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4:1  What accounts for the quarrels and disputes among you? Is it not this—· your desires that are at war in · your members?
4:2  You desire and do not have; you murder and envy and cannot obtain; you fight and quarrel. You do not have because you do not ask.
4:3  You ask and do not receive because you ask for the wrong reason, that you can spend it on · your pleasures.
4:4  You adulterous people! Do you not know that · friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore whoever desires to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.
4:5  Or do you imagine that scripture has no meaning · when it says, “God yearns jealously over the spirit that he has placed in us”?
4:6  But he gives greater grace. That is why scripture says, · “God opposes the proud but he gives grace to the humble.”
4:7  So submit yourselves to God. Resist · the devil and he will flee from you.
4:8  Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.
4:9  Be miserable and mourn and weep; let · your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy into gloom.
4:10  Humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord and he will lift you up.
4:11  Do not speak against one another, my brothers. Whoever speaks against a brother or judges · his brother, speaks against the law and judges the law; but if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge of it.
4:12  There is only one who is the lawgiver and judge—the one who is able to save and to destroy; so who are you · to be judging your neighbor?
4:13  Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to some · city and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit.”
4:14  You have no idea · what your life will be like · tomorrow. · For you are but a mist that appears for a brief moment and then disappears.
4:15  Instead, you ought to say, “If the Lord so decrees, then we will live and do this or that.”
4:16  But as it is, you are making arrogant boasts; · all such boasting is evil.
4:17  So the person who knows what is right to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.