Wicked ambitions
1 What causes these fights and quarrels among you? Is it not your cravings that make war within your own selves?
2 When you long for something you cannot have, you kill for it and when you do not get what you desire, you squab ble and fight. The fact is, you do not have what you want because you do not pray for it.
3 You pray for something and you do not get it because you pray with the wrong motive of indulging your pleasures.
4 You adulterers! Don’t you know that making friends with the world makes you enemies of God? Therefore, whoever chooses to be the world’s friend becomes God’s enemy.
5 Can you not see the point of the saying in Scripture: “The longing of the spirit he sent to dwell in us is a jealous longing?”
6 But God has something better to give, and Scrip ture also says, God opposes the proud but he gives his favor to the humble.
7 Give in, then, to God; resist the devil and he will flee from you.
8 Draw close to God and he will come close to you. Clean your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you doubters.
9 Rec ognize your distress, be miserable and weep. Turn your laughter into tears and your joy into sadness.
10 Humble yourselves before the Lord and he will raise you up.
11 Brothers and sisters, do not criticize one another. Anyone who speaks against or condemns another, speaks against the Law and condemns the Law. If, however, you condemn the Law, you are no longer an observer of the Law but a judge of it.
12 There is only one lawgiver and one judge: he who has the power to save or condemn. So you, who are you to judge your neighbor?
13 Listen now, you who speak like this, “Today or tomorrow we will go off to this city and spend a year there; we will do business and make money.”
14 You have no idea what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? No more than a mist which appears for a moment and then disappears.
15 Instead of this, you should say, “God willing, we will live and do this or that.”
16 But no! You boast of your plans: this brazen pride is wicked.
17 Anyone who knows what is good and does not do it, sins.
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Comments Letter to James, Chapter 4
• 4.1 You pray wrong ly. James tells us that prayer obtains for us things that enable us to respond to God’s plan (see 1:5-8). Our prayers will not be heard if love for the world takes the place of God in our hearts.
What is the friendship with the world that prevents our be ing heard? We explain this in more detail in the commentary on John 3:17 and 1 John 2:15. God asks us to love all the things he created, view ing them as means of reaching him, and to reject what does not serve this purpose. Loving the world is wishing for and clinging to things, without looking beyond them for God himself and the brothers and sisters that he gave us. It is adultery in the same sense as the phrase from the Gospel: “No one can serve two masters” (Mt 6:24). We cannot divide our love between God and the world; neither can we ask God to help us satis fy egotistical ambitions.
Criticizing others is the same as despising the law of love. We must see, and at times say, what is wrong in an action, but we must not judge the responsibility of others, nor their intentions, which God alone knows. God is the only judge. See Rom 14:4 and Mt 7:1.
You who are making plans. We all make many plans: to earn more, to buy things, to have a good time. What is serious about this is that we forget meanwhile to do good. We know it has to be done and we know how to do it, but what we do not know is if we will have time to accomplish it. We may die without having done what mattered most.