We Do Not Have

 What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You desire but do not have, so you kill. You covet but you cannot get what you want, so 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. (James 4:1-3)

 

            Talk about an indictment. This is one of those passages that, in some ways, is comforting to me. Sometimes, the early Church is described as this wonderful, perfect entity that we, in our modernity, have corrupted. The reality is that the early Church was as human as we are. That doesn’t mean we can shrug and not bother to try to do better, but it does mean we don’t need to perceive ourselves as being a lost cause – because people we might look up to might not have been better.

            Today, I want to focus mostly on the fifth sentence: “You do not have because you do not ask God,” but I don’t want us to look at it without some measure of context. As you go before the throne in prayer, what sort of things do you ask God for? I seem to have two basic prayers: “The Lord’s Prayer,” which I adapt slightly be asking for His kingdom to come, and His will to be done in my life as it is in heaven, and “WDA” or wisdom, direction, and attitude. Both are copouts – the former because I’m asking God to do in my life so I don’t have to, and the second for the same reason plus because it’s a safe request. It doesn’t require that I take any risks.

            There are people who probably think that I have no fear – or none except spiders, or some other such nonsense. There’s a song I’ve been listening to and thinking about recently that I think speaks to the reality.  (The Warrior Is A Child) And into this, people have spoken challenges like –

 

The universe is a perfectly safe place to live (if the Lord is your shepherd.)

We should be taking faith risks.

Be anxious for nothing, but in everything, through prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.

We do not have because we do not ask.

            And “Not Good Enough” howls in derision. Anything I might want must be desired with the wrong motives, so that I can spend what I get on my desires. Therefore, there is no better way in which to make sure I will never get something than to ask for it. And if God starts answering my prayers, how quickly will I become greedy and arrogant? For fear of becoming a monster who uses others (including God) for my pleasure, I become a monster who destroys what I could build up for fear of doing anything wrong or failing.

            And so I do not have because I do not ask God. And so my prayer request is – once again – wisdom, direction, and attitude, but the attitude I need is faith.