4:1 What causes quarrels and conflicts among you? Do they not arise from the desires that wage war within you?
4:2 You desire what you don’t have, so you kill. You are envious and cannot get what you want, so you fight and argue. You can’t get what you want because you don’t ask.
4:3 Should you ask you don’t receive, it is because you ask with the wrong motives: So that you can apply it towards your pleasures.
4:4 You faithless people: don't you realize that friendship towards the world is hostility towards God? Therefore, one who wants to be a friend of the world ends up being hostile to God.
4:5 Or do you think Scripture speaks with no purpose? That the Spirit He caused to dwell within us has jealous longings?
4:6 Rather, He gives us a greater grace. Therefore, it says: "God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”1
4:7 Therefore, submit yourselves to God. Resist wickedness, and it will flee from you.
4:8 Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, duplistic ones.
4:9 Be miserable, and mourn and weep. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom.
4:10 Humble yourselves before the LORD, and He will lift you up.
4:11 Fellow believers, don’t speak against one another. Anyone who speaks against a fellow believer or judges them speaks against the instructions and judges them. When you judge the instructions, you are not keeping them, but sitting in judgment on them.
4:12 There is only one Instructor and Judge – the One who is able to save and destroy. So who are you to judge your neighbor?
4:13 Come on now – listen – you who say, "Today or tomorrow we’ll travel to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money."
4:14 Yet you don’t even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a breath that appears for a little while and then disappears.
4:15 Rather, you should say, “If it is the LORD's will, we will live and do this or that."
4:16 But currently, you boast in your arrogance. All this boasting is wicked.
4:17 Therefore, if anyone knows the good they should do and doesn’t do it, for him it is wicked.
Footnote:
1. Verse 4:6.
He mocks proud mockers but shows favor to the humble and oppressed. (Proverbs 3:4 NIV)
4:2 You desire what you don’t have, so you kill. You are envious and cannot get what you want, so you fight and argue. You can’t get what you want because you don’t ask.
4:3 Should you ask you don’t receive, it is because you ask with the wrong motives: So that you can apply it towards your pleasures.
4:4 You faithless people: don't you realize that friendship towards the world is hostility towards God? Therefore, one who wants to be a friend of the world ends up being hostile to God.
4:5 Or do you think Scripture speaks with no purpose? That the Spirit He caused to dwell within us has jealous longings?
4:6 Rather, He gives us a greater grace. Therefore, it says: "God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”1
4:7 Therefore, submit yourselves to God. Resist wickedness, and it will flee from you.
4:8 Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Wash your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, duplistic ones.
4:9 Be miserable, and mourn and weep. Change your laughter to mourning and your joy to gloom.
4:10 Humble yourselves before the LORD, and He will lift you up.
4:11 Fellow believers, don’t speak against one another. Anyone who speaks against a fellow believer or judges them speaks against the instructions and judges them. When you judge the instructions, you are not keeping them, but sitting in judgment on them.
4:12 There is only one Instructor and Judge – the One who is able to save and destroy. So who are you to judge your neighbor?
4:13 Come on now – listen – you who say, "Today or tomorrow we’ll travel to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money."
4:14 Yet you don’t even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a breath that appears for a little while and then disappears.
4:15 Rather, you should say, “If it is the LORD's will, we will live and do this or that."
4:16 But currently, you boast in your arrogance. All this boasting is wicked.
4:17 Therefore, if anyone knows the good they should do and doesn’t do it, for him it is wicked.
Footnote:
1. Verse 4:6.
He mocks proud mockers but shows favor to the humble and oppressed. (Proverbs 3:4 NIV)
