James - Chapter 4 | English Standard Version

  • 1. What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?
  • 2. You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask.
  • 3. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.
  • 4. You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.
  • 5. Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, "He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us"?
  • 6. But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, "God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble."
  • 7. Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
  • 8. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.
  • 9. Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom.
  • 10. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.
  • 11. Do not speak evil against one another, brothers. The one who speaks against a brother or judges his brother, speaks evil against the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge.
  • 12. There is only one lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbor?
  • 13. Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit"--
  • 14. yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.
  • 15. Instead you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that."
  • 16. As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.
  • 17. So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.
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