Ask.

James 4

Submit Yourselves to God
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.

This passage came alive to me when I was reading at school today. The idea that 'the sole reason we have quarrels and fights with one another is that we want something but don't get' it is both groundbreaking and simple.

It's crazy to get to the roots of life, the very foundational theological and philosophical truths and ideas that make life life, and to see how everything works and why it works the way it does. I wrote the other day about how simple it is to have Joy in all circumstances and to be free of sin - keep your eyes focused on Jesus. And today, I see that any personal issues we have are simply there because we have needs that aren't being met by God. And not because He is depriving us of something we need, but because we aren't ASKING for and therefore RECIEVING the satisfaction for our needs.

What causes fights and quarrels among you? You want something but don't get it.

It's so true! We humans are way too focused on ourselves and meeting our selfish fleshly desires that we don't see the outstretched, open hand in front of us. And, on an even more embarrassing level, the people of God's church are so fixed on getting what they want, be it spiritual, emotional, or physical, thinking that spiritual rituals or good deeds will suffice, that we are blind to the God we claim to serve! I can't believe how embarrassed Christ must be of His bride when he sees us fighting amongst each other, quarreling over eternally trivial trivialities, missing the whole point of His sacrifice.

All we must do is focus on Jesus - see who He is and therefore who WE are, and then ask Him to satisfy our needs. I promise, He'll do it every time, as long as we're asking Him to give us more of Himself. Once we begin to actually ASK God to fulfill our battling desires, we'll lose a lot of church members' drama and win a lot of skeptics' hearts.

We're all in this together.