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. (James 4:2, NIV)
Recently, I got the rare opportunity to get out and play a round of golf on a Friday morning. At our club, the same groups usually play at the same time each day of the week. I knew a group of men that played on Fridays, so joined up with them. It worked out well because they only had seven players and I completed their second foursome—or so I thought! As I stepped up to the first tee, I realized I we had only three. Our fourth decided to play with the foursome in front of us. So we oddly played in a threesome right behind a fivesome in the same game, waiting on most shots.
Eventually, I learned the reason why our “fourth” abandoned our group for the one in front of us. He and one of the guys in our group had a little conflict over something very minor from a previous round. He didn’t want to play with our guy again. He used the excuse that we were playing from different tees, but a few people saw through his excuse and found it as awkward as I did.
This sounds like a silly example to transition our thoughts to Scripture, but conflict is all around us. God’s Word offers us tremendous insight into the root of our quarrels. The Bible can help us understand why nearly all the interpersonal conflict that we face with our friends, family, co-workers, and fellow golfers(!) happens.
Choose your tendency:
– Avoid conflict and allow your bitterness to fester inside, or
– Fight and argue all things to the death because winning becomes more important than resolving the actual conflict.
Either way, you can learn from the brother of Jesus, and the insight he gave in James 4.
First and foremost, the message in these two verses is that our not getting what we want is the common problem to all of our conflict. We are usually pretty good at finding the other party’s fault, but rarely do we own the fact that it is our own desires that is the problem. Because of this, we are willing to “kill” the other person. The author may not be calling the reader a literal murderer here, but he is at least implying that we in essence kill the other person when we fight because we put our own motives and desires above theirs.
My encouragement to you today is to take a good look at yourself. In the quarrels you are having and conflicts that you are in the midst of, what is it that you are not getting? What “need” of yours is not being met? Once you start doing this simple, yet powerful exercise, you will begin to realize that your own selfish desires are the common denominator in all your conflicts. You will hopefully begin to extend a little more grace to others, because you will realize that their issue is the same as your issue—nobody is getting exactly their way.
—
Josh Nelson
October 9, 2012
Copyright 2012 Links Players International
The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.