James 4 :: English Standard Version (ESV)

Warning Against Worldliness

Jas 4:1What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions[fn] are at war within you?[fn]

Jas 4:2

Jas 4:2You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask.

Jas 4:3

Jas 4:3You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.

Jas 4:4

Jas 4:4You adulterous people![fn] Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.

Jas 4:5

Jas 4:5Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us”?

Jas 4:6

Jas 4:6But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”

Jas 4:7

Jas 4:7Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.

Jas 4:8

Jas 4:8Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.

Jas 4:9

Jas 4:9Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom.

Jas 4:10

Jas 4:10Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.

Jas 4:11

Jas 4:11Do not speak evil against one another, brothers.[fn] The one who speaks against a brother or judges his brother, speaks evil against the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge.

Jas 4:12

Jas 4:12There is only one lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbor?

Boasting About Tomorrow

Jas 4:13

Jas 4:13Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”—

Jas 4:14

Jas 4:14yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.

Jas 4:15

Jas 4:15Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”

Jas 4:16

Jas 4:16As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.

Jas 4:17

Jas 4:17So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.

See the ESV Preface (Especially for Parenthesis, Brackets, & Asterisks).

ESV Footnotes

(4:1)

Greek pleasures; also verse 3

(4:1)

Greek in your members

(4:4)

Or You adulteresses!

(4:11)

Or brothers and sisters

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