The Battle for Our Hearts

Terry Ellis

Heart to Heart • Sermon • Submitted 6 months ago • Presented 6 months ago

James 4:1–6

Conflict

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James 4:1–6 NKJV

1 Where do wars and fights come from among you? Do they not come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members? 2 You lust and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and war. Yet you do not have because you do not ask. 3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask amiss, that you may spend it on your pleasures. 4 Adulterers and adulteresses! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. 5 Or do you think that the Scripture says in vain, “The Spirit who dwells in us yearns jealously”? 6 But He gives more grace. Therefore He says: “God resists the proud, But gives grace to the humble.”

What is conflict?

Websters Dictionary says this about conflict, it is

: competitive or opposing action of incompatibles : antagonistic state or action : mental struggle resulting from incompatible or opposing needs, drives, wishes, or external or internal demands : the opposition of persons or forces that gives rise to the dramatic action in a drama or fiction

I. The Cause of Conflict.

v. 1-2

A. Righteous indignation

Not all conflict is bad.

anger aroused by something unjust, unworthy, or mean.

Jesus flips over the money changer tables in the temple.

B. Ungodliness

Not all conflict is good.

Nietzsche said, “Even a belief that is necessary dor life may be false: just because one cannot bear the idea that God does not exist does not give God the right to exist.”

He would go on to say that in a world without any universal confirmation of human values, the higher man alone must become his own legislator of values. According to Nietzsche, sickness and health, pain and joy, truth and fiction are the raw materials for the higher man to harness in his quest for self-mastery. Power, not survival, is the measure of a man.

Nietzsche claimed to be the anti-christ, and desired to be the replacement for Christianity.

He wrote a book “Beyond good and evil” In it he asked, where does Christian morality come from?

Here he would say that there are two types of morals. The first is herd morals or the morals of the week and enslaved. (The morals of Christianity) And the warrior morals, those who make judgement on their strengths and not from weakness.

Here we see that we are in a Spiritual warfare that is not only for our freedom to define ourselves as believers or to maintain our tax benefits, but in a warfare for truth and righteousness. We are in a warfare for the soul of our nation.

According to him, we have no more right to judge an aristocrat as evil as we do to judge a hawk. We are not morally the same. The idea of do what I say, not as I do is not a humorous joke but a real philosophy.

Ephesians 6:12 NKJV

12 For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.

Thus, we can see that church and walking with God are essential to the Christian faith and society.