James 4
Your Life Is a Mist That Appears and Vanishes
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From Where Come Wars and Fights?
4:1From where come wars, and from where come fights among you? Is it not from here—from your pleasures that wage war in your members?
4:2You desire and do not have; you murder and envy and cannot obtain. You fight and wage war. You do not have because you do not ask.
4:3You ask and do not receive, because you ask badly, so that you may spend it on your pleasures.
4:4Adulteresses! Do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Whoever therefore wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.
4:5Or do you think Scripture says in vain, “He yearns jealously for the spirit that He made to dwell in us”?
4:6But He gives greater grace. Therefore it says, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”
Submit to God
4:7Submit yourselves therefore to God; but resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
4:8Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, sinners, and purify your hearts, you of divided mind.
4:9Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy into dejection.
4:10Humble yourselves before the Lord, and He will exalt you.
Do Not Speak Against a Brother
4:11Do not speak against one another, brothers. The one who speaks against a brother or judges his brother speaks against the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge.
4:12There is one Lawgiver and Judge, the One able to save and destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbor?
Boasting About Tomorrow
4:13Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to this city, spend a year there, trade, and make a profit”—
4:14you who do not know what tomorrow brings. What is your life? For you are a vapor, appearing for a little while and then disappearing.
4:15Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we shall both live and do this or that.”
4:16But now you boast in your pretensions. All such boasting is evil.
4:17Therefore, to the one who knows to do good and does not do it, it is sin.
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Saints Translation · Liturgical reading edition · V1 · working draft awaiting specialist review.