Be honest.

How much contention and strife do you experience in your friendships, family, and church life? Do you want to heal your contentious relationships? Are you willing to accept that the contention is because of ungodly pride?

You might think it is acceptable to have contention due to differences over doctrine and practice, but this is not so. While you can affirm doctrinal positions and to seek to live holy lives, to be contentious over these things is not godly—“a servant of the Lord must not quarrel but be gentle to all” (2 Tim. 2:24). The word contention refers to strife, quarrels, and arguments. To love it is to love sin (Prov. 17:19). 

“By pride comes nothing but strife” (Prov. 13:10). When you think about it, this statement from Proverbs is quite dogmatic. Some people interpret it as saying that the sole source of contention is pride. Others understand it as saying that pride’s only product is contention. Either way, the verse links pride and strife very closely.

The bottom line is that if you walk into a room and encounter both bad feelings and angry words between people, ungodly pride is likely there. Arrogance and quarreling go hand in hand.

There is never an excuse to be harsh or cruel with one’s attitudes, words, and actions. People who claim the right to do so are actually arguing for sin, whether they intend to or not. We must accept these absolutistic and zero-tolerance statements about contention. You may recall incidents in which it was difficult to tell whether a person’s words were, indeed, contentious, but to live a life of peace, we must take a strong stand against strife.

In 2019, I had the opportunity to support a friend by attending two court hearings. I spent a few hours sitting in courtrooms and watching several cases come before the judges while I waited for my friend’s case to come up. As the hours ticked by, I noticed that many, if not most, of the cases involved domestic abuse or violence. As a pastor, I have known couples over the years whose marriages and families were suffering due to anger and strife in the home. Despite trying to help these people, I have often felt ineffective and have found myself, many times, fervently wishing that people would gain peace in their lives through the power of the Spirit and the Word of God. For many years, I have heard from both religious and secular sources that domestic abuse is a problem of epidemic proportions in our nation. 

As I was watching one couple after another stand before the judges in those hearings, it struck me that I was seeing, in a very short space of time, firsthand evidence of how widespread the problem is. I wanted to distance myself from the abusive men who stood, seemingly remorseful, before skeptical judges. But I realized that people who want to avoid strife must not merely avoid bad examples but must admit their own tendency to sin, and I realized that this applied to me, too. We may not have traveled down the path of strife as far as others have, but we all carry with us a sinful nature, and we all fail, to some degree, at being loving with our words (James 3:2). Every one of us must continually seek God anew for empowerment over sin. 

I wrote Healing Contentious Relationships: Overcoming the Power of Pride and Strife to help you, and me (!) seek God’s will in this area of contention and pride by providing insight into a passage that deals directly with the problem of strife—James chapter 4. Christ has wondrously provided God’s church with the Word and the Spirit in order for Christians, like you and me, to overcome sin (Ps. 119:11; Gal. 5:16). This book mines the riches that Christ, in His wisdom, placed in James 4 so that the Spirit might empower us to change.

James 4 is an exposé of the pride, covetousness, and unbelief that inevitably lead to contention. In this wonderfully helpful chapter, James diagnoses the sources of quarreling and sinful fighting, and he provides essential help for us to pursue a life of peace.  

Healing Contentious Relationships wastes no time engaging with the text of James, even while continually pointing the reader to the gospel. There are study questions at the end of each chapter, provided in the hopes that they will promote meditation on James’s thoughts, I have also included an appendix in the back which contains a list of pertinent Scripture passages for memorization.

I hope you enjoy the book, and that it leads you to deeper relationships free of strife and full of humility.