What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so 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. (James 4:1-3)
Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. (1 John 4:20)
In all their verbal combat and schemes against Jesus, the Pharisees never doubted their own devotion and love for God. Little did they know that the very Man they were calling a "deceiver," "demon-possessed," "false prophet" and "fraud" was none other than the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob incarnate. They were so convinced of their love for God, and yet when that actually met Him, they hated Him to the point of murder.
As Christians, we have a similar challenge: To say we "love God" is one matter, but the truthfulness of our love for God is revealed in our relationships with our brothers and sisters in Christ, in whom lives the Spirit of God, says the apostle John. The one who says "I love God," but does not love their brothers and sisters is, as John puts it, "a liar."
And yet many Christians, like the Pharisees before us, constantly try to separate what God has joined together. No matter how plainly Scripture puts it, "Bible-believing" Christians claim to have a "great relationship" with God, all the while having an abysmal relationship with their fellow Christians. This self-deception allows a person to forgo repentance and humility while having a clean conscience—a spiritual poison that will eventually destroy the walk of any disciple.
James, however, hits this topic from a different angle. In James 4:1-3 the apostle is essentially saying this: You think you're fighting against your fellow believers, but you are actually fighting against God.
You see, again, like the Pharisees, we often refuse to allow ourselves to fight or speak against God Himself (at least at the beginning). So when we are walking in the flesh, sin, or lukewarmness and refuse to repent, we begin by fighting against our brothers and sisters in Christ. We become critical and argumentative. We begin seeing people as "in the way," frustrations to the life we want. Essentially, God isn't giving us what we want in life so we blame our friends instead of God and we fight away.
James rips the mask off this delusion, and yet, we read this passage and go on fighting, criticizing, suspecting as we want. Instead, we should tremble with the fear of the Lord, because James goes on to warn us that this conflict with our brothers and sisters is a sign of spiritual worldliness with deadly consequences:
You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world means enmity against God? Therefore, anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. (James 4:4)
And so we see how a person who is a Christian, who is part of the Church, who is even praying (although with wrong motives) can be, in reality, an enemy of God.
Dear friends, let us look at our relationships in Christ and see, as in a mirror, the true quality of our walk with God. If we see lack of love, strife, mistrust, or division, then may we take the holy advice of James:
Submit yourselves, then, to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Grieve, mourn and wail. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up. (James 4:7-10)
Let's stop resisting reality and come to terms with our adulterous hearts so that we might humble ourselves and receive the real help we need from our very gracious and willing heavenly Father.
May we use the measure that Scripture gives us to test our love for God, not our own inventions, as the Pharisees did. What tragedy would it be to stand before Jesus and to find it was not truly Him we loved, but an image of Him our own religious imaginations invented...to think we will love Him in heaven when we don't love Him now as He dwells in our beloved sisters and brothers. For it was He Himself that said, "Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me" (Matthew 25:40).
Essene Press Team
