James
4
English
Standard Version Anglicised (ESVUK)
Warning
Against Worldliness
4
What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that
your passions[a] are at war within you?[b] 2 You 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. 3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly,
to spend it on your passions. 4 You adulterous people![c] 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. 5 Or 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”? 6 But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, “God
opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” 7 Submit yourselves
therefore 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, you sinners, and purify
your hearts, you double-minded. 9 Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your
laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom. 10 Humble yourselves
before the Lord, and he will exalt you.
11
Do not speak evil against one another, brothers.[d] 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. 12
There is only one lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy.
But who are you to judge your neighbour?
Boasting
About Tomorrow
13
Come 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”— 14 yet 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. 15 Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord
wills, we will live and do this or that.” 16 As it is, you boast in your
arrogance. All such boasting is evil. 17 So whoever knows the right thing to do
and fails to do it, for him it is sin.
The
Bible Panorama
James 4
V 1–3: WARS All
wars and fighting come from wilful and wayward human hearts. How different is
submission to God which seeks for what pleases Him, rather than what pleases us
. V 4–5: WORLDLINESS Those who are
friends of the world and its standards, pastimes and entertainments show that
they are enemies of God. This is equivalent to spiritual adultery, and God
yearns jealously for His people, as a husband would for an unfaithful wife.
V 6–10: WEEP Benefiting from
God’s grace enables us to resist the devil, to draw near to God, and to weep
over our sins and double-mindedness. God thus enables us to cleanse our hands
and purify our hearts and minds. As we humble ourselves, God will exalt us
. V 11–12: WRONG It is always
wrong to speak evil of Christian brothers. Christians should obey God’s law,
not use it to judge other Christians. Who am I to make myself the judge?
V 13–17: WILL We
should live in dependence on God’s will. We should not boastfully count the
future as ours, but realise that God can take away the vapour of our lives
instantly. To think otherwise is sin. In fact, whenever we fail to do what we
know to be good, we sin.
The Bible Panorama. Copyright © 2005
Day One Publications.
Yours
by His Grace
Blair
Humphreys
Southport,
Merseyside.
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