Thursday, Nov. 29

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Thursday

What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you?  You want something but don’t get it. You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God.  When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.     - James 4:1-3

This passage from James 4 makes it clear that the primary problem in Christian community is our own pride.  Christians often talk about the side of pride, but I am not sure that they (we) always have an accurate picture of what pride is.  Most of us think of pride as a form of arrogance or self-confidence gone way overboard.  While proud people can certainly be, and often are arrogant, there is much more to it than this. 

C.S. Lewis writes about pride in his book Mere Christianity...

It is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began. Other vices may sometimes bring people together: you may find good fellowship and jokes and friendliness among drunken people or unchaste people. But Pride always means enmity-it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God.

So what is the root of pride?  Where does it come from?  James actually gives us some clues as to the source of all human pride and how it destroys our relationships.  Notice that in verse 1 James refers to our desires that battle within us and in then in verse 2 (bold above) he says that our real issue is that we want something but we cannot get it.

What is it that we want but we cannot get?  The greek word James uses here is the word ‘hedone’ and it is where we get our english word hedonism, which means pleasure or pleasure seeking.  The point that James is making is that our desire for our own satisfaction and pleasure is at the heart of all of our trouble and relational conflicts.  
If we come to any relationship or community demanding (even subconsciously) that our needs be met, we can be certain that they won’t!  But, if we approach the christian community thinking not about what we can get, but about what we can give and how others might be blesses, we discover that in the process, we too are blessed!  

I see this truth at play in the way that people “shop around” for a new church.  They will come to a weekend worship service and the whole time they are evaluating the experience; the quality of the music, how good was the sermon, how nice were the people, etc.  Now there is nothing wrong with visiting churches to find one that will be a good fit for you and your family.  However, at some point, if you want to grow in the kind of Biblical community that James is talking about, you must move past the questions of what am I getting out of this?, and start asking questions like, what can I give, and how can I bless others and bring glory to God?

All throughout the Bible we see that pride is really a kind of spiritual cancer.  It eats away at us from the inside out and it slowly destroys our ability to love and serve others.  This is why James quotes the OT when he says that, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”  

Or, in the words of C.S. Lewis,  As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.  

Jeff Frazier