Killing Conflict
Why do we fight with people we love?
EVERYBODY DOES IT
You love your family and/or your friends very dearly if you’re anything like the rest of us. That doesn’t mean there are not seasons where one or two of them don’t get under your skin from time to time, and let’s not deny that sometimes you might have someone you love drive you up the wall here or there.
If you find yourself in a moment where you’re in a seemingly reoccurring inability to have peace with someone you love, we need to spend the time to dive deeply with the Lord into why we fight with those we love. I was living in poor conditions for a long duration of my life in which fighting was something I couldn’t seem to get away from. Try as I must, one of the people I loved most dearly in my life I simply could not figure out how to get along with for the time being. Prayer and wise counsel got me through, but I needed peace. Long, drawn-out arguments plagued our relationship and I was feeling trapped because we both knew our goal was just to love each other. What was stopping us from loving one another?! Sibling, parent, spouse, child; those closest to us often have the ammunition to hurt us the most.
Enter Jesus.
God was really good to me in those moments. He never left my side. And I guarantee that whether it feels like it or not, He hasn’t left your side either. Do you keep asking God for answers? Are you praying for peace? For love? Are you praying for reconciliation and for the storms to calm? Do you ever ask yourself, “Why can’t I get along with the people I love the most?”
This particular Season of my life where I had this question posed to me over and over I was going to God to ask over and over again the questions and prayers that I thought would remove the rocking boat.
The right question: “Would you humble me to be able to learn, Lord?”
And the answer I’d usually receive was a Bible verse that glared loudly at my concealed, calloused heart. I had been living thinking I was doing nothing wrong, unbeknownst to me, God was ready to fix something in me. The unrest was God poking at the spots in my heart that I didn’t yet realize that I struggled with (as it often is).
As He often does, God led me to the book of James.
He kept me in these verses for a long time before I was able to uncover what it was that He was leading me to understand. And by a long time I mean months; walking with God is never overnight.
JAMES 4:1-3
“What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you? 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. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.”
There is a lot in this verse but it holds so many key things to digest. Let’s feast together…
Any time the Bible asks a question like, “what causes fighting,” I tune in. My understanding of the Word is at a point in my life where I unarguably know the Bible to be the ultimate and final Truth from eternity to eternity. God is Alpha and Omega, beginning and end. He is sovereign. He is just. He is good. Therefore, I know that when the Bible gives an answer for something, it is irrefutable and unable to be dismounted.
So the simple answer God reveals to us here is that we fight because “we have passions within us.”
To understand deeper and pinpoint the intention of these truths, we can look at the Greek meaning of the word used for “passions” or “lusts” (in other translations) in this verse:
ηδυς
ηδυς | Abarim Publications Theological Dictionary (New Testament Greek)
The word in Greek generally means sweet, but when used as a noun like this, the word refers to a translation closer in English to the word “entertainment”.
With this understanding, take the verse to say something more like “your fighting with the people you love is caused by your constant desire to entertain what your heart wants.”
The realization that my quarrels were caused by my own “wants” led me to look at Psalm 23, where I know that the Lord says “I shall not want” because He makes me lie down in green pastures. This passage has been revealed to me to mean that He leads me to be able to rest mentally and emotionally within His peace because I already have all I need. Contentment.
The next couple of weeks God led me to understand that all of my discontent, my coveting, my “wanting”, was destroying my ability to have peaceful relationships. It was “murdering” my relationships as the verse lends us to interpret. James lays it out here in as simple terms as we can get: “you fight because you aren’t getting what you want.”
Okay, called out. Yes. This is all of us! We are greedy little humans who can’t bear to be unheard and unseen and misunderstood. I think my pet-peeve in life is being misunderstood, and this was eventually something that I needed to lay down. Along with my more complex wants like wanting to be respected. Who really is a fully respectable human besides Jesus? One must aim to respect all, but which of us is able to be respectful of every single person at all times in our human nature? Where was my grace, and why was there so much pride?
Oh, how much God had to teach me during this time! I was wanting love, I was wanting peace, I was wanting kindness, I was wanting and wanting and wanting. Not so much that my wants were incorrect… let’s not be mistaken. It’s not a bad thing to desire these things, but my issue here was that I placed my happiness in whether I had these things or not. Joy outside of circumstances was something I prided myself in living out through rough finances, medical scares, chronic pain, abuse and divorce, and every other experience that happened to me, but in this way (relationally) I had not mastered it.
Do you know what I did when I finally had this lesson down of what it means to know that “The Lord is my Shephard, I shall not want”? Don’t hate me, okay, I know this is extreme, and you may not have expected it, but I am a tattooed woman, and I loved this lesson so much as it truly felt like God reaching down and embracing me… so much so that I got it tattooed on my hand. We can talk about that later! If you disagree with tattoos as a Christian, I understand completely.
Now I am reminded every single day (because a sticky note on the mirror simply doesn’t cut it for me) that I have what I need. God has already provided. And He will continue to provide. Which leads me to the last part of the lesson:
All you need do is ask.
“You do not have, because you do not ask,” is the next part of the verse. We ask our Father for so much. Maybe you are in constant communication with Him. Maybe you speak to Him first thing in the morning or first thing at night. Maybe you are a prayer warrior. These are all things I consider of myself, but I needed to stop to consider this twist that had been tugging on my heart:
I am asking this request of this person, but have I gone to God with it yet? Why wasn’t that my first move?
My previous mode of operation, as much as I hate to admit it, was to notice an issue and address it myself. What if I started to live in a world where I didn’t even talk to that person about what I wanted to see in our relationship from them? I’ll tell you what happened… my faith increased.
I started noticing a problem in a relationship with family, friends, or my spouse, and instead of taking it head on, by myself, as I often do, I decided instead to sneak away and get on my knees. The amount of prayers God answered without me saying anything to this person was sheerly the product of being loved by an Almighty God. Not only did I know He was listening, but I felt deeply loved. This has been my new habit ever since. I have become a more pleasant person in the way that I let God do the work. I had no idea what other Christians meant when they said “I need to stop trying to do it alone.” This is what that not-so-godly, hyper-independence looks like, friends! Lean on Him in the small things, too.
I’ve heard it stated once that “God is a Gentleman” because He delights for His children to ask of Him so that He can give them their desires.
MATTHEW 7:9
“Which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a wish, will give him a serpent? 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!”
Summary: Our God is good. Our God loves us. Our God desires to give us what we want.
But that’s not the end of the story, loves.
The last part of the verse continues to convict me (my favorite kind of verse). “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.”
Okay, called out. Again. As usual. Thank you, Jesus, for shining a light on my sin so I can surrender it to You!
This verse points directly to another place in the Bible that is often interpreted without the full picture of what James illuminates here:
JOHN 16:23
“Truly, truly, I say to you, whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he will give it to you.”
Here it is again in John. How many times does God tell us He desires to please our hearts?
One final note on this passage that is of great importance… so much so that I have an entire other post allabout this called, “When Claiming It is Disobedient”. The desires of our heart must align with God’s when we are asking for things. What is your heart desiring? Is it appropriate to ask God for this? How does it give Him glory?
When we pray for these things, we must be aligning ourselves with God’s will.
Back to wanting, though, because that’s the big picture:
Coveting
I’m a big fan of the ten commandments! While we certainly do not live under the law, the commandments are designed to show us how to love one another and worship God well. And yes, there is in fact, yet another blog post I wrote just on this that will be released soon!
I’m not sure if you knew it, maybe you live it, maybe this is news, but one of the commandments tells God’s people not to covet. The tenth and final commandment says:
EXODUS 2:17
“You shall not covet your neighbor's house; you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor's.”
According to this amazing website below, the word used for covet in this sentence in the Greek is:
תַחְמֹ֞ד which means in the most literal translation, “delight.”
Strong's Hebrew: 2530. חָמַד (chamad) -- To desire, to covet, to take pleasure in, to delight in
While enjoyment is lovely, and God desires our rejoicing and gladness, and joy, I like to think of this as, again, believing that we truly do already have what we need that God has provided for us. This all comes down to trust, as usual!
Not “wanting”
Every single day we have wants. We want our kids to do this. We want our family to behave this way and that way. We want kindness, we want pleasure, we want love. The list is exhaustive.
I’d like to challenge you to think of whether your wants throughout the day are coming from a place of love or a place of selfishness. Let’s get real with ourselves and examine our hearts. Search our hearts, God!
When you know what it is the wants you’d like to remove, here is the next step.
Antedote: Loving Others/Fasting
When we are able to pinpoint why it is we have these wants. Who it is benefiting, and how we are loving through it, we can see what needs to go. Pray that God would help you to want what He wants. Pray He would teach you to want things for the good of others. To love others in that way.
I have a full blown post on why we fast, head to the menu to see a PDF version to help you fast if you are interested. One of the reasons we fast is to deny ourselves of what we want. In this way, we can remove from ourselves our own desires and seek God’s desires instead.
All this to say that we should constantly be evaluating our own walk, our own relationship with the Word and God Himself. We can examine how we can love God better and how we can be more sacrificial and loving. In conclusion I will say that our desires are not all bad, but what do we do with them? What should we think of them? Let’s let God search our hearts and be men and women of God.
I hope this serves a good purpose in your life and brings you closer to the Lord. Follow me on Pinterest so you don’t miss my upcoming posts! Until next time!
-Mackenzie
