Can a fig tree produce olives, my brothers and sisters, or a vine produce figs? Neither can a salt water spring produce fresh water.

So too the tongue is a small part of the body, yet it has great pretensions. Think how small a flame sets a huge forest ablaze.

For if someone comes into your assembly wearing a gold ring and fine clothing, and a poor person enters in filthy clothes,

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into this or that town and spend a year there and do business and make a profit.”

If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacks daily food,

You do not know about tomorrow. What is your life like? For you are a puff of smoke that appears for a short time and then vanishes.

since he is a double-minded individual, unstable in all his ways.

You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.

he should know that the one who turns a sinner back from his wandering path will save that person’s soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.

For if someone merely listens to the message and does not live it out, he is like someone who gazes at his own face in a mirror.

From James, a slave of God and the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes dispersed abroad. Greetings!

You have lived indulgently and luxuriously on the earth. You have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter.

Do not speak against one another, brothers and sisters. He who speaks against a fellow believer or judges a fellow believer speaks against the law and judges the law. But if you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but its judge.

A spring does not pour out fresh water and bitter water from the same opening, does it?

But no human being can subdue the tongue; it is a restless evil, full of deadly poison.

Speak and act as those who will be judged by a law that gives freedom.

Then he prayed again, and the sky gave rain and the land sprouted with a harvest.

Look at ships too: Though they are so large and driven by harsh winds, they are steered by a tiny rudder wherever the pilot’s inclination directs.

By his sovereign plan he gave us birth through the message of truth, that we would be a kind of firstfruits of all he created.

So confess your sins to one another and pray for one another so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great effectiveness.