Insight and Hope in Relationship Conflict

What is conflict, where does it come from, and where does it lead to?

If most people had to describe their greatest source of joy and their greatest source of sorrow, they would tell you stories about their relationships.

They would tell you about their wife, their husband, their kids, their grandkids.

They would tell you about divorce, tension, estrangement.

Our relationships are the source of our joy and the source of our sorrow.

The Bible has a realistic and insightful view of these things. The Lord said in the beginning of the world, “It isn’t good for man to be alone” (Gen. 2:18). The Bible shows and tells throughout its stories and storyline how relationships go sour. Just a few chapters after God creates man and woman, their sons fight and one literally murders the other.

We all know that the aphorism, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” tells the opposite story of reality. Physical pain fades into nothing compared to the grief of betrayal, abuse, abandonment, and estrangement.

Such joy and such sorrow.

People.

You certainly can’t live without them, but sometimes it feels like you can’t live with them.

Why are relationships with other people so difficult?
Why do we get into endless, arguments that spiral in on themselves?
Why do we hurt each other, physically, but even more often, spiritually and emotionally?
Why do we get into feedback loops of arguing and fighting with people, especially the people we love the most?

The Bible explains it.

James, the half-brother of Jesus, wrote a letter to a group of people he was pastoring after they had scattered from Jerusalem because of persecution. He wrote with this call: cultivate a whole, undivided life with God and one another.

An undivided, whole life includes resolving conflict in our relationships, so James illuminates how to do that. He gives us insight into the characteristics, source, and the results of conflict.

I remember the first time this text smacked me. In an introductory counseling class in seminary, I saw how clearly the Bible addresses these things:

What is the source of wars and fights among you? Don’t they come from your passions that wage war within you? You desire and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and wage war.
James 4:1-2.

What is conflict, where does it come from, and where does it lead to? Conflict is battle between multiple people, that comes from them not getting what they want, and it leads to death.

What is conflict?

Notice the words James uses to describe conflict in our relationships: “wars” and “fights.” The word “war” in the Bible often defines actual war between tribes and nations, but James here uses it figuratively (as scholars like Douglas Moo have pointed out). Think of war and all that it includes. Loss, grief, fear, violence, abuse, blood, death, maiming, injury, sorrow. Every realistic war movie is rated R, because it’s too gruesome to imagine.

James says that our relationship conflicts are like war. Destructive, horrible, painful.

Quarreling is the tension of emotional and verbal disagreement. Conflict is the combative tension between two or more parties. It’s the loud argument that raises your frustration. It’s yelling about whose fault it is that we’re running late. It’s passive comments about no one helping out around here.

Where does conflict come from?

James puts a stethoscope on the heart of the issue. Conflict with other people comes from the conflict within our own hearts. We are beings who ache with desire and longing and passions. Desire can be good and longing can be holy, but here passion describes something misguided. The word is hedona, where we get the word “hedonism.” It’s used for the “pleasures of life” that choke out the gospel’s fruit in a person’s life in the parable of the soils (Lk 8:14). It’s used for the enslaving passions of the flesh (Titus 3:3). John Calvin said, James “takes lusts as designating all illicit and lustful desires or propensities which cannot be satisfied without doing injury to others.” These passions wage war within the human heart and within human relationships. There is a longing for what we can’t have, or shouldn’t have in our hearts, and these longings always hurt others.

When people don’t get what they want, they fight and quarrel. They wage verbal and sometimes physical war against others. Inside of every human heart is a spoiled three-year-old who throws a fit when they don’t get what they want. Inside of every human heart is a little Veruca Salt saying, “Give me what I want, now!”

Our conflicts can seem never-ending because nothing satisfies the lusts of our souls: “The soul of man is insatiable when he indulges wicked lusts…were even the world given to him, he would wish other worlds to be created for him” (Calvin, again).

What does conflict lead to?

Conflict flowing from selfish desire leads to more conflict, and ultimately it leads to death. Obviously, this can be a literal, physical death, as we hear of tragic cases of spurned lovers murdering the person who rejected them. It can be physical abuse.

More often, it is a verbal, emotional sparring, leading to sorrow, pain, and figurative death. Relationships die when the sinful desires that produce conflict aren’t held in check. When we feed our passions instead of restraining them, we will get conflict. Eventually we will kill something beautiful: a friendship, a relationship, a partnership, a marriage.

Moving Toward Resolving Conflict

So, how can we resolve conflict? Here are a few thoughts.

Do a conflict inventory

Think over the past week.

What conflicts have you had? Arguments with a spouse? Disagreements with a kid? Tension with a coworker?

Write or type out specific things. Name them.

Diagnose your desires when you’ve had a conflict

Now, ask yourself, “What did I want when I sulked off to the other room when I argued with her?”

“When I entered the ring verbally with my teenage kid, what was I looking for and not getting?”

Maybe you wanted respect, and they didn’t give it to you.

Maybe you wanted truthfulness, or effort, or some display of care for you, or someone or something else.

Those are often good desires, but we can desire good things badly. Sin in our hearts grabs good things and provokes sinful reactions. We want sinful things in sinful ways, but we also want holy things in sinful ways.

So we fight and quarrel and murder when we don’t get what we want.

Trust in God who raises the dead

Maybe you’re well beyond the point of repair, you think. “That relationship is dead.” Maybe it’s dead because you killed it.

That might be.

But we just celebrated Easter, remember? We serve a God who raises the dead. Trust him.