James 3:16

You see, sometimes people get jealous of each other, and sometimes they only do things to make themselves happy, and they don’t think about anyone else. Whenever that happens, those people start fighting each other, and they get into all sorts of trouble.

Plain English Version

In The King James Version

For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work.

In Context

17But whenever we think God’s way, we are like this, – We keep away from doing anything bad. – We want to make other people happy, and we want to help them to be friends with each other. – We are easy on other people, not hard. – We listen to people and let them get a fair go. – We feel sorry for people that have problems, and we do everything we can to help them. – We are fair to everybody. We don’t treat some people good and other people like they are rubbish. – We don’t pretend that we are better than we really are.

Read all of James 3

Cross References

Genesis 11:9They all left that city and went to live in lots of different places, all over the world. That’s how God got people to be in different tribes all over the world. And they called that city Babel. That means mixed up. They gave it that name because God mixed up their languages at that time.

Mark 3:25In the same way, people in a family, if they fight each other all the time, they will split up and will stop being a family.

1 Corinthians 3:3Even though you are Christians you still don’t live like Christians. You still let your old human spirits control you. You want things that other people have. And you argue with each other. That shows that you are letting your human spirits control you, not the Holy Spirit. You are still like people that don’t know God.

Galatians 5:20They respect the spirits that are not God. They try to get bad spirits to hurt other people. They hate other people, and they fight other people. They want to be like some other person, and if they can’t be, they hate that other person. They get very angry. They want to be more important than everybody else. They will not agree with other people, so they split off into separate groups.

1 John 3:12Remember that old story in God’s book, about Cain and Abel. They were brothers. Cain belonged to the devil, and he did bad things. But Abel lived God’s way. So Cain hated Abel, and he killed him. But we can’t be like that. We can’t hate people or kill people.

Matthew Henry on James 3:14-18

Properties of Wisdom. ( a. d. 61.) 13 Who is a wise man and endued with knowledge among you? let him show out of a good conversation his works with meekness of wisdom. 14 But if ye have bitter envying and strife in your hearts, glory not, and lie not against the truth. 15 This wisdom descendeth not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish. 16 For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work. 17 But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be… Read the whole commentary →

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