Proud or Humble
1What is the source of wars and fights among you? Don’t they come from your passions that wage war within you? 2You desire and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and wage war. You do not have because you do not ask. 3You ask and don’t receive because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures.
4You adulterous people! Don’t you know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? So whoever wants to be the friend of the world becomes the enemy of God. 5Or do you think it’s without reason that the Scripture says: The spirit he made to dwell in us envies intensely?
6But he gives greater grace. Therefore he says:
God resists the proud
but gives grace to the humble.
7Therefore, submit to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. 9Be miserable and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. 10Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.
11Don’t criticize one another, brothers and sisters. Anyone who defames or judges a fellow believer defames and judges the law. If you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge. 12There is one lawgiver and judge who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbor?
Our Will and God’s Will
13Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will travel to such and such a city and spend a year there and do business and make a profit.” 14Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring — what your life will be! For you are like vapor that appears for a little while, then vanishes.
15Instead, you should say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” 16But as it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. 17So it is sin to know the good and yet not do it.