When There?s Strife, There?s Self: In Pursuit of Radical Humility

[Adapted from A Walk Thru the Book of James: Faith that Endures, a small group study guide from Walk Thru the Bible and Baker Books. This small group study and others can be found at www.walkthruguides.org.]

The church was in turmoil, but that's often the case when the budget is tight and factions have developed. Everyone has an agenda, usually tied to pet programs and ministries. Competing priorities make everything an issue: the building project, the style of music, the youth ministry, the missions budget, the education curriculum, the sound system, the amount of parking, the community outreach, the fellowship dinners, the quality of leadership, the recreation outlets, and even the color of the carpet. All can be justified as a spiritual necessity in the minds of various advocates, and most can be minimized as non-essential in the minds of opponents. Even in the setting of the fellowship of believers, "spiritual" can turn to "selfish" in a heartbeat. Why? Because the peace of the Spirit is usually farther down on our agenda than getting what we want.

If that can be true in churches, it's even more evident in other areas of life where grace isn't the official climate. Competitiveness is an admired quality in much of society—sports, politics, the marketplace, the workplace, academia, and more—so it's easy for us to absorb a competitive culture. But in all honesty, scripture doesn't condone striving for what we want at the expense of others. It urges submission to God and humble dependence on his provision. There's nothing selfish about that.

That doesn't mean our desires are irrelevant or even bad. Many of them have been placed within us by God himself. But when those desires become the source of discord, something's wrong. Our motives are exposed, and they aren't always selfless.

As Christians, why do we do the things we do—even when those things are good? Do we attempt to be pure and to love our neighbor as ourselves because we know that's what God commands and, as a result, find ourselves mechanically obedient while harboring deeper desires for the things of this world? It's important to dig deep and examine our motives for what we say and do. Often, we find a lot of "self" in the way we relate to others and even in how we try to serve God.

James 4:1-10 asks what causes fights and quarrels among his readers specifically, knowing already the general root of conflict among human beings. They come from cravings, wants, desires—a word from which we get "hedonism." Unfulfilled desire, says James, comes from either not asking God for what we need or asking with wrong motives, and it results in conflict both within ourselves and with others.

The motives behind many of our desires, James implies, is friendship with the world. And that isn't as innocent as it sounds; friendship with the world is enmity with God. We choose either to seek his character, ways, and blessings or the world's character, ways, and blessings, but we can't seek both. And the reason it's an either/or proposition is that the Spirit within us is jealous for our exclusive affection (see Exod. 34:14 and Deut. 4:24, for example). Therefore, in all humility, we are to submit to God—to make ourselves low and line up under him, just as a soldier lines up under his superior's authority—and resist the devil.