Letter of James 1

¹ From James, servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ. Greetings to the twelve tribes of the Dispersion.[*a]

² My brothers, you will always have your trials but, when they come, try to treat them as a happy privilege;[*b]

³ you understand that your faith is only put to the test to make you patient,

⁴ but patience too is to have its practical results so that you will become fully-developed, complete, with nothing missing.

⁵ If there is any one of you who needs wisdom, he must ask God, who gives to all freely and ungrudgingly; it will be given to him.

⁶ But he must ask with faith, and no trace of doubt, because a person who has doubts is like the

⁷ waves thrown up in the sea when the wind drives.

⁸ That sort of person, in two minds, wavering between going different ways, must not expect that the Lord will give him anything.

⁹ It is right for the poor brother to be proud of his high rank,

¹⁰ and the rich one to be thankful that he has been humbled, because riches last no longer than the flowers in the grass;

¹¹ the scorching sun comes up, and the grass withers, the flower falls;[*c] what looked so beautiful now disappears. It is the same with the rich man: his business goes on; he himself perishes.

¹² Happy the man who stands firm[*d] when trials come. He has proved himself, and will win the prize of life, the crown that the Lord has promised to those who love him.

¹³ Never, when you have been tempted, say, ‘God sent the temptation’; God cannot be tempted to do anything wrong, and he does not tempt anybody.

¹⁴ Everyone who is tempted is attracted and seduced by his own wrong desire.

¹⁵ Then the desire conceives and gives birth to sin, and when sin is fully grown, it too has a child, and the child is death.

¹⁶ Make no mistake about this, my dear brothers:

¹⁷ it is all that is good, everything that is perfect, which is given us from above; it comes down from the Father of all light; with him there is no such thing as alteration, no shadow of a change.

¹⁸ By his own choice he made us his children by the message of the truth so that we should be a sort of first-fruits of all that he had created.

¹⁹ Remember this, my dear brothers: be quick to listen[*e] but slow to speak and slow to rouse your temper;

²⁰ God’s righteousness is never served by man’s anger;

²¹ so do away with all the impurities and bad habits that are still left in you – accept and submit to the word which has been planted in you and can save your souls.

²² But you must do what the word tells you, and not just listen to it and deceive yourselves.

²³ To listen to the word and not obey is like looking at your own features in a mirror and then,

²⁴ after a quick look, going off and immediately forgetting what you looked like.

²⁵ But the man who looks steadily at the perfect law of freedom and makes that his habit – not listening and then forgetting, but actively putting it into practice – will be happy in all that he does.

²⁶ Nobody must imagine that he is religious while he still goes on deceiving himself and not keeping control over his tongue; anyone who does this has the wrong idea of religion.

²⁷ Pure, unspoilt religion, in the eyes of God our Father is this: coming to the help of orphans and widows when they need it, and keeping oneself uncontaminated by the world.