- 1
- Where do wars and fights come from among you? Do they not come from your desires for pleasure that war in your members?
- 2
- You lust and do not have. You murder and covet and cannot obtain. You fight and war. Yet you do not have because you do not ask.
- 3
- You ask and do not receive, because you ask amiss, that you may spend it on your pleasures.
- 4
- Adulterers and adulteresses! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.
- 5
- Or do you think that the Scripture says in vain, “The Spirit who dwells in us yearns jealously”?
- 6
- But He gives more grace. Therefore He says: “God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.”
- 7
- Therefore submit 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
- Lament and mourn and weep! Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom.
- 10
- Humble yourselves in the sight of the Lord, and He will lift you up.
- 11
- Do not speak evil of one another, brethren. He who speaks evil of a brother and judges his brother, speaks evil of 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 one Lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy. Who are you to judge another?
- 13
- Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit”;
- 14
- whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away.
- 15
- Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that.”
- 16
- But now you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.
- 17
- Therefore, to him who knows to do good and does not do it, to him it is sin.
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