A Faith that Works through Conflict

If you would turn again in your copy of God's Word, it's the book of James. Some of you have been able to attend our Wednesday night service. We've been in a series entitled, "A Faith That Works Well." In this past week, we opened up the book, and I read in James chapter 3 verse 13, "Who is wise and understanding among you? By his good conduct let him show his works." See, the theme of James is that faith without works is dead, and he transitions to wisdom. And just as faith without works is dead, wisdom that does not demonstrate God's blessedness in the life of the local church is also dead.

And as I started to look ahead, and I heard Brother Chris preach about the worthy walk. It was too good to really see this as a coincidence. Brother Chris talked about the worthy walk in the life of the local church that is forbearing, that actually we are called by God to maintain the bond of peace, that we are slaves to peace, Brother Chris taught us. And so when I'm opening the book of James and I see chapter 4 verse 1, what causes quarrels, what causes fights among you? It's not this that your passions are at war within you. I knew that this could not be a coincidence.

So I want to give you the message title before we look back into the Word. Today we'll be looking at a wisdom that works it out. A wisdom that works it out. You see, in the life of the local church, if we're going to walk the worthy walk, then we're going to have to wrestle with the conflict that we face. Most conflict begins not in an argument, it actually begins in the heart of the human spirit. Tomorrow we celebrate July 4th, it's Independence Day. As you know, our independence was purchased at great cost, many lives were lost, wars were fought to attain and to maintain liberty, freedom.

But all too often in our local churches, we see fighting, we see warring. And this is not a fight that brings independence, in fact it's a fighting that brings bondage. If we don't walk the worthy walk that we learn here today in the book of James, then we will find ourselves bound, we'll find ourselves bitter, and we will find the church broken. Wednesday night we explained that this is a demonic wisdom. If you remember, during last week's message, Brother Chris challenged us to memorize Ephesians chapter 4 verses 1 through 6. This is what he called the Creed and our calling.

So I want to ask you to listen as I read, if you want to turn to Ephesians chapter 4, 1 through 6. And I think you'll see this is beyond coincidence, the Lord is doing this for a purpose. Could it be that just as James called his readers to unity in the church, the Lord would use Ephesians and James to make sure that we have a wisdom that works it out. We have a wisdom that resolves conflict. Let's read this, Ephesians chapter 4 verses 1 through 6.

"I therefore, prisoner of the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility, with all gentleness, with all patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all." So today we will look at a wisdom that works it out. Let's go to our text this morning, James chapter 4.

And before we read this, there will be something of a lengthy introduction. If you could be patient with me, this is to catch you up if you've not been with us on Wednesday nights. And if you've been with us on Wednesday nights, this will be a good refresher. But James is writing to a group of dispersed Hebrew converts. They're Jewish in their background, they're Jewish in their culture, yet they have been displaced and dispersed throughout the known world because of persecution. These are people who have been persecuted for walking with Jesus. And yet they find themselves embroiled in a lot of church conflict.

Why is James writing this message? Is it just because he's got a spiritual hunch that people might be fighting? I believe he is writing about things like favoritism. He's writing things about preferring the wealthy than the poor. He's writing these things because these are the needs in the local church. And he's saying if we're going to have a faith that works, we have to have a wisdom that works through conflict, and that requires a humble wisdom. What I'd like to do is to call up the background from last Wednesday. We must have a humble wisdom. Humility was not a virtue prized in the local church when he was writing.

In fact, this was the context of Hellenism. Hellenism is Greek culture that when Romans took over the empire, they maintained a lot of this. And so if you were wise in that day, you were expected to display your wisdom. Wisdom was not associated with meekness nor humility. So when James is challenging his readers to display wisdom with all meekness and humility in James 3.15, he's actually saying something that's radical, that's even counter-cultural. And friends, you know of the turmoil in our day. Very few people are meek on Twitter. Very few people are displaying their wisdom in the public form of social media with humility.

Regardless of what happens in the culture, we need a humble wisdom. James also urged them to avoid human wisdom. The human wisdom that would bring about boasting, human wisdom that would be bitter envy, selfish ambition. He said that human wisdom is faulty wisdom and it stems from arrogant motives. In our local church, we cannot have any form of wisdom that would prop the self up. Because grace life, we are prone to wonder, "Lord, I feel it. I feel the constant drift." James also urged them to avoid hell's wisdom if you read James 3.15b. It says that the wisdom of the world is earthly, natural, and demonic.

Your three great enemies are the world, the flesh, and the devil. And if you look in the James 3, the wisdom from below is earthly. That is the world. It is natural. That is the flesh. And it is demonic. Now let's think about this honestly. The last time you got your feelings hurt at church and you started to nurse a grudge, or you started to get angry, or you found your heart sort of welling up with pride, did anybody look at you and say, "That's demonic." That's exactly what James is doing here. And as we get into the message, you're going to see how scathing a rebuke this actually is.

In the church, sometimes that which would draw us away from conflict is actually the hardest to hear sometimes. That is the mark of a truly healthy, loving church, is that when we speak the truth in love, we can lovingly tell someone that their attitude is of the devil. I remember Oswald Chambers once said that self-pity was satanic.

Those are harsh words, but if you think about the words that Chambers says, it fits right in line with what we're learning, the demonic wisdom is that which would say, "Hey, your rights are not being appreciated." I tell this story oftentimes, and it's usually joking, but Jared and I and Brother Chris were doing some camp ministry and young people would come up to us after a service and they would kind of cry and sometimes say, "I'm dealing with this. I'm dealing with parental conflict. I'm dealing with this crisis in my life." Well, I had one young man come to me.

Jared knows his story very well, and he says, "I'm having a problem in my youth group." I said, "What's that?" He said, "They don't appreciate what I bring to the table." I did my best to hold back the laughter. I said, "Well, tell me about that." He said, "Well, they just don't appreciate who I am." And isn't that the problem that we run into? We find a check in our spirit because, "Hey, I'm not being appreciated. I'm not being appreciated at my work. I'm not being appreciated in my marriage, or I'm not being appreciated with my friends or at church. People don't appreciate what I bring to the table." That's demonic.

And I think our only hope of having a wisdom that works out conflict is beginning to have a godly wisdom that would bring us down a notch. Then, perhaps, we might be able to gain some traction in our spiritual growth. Fighting, warring, unspiritual, demonic. And Wednesday night, we concluded with a heavenly wisdom. There's a commentator I've enjoyed reading, Douglas Moo, who said that there are attributes of wisdom. The attributes of wisdom given in James, chapter 3, begin with purity. If you're going to have a wisdom that works in the life of the local church, a wisdom that promotes peace, that resolves conflict, you must pursue holiness.

So, to move into the message this morning, I trust you'll be taking notes. We'll go right from the text. I want us to see the sad reality of conflict as I read James, chapter 4, verses 1 and 2. What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? The assumption here is that there is fighting and there is quarreling in the churches that James is writing to. What causes quarrels and fights among you? Is it not this? Your passions are at war within you? You desire and do not have? So you're murder? You covet? You cannot obtain? So you fight and quarrel? I want us to trace the cause and the sad reality of conflict.

If we look first, let's see coveting right from the text. He asks a question and then answers it. What causes the quarrels? What causes the fights? Is it not that your passions are at war? In 2014, Brother Chris preached a series consisting of about 30 messages from this book. We highly recommend those to you. I've enjoyed listening to many of those. And Brother Chris begins here with James, chapter 4, verse 1 and says, "The problem in the church with conflict is man." If we start there, the problem with church conflict, it's not in psychological predispositions. It's not in personality.

The conflict is not in, we don't have the right policy or program. Let's just call it what it is. It's you. It's me. If we move forward, coveting begins not just with unyielding man, but uncontrolled desires. Into the text. What causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war? Now, let's talk about these passions. Are these illegitimate passions? Some of them. Is it possible for us to want the wrong things and therefore covet and quarrel? Yes. But what about Cain and Abel? What was it that Cain really wanted? He offered a sacrifice before the Lord. It did not gain the honor and the joy.

It did not produce a heart of gladness within the heart of God. Was it right to desire that the Lord would look upon his offering? Yes. I think sometimes what causes quarrels and fights are not necessarily the unspiritual desires that we have. Sometimes we want legitimate things. And I'll go further. Sometimes we have legitimate needs. And those legitimate needs may not be met or they may not be met in the way that we feel we deserve. And therein lies the problem. The problem was not that they had passions or that they had desires. The problem was that these problems were uncontrolled. And so the answer today is that we need a wisdom.

We need a discernment from the Lord to know how to put our passions on the altar. See, if we're going to have a loving congregation, it has to begin in your heart. Even before you walk in the door. It has to work in my heart, especially the elders. We've got to lead out that we do the hard work of allowing the Lord to do heart surgery, to take the sword of the Spirit, to examine every motive. What does Scripture say? Let the words in my mouth end the meditations. If we are not free in our meditations, we will be in bondage in the life of the local church. So with coveting, we see unyielded man and uncontrolled desires and passions.

And within, if coveting is not addressed, then we see quarreling. In James 2, chapter 4, verse 2. "You desire and you do not have, so you murder. You covet and you cannot obtain, so you fight." Now you might say, "I would never kill someone." We learned in the Sermon on the Mount. We learned the words of Jesus. That if you've hated someone in your heart, you've murdered them. You might even say, "I would never hate someone." You ever get so mad you can't stop thinking about something? You ever get so riled up that you just have physical reaction? Your muscles get tense? Your breathing may just get labored?

Is that not just one step away from hatred? And it gets deeper in James's scathing rebuke. That quarreling leads to killing. There has never been a murder on the face of the planet throughout human history that did not truly begin in hatred. To murder is to hate. It's a hatred of man. It's a hatred of the Lord because the Lord created us in His image. So if we would hold on to anger and spiritually murder someone, then even resentment or bitterness that we would grab hold of in our hearts is connected to an image-bearer of the Lord. And you say, "Brother Keith, you don't know what I've been through.

You don't know the trauma that I've gone through. You don't know the difficulty. You don't know the hardships." I can't do that. I can't let go of this bitterness. I can't let go of this resentment. And I would say, "You are exactly right. You cannot." See, the Lord calls us to freedom from bondage, but we can't do that. He commands us to be wise, but this is not a wisdom within you. See, the whole Christian journey is that the Lord provided a substitute that you couldn't provide for a need you could do nothing about.

And so the way we live out a peacemaking wisdom, a wisdom that works, is by living in the Gospel and letting the Gospel permeate our hearts' motivations and letting it really, really make a difference. If you get out and you go to lunch with people here in this fellowship, you'll know that so many of us have been through church hurt. So many of us have been through church pain and church difficulty. And so many of us have experienced church life that doesn't work. When you see church pain and heartache, and I think that's what we need when we read this text, I think we can relate to James.

Specifically, I think we relate to his readers more than we know. So we see a coveting and a corolling and a killing, and eventually we see a committing of spiritual adultery. That's right, spiritual adultery. Let's read this text in verse 2. "You desire and you do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. But you do not have because you do not ask." Let's look at verse 4, "You adulterous people." That doesn't really sound like a pastor who wants people coming back and tithing. You know what this sounds like is that he is making an appeal to people who he believes are in sin and he loves them.

The original language is that of the feminine plural, which is "you adultresses." He's calling them harlots. Now the key to understanding this verse is actually knowing something about history. Jeremiah and Isaiah both used this term, and when God was angry with people who were his chosen people, they were worshiping Molech, they were worshiping the gods of the pagans, Astaroth, and he called them adultresses. And it is particularly important to know that James is writing to people, there's a lot throughout the book, there's a lot of Hebrew imagery.

They're very Jewish and they're very Christian, but they're very divided and they're having conflict and they're having fights. James is saying, "You covet, you quarrel, you kill, and you commit adultery." Secondly, we see the sad reality of conflict. Let's see the source of conflict as we continue in verse 3. "You ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly to spend it on your passions." I'll read through verse 5. "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 earns jealously over the Spirit He has made to dwell in us? I want you to see that these were praying people. He's saying you have not because you ask not, and when you ask, you ask amiss. That means they were praying. Specifically, if you would take something to write with and write under verse 4, verse 3, excuse me, "You ask." This means they were praying. They were praying, but their prayers were hindered. Scripture admonishes us not to go to bed angry lest your prayers be hindered.

Husbands, can I ask you if your prayer life is hindered because of the way you treat your family? Moms, is your prayer life hindered because of unwise bickering or even resentment that you would hold in your heart? The hindered prayer came from an active prayer life, but a fruitless prayer life and a hypocritical prayer life. He tells them you are asking wrongly and with wrong motives. There's a hindered prayer life and there's a haughtiness in prayer. The picture here, James is calling them adultresses, yet the adultress people are still going to the Father that they are offending.

And the imagery here is a woman is immoral and she leaves her children and her family and comes back to the house to ask for money. That is the picture. He's calling them adultresses, yet he is saying, "You ask." We have to be careful that our motives are examined by the Lord. This is actually a haughtiness in prayer life, a hindered prayer life and friendship with the world. James uses this phrase, "You adultress people." And the language here comes from a word that refers to choosing one above another. And I got the image of kickball. Have you ever been chosen last for kickball? Have you ever been chosen last on the team?

The picture here is that the readers that James is writing to were choosing themselves above God. There is another word here. It means to appoint oneself. So it's a layered imagery. Not only are we choosing someone other than God, but we are appointing someone in his place. This is not just adultery in the sense, but it is choosing someone, placing them above the Lord. And that person is me. The key to understanding this hatred and this adultery is in verse 4 of chapter 4. Commentators say the key specifically hinges upon God as the spouse and his people as rebellious. He says that friendship with the world is enmity or hatred.

Let's go all the way back. Is it really that bad, Brother Keith, if I hold resentment in my life towards someone in the church, it's really that bad. And if you would need any evidence, just ask people their stories of how they came to Grace Life. There's heartache. There's pain. There is fractured fellowship. There are close relationships. Relationships that really meant the world to you, and those people may even live in the same town. We've seen cases of you stop at a stoplight and you look over and there's someone you know and they see you and they pretend not to see you.

Spiritual adultery in the life of the church has the same impact that adultery has in the life of the family. It hurts friendships. It hurts relationships. And so the question is, how are you doing in the worthy walk? Ephesians chapter four verse two. I just want to read this portion. "With all humility, with all gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love." And Ephesians four verse three. "Eager to maintain the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace." As Brother Chris has been challenging us, are we slaves to this peace? Do we understand what's at stake?

Now we have been called a loving fellowship by several people who've come to preach. People that come visit that we know comment to us. The church is so loving and welcoming. So why would we spend two, three, four messages on this? I can remember when Brother Chris preached this in 2014. And a lot of the divisiveness that took place in years to come happened with people who heard that message. The real question is not, will you hear this? The question is, will you heed this? Three years, four years, five years down the road. So we see a sad reality of conflict and the source of conflict. So what do we do about it?

Let's seek the cure for conflict. Verse six of James chapter four. I'll read through verse ten. "Praise the Lord, He gives more grace. Therefore it says God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Submit yourself therefore." What is the therefore? Therefore. In light of everything he's been saying in chapter three and in verse seven of chapter four. "Submit yourself 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. Be wretched and mourn and weep.

Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. Humble yourself before the Lord and he will exalt you." This is the wisdom that resolves conflict. This is the wisdom that is the worthy walk. And if it is hard for you to read, James, say some of these things to his fellowship. Let's think about this for a second. Is he hurling insults at them when he calls them adulteress, double-minded, sinners? He calls them impure. He's writing an entire book about being kind. I don't believe for a second these are insults. This is actually kindness.

If you were in spiritual adultery, if you had bitterness, if you had resentment, you would want someone like James to lovingly, earnestly come to you and call you out. He is not hurling insults at them. He is speaking the truth in love to them. Very quickly we see a submission to God in verse seven. He says yield to God, relent to God, take up your cross and follow Jesus. We see a resistance to Satan in verse eight. What a blessed privilege that the enemy of the Lord will flee from us when we simply yield to the Lord. Submission and resistance and we see restitution.

If we're going to cleanse our hands, then we have to do the hard work of unity. I'm just glad Brother Jared this morning, as we try to do all the time, took some time. We pray silently. I will oftentimes ask the Lord in that time to give us clean hands and a pure heart. Because clean hands are hands that don't have blood on them. Blood from fighting. Those are sins against people. But the pure hearts are hearts that are made pure by Christ's blood. And every Sunday morning we need the Lord to remind us. Scripture commands, if you have ought with someone, you need to address that before service.

And chances are this can't be done with a quick phone call on the way to church. This needs to happen on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. If you're going to have clean hands, conflict needs to be resolved on a Monday or a Tuesday. I have seen conflict so entrenched and so challenging that it literally takes weeks and months to work through. Meetings, letters, cards. If we're going to have clean hands and a pure heart, we have to be willing to make restitution. As our friend Ed Lacy used to often say, we also need contrition. Contrition speaks to emotions. What does the text say?

In verse 9, "Be wretched, mourn, weep, let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom." Brother Keith, this sounds kind of like emotional. Couldn't that be forced and faked? Yes, it could. But if you see a person who has no emotions whatsoever, and they don't grasp the depth of the sin that they've committed, then they're probably not fully repentant. When you really take seriously what James is talking about, he's calling them lovingly spiritually adulterous. He's calling them spiritual harlots because of how they bicker in the church, how they are fracturing the fellowship, how they are not walking the worthy walk.

If you really see who you are and you really see what God says about you, if you're God-sided against yourself, you will weep and you will howl and you will cry. You will be broken. And that does look different for different people. But when a person comes clean, you know it. And this is actually enlightened with everything he has said in the book. Be repentant and demonstrate it. Be wise and demonstrate it. Have faith and demonstrate it. Friends, if I can ask you, what do you need to weep and wail and mourn over? That fractured relationship. Are you doing everything you can to be at peace with all men?

And finally, seeking the cure for conflict and finally in four, slander and continuous conflict. Now some commentators say that in verse 11 and 12, it almost seems like this is an addendum. But the way I read it, it seems to me that James is showing them how they need to put his lesson into practice. Another important thing here is that he stops calling them adulteresses. He stops calling them murderers. And he starts calling them brothers and sisters in verse 11. And this tells me that real born again believers struggle with this. If I'm honest, I don't need scripture to tell me. I do.

But I've seen enough evidence in my own life to know that I struggle, Christian struggle. Real brothers and real sisters battle resentment. Real brothers and real sisters genuinely saved people need a James in their life to say, I know you've been through that hurt. How are you dealing with that? I'm thankful that we have a pastor who's looked at me with this same loving heart and said, how are you doing there? I'm thankful that we have many people in the church who do the work, the hard work of body life, maybe in our small groups, maybe over lunch, maybe in a letter. I would just like to ask, how are you doing in the worthy walk?

Praise the Lord. God says in James chapter one, if any of you lack wisdom, let him ask. The place to start here is realizing that you need to ask the Lord to do a work in your heart. These verses almost assume that James is giving them their first homework assignment. He's told them what needs to happen in verse 11 and 12. He says, now let's start working on something. Let's work on slander, brothers and sisters. And I would say the same to you here. Let's work on slandering. What is slander? Slander in the legal sense is to speak against one's character and motivations.

MacArthur helped me here by giving a list of scriptural passages on slander. This could involve questioning authority the way Israel rebelled against Moses, Numbers, chapter 21 verse 5. Slandering usually happens in secret, Psalms 101.5. This could involve levying incorrect accusations, 1 Peter chapter 2. James is referring to personal attacks. What I have found in the local church is that slander usually begins with very spiritual veneer. It usually begins with something like doctrine or theology or it could be really anything from there. Leviticus 19.6 says this.

This is a problem in the Old Testament and the New and the Old Covenant and the New. Do not go about spreading slander among your people. Do not do anything that endangers your neighbor's life. See if you bore false witness in the book of Leviticus, you were brought before Moses and the fire of God could fall down. The elders were required to execute judgment, in some cases the death penalty. And if you levied a false accusation, someone could literally die. And the case remains the same. If you slander in the body, someone's going to die. It could be the death of a relationship. It could be a death of a reputation.

It could be the death of a career. It could be the death of a ministry. Ken Sand, author of a Bible study called The Peacemaker, was a blessing in the life of our church for those that really leaned into that study. Some things that I took from it in conclusion. In fact, these were some things that challenged me. I would like to challenge you with a few things as we conclude. Be careful that you don't judge someone according to your own strengths. In the life of the local church, we have a tendency to use our own giftedness and our own calling as the standard. God did not make other people like me praise the Lord.

God gave the church only one of me, and He gave the church only one of you. And He gave you with unique callings, unique challenges, and weaknesses. Challenges and weaknesses are not sin. And sometimes we can use our own callings and our own giftedness as the standard and say, "Well, they didn't show up to church early to clean." "I showed up early to church to clean." "Maybe the Lord didn't call them to show up early and clean." "Maybe He called you." But we can use our own giftedness and our own standards as the benchmark. We may be angry because someone else's difficulty or challenge or weakness is causing us to exert more energy.

Well, praise the Lord, this is the church. And the Lord will bring someone in your life who's not like you. And this is not a bad thing. In fact, it's only a bad thing when we demand our rights, when we demand our own just desserts. Instead of dying to ourself, I love how Brother Jeff Noblett puts this. He says, "You know, your rough edges are supposed to rub off on me, and my rough edges are supposed to rub off on you, and we're supposed to have iron that sharpens iron." Wisdom is heaven-born. It's rooted in a merciful meekness, and this is the worthy walk.

It's not rooted in self-justification or self-preservation or even self-consciousness. So the body life is a beautiful thing. And sometimes these difficulties, when you find them welling up more than anything, I think these messages should give us a very sober humility. We should realize what's at stake here. We should realize that we are a loving, compassionate, genuine fellowship because of heartache that's happened. And we need to preserve that unity, and we need to fight. And as Brother Chris has been challenging us, we need to be slaves to this peace. This means that we all need to be willing to lay down our rights at times.

Let's pray and ask the Lord to solidify this in our heart.