Conflicts and Friendships with the World

1 What is the source of quarrels and fights among you? Is it not from your desires that wage war within you?
2 You desire and do not have; so you kill. You covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war. You do not have because you do not ask.
3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend it on your pleasures.

4 Adulteresses! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever, therefore, desires to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.

5 Or do you think that the Scripture speaks in vain, “The Spirit whom He made to dwell in us longs intensely”?

6 But He gives more grace. Therefore, He says: “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”

7 Therefore, submit yourselves to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
8 Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, sinners; and purify your hearts, double-minded.
9 Be afflicted, mourn, and weep! Let your laughter be turned into mourning, and your joy into heaviness.
10 Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and He will exalt you.

Warning Against Judging and Boasting

11 Do not speak evil against one another, brethren. He 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.
12 One is there who can save and destroy, who are you to judge your neighbour?

Warning Against Arrogance About the Future

13 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such a city, and we will spend a year there, and trade and make a profit.”
14 Yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes.
15 Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”
16 But now you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.

17 Therefore, he who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is sin.