James 4 — PEV

Let God be your boss, not the devil

4Verse 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.^{Verse 2}You 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. But you don’t ask God for it, and that’s why you don’t get it.^{Verse 3}And even if you do ask God for something, 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.^{Verse 4}If you are like that, 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.^{Verse 5}God says something important about this in his book. He says that he put his Holy Spirit in us, and he says that if we leave him and follow some other way, his spirit gets really upset.^{Verse 6}And remember that God is really good to us. His book says this too,“God is against people that think they are great,
but he is good to people that know they are not great.”^{Verse 7}So listen to God, and follow him, and do what he says. Fight back against the devil, the boss over the bad spirits. Whenever he tries to get you to go wrong, just tell him to be quiet, and don’t listen to him. Then he will leave you, and he will run away from you.^{Verse 8}But when you trust God, you go close to him, and when you do that, he will come close to you, and he will help you. So 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.^{Verse 9}Stop laughing about the bad things you did. Cry about them instead. You went wrong, so be sad, not happy.^{Verse 10}Tell God that you are sorry. Tell him that you know that you are weak, and that you are not important. If you do that, he will tell you that you are important, and he will make you strong.

Don’t make yourself the judge of other people

^{Verse 11}My Christian 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 if you rubbish them, you are really saying that you think God’s law is wrong. But you are not a judge, so you can’t say that God’s law is wrong. Your job is to do whatever God’s law says.^{Verse 12}God 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 do that. You are not God, so you can’t make yourself a judge and rubbish other people.

Don’t talk up big about something you want to do

^{Verse 13}Listen. 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 we will sell them for a lot of money. We will keep on doing that for a year. That’s how we will get plenty of money to keep for ourselves.”^{Verse 14}You talk like that. You say, “Tomorrow,” but you don’t know what will happen tomorrow. Will you still be alive tomorrow? You know, your life is like a puff of smoke, it doesn’t last long. You are alive today, but maybe tomorrow you will die.^{Verse 15}So 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 that thing.” It is wrong to forget God and talk up big about something before you do it.^{Verse 17}You see, 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.