James 4

Tree of Life Version

Resist Pride and Evil

4 Where do quarrels and conflicts among you come from? Don’t they come from this, namely your passions that battle within your body parts? ² You crave and have not. You murder and you envy, yet you cannot get it. You fight and you wage war. You do not have because you do not ask. ³ You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives so you may spend it on your passions. ⁴ You adulteresses!^[a] Don’t you 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 think that in vain the Scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit which He made to dwell in us”? ⁶ But He gives greater grace. Therefore it says,

⁷ Therefore submit to God. But 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! ^{[c] 9} Lament and mourn and weep! Let your laughter be turned into mourning, and your joy into gloom. ¹⁰ Humble yourselves in the sight of Adonai, and He shall lift you up. ^{[d] 11} Do not speak evil against one another, brethren. The one who speaks against a brother or judges his brother, speaks evil against the Torah and judges the Torah. But if you judge the Torah, you are not a doer of the Torah, but a judge. ¹² There is only one lawgiver and judge^[e]—the One who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you who judges your neighbor?

If the Lord Wills, We Will

¹³ Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.” ¹⁴ Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. What is your life? For you are a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes. ^{[f] 15} Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.” ¹⁶ But now you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. ¹⁷ Therefore whoever knows the right thing to do and does not do it—for him it is sin.