Dual Panel1What causes fighting and quarrels among you? Is not their origin the appetites that war in your bodies?
2You want what you cannot have, so you murder; you are envious, and cannot attain your ambition, so you quarrel and fight. You do not get what you want, because you do not pray for it.
3Or, if you do, your requests are not granted, because you pray from wrong motives, in order to squander what you get on your pleasures.
4Unfaithful creatures! Surely you know that love of the world means enmity to God? Whoever chooses to be the world's friend makes himself God's enemy.
5Or do you suppose that scripture has no point when it says that the spirit which God implanted in us is filled with envious longings?
6But the grace he gives is stronger; thus scripture says, “God opposes the arrogant and gives grace to the humble.”
7Submit then to God. Stand up to the devil, and he will turn and run.
8Come close to God, and he will draw close to you. Sinners, make your hands clean; you whose motives are mixed, see that your hearts are pure.
9Be sorrowful, mourn, and weep. Turn your laughter into mourning and your gaiety into gloom.
10Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.
11Friends, you must never speak ill of one another. He who speaks ill of a brother or passes judgement on him speaks ill of the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, you are not keeping it but sitting in judgement upon it.
12There is only one lawgiver and judge: he who is able to save life or destroy it. So who are you to judge your neighbour?
The danger of wealth
13NOW A word with all who say, “Today or the next day we will go off to such and such a town and spend a year there trading and making money.”
14Yet you have no idea what tomorrow will bring. What is your life after all? You are no more than a mist, seen for a little while and then disappearing.
15What you ought to say is: “If it be the Lord's will, we shall live to do so and so.”
16But instead, you boast and brag, and all such boasting is wrong.
17What it comes to is that anyone who knows the right thing to do and does not do it is a sinner.