4:1 Where do battles and fights among you come from, if not from the cravings clashing among you?

4:2 You want but cannot have; you murder and are jealous but it doesn’t get you anywhere; you fight and battle but gain nothing because you do not ask.

4:3 And even when you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with the bad intention of squandering it all on self-gratification.

4:4 You unfaithful spouses! Don’t you realize that to be friends with the world is to be enemies of God? Whoever wants to be a friend of the world is considered an enemy of God.

4:5 Or do you think the scripture says this for nothing: “The Spirit that lives within us wants us for itself”?

4:6 Yet he grants favor all the more, which is why he says, “God sets up for battle against the proud but is favorable to the humble.”

4:7 So align with God. Stand against the Accuser and he will run from you;

4:8 come near to God and he will come near to you. Wash your hands, you errant ones, and make up your minds, you who can’t decide!

4:9 Be miserable and mourn and cry; change your laughter into mourning and your joy into sorrow.

4:10 Humble yourselves before the Master, and he will lift you up.

4:11 Don’t cut each other down, brothers and sisters, because those who do that despise the law and judge it. And if you judge the law you are putting yourself in the place of a judge,

4:12 but there is only one Lawgiver and Judge, the one who can either save or destroy you. Who are you to judge others?

4:13 Now see here, you who say “Today or tomorrow we will go to the city for a year and conduct a profitable business,”

4:14 you have no idea what will happen tomorrow. Your life is a vapor that vanishes as soon as it appears,

4:15 so instead you should say, “If the Master approves, we will live and do this or that.”

4:16 But right now you are boasting and showing off, and that is wicked.

4:17 So, if you know what’s best but don’t do it, you fail.