Add parallel Print Page Options

Drawing Close to God

What is causing the quarrels and fights among you? Don’t they come from the evil desires at war within you? You want what you don’t have, so you scheme and kill to get it. You are jealous of what others have, but you can’t get it, so you fight and wage war to take it away from them. Yet you don’t have what you want because you don’t ask God for it. And even when you ask, you don’t get it because your motives are all wrong—you want only what will give you pleasure.

You adulterers![a] Don’t you realize that friendship with the world makes you an enemy of God? I say it again: If you want to be a friend of the world, you make yourself an enemy of God.

Read full chapter

Footnotes

  1. 4:4 Greek You adulteresses!

Passions and Pride

Where do the conflicts and where[a] do the quarrels among you come from? Is it not from this,[b] from your passions that battle inside you?[c] You desire and you do not have; you murder and envy and you cannot obtain; you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask; you ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly, so you can spend it on your passions.

Adulterers, do you not know that friendship with the world means hostility toward God?[d] So whoever decides to be the world’s friend makes himself God’s enemy.

Read full chapter

Footnotes

  1. James 4:1 tn The word “where” is repeated in Greek for emphasis.
  2. James 4:1 tn Grk “from here.”
  3. James 4:1 tn Grk “in your members [i.e., parts of the body].”
  4. James 4:4 tn Grk “is hostility toward God.”