in this body and this brain, this physical realm. And so you think about it. All the desires, all the pleasures are things that you want to satisfy with some sense. We've got the five physical senses. Vern talks about how we also have the five spiritual senses. And they're operating in different sources. They're operating in entirely different ways.

And no matter what the desire that you struggle with, it's sourced in the fact that you've got this physical body attached to you. And what's interesting is that battle will no longer exist once this body is no longer attached to your soul and your spirit. Once those are free from this body, those desires, those pleasures will not wage war with you any longer because they're attached to this body. And so, it's an interesting way to perceive what's going on in the mind of a believer and how that spiritual anatomy and the physical anatomy match up with one another.

What I find interesting is even some of the world of entertainment, some of the better stuff that I enjoy, focuses on the idea that we don't know what's going to satisfy us. I mean, there's this struggle where we kind of decide, okay, this is what I need, and then we pursue that.

And attaining that isn't all that difficult. But when we attain it, we realize, well, that's really not what I wanted. a show I watch where one of the characters says, well, now you got what you wanted. And the other one said, well, this isn't what I wanted. And the other person said, well, now you know that. And that's pretty much the human interaction is we think we want something, we attain it. And it turns out that that's not going to satisfy us.

And I think for the Christian, the war is that the Bible clearly says, what can satisfy us. It's our riches in Christ. But we deceive ourselves. We say, well, actually, this is what's going to do it for us. Well, even for the non-believer, it's the same thing. The only thing that will satisfy us is having that position in Christ, having that relationship with Christ. That's what we're designed. That's why God created us. And yet we can make up all these other things.

No, this is what's actually going to make us happy. And we get it, and now it doesn't make us happy. So now we have to figure out something else. And the quarrels and the strife come because ultimately our interests are going to conflict with someone else's interests. But I just find it interesting that even the world understands.

They don't have an answer. Basically the answer is, we have no idea what's going to satisfy us and we're just going to keep struggling. And they have to leave it at that. Yeah, and so to kind of go back to the word for pleasure, that hedonism, hedonism is a philosophical question, or a philosophical framework, and it tries to answer, you know, who am I, where did I come from, and where am I going, it tries to answer those big philosophical questions with It's all centered on you, man. I mean, whatever you want, you get it. And whatever it costs, it requires, you know, the source of all pleasure is found in what you can obtain in this life. So, obtain it. And treat yourself with all pleasure and and self-desire.

So self-desire is ultimately the God, and that's another form of paganism and ultimately humanism, but hedonism was something that was very well-known throughout the Greek culture there. So, good point, and I'm going to actually touch on that a little bit further here in a minute, because the verse dives right into that whole concept. But I think this chart helps to put in picture... I was thinking about trying to teach my kids.

Where is this desire coming from? You want this thing so bad. Is this coming from the physical realm? Is this coming from... You're going to satisfy something that feels good, or tastes good, or is more fun than not. It's going to satisfy some kind of a worldly need. God's wisdom, you know the Lord's wisdom about this, and it says that this is not what you need.

So you've got this spiritual realm of desire, and you've got this physical realm of desire, and as a believer, this is where your battle is. Your battle is back and forth between these two sources. But the truth of the matter is, is that who you really are is all on the spiritual side, seated with Christ in the heavenlies, right? And so, I just thought that this would be helpful in explaining, even to young people, how we literally have, we are a new man in Christ. And this new man is represented by the spiritual side, the Lord's dwelling place in our life.

So you lust, you commit murder, is what these words amount to here. So lust is better translated as a desire or a longing, and can be used to desire both good or bad, in this case bad. So we talked about how the text, I believe it was in 1 John, was it 1 John, where we longed for the Lord, and it was the same word there, I can't remember. That same word can be used for longing after God, just as it can be used for longing after sexual pleasures. You have to look at the context and how the word is used. Lust in our culture usually means something sexual in nature, but that's not the case in the scripture. It just means to long with deep intensity for something. It can be good or bad, depending on the context. So, it's interesting here.

Here's one of the parallels, the first parallel that James mentions. You end up with murder. You long for something intensely that is evil, and you end up with murder. And that's what he's saying. And then he'll set up another one here in a minute. But we can see through human history, all the way from Cain down to the present, that murder happened in Israel. It happened in God's chosen nation. And it even happens for the believers in the church. Murder does happen. He's not specifically saying that the Jewish believers were guilty of having murdered someone. I believe it's a hyperbole for the hatred that they had in their heart.

We can see that from 1 John 3.15. Why don't you go ahead and read that, Pat, while your hand's up? Then I'll get your question. When he mentions this word, kava, the murder, it seems like in our heart we can covet what somebody has.

And it seems like in this somewhat class warfare, there's a hatred because he has more than I do. And it kind of ties back to last week when I talked about the earthly desires, the world, flesh, and the devil. It seems like in the world we see somebody always has more than me, and that's not right. So it just seems like, in this idea of murder, you can murder somebody in your heart just with the hatred that you have because he has more than me. And you think of the Jewish thing, well he's a rabbi, and what you're talking about here in this new kind of structure, that guy has more power than I do, it's not right.

And it just seems like it's interesting that he brings up this word covet, how powerful that is, to look around and say, is this not right? People have more than me. Yeah, I think that the parallel that we're going to look at here in a minute. So we'll go into that one. Actually, let's do this, though. Let's do read that 1 John passage, if we could, real quick, just so we have that.

1 John 3.15 and so on.

Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life in him. So we've covered that in the First John series, and we talked about that ultimately hatred is equal to the physical act of murder. And we see that, we see a lot of the guilt of a sin being related to the actual deed itself, just because it happens in the heart. So in this case, it's hatred being equivalent to the deed of murder itself. And I think that's what James is pointing to here is that lust or longing for something intensely that is evil or wrong leads to murder in the heart. Now what do you murder? What do you hate?

It could be another person. It could be your situation. It's usually a relationship or a circumstance. That's where you end up murdering or hating something. If you're in a situation where you literally hate the circumstances that you're in and you are there because of the self self-satisfactory decisions that you made along the way, then you can see this pattern take place in your own life, even through the very circumstances that you find yourself in. Does that make sense? Because I think it's so easy to think about this as just purely about a person, right? If you murder someone, well, we're talking about hatred here, extreme hatred, and you can hate a situation, It's just as much as you can hate a person.

I'm not saying you can murder a situation. That sounds rather odd. But the pattern is still the same. And in the next verse here, I think you're going to see that parallel, which leads to covet, which is very similar in that. So I'll go to that next one here. So you are envious, so you fight. Right? You're envious, so you fight. Jim? Yeah. It was interesting. I listened to Macaulay. out there's like a pattern.

You lust and you do not have and you commit murder and you're envious, you cannot obtain. So there's a not fulfilling, there's a middle piece to it. There's like a trilogy there, the three things and the middle part is where I can't have it and I've got to do something about it and it results in this murder in your heart or Yeah, I think that's a really good point. So let's look at that pattern that we're talking about here. So you lust, and you do not have, so you commit murder. So there's that three-stage progression. And then the second pattern that parallels that is you're envious, and you cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. And so there's the source of the issue, There's the attempt at satisfying it yourself, and then there's the ultimate outcome.

Right? It's good. Thanks for pointing that out. I thought that was... It is. It was good, and I just failed to bring that out. I didn't want to miss that one. No problem. That's great. So this word envy here is used of Joseph's brothers in the Old Testament. The same word is used in the Septuagint in Genesis 37. But there's this envy in a person's heart. Literally to want something that doesn't belong to you to covet is the same word here. This is extreme covetousness, envy, to want something that you don't have. In the case of Joseph and his brothers, they wanted to be special in the same way that Joseph was special, and they weren't.

What did it lead to? It led to fighting. And ultimately it led to, you know, not actual murder, but, you know, the pseudo attempt at that, you know, the deception of it. They came pretty close to that, though. They sure did. They were teetering right on the edge of actually doing it. And if Don hadn't intervened, they would have committed murder. That's right. And that's what they wanted to do.

In other words, these are fighting words, so we're talking about a verbal warfare here. So this covetousness and envy, maybe, of a position that somebody has in the church, or some kind of a privilege that someone has, whatever it is, led to fighting words. I want what you have, and therefore I can't obtain it, we talked about. I'm going to fight with my words and I'm going to nail you with every verbal attack that I can think of because you have something that I don't.

And it's not right. So notice that, and this is that chain here that Macaulay mentioned, notice the twice repeated chain of desire, frustration, and violence. That's actually the three parts that I did bring it out, I just forgot where I put it. But yeah, it's right here. So this frustration, or I'm sorry, the desire, the frustration, and then the actual violent act itself. And there's that parallel components there. So frustration follows desire because every time desire is fulfilled, it comes back desiring more. Man's wanter is never satisfied. And yet millions are spent in an effort to fulfill it.

I thought that was a really clever way of saying it. It's what you were saying earlier. The reason I didn't comment is because I wanted to say man's wanter later. I talk to myself as though I'm talking to my children a lot of times. Okay, I need you to understand something. This is very simple. You have a decision here before you. I talk to myself in the same way that I actually would think about talking to my kids a lot of times.

But this wanter, your wanter is going to get whatever it wants eventually if you keep pursuing and pursuing, but it's going to lead to a frustration. And then your wanter is going to lead to a violent situation. And then what you're going to find out is that your wanter was never fulfilled in the first place. And so you're going to start over. And you're going to go back, and you're going to have this desire. And then you're going to have this frustration because you can't get it, and then it's going to lead to some sort of violent act. And then you're going to think that you've fulfilled your wanter, but yet your wanter is empty, and you're going to go back. And your wanter is never going to be filled with, I want, I want, I want.

We hear that all the time with kids. I want this and I want that. Maybe for good reason, they need to eat. You never hear them say, I want to go to bed. Sometimes you get that maybe. The truth is that the bucket is never going to get full. And you're never going to just have exceeding pleasure because you've fulfilled everything that you ever wanted. See, that's not the way the flesh works. It never, ever satisfies.

And guess what? This is the truth that we're wanting to be reminded of ourselves, right? It's the very thing that I struggle with, and that you struggle with, and that we need to be trusting the Lord to do the satisfying rather than our own flesh to do the satisfying. Now that's tough. That's real tough because each of us want different things and in different ways and at different levels. It seems like the Lord always has a different timetable than we have. Our timetable is always different.

It's interesting how, you know, Miles Stanford talks a lot about the time element and the principles of spiritual growth. It's interesting how God allows you to attempt to satisfy your own needs time and time again, only to learn the fact that you're dead. There's a death to the wants and the desires that you have, and there's a life to the desires and the wants that the Lord has for you. And so He takes you through this time period where you attempt to satisfy. And for each of us it's a different time. It can take 30 years, it can take 10 years. Each person is attempting to satisfy and learning about their own sin nature in a different way and in a different kind of need, right?

I think that's important to realize that It's not that our desires are wrong, it's that we need to rely on Christ to satisfy them. And I think that's part of what you've been saying there. It's easy to go the puritanical route or the stoic route. avoid any desire whatsoever, and live this life on bread and water, but that's not what God wants from us.

It's not that any desire is wrong. No. Because he's given us desires that he wants to satisfy, and for the believer, the problem is we look to other areas. Yep. Right? I mean, for me, coming out of a fundamentalist background, where there's maybe, here's the list of desires that are okay and everything outside of that.

I think it's not, it doesn't come down to, this desire is fine, every other one is wrong. It's realizing, I won't say that no desire is wrong, but I will say ultimately it's just focusing on Christ and realizing He's the only one that's going to satisfy us and realizing that He's given us desires that he wants us to trust in him, that I'm going to take care of that for you.

So you bring up an interesting point there, and I think it just segues right into the next verses here, so that's good. So the next part of the verse talks about, you do not have because you do not ask. So here's an issue. where we're talking about prayer very clearly. This is about prayer.

And James tells us in chapter 1 verse 5, but if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, so pray, talk to the Lord, who gives it to all generously and without reproach, and it will be given to him. And so we have this concept of asking the Lord for wisdom already present in the book of James, and we've talked about that in previous lessons. But God is the source of wisdom and he gives wisdom to those who ask for it. You don't get it without asking for it. There's a difference there. You can get understanding and you can get some knowledge without asking for it, but to have true wisdom is actually a component of prayer.

It's the application of God's divine viewpoint in combination with your understanding of the scripture being carried out in a very unique situation in life for that very need, right? It's looking at life through the lens of the Lord himself, but not just mimicking what you understood in the scripture, but literally the living word of God having the mind of Christ, having the wisdom that you've asked for, and it is in combination with what you've learned in the scripture, being applied to a very special need and moment in time, right? So we don't know what wisdom looks like until we get to a situation where we actually have to apply it, and that's where the Lord says, the source is in me, it's my word, and it's going to be carried out through you trusting me to do the do the desire forming in your mind so that you can make the best decision in fellowship with me.

Does that make sense? I said a lot there. Don't worry. But this is one of the most important verses in the Bible concerning prayer, I think. There are things we can have from God that is within His will that we won't possess unless we ask for them. That's interesting, isn't it? Then there's the flip side. to it as well.

You ask and do not receive, and that's based on the wrong motives that you have. So these wrong motives here are literally evil motives. So that's where we get, you know, it's very literal, not just wrong, it's evil. So you ask and do not receive because of the wrong motives there.

We often ask God for things to enable us to satisfy our own selfish desires, right? We want what we want, and so we ask for the things that will align with our wants. And so we request more time for something, we request more money, more energy so we can do things we desire but God does not desire for us.

And that's the difference here is that sometimes we may not know. Is this what the Lord desires for me? And so you may be in a situation where you're waiting to know whether or not it lines up. I think about health situations and that's probably the most frequent prayer that we all go to the Lord with is the healing of a loved one, right? But we don't know if the Lord's will would have that person spend more time, for a believer in this case, more time with us on this earth or with him in heaven. We don't know the exact timing. And we get very thankful when the Lord's will matches up with our wishing. We selfishly want this person to be with us longer, and the Lord provides maybe a healing, and it can be very miraculous in nature.

But it doesn't mean that in every instance that when we ask with the right motive, we're going to get what we want, right? But it's very true that if you ask and do not receive, those are based on wrong motives. You can not ask, number one, or you can ask with the wrong motives. And both result in the same thing.

You're not going to get it. Right? That's what's going on here. Bob? Sorry, just real quick. There is so much here about prayer to impact. You already connected it to verse chapter one. In a meager lack of wisdom, let him ask of God. It talks about asking in faith. I don't think you can separate that verse from this verse. Just like you pointed out. I think that's the key.

It starts by asking for wisdom. And being able to have that reliance on God. Being able to have that Godly perspective. There's so much more we could talk about. Asking for specific things. Like you say, is it wrong to ask for our loved one to be healed? There's just so much there that we need to understand that it starts by asking in faith, and relying on that wisdom that comes from God.

Absolutely. You're right, there's a lot going on here. I did try to... I wanted to mention that point about gospel there, that we also need less desire for what is contrary to His will for us. And so, the idea there is that we are thinking and our desires are being aligned with what we know of God's will. And we could talk about God's will too as a whole other specific and the general and the very personal. So we've got a lot of big topics being discussed here, but nonetheless, it's good.

So what do they want? They were asked with the wrong motives. The result is that they want to spend it on their pleasures. So here, to spend completely. So this is a wastefulness. Another word might be... I can't think of it right off the top of my head. Scourge? What am I thinking of? Yeah, just wasting completely. Scourging. I can't think of the word. Splurge? Scourging it. I can't think of the word. I read it yesterday and I didn't write it in here. Splurge. Yeah. Totally splurging. That's another way of saying it. But I think that the idea is to spend time squandering, squandering it away.

So they ask with these wrong motives, and what they want in result is to get something so that they can just turn around and as a result squander it all away. And this is the wanter that never gets fulfilled, right? And this is the wanter going to the Lord in prayer with the wrong motives, and if they were to even get it, all they would do is squander it away on their pleasures. Again, that word pleasures here is that desire for self-gratification. So God is not interested in hearing prayer and providing for some hedonistic waste. And that's the point here.

These guys were likely praying a lot for power and praying a lot for the certain kinds of responsibilities of teachers in the church, and they were looking for a higher status. It was probably a very status quo issue. Where do I fit in this whole hierarchy of the church? Because I used to have a hierarchy over here, and I knew where I fit. Now where do I fit here?

So there's a squandering, and there's this going to the Lord and asking for it. The Lord tells James, and James shares with us, this is the wrong motive. Half the time you don't ask, and when you do, the motive is wrong. And then if you really get it, all you do is squander it away on the pleasures that you're asking to receive for in the first place. And so there's just that wanter. And the interesting thing is that Here we see, we think of that as just being completely an unbelieving kind of thing.

It's like, oh, that's when I'm in my flesh. Well, yeah, you can even be praying in the flesh. You can totally be praying in the flesh, and that's what James is talking about here. So that's the last slide there. So let's read it together again, just to get the full flow of these three verses.

So what is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you? Is not the source your pleasures that wage war on your members? You lust and do not have, or you desire intensely and do not have, so you commit murder. You are envious and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel.

So remember there's that three phase progression there. The desire, the frustration, and then the violence. We see it in lust, the frustration and murder, and then we see it here in envy or covetousness, can't be obtained, and so you fight. Those are literally fighting words, right? You verbally spar with one another over this whole covetous thing. And then finally in verse 3, you ask and do not receive because you ask with wrong motives so that you may spend it on your pleasures. So here we have the believer praying to God with the wrong motives, for the wrong reasons, for the wrong results.

And we're going to continue in these next several well, the rest of the chapter, but specifically in these next couple weeks, we're going to continue nailing down this worldliness that they're struggling with and James is trying to correct. This is very much a correction part of the book. There's a lot to do all throughout James, but this is where he gets really nitty-gritty and starts correcting things that were problems. Any questions? Thoughts? Yeah. One thing that occurs to me is just, you know, what do you pray for? And possibly pray for the right kind of desires. Pray what's that? For the right kind of desires. That's right. That's right.

And you know, it goes back to that first James 1.5. If you don't have wisdom, you can ask for it. And God's gracious and He'll provide wisdom. So where we don't know what to desire, we can ask the Lord to give us the wisdom we need to have the right desires. And He is faithful to give us that wisdom.

We still have to trust, right? There's still a trust component. There's always that personal volition that is required in order to be in fellowship with the Lord. And that is to trust Him for the desire that He gives you and clearly makes known in your heart.

So, I think that's a really good point. You're right. Sometimes we don't know. It's like it's an intellectual thing. It doesn't seem like I'm going to say, oh, tell me what to desire, and then I'll go desire that. It's like the desire itself has to be the source. That's right.

You know, we go back to the beholding the Lord, right? When we're beholding the Lord through His Word, the desires will naturally become a part of the life that Christ lives out through you. And so it's about a person. It's not this, oh, I'm going to get some nugget from the Lord and run away with it, and I'll have this wisdom outside of Him, and I'll all of a sudden have some kind of unique special gold nugget thing going on. It's about Him. It's about the Lord Himself being the desire, and all those other desires flow from beholding the Lord.

Yes, what you were saying, there's one psalm, I can't remember where it is, but it says, delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your hearts. And then we find out that our desires actually are His desires. That's right. When we delight ourselves in the Lord.

Very good. I like that one. Yeah, that's great. That's a great way to end. When you what? That's a good bookend to the whole conversation. Well, when our desires just match up with Him. Because we delight ourselves in the Lord. Oh, delight. If you delight yourself in the Lord. Is that Proverbs 3, 5? I forget. No, I don't think so. It's a Psalm. Did I say Proverbs? You said Psalm.

Okay, don't worry, we'll figure it out. Let's pray. Lord, I thank you so much for the time that we've had to be reminded about the source of our life and As we look at the believers in the book of James, we're reminded that even as Christians, we can come to you in ways that result in frustrations and result in very intense, violent acts. And Lord, we just ask that we would find ourselves just simply beholding you through your word. making you the central focus of our hearts, allowing you to do the living through us so that we don't have to get caught up in all the nitty-gritty and all the analyzation of every single element of our life, but we can simply just enjoy walking and resting with you, Lord. And I pray that we would better understand that as it relates to prayer and these verses that we've learned from this morning. It's your name we pray. Amen.