Down to Earth But Heavenly Minded

What does James Chapter 4 mean?

What is the result of living by the wisdom of the world, rather than the wisdom of God? What should Christians do when they realize that’s the path they’ve been on? James answers those questions in chapter 4. This passage continues to build on the end of chapter 3. Previously, James described the so-called wisdom of the world: figure out what you really want out of life (bitter envy) and plan to get it for yourself at any cost (selfish ambition). He described this earthly, unspiritual, demonic philosophy as the source of disorder and all sorts of evil in the world (James 3:15–16).

James has been writing to Jewish Christians of the first century (James 1:1). Here, in chapter 4, James says to these very readers that a worldly, unspiritual road is the very one they have been following. This is what causes fights and quarrels among them. When people follow this road, they try to get what they want for themselves, frustrated by the people standing in their way. So, they fight, quarrel, even kill. Instead of trusting that they have a loving heavenly Father to provide in His perfect timing, worldly-minded people insist on fighting to get what they want.

James elevates our awareness of how serious this problem is by putting a sharp label on it: adultery. Are you following the wisdom of the world, while claiming to be a Christian believer? If so, you’re cheating on God with this world system of serving yourself first and at all costs. You can’t do both. If you make yourself a friend of the world, you make yourself an enemy of God (James 4:1–5).

James writes that if in your pride you stay on that path, God will oppose you, but He will not reject you. Repentance is always possible. He gives more grace (James 4:6).

So, James’s plea to those caught up in the wisdom of the world is simple: turn around. Submit to God. Resist the devil. Move closer to God. He will move closer to you. What grace! Cleanse yourself of sin, and be truly sad about it. Humble yourself by quitting your life’s work of getting what you want, and trust God to exalt you far above anything you could have done for yourself (James 4:7–10).

God is the only judge. He wrote the Law. Don’t make it your business to judge other people as if you are either the judge or lawgiver. That’s God’s job (James 4:11–12).

In true humility, Christians understand that their lives are fragile and short. Unless God allows it, they can accomplish nothing. Don’t be so arrogant as to declare what you will do to gather good for yourself. That’s just empty, arrogant, evil, foolish boasting. Instead, make your plans with the humble awareness that God may change them at any time (James 4:13–16).

The chapter also presents a unique aspect of Christian ethics. Rather than simply not harming others, the Bible actually obligates us to actively do what is right. As James says, it is sin to know the right thing to do, and choose not to do it (James 4:17).

Book Summary
The book of James is about specifically understanding what saving faith looks like. How does faith in Christ reveal itself in a believer’s life? What choices does real trust in God lead us to make? Those are the questions James answers. Most scholars believe the writer was Jesus’ half-brother, a son born to Joseph and Mary after Jesus’ birth. James may not have come to believe Jesus was the Messiah until after the resurrection. Eventually, though, he became one of the leaders of the Christian church in Jerusalem. This is possibly the earliest-written of all the New Testament books, around AD 40–50. James addresses his letter to Jewish Christians scattered around the known world.

Verse by Verse

Verse 1. What causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this, that your passions are at war within you?

Chapter and verse divisions were not part of the original texts of the Bible. These breaks were added many centuries later in order to make it easier to refer to specific passages. Therefore, even though this verse begins a new chapter, James is continuing a single train of thought from chapter 3 where he just compared the results of living by the wisdom of heaven, versus the results of living by the world’s wisdom.

The world’s wisdom states that human beings are responsible to identify what they want out of life and to make a plan to get it at all costs. This has become such a “normal” perspective that even Christians may see nothing abnormal about it. It even sounds industrious to most of us. The problem with this attitude is that it puts the focus of our lives on ourselves. Success, according to the world, is defined by whether we get what we want out of life. Worldliness is driven by envy—”I want that”—and selfish ambition—”I will do whatever it takes to get that.”

James 3:15–16 noted that this un-heavenly wisdom is earthly, unspiritual, and demonic, leading to disorder and all kinds of evil practices. Now he scolds his readers, who, though they are Christians, are continuing to live by the world’s warped wisdom. Apparently, the community that James was writing to was in conflict. He rhetorically asks what is causing their fights and quarrels. They likely would have been tempted to answer that question by pointing to their opponents. James won’t let them get away with that. Instead, using another question, he says their conflict is driven by the passions or desires that are battling within them.

Just like unbelievers, these Christians had decided they were not willing to give up getting what they wanted. They were not willing to trust God to provide good for them (James 1:7) in His time. Driven by envy and selfish ambition, they wanted to win.

Context Summary
James 4:1–12 builds on the end of chapter 3, describing how living according to the world’s wisdom has led to great conflict among James’s Christian readers. They were fighting with each other because they couldn’t get what they wanted. James says that living that way is adultery. It’s ”cheating” on God. He calls them to quit their friendship with the world, humble themselves, repent from their sin, and receive God’s grace. God is the Lawgiver and Judge, not man.

Verse 2. You desire and do not have, so you murder. You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You do not have, because you do not ask.

James continues making the case to his Christian readers that they are living according to the world’s wisdom. They are not trusting God to provide while serving others, which is the wisdom of heaven.

Driven by bitter envy to get what they want, and a deep ambition to serve themselves, James’s readers continue to kill, quarrel, and fight. This is not necessarily a direct accusation of murder or mayhem. A major point of James’s words are the effects which worldly wisdom leads to. We have no way of knowing how violent this conflict had become. Had someone actually been murdered, or was James equating their hatred of each other to murder? Perhaps, but regardless of the severity, it’s clear these religious people are off track.

At the heart of the problems is their response to not getting what they want out of life. In those moments when we realize that what we want is still out of our grasp, we always have a choice. The world’s wisdom tells us to sacrifice everything to get what we want, including the welfare of others. The world will tell us to fight, to scratch, to wound, if that’s what it takes. Driven by envy for what they want, James’s readers are frustrated when they keep coming up empty. So they fight.

James identifies their root problem: These believers in God refused to trust Him to provide what they needed. They refused to even ask God for what they wanted. God might say no, after all. They were not willing to trust that if God would not give it to them, it was something they could live without for now. They would rather hurt someone else in attempting to provide it for themselves.

Verse 3. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.

In the previous two verses, James scolded his Christian readers for living according to the destructive wisdom of the world. They are allowing themselves to be driven by envy and ambition. This does not reflect a trust in God to provide all they needed and much more. As a result, their lives are consumed with fights and quarrels to get what they want.

James identified their root problem: They didn’t even ask God for what they wanted. They believed in God, but they didn’t trust Him to provide for them. And they really didn’t trust that if He would say no, that would be the best for them.

Here in this verse, James reveals that when they did ask God for what they wanted, they were simply trying to manipulate Him. Their prayers were not really requests, they were an effort to make God serve their selfish desires. They weren’t engaging in trust in the Father who loved them and wanted to provide what was truly best for them. Instead, they were trying to plug God into their worldly approach to get what they wanted.

The God who loves us won’t allow Himself to be used to serve envy and ambition. He wants us to bring our requests to Him with a spirit of humility and trust. He wants us to trust Him, allowing Him to give to us the good He has for us as a gift and in His perfect time.

Verse 4. You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.

In the previous verses, James has been blunt: His readers have been living according to worldly wisdom. The wisdom of the world says that to be successful, we must do whatever it takes to get what we want out of life. We must provide for ourselves; nobody else is going to. We must be willing to fight for what we want.

The wisdom of heaven calls us to a far different approach: Christians should trust God to provide all the good we need. That’s what He does (James 1:17). And because we trust His love and goodness and power to provide, we don’t have to abuse each other to get what we want. Instead, we are free to obey Him. This means serving each other. It means meeting each other’s needs.

Because James’s readers were unwilling to trust God in this way, He now calls them “adulteresses.” The original Greek uses female terminology, which echoes other biblical metaphors about being tempted to stray from God (Proverbs 2:16; Isaiah 1:21). Yet it’s clear that James is not singling out women—gender is not the point of the lesson—which is why many translations use broader language. He equates their choice to continue following worldly wisdom with the sin of a spouse having sex outside their marriage. Spiritually speaking, these Christians are cheating on God with the world.

James says something which should be obvious to us, but it’s not: We can’t be friends both with the world and with God. Worse, anyone who continues to be friends with the world is living as God’s enemy. It’s important to understand what James is not saying here: He is not saying Christians should never be friends with non-Christians. Nor is he saying that Christians should never engage their culture, or with the people they meet. That’s not what this passage is about.

James is clear: Christians who choose to continue to live according to the wisdom of the world, driven by envy and ambition, seeking what they want above all else, are not living as friends of God. They are living in adultery as God’s enemies.

Verse 5. Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us”?

In the previous verse, James said an alarming thing: There is an approach to life that feels normal to us as human beings. It can even become normal for Christians. And yet, the approach James condemns is cheating on God just as much as an unfaithful wife is cheating on her husband. It makes us God’s enemy.

What is this approach? It is living according to the world’s wisdom, rather than God’s. It is allowing our lives to be driven by envy for what we want and ambition to get it at any cost. It is the attitude which excuses fighting, quarreling, and conflict with other Christians.

Now James asks another rhetorical question to make a point. Bible scholars note that this is one of the most difficult verses to translate in all of the New Testament. This is reflected in the various translations, which record it quite differently. This is not because of a confusion over the words themselves, but a question about the perspective James is speaking from. This translation issue has to do with how we read the original Greek text.

There are two ways to view this text. First, James may mean that the Old Testament says God is jealous for the spirit—our spirit or His Holy Spirit—which He has caused to live in us. If this is the case, James does not seem to be making a direct quote, but previewing a direct quote he will use in the next verse. The second possibility is that James means that the spirit that God has caused to live in us—our human spirit—tends to become intensely envious.

As it turns out, the Bible teaches both of these ideas elsewhere. The question here is not whether or not either of these interpretations is valid. Rather, there is debate over which one James really intends. Scholars tend to agree that the first idea is what James has in mind. Namely, that God is jealous—in the sense of being concerned and involved—for the Holy Spirit He has made to live inside of those who have trusted in Christ.

In other words, if we continue to live according to the world’s wisdom, God takes our choice not to trust Him very personally. He is jealous for us. He won’t easily allow us to continue to lead lives of self-service and self-reliance when He has placed His Spirit in us.

Verse 6. But he gives more grace. Therefore it says, “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.”

So far in chapter 4, James has delivered a devastating diagnosis and a dire warning to his Christian readers. He has scolded them for living according to the wisdom of the world. They have been driven by envy, and the ambition to succeed at any cost. They have even been fighting with each other to get what they want.

To some extent, it feels normal to us to live that way. This is the world system we are born into, after all. But James warned believers that they are committing adultery against God by living this way! God takes this unfaithfulness personally. In fact, according to the most common translation of the previous verse, God was jealous for the Holy Spirit He had placed in them. To cheat on God by living according to the world’s system of self-reliance, refusing to let go of getting what we want, puts us in the category of God’s enemies.

Now James offers reassurance. Even if we have been living this way, we have not outrun the grace of God. This grace is given to all who trust in Christ. Our sin is serious, devastating, and wicked, but God gives more grace. He forgives our sinfulness in Christ and continues to give us the good we have not earned.

James quotes Proverbs 3:34. This relates a simple, but powerful idea: God opposes the proud. Our refusal to trust God to provide what we need, what He wants for us, and our insistence on getting what we want for ourselves is an act of pride. We are attempting to be the God of our own lives. God will lovingly, jealously oppose us when we do so—but He will not reject us in Christ.

Instead, He calls us to humble ourselves and receive more grace from Him. He calls us to repent of the sin of self-reliance and demanding what we want and yield to Him, receiving with gratitude all the good He chooses to gives us and all the seeming good He chooses to withhold.

God is calling us back to the peaceful, faithful path of trusting Him.

Verse 7. Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.

In the previous verses, James spelled out how his Christians readers had been living lives of worldly self-reliance, as many of us do at times. They had committed themselves to getting what they wanted at all costs, even to the point of fighting with other believers. They believed God, but they refused to trust Him to provide good for them and to accept that He was still providing good when He withheld what they wanted most.

God sees this as adultery, cheating on Him with the world. He takes it personally. He opposes us in our pride when we live that way, but He doesn’t reject us. In the previous verse, James wrote that God gives more grace. He gives grace to the humble.

How should we respond when we realize we’ve been on the world’s path again? This verse reveals the beginning of James’s answer: submit to God again. Give up getting what you want, and willingly receive all the good He gives. We must surrender our battles to achieve our own desires, and turn to serve others instead.

Finally, we must resist the devil. In chapter 3, James revealed that this worldly wisdom we’ve been following is, in part, from the devil, God’s enemy. Satan has been instrumental in engineering this system of self-service from the very beginning of human history. James’s promise is clear: If we quit the path of the world and resist the devil, he will run away from us.

We must resist, though. Resistance requires us to actively pull away. It demands we continually counter his lies by telling ourselves the truth about our God’s goodness, love, and power. The devil won’t remain in the presence of our submission to the truth of God’s Word.

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

How should we respond if we realize we’ve been living according to worldly wisdom, driven by envy and selfish ambition to get what we want? What should we do if we want to get back to living according to heaven’s wisdom, trusting God to provide all the good we need and focusing ourselves on serving others?

Beginning in the previous verse, James describes how we should repent. First, he wrote that we should quit blindly chasing what we want. Instead, we should submit to God. Next, we should resist the devil, instead of continuing to cooperate with him. James promised that when we resist Satan, he will leave.

Here in verse 8, James calls us to draw near—to move closer—to God. This comes with an additional promise: God will respond by moving closer to us. That’s an incredible act of mercy on God’s part. The God of the universe owes us nothing, including His closeness. What grace on His part to come in our direction at all! This is especially gracious as a response to our step in His direction.

Next, James calls us sinners to clean our hands. He calls us double-minded people: trying to serve both self and God. James pleads with us to purify our hearts. For James’s Jewish readers who had grown up under the law, these commands would have called to mind ceremonial washings. The idea here is to completely turn from our sin, to resolve that we will serve God, and to begin again.

That is what true repentance is.

Verse 9. Be wretched and mourn and weep. Let your laughter be turned to mourning and your joy to gloom.

James continues to describe the process of repenting from worldly self-reliance and ambition. Thus far, he has instructed us to submit to God and resist the devil. We are to draw near to God, with the confidence that God, in His grace, will draw near to us. We are to cleanse our hands and hearts of the sinfulness and double-mindedness we had been choosing.

Now in this verse he calls us to engage in an emotional response to our sinfulness. He calls us to cry, to mourn, to be gloomy, even. He calls us to set aside laughter and joy. James is not suggesting that we embrace sadness as an ongoing lifestyle. On the contrary, Christians are to be known for their joyfulness. James himself opened this letter by instructing believers to chalk their hardships up as joy (James 1:2)!

Rather, James is directing us through a season of repentance, when we have recognized our own sin. True believers, those who claim to believe God and who have received His loving gift of salvation, ought to feel shame and sadness over their sins, at least temporarily. If we have been destructively living only for ourselves, realizing this should make us sad. We should be provoked to grieve the lost hours, days, and years spent in pursuit of worthless things.

We must not be too quick to rush on to a status of “everything’s fine now.” Our rebellion happened. We cheated on God. We lived as His enemy for a time while we were friends with the world. Tears are an appropriate and necessary response if the repentance is genuine—as are the end of tears after receiving God’s grace and forgiveness once more. This season of grief is not meant to be a lifestyle or a pattern.

Verse 10. Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will exalt you.

Everybody wants to be exalted. We all want to be glorified. Maybe we wouldn’t say so. Maybe we don’t feel it all of the time. But part of the motivation for living according to the world system is to get exaltation for ourselves. This comes in having the things we want, getting the respect we feel we deserve, or living in the comfort and pleasure we crave. God asks us to quit the world’s way of pursuing those things. Instead, He calls us to trust Him to exalt us when the time is right without trying to get that glory for ourselves.

That requires real humility. We agree not to make our daily lives about ourselves, and our God promises to make it about us when and how He sees fit. That’s how Jesus lived, after all. Paul described Jesus’s life on earth in Philippians 2. Jesus, God Himself, refused to fight for His right to be glorified. He “made himself nothing” (Philippians 2:7, NIV) and became a servant, even to death. Then, when the time was right, the Father exalted Jesus to the highest place and gave Him the name that is above every name (Philippians 2:9).

God calls us to walk that same path: Humility today, God’s glory forever.

Verse 11. Do not speak evil against one another, brothers. The one who speaks against a brother or judges his brother, speaks evil against the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge.

So far in chapter 4, James has described how his readers were being unfaithful to God by following the world’s path of self-reliance and self-glorification. He has also described how Christians can repent from this sinful approach to life and begin to trust God and move closer to Him again.

Now James warns his readers not to turn on each other in slander or in judgment of each other. As used in the Bible, slander means to question someone’s authority, to spread hurtful lies about them, or even to say unkind, unhelpful things about them. To judge someone is to assume a position of authority over them. James may have in mind Leviticus 19:16, one of the verses found just before the “love command” (Leviticus 19:18) he quoted earlier in his letter. The earlier verse says, “You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people…”

James’s Jewish readers had high respect for the Old Testament Law. His point is that to disobey the Law by judging another person is a way of putting yourself above the Law. If you’re going to be a doer of the Law, just be a doer. Don’t be a volunteer judge of how others are doing. Again, James is urging Christians to walk in humility in our relationship with God and with each other. As he will say in the next verse, God is the only judge we or our neighbors need.

Verse 12. There is only one lawgiver and judge, he who is able to save and to destroy. But who are you to judge your neighbor?

Few people are more eager to judge others than those who are struggling to do right themselves. In the previous verse, James insisted that to speak against and judge our neighbors is to make ourselves judges of God’s Law itself. It’s not our job. This is especially true because, as James wrote in verse 6, God gives us more grace in response to our sin. For us—Christian believers who are forgiven only by God’s grace—to try to make ourselves arrogant judges of other people’s sin is an extreme form of hypocrisy.

Here, James makes it clear that God is the only Lawgiver and the only Judge. He is the only one able to save or destroy. If we mean to have our works judged by the Old Testament Law, the Judge will destroy us as guilty sinners. If we mean to be forgiven by the Judge on the basis of His grace through faith in Christ, we will be saved. As people dependent on God’s grace, we should not presume to pronounce any verdict against others based on our own judgment. What arrogance that would be!

Verse 13. Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit” —

In the previous verse, James warned about arrogantly judging our neighbors for their sinfulness. Now he begins a section about the arrogance of imagining that we have total control over the events of our own lives. Over the next few verses, he will point out that true humility means recognizing our limitations. We really don’t know everything about the future. Even our best planning is still subject to God’s will.

This verse sets up this point with a generic business plan. The problem here is not in making the plan—James doesn’t go on to say that planning is sinful, or foolish. The problem James is relating, by using this example, is an attitude of self-reliance. “Tomorrow, I will do this or that.” Verse 16 shows the attitude James intends behind the words of this verse. Making such a statement, out of confidence in one’s own ability, and without humility, is unwise.

The context of the prior passage is important. James has been discussing the problem of following the thought process of the world, instead of the wisdom of God. Here, James imagines a businessman declaring how he will make more money, how he will get what he wants out of life. In context, this is meant to mean one who is planning according to the pattern of the world. This man is making plans and vowing to keep them in his own power and by the force of his own will.

That’s not the life of dependence God calls His children to walk in.

Context Summary
James 4:13–17 focuses on the arrogance of planning for our own success without acknowledging that we are dependent on God. It is foolish to ignore the fact that we can’t see the future. Our lives are short and fragile. This doesn’t mean never making plans. Rather, we should always make plans with the awareness that they can only succeed if God allows them to. Any other attitude is sinful, arrogant, and short-sighted.

Verse 14. yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.

James has spent most of this chapter warning about the wisdom of the world. This includes the attitude of success at all costs, and selfish ambition. In that context, verse 13 imagined the declaration of a businessman: “Today or tomorrow, we will…” James wants us to hear this statement in the context of his prior points. We should recognize our own arrogance in believing that we are the masters of our own fate. We want to think of ourselves as able to do whatever we put our minds to, especially if that involves gathering for ourselves money or status or comfort.

The first problem with that, James writes, is that we can’t predict or control the future. We truly have no idea what will happen tomorrow. In addition to that, our lives are temporary and fragile. We are a mist that is here for a moment and then gone.

James isn’t being a pessimistic downer. Nor is he denying the value of sound planning or judgment. As verse 16 shows, James is condemning these kinds of remarks in a mindset devoid of God’s influence. He is asking us to understand and embrace our human limits instead of trying to shrug them off. Realizing how dependent and fragile we truly are is a major step in escaping the desperate pursuit of cash, power, and pleasure. James wants us to carry with us an awareness that our every moment, every movement, is dependent on God’s grace, mercy, and will.

Verse 15. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.”

In the previous verses, James called out declarations of what we will do in the future, without humbly admitting our dependence on God, as arrogant and foolish. Most of this chapter has been James’s explanation of how arrogant self-reliance is behind much of the evil in the world. When we don’t rely on God for our needs, we tend towards envy, competition, and abuse of others. Here in this verse, James shows how we should demonstrate our awareness of our dependence on God.

This is a deeper issue than simply tacking the words “if the Lord wills” onto any statement of future plans. God wants His children to willingly live in dependence on Him. The right approach includes weighing God’s will before we make the plans, then relying on Him to be in control of the results. He wants us to trust Him, to allow Him to direct our course. He wants to commit ourselves first and above all to accomplishing His will, not our own

Verse 16. As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.

James began this section with what sounds to our ears like a pretty innocuous statement. In verse 13, he pictured a businessman saying, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit.” What could be wrong with that? The context of this statement, however, is James’s discussion of worldly wisdom. Specifically, James is condemning the attitude which ignores God and focuses on selfish ambition. This is an attitude which leads us to abuse others.

This verse supports that James has in mind a particular attitude behind the words of verses 13 and 14. In that context—bragging about one’s plans devoid of God’s influence—such a statement reveals arrogance and self-reliance. It is foolish for creatures as short-lived and near-sighted as we are to assert with confidence that we will accomplish our plans to gather up good for ourselves. We can’t predict the future and we could very well die by tomorrow.

The good news for those of us who are in Christ is that God is for us. In love, He directs the course of our lives. Every good that has ever come our way is from Him (James 1:17), and He has promised to provide all we need now and great abundance with Him for eternity. To declare our independence in the face of that is more than just foolish, James now writes. It is evil and arrogant boasting.

What does God want from us, instead? First, to make plans with the intent of obeying the will of God in the first place. Then, to speak of any human plans with the awareness that God may well interfere with them if they are not His will (James 3:15). He wants us to trust Him, to live every moment in dependence on Him.

Verse 17. So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.

The entire passage leading up to this verse has been about the difference between earthly, worldly wisdom, and heavenly, godly wisdom. Most recently, James has pointed out that speaking about human plans without acknowledging the influence of God is evil. It’s a form of bragging and fits only with the arrogant attitude over which he’s been scolding his readers.

Then, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, James makes this profound and challenging statement. This verse is a bit jarring, and it is probably meant to be. James has offered several arguments about what it means for a Christian to live out our faith in God. He has been clear that many of the “normal” ways we’re used to thinking about our lives are arrogant, self-serving, and faithless.

Most religions frame moral obligations in a very passive way. They emphasize the avoidance of evil. Here, James follows the example of Jesus, who gave us a much more difficult, more powerful command: to actively pursue the good of others (Matthew 7:12). James’s intent here is to make the need for obedience to God very personal. Christianity does not accept the idea of passive spirituality—a response is required from all men.

For the non-believer, this begins with the response to—or rejection of—the gospel. For the saved believer, it means acting according to what we claim to believe. To continue down a path of worldliness and self-reliance instead of trusting God in our everyday choices is sin. We know what we should do, so we have no excuse not to do it. If any of James’s teaching in this book describes us, we will be wrong if we don’t change course now.

It’s too easy to respond to the teaching of Scripture philosophically without really making any changes. We might enjoy pondering the big ideas, considering the various points and counterpoints, weighing the meaning. But if all we do is think about it and never become “doers of the word” (James 1:22), we will be in sin. This verse adds a layer of duty to our knowledge: failure to act is, in itself, an act. We are not merely meant to avoid evil—believers are morally obligated to do what we know is good.

End of Chapter 4.

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