James Chapter 4 — Humility and Submission to God

¹Where do wars and fightings among you come from? Don’t they come from your pleasures that war in your members?

²You lust, and don’t have. You murder and covet, and can’t obtain. You fight and make war. You don’t have, because you don’t ask.

³You ask, and don’t receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures.

⁴You adulterers and adulteresses, don’t you know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.

⁵Or do you think that the Scripture says in vain, “The Spirit who lives in us yearns jealously”?

⁶But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”✡Proverbs 3:34

⁷Be subject 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. Purify your hearts, you double-minded.

⁹Lament, mourn, and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom.

¹⁰Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and he will exalt you.

¹¹Don’t speak against one another, brothers. He who speaks against a brother and 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.

¹²Only one is the lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge another?

¹³Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow let’s go into this city and spend a year there, trade, and make a profit.”

¹⁴Yet you don’t know what your life will be like tomorrow. For what is your life? For you are a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.

¹⁵For you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will both live, and do this or that.”

¹⁶But now you glory in your boasting. All such boasting is evil.

¹⁷To him therefore who knows to do good and doesn’t do it, to him it is sin.