James 4

What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don't they come from the desires that battle away inside you?

You want something and you don't get it. You kill and covet and you can't have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You don't have because you don't ask God.

And when you do ask, you don't get it, because you ask with the wrong motives, so you can spend it on your own pleasures.

You adulterous people, don't you know that friendship with the world means hostility toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God.

Or do you think Scripture says for nothing that the spirit He caused to live in us longs jealously?

But He gives us more grace. That's why Scripture says, “God opposes the proud but shows favour to the humble.”

So submit yourselves to God. Resist the devil, and he'll run from you.

Come near to God and He'll come near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.

Grieve, mourn and wail. Turn your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom.

Humble yourselves before the Lord, and He'll lift you up.

Don't slander one another, brothers and sisters. Anyone who speaks against a brother or sister, or judges them, speaks against the law and judges it. And if you judge the law, you're not keeping it — you're sitting in judgement on it.

There's only one Lawgiver and Judge, the one who's able to save and destroy. But you — who are you to judge your neighbour?

Now listen, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we'll go to this or that town, spend a year there, do business and make money.”

You don't even know what'll happen tomorrow. What is your life? You're a mist that appears for a little while and then disappears.

What you ought to say is, “If it's the Lord's will, we'll live and do this or that.”

As it is, you boast in your arrogant schemes. All such boasting is evil.

So anyone who knows the good they ought to do and doesn't do it — for them it's sin.