Hostile Desires - James 4:1-3 Series

James 4:1 What causes wars and battles among you? Don’t they come from your desires that wage war within you? 2 You covet something but don’t get it – you murder. And you envy, but you cannot have [what you want] - you battle and war. You do not have, because you do not ask. 3 When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your desires. 4 Adulteresses! Don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. 5 Or do you think Scripture says without reason that the spirit he caused to live in us envies intensely?

Introduction

Review: Hostile Desires

I’m sitting across the table from a man and his wife who have come in for marriage counseling. I ask, “How did it go this week?”

“Not very well.”

“Did you have another fight?”

“Yes.”

“What day did that happen?”

“All of them.”

“What did you fight about?”

Long pause… Finally he looks over at her – “Do you remember?”

“Well, um, I think…it was…um … I can’t really… - it’s just stupid stuff.”

“Yeah, we fight over the dumbest things.”

Either they can’t remember what they fought about, or, when they can remember, it is such a silly thing to fight about that they’re embarrassed to even tell me.

And very often they look at me and say, “We’re never like this with other people. When I deal with other people I can listen, I can admit I’m wrong, I can show compassion, I’m not selfish. But somehow when it’s just the two of us we fight like cats and dogs.”

Why is it such a common experience? How is it that we can get into a fight and not know why? We have been studying through the book of James and last week we began chapter 4 where James begins the chapter by asking that very question.

1 What causes fights and quarrels among you?

And then he immediately gives us the answer.

1 … Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you?

The reason we fight is because of hostile desires. When you fight with your spouse over dumb little things that are so small that by the end of the fight you can’t even remember what the fight was originally about – the reason that happens is because there is hostility in your heart over some unfulfilled desire. There is some latent resentment toward your spouse because of some desire you have that they aren’t fulfilling or that they are blocking. There are 100 desires you have that you can live without. Those don’t make you angry. But whenever you have one of those desires where your soul decides, “I have to have this in order to be happy,” (the Bible calls that a covetous desire), whenever one of those kind of desires gets blocked or goes unfulfilled, it results in some form of hostility. It might be yelling and screaming, or it might be a quiet, cold resentment or bitterness. But either way, it’s hostility.

Desires are good. God made us to have desires and to seek fulfillment of those desires. But just as perfectly good food can go bad, so perfectly good desires can go hostile. It used to be a perfectly good desire, but now it is one of those ones where, if I don’t get it, I’m going to get mad.

So we have these hostile desires, they go unfulfilled, and that results in a latent hostility and resentment and bitterness just sitting there under the surface. And you never even know it’s there until your spouse does some tiny little thing wrong and you blow up. Or it turns into a fight. And you don’t even know why because that little thing they did barely even matters to you. It is because of underlying hostility and bitterness caused by hostile desires going unfulfilled.

So this is a great insight that James is giving us. When you get into a fight with your spouse, or with your brother or sister, or your roommate, ask yourself these two questions: What do I want that I’m not getting? Or what am I getting that I don’t want? It might be something totally unrelated to the current fight you’re having, just like sometimes you go to the doctor with pain in one part of your body and he finds the cause of it in a completely different part of your body. When you find yourself getting into conflicts with someone, search your heart for desires that have gone hostile ? perfectly good desires that have gone bad because your soul thinks it has to have those things in order to be happy. What do I want that I’m not getting? Or what am I getting that I don’t want? What is it that I think I need in order to be happy, and that desire is being blocked?