The Cause of Conflict | James 4:1-3
Intro
On July 5, 2000, two dads got into a fight at an ice rink where their sons had a hockey practice. A 2002 CBS News story reports, “The confrontation between [Michael] Costin and [Thomas] Junta began when Junta became angry about slashing and checking at what was supposed to be a non-contact hockey scrimmage, which Costin was supervising. Junta saw another player elbow his son in the face. Witnesses said that when Junta yelled at Costin for not controlling the rough play, he snapped: ‘That's hockey.’ The two men then got into a scuffle near the locker rooms, but it was quickly broken up by bystanders. Junta went outside, but returned moments later. He said he came back to pick up his son and his friends, who were still inside the locker room. Nancy Blanchard, a rink worker, said Junta shoved her aside and headed straight for Costin.”
Reports differ on who started the physical altercation, but it ended with Michael Costin unconscious. He never regained consciousness and died the next day.
How quickly conflict escalates—from heated tempers to harsh words to haymakers. Sadly, violence in and around youth sports is widespread in America. An article in a sports law journal from Villanova once posed this question: how can we prevent soccer moms and hockey dads from interfering in youth sports and causing games to end in fistfights rather than handshakes?
Indeed, how can we prevent conflict? That question is relevant, not only in the world of sports, but inside every household and every church. How can you overcome conflict in your closest relationships?
Can you overcome conflict.
God’s Word says you can.
James 4:1–3
1 What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? 2 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. 3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.
Conflict and murder is as old as Cain and Abel. And putting an end to fights in youth sports might seem like a pipe dream. But the end of James 3 described wisdom from above and claimed that this gracious gift from God transforms divisive and envious people into peacemakers: “A harvest of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace” (James 3:18).
God’s will is for you to be a peacemaker, and the very next verses in James impart the divine wisdom that will enable you to overcome conflict and make peace. This revelation from God shines a spotlight on our souls so that we can see the reality of our condition and the true cause of our conflict, in order that we might become peacemakers. That’s where we’re going.
Let’s start by looking at the nature of conflict, followed by the cause of conflict, and finally the cure to conflict.
The Nature of Conflict
In verse 1, James asks, “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you?” He uses the same words as verbs in v. 2: “So you fight and quarrel.”
The word translated quarrels literally means wars and battles. In fact, it’s used 18 times in the NT, and it refers to physical wars and battles everywhere except here. It’s used almost 400 times in the Greek Old Testament, almost always referring to literal wars and battles.
The word for fights also means conflicts or battles, but it tends to refer to verbal conflict and relational hostility rather than armed warfare. Paul uses the word to warn Timothy (2 Tim 2:23) and Titus (Titus 3:9) to avoid ignorant and foolish controversies that lead to quarrels or fights.
So James is making his point through metaphor and hyperbole. When he speaks of relational conflict as wars and battles, it should get your attention. James is not going to minimize anything. Neither is he overexaggerating or making conflict into a bigger deal than it ought to be. Rather, he turns up the magnification power on the microscope to inspect our hearts.
And he grabs our attention, especially when he says to his Christian audience, “You desire and do not have, so you murder” (v. 2). I don’t think that means church members had already murdered each other. But I do think James is sounding the alarm: murder is the endpoint of envy. Conflict in your relationships is nothing to minimize or ignore. Conflict is dead serious. When you are fighting and quarreling, you are on a path headed in a direction. You have boarded a train and the last stop at the end of the line is murder.
And just like wars between nations, relational conflict can be hot or cold. Hostility and animosity is obvious where there are angry outbursts and raised voices. It’s more than likely verbal (cf. James 3:1–12), at least at the start: name calling, cursing, and insults. But it may escalate to physical violence: slamming doors, punching a hole in the wall, throwing objects, even attacking the other person. But cold wars are common too: shutting down, clamming up, ignoring, avoiding, isolating.
To whom does this apply? In verse 1, James says, “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you?” Or we could say between you or in your midst. In other words, James is not primarily concerned here with relational tension between Christians and non-Christians or the persecution that comes from unbelievers. He has his sights set on relational conflict between believers. It’s not just that you fight and quarrel. It’s that you fight and quarrel with those you supposedly love the most—members of your own family and members of your church.
On the one hand, this shouldn’t be that shocking. These are the people with whom we spent the most time. And only people who are close to us (physically or relationally) can actually hurt us. The hurt you feel has more to do with the closeness of the relationship than the size of the sin against you. This is why seemingly small and insignificant offenses and sins in your marriage can turn into intense battles. Lots of people in the world are sinning in all kinds of awful ways and you’re not directly hurt or bothered at all. But when someone close to you says or does something—that cuts deep.
By the way, did you notice that James never mentions the issue people were fighting about? James is noticeably silent as to the specific details of any conflict that existed in the community of believers he was addressing. Of course, his silence invites the speculation of scholars, but speculation is fruitless.
James’s silence is actually quite instructive. For one thing, it means the wisdom of this passage is universally applicable. It also indicates that the issue is never the issue. The conflict is not what you think it is. You think you’re arguing with your spouse about the budget, the calendar, or the kids. That may be the content or the topic of the conflict, but it’s not the root or the cause.
The Cause of Conflict
James’s main point is to identify the cause of relational conflict. He asks the question, “What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you?” (v. 1). Literally, where does it come from? What is the source of your conflict?
Have you ever been assaulted by an awful smell in your home or your car or your fridge? The solution is to find the source and remove it. I heard the story once of a missionary family that lived in a stilt house in the jungle. An unbearably foul odor filled their home, but they couldn’t find the source anywhere. Finally, they found the rotting carcass of a dead rat, not in but underneath their house.
James, too, identifies the less-than-obvious source of conflict below the surface: “Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?” (James 4:1). In other words, conflict with those around you comes from a conflict within you. Your passions are at war within you.
What does that mean? James provides this breakdown in the first part of verse 2: “You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel.” God’s Word shifts the battlefield from your relationships to your heart. The tension between you and your wife, you and your child, you and a parent or a brother or sister in Christ, is growing out of tension in your heart.
Passions & Desires
Joe Rigney writes, “What are passions? At the most basic level, they are our immediate and impulsive desires. Paul links them closely to our bodies: ‘Let not sin reign in your mortal body, to make you obey its passions’ (Rom. 6:12). Peter does too: ‘I urge you to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against your soul’ (1 Pet. 2:11).” James also makes the same connection between your passions and your body when he says, "Your passions are at war within you” (v. 1). The Greek literally says within your members.
In what sense are your passions waging war? They are fighting for fulfillment, warring to have their way. Listen to Joe Rigney again: “[Passions] have a direction; they want to take us somewhere. If we follow them, then we are indulging or gratifying our passions. We are being conformed to our passions.”
This is what James said earlier: “But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death” (James 1:14–15).
Inwardly, we often experience passions as knee-jerk reactions and instant impulses in response to something we desire. When we want something, passions like lust, greed, envy, or impatience rise up. When something we value or desire is threatened or lost we experience passions like anger, fear, jealousy, or sadness. Outwardly, we express our passions, sometimes aggressively, sometimes passive-aggressively.
Passions can also be “on a slow-burn,” which we typically refer to as a mood or attitude. We usually call low-grade anger frustration. Low-grade fear is anxiety. Vague sadness is depression. A bunch of these passions combined, we call stress. Rigney writes, “Whenever we use the language of angst, frustration, anxiety, depression, or stress, we’re talking about passions on a low-boil, but often ready to erupt at the slightest trigger.”
So how do passions lead to fights and quarrels?
Inordinate Desires
Notice that James does not say that conflict comes from desiring something illicit or sinful. We know this because he says in v. 2, “You do not have, because you do not ask.” If you ought to ask God, then the thing desired must not itself be sinful.
But then where does the fighting and quarreling come from? It comes, not from wanting bad things, but from wanting good things so badly. The problem is not so much what you want, the problem is how much you want it. And what you’re willing to do to get what you want.
This insight is so transformational and freeing. When your anger and conflict comes from wanting a good thing, you are likely to remain stuck if you focus on the good thing you don’t have. Say you’re a parent and you’re quick to react in frustration and anger when your kids disrespect you or disobey you. The more you focus on the wrongness of their disobedience and disrespect, the more convinced you are that you’re right and they're wrong. But that distracts you from your problem: wanting them to please God by obeying you more than you want to please God when they disobey. How do you know you want their obedience too much? Because you are the one sinning when they disobey.
Church fathers from Augustine to John Calvin referred to these desires as inordinate desires. Inordinate desires are wrong, not because the object desired is wrong, but because the desire within our hearts is excessive, disproportionate, disordered. Augustine wrote, “There is nothing wrong with the gold, but there is with the miser. So it is with any created thing. Although it is good, it can be loved both well and ill—well when due order is observed and ill when that order is disturbed.” And the order, of course, is love for God first, then proper and proportionate love for created things as gifts from God. You were made to love God and the things God made, in the right order.
Unfulfilled Desires, Not Unmet Needs
What James says here is completely contrary to the wisdom of the world. The world, driven by envy and selfishness, misidentifies the cause of conflict in relationships as unmet needs. “I have needs, and you’re not meeting my needs; so you are clearly the problem!”
One reason this is so popular is because it’s so convenient. You can frame yourself as the victim of unmet needs in every conflict. And there’s no shortage of empathetic therapists to pet your hair and tell you how unfair it is that you’re not appreciated or heard or respected or understood. The prescription is always the same: remove the “toxic people” in your life and focus on “self-care” so your needs are finally met.
When you frame your situation as one of unmet needs, you feel justified in your own sinful reactions because you see yourself as the victim of everyone else’s sin. Your husband doesn’t love you like he should. Your wife doesn’t respect you like she ought. Your children don’t obey you. Your boss doesn’t appreciate you. But when you reframe your situation in light of this wisdom from above, you see yourself, not as a helpless victim, but as a guilty sinner.
James speaks entirely in the second person: you desire, you murder, you covet, you fight and quarrel, you do not ask. James says nothing about the third party in the conflict. That is telling. It means your issue is your own sinful reactivity when your own passions and desires are frustrated or unfulfilled.
I love how Dave Harvey says it:
“James masterfully shifts our entire paradigm from something we’re missing (an unmet need) to something we’re doing (passionately desiring something we’re not getting).”
This means there is hope! If your problem is fundamentally about what you don’t have, there would be no hope. What if you never get what you think you need? What if the other person never changes? But if your problem is something you are doing—namely, the way you’re sinning—then there’s hope because Jesus Christ died for sinners. You can confess your sin right now. You can repent and forsake your sinful desire. You can be forgiven in Christ right now.
The Cure to Conflict
While James does not explicitly prescribe a cure here—there’s no imperative or command—we can draw several conclusions from his Spirit-inspired insight. I’ll offer three.
Regulate yourself.
Conflict is the attempt to change the other person through some kind of force. This focus on changing or controlling the other keeps you locked in conflict. But if the problem is passions and desires in your own heart, then the remedy is to regulate your own passions.
So pay attention to your passions and desires. Be mindful of your moods and attitudes. In any conflict, our tendency is to focus on all the ways someone else is wrong. Adam blamed Eve, Eve blamed the serpent. But the wisdom from above, which will make you a peacemaker, leads you to focus on yourself and to pay attention to your own passions.
Our practice at Emmaus Road Church is to regularly identify and confess our attitudes of unbelief in our Discipleship Huddles. Attitudes of Unbelief include:
False guilt or shame
Bitterness
Anxiety
Despair
Impatience
Pride
Covetousness, jealousy, and envy
Lust or other indulgent desires
Laziness
Train yourself to speak of wants and desires instead of “needs” and “rights.” Articulating what you want helps you take responsibility for your moods and actions. When you notice an attitude of unbelief, ask yourself, what am I wanting? And what am I tempted to do if I don’t get what I want?
Whenever you notice one or more of these attitudes settling over you, beware! Your passions, left unchecked, will issue forth in conflict.
Worship God.
Worship is the way to regulate your passions; worship is the remedy to relational wars. This is the main takeaway from James 4:1–3. If the problem is your own passions at war within your own heart, the remedy is rightly ordered passions. And the remedy to idolatrous desire is right worship. When you desire God more than you desire anything else, you win the battle inside your own heart so that you can make and maintain peace with those around you.
Practically, there are two parts to that: first, turning away from inordinate desires; and second, seeking your satisfaction and security in God alone.
When your desires are frustrated, you can either react sinfully, or you can set your heart on God. I often pray, “I want you more than I want [fill in the blank]. I want you, and I have you.”
Fight desire with desire for superior satisfaction. The solution is not to escape all desire, but to re-order your desires, to put them in their proper position. Every legitimate desire must be subordinated to your desire for God and his glory and goodness.
And here’s the assurance: You have access to God himself now. Look how many times James speaks of what you do not have. “You desire and do not have” (v. 2). “You covet and cannot obtain” (v. 2). “You do not have because you do not ask” (v. 2). “You ask and do not receive” (v. 3).
The thing about idolatrous desires is that you have no guarantee they will be fulfilled. If your satisfaction depends on the fulfillment of these desires—no matter how right they are on their own—then it’s hopeless for you. But if your satisfaction and security depends on Christ, then there is hope.
There is hope because you have Christ. You have access to the glory and goodness of God right now, before anything else changes in your situation. And you have the strongest possible guarantee of unhindered access to God’s glory and goodness—the blood of Christ shed for you.
Ask God.
James says, “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” (James 4:2b–3). The implication is that instead of fighting and quarreling when your desires are unsatisfied, the proper response is to ask God in prayer.
James identifies two problems. One is prayerlessness: “You do not ask.” The other is improper prayer: “You ask wrongly.”
The word for ask is the same word Jesus uses when he teaches on prayer:
“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. … If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”
—Matthew 7:7–8, 10–11
According to verse 3, some prayers go unanswered because you ask with the wrong motives: “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions” (James 4:2b–3). The way you pray matters. It’s not that there’s a formula or a magic phrase you have to pronounce properly. But your aims and motives in prayer matter. There is a way of praying that uses God as a means to an end and treats him like a vending machine or a wish-granting genie. But if your god is that which you desire the most, then God will not answer prayers that do not address him as God.
This is what Jesus meant when he said, “Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son” (John 14:13). Praying in Jesus’ name means more than saying in Jesus’ name, Amen at the end. It means praying in line with the will of Jesus, resting in the finished work of Jesus, for the fame and honor of Jesus’ name.
As you pay attention to your passions and what they indicate about your wants and desires, turn your desires into prayers, for God’s glory and for your good.
God's purpose for you is to experience peace and unity, not just relational détente—a temporary easing or relaxing of strain and tension in the relationship. You can overcome conflict. This peace is possible because God has made peace through the blood of Christ.