Where does the fighting and where does the quarreling among you come from? Is it not from this: from your desires for pleasure that are at war in the parts of your body?
You desire, and yet do not have. You murder and are envious, and yet are not able to obtain. You quarrel and you fight. You do not have because you do not ask.
You ask and yet do not receive because you ask with wrong motives, so that you can spend it on your pleasures.
Adulteresses! Do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore, whoever chooses to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.
Or do you think that the Scripture says in vain, the spirit that he caused to live in us yearns enviously?
But he gives a greater grace. This is why it says, God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.
Therefore submit yourselves to God. Resist the Devil, and he will flee from you.
Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded!
Grieve, and mourn, and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning, and your joy to gloominess.
Humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord, and he will lift you up.
Do not speak evil against one another, brothers and sisters. Whoever speaks evil against a brother or sister, or judges his brother or sister, 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.
There is only one Lawgiver and Judge: the One who is able to save and to destroy. So who are you to judge your neighbor?
Boasting About Tomorrow
Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a city and spend a year there and do business and make a profit.”
You do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes.
Instead, you should say, “If the Lord wants, we will live and do this or that.”
But as it is, you boast in your arrogant plans. All such boasting is evil.
Therefore, whoever knows to do good but does not do it, it is sin.