1Where do wars and where do fights among you come from? Is it not from here—from your pleasures that wage war among your members?
2You desire and do not have; you murder and covet, and are not able to obtain; you fight and wage war. You do not have because you do not ask;
3you ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, so that you may spend it on your pleasures.
4Adulteresses! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever resolves to be a friend of the world is constituted an enemy of God.
5Or do you suppose that the Scripture speaks in vain: “He yearns jealously over the spirit that he made to dwell in us”?
6But he gives greater grace; therefore it says: “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”
7Submit yourselves therefore to God; but resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
8Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. Be wretched and mourn and weep;
9Be miserable 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 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.
12There is one lawgiver and judge, the one who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you, the one who judges your neighbor?
13Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such-and-such a city and spend a year there and do business and make a profit”—
14you who do not know about tomorrow, what your life will be. For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then also vanishes.
15Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will both live and do this or that.”
16But as it is, you boast in your arrogant pretensions. All such boasting is evil.
17So then, to the one who knows the good to do and does not do it, to him it is sin.
Open in the interactive reader →