## Draw Near to God 

###### 1
What is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you? Is not the source your pleasures that wage war in your members? 

###### 2
You lust and do not have, _so_ you murder. You are envious and cannot obtain, _so_ you fight and quarrel. You do not have because you do not ask. 

###### 3
You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend _it_ on your pleasures. 

###### 4
You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore, whoever wishes to be a friend of the world sets himself as an enemy of God. 

###### 5
Or do you think that the Scripture speaks to no purpose: "He jealously desires the Spirit which He has made to dwell in us"? 

###### 6
But He gives a greater grace. Therefore _it_ says, "God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble." 

###### 7
Be subject therefore to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. 

###### 8
Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded. 

###### 9
Be miserable and mourn and cry. Let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy to gloom. 

###### 10
Humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord, and He will exalt you. 

###### 11
Do not slander one another, brothers. He who slanders a brother or judges his brother, slanders 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_. 

###### 12
There is _only_ one Lawgiver and Judge, the One who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you who judge your neighbor?

## Life Is a Vapor 

###### 13
Come now, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit." 

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Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. 

###### 15
Instead, you ought to say, "If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that." 

###### 16
But as it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. 

###### 17
Therefore, to one who knows to do _the_ right thing and does not do it, to him it is sin.