1What is causing the quarrels and fights among you? Don’t they come from the evil desires at war within you?

2You want what you don’t have, so you scheme and kill to get it. You are jealous of what others have, but you can’t get it, so you fight and wage war to take it away from them. Yet you don’t have what you want because you don’t ask God for it.

3And even when you ask, you don’t get it because your motives are all wrong—you want only what will give you pleasure.

11Don’t speak evil against each other, dear brothers and sisters.4:11 Greek brothers. If you criticize and judge each other, then you are criticizing and judging God’s law. But your job is to obey the law, not to judge whether it applies to you.

12God alone, who gave the law, is the Judge. He alone has the power to save or to destroy. So what right do you have to judge your neighbor?

13Look here, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we are going to a certain town and will stay there a year. We will do business there and make a profit.”

14How do you know what your life will be like tomorrow? Your life is like the morning fog—it’s here a little while, then it’s gone.

15What you ought to say is, “If the Lord wants us to, we will live and do this or that.”

16Otherwise you are boasting about your own pretentious plans, and all such boasting is evil.