James 4

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¹Why do you always fight and argue with each other? I’ll tell you why. It is because you only think about things that you want for yourself, to make yourself happy, and you don’t care about anyone else. So you fight everyone else to get the things you want.

²You think you really want something a lot, and if you can’t get it you argue and fight for it. You try to work out ways to trick people, or maybe even kill people, just to get something you want. You don’t ask God for it so you don’t get it.

³And even if you do ask God he doesn’t listen to you. He knows that you are just thinking about yourself. He knows you just want to make yourself happy and you don’t care about anybody else, so he doesn’t give you that thing you want.

⁴If you are like this it shows that you left God. You stopped following him and joined the other people in the world that hate God. They are God’s enemies. So if you join up with people like that you make yourself God’s enemy. You ran away from God. You are just like a woman that leaves her husband and runs away with another man.

⁵God’s book says that he put his Holy Spirit in us, and his spirit gets really upset if we leave him and follow some other way. You have to understand that message.

⁶And remember that God is really good and kind to us. His book says, “God is against people that think they are great, But he is good and kind to people that know they are not great.”

⁷So listen to God, follow him and do whatever he says. Whenever the devil tries to get you to go wrong just tell him to shut up and don’t listen to him, then he will run away from you.

⁸Whenever you trust God more it is like you get closer to him, and if you do that he will come close to you and help you. You have to stop doing bad things. Don’t even think about doing bad things. Don’t think that maybe you will go the right way, or maybe the wrong way. No, forget the wrong way and just go the right way.

⁹Stop laughing about the bad things you did. Cry about them instead. You did wrong, so be sad, not happy.

¹⁰Tell God that you are sorry. Tell him you are weak and need him to help you. If you do that he will say that you are important, and he will make you strong.

¹¹My friends, don’t say bad things about each other or rubbish each other. If you rubbish other people, it is like you reckon you are their judge. But God’s law says that you have to love other people, so you are really saying that God’s law is wrong. Hey. You are not a judge. You can’t say that God’s law is wrong. Your job is to do whatever God’s law says.

¹²God made his law and he is the only judge. He is the only one that can blame anybody. He can save somebody, or he can kill somebody. But you can’t make yourself a judge. You are not God.

¹³Listen. Some of you talk like this, you say, “Tomorrow we will go to that town over there and we will buy things for a little bit of money and then sell them for a lot of money. We will keep doing that for a year. In that way we will get plenty of money to keep for ourselves.”

¹⁴You talk like that saying, “Tomorrow,” but you don’t know what will happen tomorrow. Will you still be alive tomorrow? Your life is like a puff of smoke, it doesn’t last long. You are alive today but maybe tomorrow you will die.

¹⁵So don’t talk up big about something you will do tomorrow, but instead you have to talk like this, “If God wants us to we will keep on living and we will go and do something.” It is wrong to forget God and talk up big about something before you do it.

¹⁷So if you know the right thing to do but you don’t do it, it is just the same for you as if you did something wrong.