Living on the Edge

Dave Drouilly: Today on Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram.

Chip Ingram: Do you ever wonder why some of the worst fights you have are with people that you love? I mean, what goes on inside of us that makes us do things like that? Today we'll unpack the reasons why we fight with those we love the most.

Dave Drouilly: I'm Dave Drouilly and this is Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. We're continuing our series building authentic community, how to lift up those you love. And today Chip starts right where a lot of our pain actually originates, conflict with the people we love the most. He opens with a story of a father, a park bench, and a conversation no parent ever wants to have before turning to James chapter 4 to uncover what's really driving our worst fights. It's not what you'd expect, and it's not really about the other person at all. Now let's get started with today's message titled Why we fight with those we love.

Chip Ingram: I want you to allow your mind to go to a park. It's a beautiful sunny day in your mind's eye. Big fluffy white clouds, the sky's very blue. It's a beautiful park with a lot of greenery. And as the camera of your mind's eye zooms in, there's a bench. And in the background, there's children running and playing and doing what children do, but it's kind of white noise. And as you zoom in, you see there's a little girl who's about maybe eight or nine years old. She has little pigtails. She's really cute. She's got a few freckles across her nose.

And you see a man sitting on the bench that's obviously her father. And he looks very uncomfortable. As you watch from a distance, he kind of moves here, moves there, and you can tell even from a distance it's just chit-chat and he has his keys and he keeps flipping his keys from one direction to the other because that's what dads do when they have to say something very hard to a very young child. And they don't know exactly how to say it or exactly what to say. As he prepares this speech that he's rehearsed in his mind over and over and over, and this is the moment of truth, he picked her up from their home that's about a mile away.

He thought the park would be kind of the best place to break the news. And as he fidgets and tries to figure out as a grown man how to break the news to this little eight or nine year old who is daddy's girl, the silence is broken by this little innocent comment. And she looks up at him and she says, Daddy? He goes, Yeah, hon. He said, Are you going to come home soon? Are you going to come back to live with me and mommy? I really miss you. And he realizes that all the rehearsing of his speech in his mind is didn't prepare him for this and everything in him wants to start crying, but he holds back the tears.

He says, Well, honey, um that's why we came to the park today. I need to tell you something. See, Daddy's not going to be coming home. And what I want you to know, sweetheart, it's not you. I love you. I want to be with you. I I I wish so much that I could be with you, but it's me and your mommy. We just can't get along. We've tried. We've really tried, sweetheart, and you've heard us late at night and we yell at each other and we scream at each other and we've tried everything, but we fight, fight, fight.

And so we're going to get what big people call a divorce. And I'll still see you, honey. Um I'm going to I'm going to make sure that I get to come by and you know, be here on birthdays and we even have it worked out where you get to spend a couple of months with me in the summertime. But no, honey, I I'm I can't come home. And she gives him that look that only an eight year old can give that says, I don't understand this. You love mommy and you love me and I love you and I love mommy.

How could two people that love each other this much not be able to work out whatever you need to work out? And uh he says to her, I know you can't understand, but maybe someday you will. And I just want you to know. And now those little pigtails are kind of down on her shoulder. And now the tears, she's not even crying. They're just flowing and streaming down her face. And until she is 80 years old, that picture in that park will be etched in her memory forever and ever and ever. And it will impact regardless of what mommy or dad says, how she views herself.

And it will impact how she relates to the opposite sex. And it will impact how she views God. And it will change everything about her life to some degree. And she didn't understand it when she was eight. She won't fully understand it when she's 18. And she may never fully understand it till she's 80. Why do we fight with those that we love? And what the Holy Spirit is going to say through Jesus brother who wrote the very first book of the New Testament, James, he's going to explain to us not only the cause of fighting among us as God's children.

He's going to talk about the consequences of what happens when we fight with one another. And then here's the good news. He's going to give us the cure. He's going to give us very direct, clear instruction about how we can stop the conflict, about how we we can stop it and those things don't have to go on and restoration can occur. So with that, open your Bibles if you're not already there to James chapter 4. He says, What is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you? Rhetorical question. Is not the source your pleasures that wage war in your members?

Will you circle the word pleasures and then circle the word war? Literally he says, Isn't it your passions that wage war in your members are literally among you? You lust and you do not have, so you commit murder. You are envious and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have because you do not ask. And then someone's thinking to themselves, Now wait a second, James, you know what? I I pray. And he says, Yeah, you're right. There is a second category. There's some of you that ask, but you do it with the wrong motives.

And you do not receive because you ask with the wrong motives. Why? So that you can spend it on yourself. The summary of that is the root cause of interpersonal conflicts according to James is our consuming passion for self-gratification. Jot those two words in, will you? Self-gratification. We want something badly. Maybe we want something in our marriage. Maybe we want it from our boss. Maybe we want it in the church. Maybe we want it from one of our kids. Maybe we want something badly as a single person and it says the wrong strategy is you try and get it apart from God.

Notice the line that he said. He said, you don't have because you don't ask. There's some ways through either manipulation or intimidation or image management that we try and get what we want instead of going to God and say, God, this is my heart's desire. The second way in terms of strategy is not just attempts to fulfill desires apart from God, but we try to use God to fulfill our selfish desires. We we try to make God our self-help genie. God, I'm praying that you will give this to me. And the goal isn't the glory of God.

The goal isn't the agenda of God. And what he's saying here is your wrong strategies are one, you try and get your stuff apart from God or you try and actually use God. You're asking God to do things, but it's not for him. It's with perverted wrong motives. And then finally the results are our passions and our drives and the blocks of people's goals result in frustration within and fights without.

Dave Drouilly: You're listening to Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. We'll pick the message back up in just a moment. But did you know you can actually watch Chip teach, not just hear him? Head on over to YouTube, search Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram and hit subscribe. You'll find full video teachings there on marriage, parenting, leadership, and a lot more. Ready to watch whenever it works for your schedule. Well, now here's Chip with the rest of today's message.

Chip Ingram: Well, let's get on the uh diagnostic side and then we will quickly move to the solution side. James is going to say, Okay, that's the cause of quarrels. Now he's going to give us God's diagnosis. Our constant quarrels reveal three different things. He's going to say that you have a belief system. And in your belief system, because when you have this frustration within, conflict without, you have a belief system that you have believed a lie. And he's going to tell us what that lie is in just a minute. And at the core of that lie is that we have believed the lie of hedonism.

And I'll address it in a second. Then he'll say that after believing the lie, once you believe a lie, there's a series of behaviors that have you beginning to move farther and farther and farther away from God and closer to the world and the world system. And God says, when we buy into that, we become spiritual adulteresses. We leave our first love and we embrace and fall in love with the world and we lose our relationship and our heart for God. He says we believe a lie, we betray a trust, and then it gets actually scary.

He says we actually can come to the point where even though we are God people, we become enemies. God will literally in this passage, you'll see in the next few verses, God will literally put on battle array when his children are being wooed away from him and beginning to live like the world. He will put on battle array and go to a war against us. It will be out of a heart of love and he will do what I call the velvet vice. It'll be a vice and they'll have velvet on the outside of it and he will bring about a velvet vice of pressure in your life to get you to change your mind about what really satisfies and to return to him.

It's called the Hebrews 12 experience. All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful, but sorrowful. Yet those who have been trained by it afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness. Now you say to yourself, Where did I get that? That all flows out of the passage here in James 4:4-6. Follow along as I read. Verse 4. You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world, notice this, makes himself an enemy of God. It's in what's called the middle voice.

And it's it's something that we do on our own. We willfully in intentionally out of our own choices, we make ourselves an enemy with God even though we're believers. Or do you not think that the scripture speaks to no purpose? He jealously desires the spirit which he made to dwell in us. See, you are a child of God. His spirit dwells in you. And when you or when I we when we get infatuated, when we start to flirt with the world and the world system and we start to buy the lie and after we buy the lie we begin to betray the trust and after we betray the trust we begin to live the antithetical kind of life as a Christian.

And then God loves me and loves you so much he will bring the velvet vice of discipline because he's jealous over the spirit that's in you. But notice his response is he gives more grace. He gives more grace. Well, how does he give the grace? Therefore it says and he quotes the Old Testament here, God is opposed. Literally he's anti. He's against the proud, but he gives grace to the humble. Literally he goes, adulteresses or unfaithful creatures. Don't you know circle the word friendship, will you? That's our word phileo. It's the affection with the world system and its sensual pleasures.

It means you are in in hostility. You become an enemy or you're in hostility with God. You make yourself an enemy. Then he goes on to say, he yearns jealously for the spirit that he puts within us. And this word, if you want to circle though it, God opposes the proud. It's a picture as you study this phrase of literally God going into battle and putting on holy array in battle to come against that which is opposed to what's good. And there are times in your life and there's times in my life when we do that.

Let's go back and and play out what the lie is then. He says we believe the lie. The lie basically is hedonism. And hedonism is a worldview that promises that I will be fulfilled by pleasure. See, the lie is fulfilling your sensual pleasure will deliver significance, security, joy, and fulfillment. That's hedonism. We buy the lie that sensual pleasure will meet my inner longings for fulfillment. And that lie leads us to betray a trust. And we become spiritual adulteresses. I don't know anything uh that is happening in our day that breaks God's heart more than a church that has fallen in love with the world.

But this problem isn't new. I mean, this is in the first century. The first century church was struggling with falling in love with the world. But when they fell in love with the world, they didn't blink and say, Well, you know, every other Christian's doing it, it must not be that bad. You know you know how we develop our convictions? We develop our convictions by finding someone who's doing a little worse than us and say, Well, they're doing this, at least I'm doing this. And then we find someone that deep deep in our heart it doesn't feel quite right.

And since we have a generation of people that don't know the Bible anymore, don't read it very often and don't study it hardly at all, you don't have a standard. And so pretty soon you find someone you admire and say, Well, they do that and I didn't I always thought that was wrong, but if they do it, I guess it's okay. And pretty soon we got sheep following sheep. And see, I I didn't grow up as a Christian, so you need to hear what those unbelievers out there think. I didn't grow up as a Christian.

You know what guys like me grew up thinking? What are you telling me this Jesus stuff? It's not working for you. I mean, I am sorry. That's just what I thought. What are you telling me about this love stuff? Your marriage doesn't hold together. You guys scream at each other. Your daughter's sleeping around like everybody else. Man, you you're you're headlong into materialism. So what what are you what are you talking to me about this difference Jesus makes in your life? And it's not doom and gloom, but I I would suggest that maybe some of our most difficult problems that we are facing individually and in the church today is that we believed a lie.

We betrayed a trust. And that we are we are like a wayward wife to our husband who's the bridegroom Jesus. And so we have become an enemy when we buy that lie. And And notice what it says. He yearns jealously for the spirit he made, but he gives more grace. Well, how does he give more grace? He He He it says here, we make ourselves an enemy, so he gives more grace. How does he give more grace? He's opposed to the proud. What did what did he say in the beginning was the core of interpersonal problems?

Pride, selfishness. What's God opposed to? It means he's against. It doesn't mean he tolerates it. It doesn't mean that he winks at it. It doesn't mean that, Well, you know, I'm not really happy with this and I wish you could kind of clean it up. It means he's against it. When he's against it, that means he brings consequences, not because he's down on you, because he loves you. When you mismanage your money, you mismanage your time, you mismanage your priorities, when you put stuff in your mind that will pollute your mind, when you think that vicarious gratification by reading you know, romance novels or checking on to pornography is going to meet the deepest needs, God out of his great love is going to go, Okay, you know, see, let's see, we'll work on their health.

See if they get to know that then. Okay, we can shut down that business. We'll have one of their kids go through cancer, maybe. He'll do whatever it takes, people, because he loves you. And we're going to be a pure bride. We're going to be a pure bride one way or another because his reputation is at stake. His reputation. This is not about you and your life and what people It is about his reputation. Jesus said, they will know that the Father sent me because what? How you love one another. This is how my father is exclaimed or exalted.

The word is glorified when you bear much fruit. What's fruit? Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control. It's being like Christ. Bear much fruit. It's not only exhibiting from the inside out the very character and the nature of Christ, but it's also bearing much fruit in terms of fulfilling God's agenda, reaching out to others, lost people coming to Christ through your life, found people growing to maturity through your life, mature people reproducing their life, developing leaders, your life. That's the agenda. The agenda is not how can I be happy? How can I be fulfilled?

I don't care what Maslow says. It's not about self-actualization. It's about Christ actualization. It's about abiding in Christ. And you know what? We're all smart enough. You know, here's the thing about us believers. You know, we it's like on the one hand we're like real smart and on the other it's like I look at us and we think, Are we like dumb? Who is the group of people that have most successfully fulfilled the world's agenda? Right? All you have to do It's easy. This is not a trick question. Go to the grocery store and start at the magazine racks.

Just look at the magazine racks, sports, entertainment over here, over here, over here, over here. Here Okay, here's all the faces, all the people, all the names who have zillions of dollars, play on these teams, have had multiple surgeries, are pretty pretty pretty, and are married, divorced, married, divorced, married, divorced, living with, not happy. The people that have the greatest looks, the greatest money fulfill the world system. Help me. Are they not the most miserable of all all people on the earth? And so what do we do? We have the Lord, so we try and be like them.

So what do we do? See, this isn't theoretical. And the seduction of the world is not something that you get hit in the face and go, Wow, I'm a worldly friend of the world Christian and I may be Maybe some of these difficult areas of my life really have to do with You know, I'm God's enemy and I never thought about that and No, it it it's it's like you it's so seductive. It's like when you go out to the beach and you're playing and you know, when you were a kid and you look back on the beach and your parents were right there and you're playing, you know, in the water and having around and pretty soon you look up and you mean, my parents are gone.

Where did they go? They didn't go anywhere. You were here. And as the currents went, you can be a mile away and you never know it. I don't think the average born again genuine believer in Jesus Christ in America is waking up everyone day saying, You know, you know, I know I really love God, but I think I'm going to embrace the world. I think I am going to try and live just like they are because I want all the negative consequences and want to have be a terrible witness and you know, my marriage, you know, who wants it to last more than eight or 10 years anyway and you know, the conflict with kids and alimony, it's really kind of fun and you know, all these sexual addictions and food addictions, bulimia.

I mean, you know, I mean, these counselors need money, so if I I mean, no one does that. But that's where we're landing, people.

Dave Drouilly: You're listening to Living on the Edge with a message titled Why we fight with those we love, part of our series building authentic community. Now if you missed any part of today's teaching, you can catch up anytime at livingontheedge.org. You know, everything Chip unpacked today about self-gratification and hedonism really comes down to one thing. We forget that real love is a decision, not a craving waiting to be satisfied. That's the entire case behind Chip's book I Choose Love. It's a practical, insightful look at what the Bible actually means by agape love, love that chooses the other person even when your own desires are pulling you somewhere else.

Here's an idea. Get a copy for yourself and a second copy for someone in your life who genuinely needs to hear what love really is. Or invite them to read it with you and watch what happens as God's love pours through you into them and through them into someone else. That's how it spreads. Get your copies of I Choose Love at a special price today at livingontheedge.org/offers. You know, none of this reaches anyone without listeners who choose to fund it. Give whatever you're able today and keep this kind of clear biblical teaching reaching homes, cars, and phones across the country.

Give online at livingontheedge.org or call us at 888-333-6003. You can also send your gift by mail to Living on the Edge, PO Box 3007, Suwanee, Georgia 30024. And if you'd like to catch every message as it comes out, subscribe to the Living on the Edge podcast wherever you get your podcasts. So a new lesson from Chip is waiting for you the moment it releases. Well, now here's Chip Ingram.

Chip Ingram: Thanks, Dave. I want to end our program with a question. And I want you to really think about this question before you just automatically answer in your mind. Where is there a conflict in your closest relationships? And what's stopping you from restoring it? Let me say that again. Where is there a conflict in your closest relationships, whether it's marriage, roommate, one of your kids, a mom, a dad, a a really close friend, a neighbor, someone at church? And you can kind of look in the rearview mirror and realize, Wow, it was over politics or over something about the pandemic or your view of you name it, right?

And this passage teaches me and it teaches you that at the core of those kind of conflicts is one word. And it's pride. It's pride. In the worst conflicts I've had, I was absolutely certain I was right, they were wrong. They need to get with the program. They need to see the light. And I just want to remind you that right relationships are more important than being right. And could I encourage you to uh to really pause and ask yourself, What's really going to matter? And do you really represent Jesus is this broken relationship or your attitude or you've just moved on or they just don't get it or all the other excuses that you make and I make.

It's time for healing. It's time for repentance. And you know, you can apologize. You can apologize if it's 80% their problem and 20% the way you responded. Just initiate and say, You know something? We may always disagree on this, but how I talk to you about that or how I responded. God has convicted me that I was wrong. Will you forgive me? Be the first to say you're sorry. It's not a sign of weakness. It's a sign of meekness and power and strength. Restore that relationship. You'll be so glad you did.

Dave Drouilly: Next time Chip continues with the humbling cure for the very conflict we've been discussing. So join us then right here on Living on the Edge. Today's program is produced and sponsored by Living on the Edge.