James 4

Warning Against Worldliness

¹What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?²You 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.³You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.⁴You 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.⁵Or 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”?⁶But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”⁷Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.⁸Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.⁹Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom.¹⁰Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.

¹¹Do 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.¹²There is only one lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbor?

Boasting About Tomorrow

¹³Come 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”—¹⁴yet 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.¹⁵Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”¹⁶As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.¹⁷So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.