The In-Dept Study of the Bible
James 04
1 Where do wars and fightings among
you come from? Don’t they come from
your pleasures that war in your members?
2 You 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.
3 You ask, and don’t receive, because you
ask with wrong motives, so that you may
spend it on your pleasures.
4 You adulterers and adulteresses, don’t
you know thatfriendship with the world is
hostility toward God? Whoever therefore
wants to be a friend of the world makes
himself an enemy of God.
5 Or do you think that the Scripture says
in vain, “The Spirit who lives in us yearns
jealously”?
6 But he gives more grace. Therefore
it says, “God resists the proud, but gives
grace to the humble.”*
7 Be subject therefore to God. 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. Purify your hearts, you
doubleminded.
9 Lament, mourn, and weep. Let your
laughter be turned to mourning and your
joy to gloom.
10 Humble yourselves in the sight of the
Lord, and he will exalt you.
11 Don’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.
12 Only one is the lawgiver, who is able
to save and to destroy. But who are you to
judge another?
13 Come now, you who say, “Today or
tomorrow let’s go into this city and spend
a year there, trade, and make a profit.”
14 Yet 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.
15 For you ought to say, “If the Lord wills,
we will both live, and do this or that.”
16 But now you glory in your boasting.
All such boasting is evil.
17 To him therefore who knows to do
good and doesn’t do it, to him it is sin.