James 4:11-17

11My Christian friends, do not say bad things against each other. If you speak against another believer, you are really speaking against God's Law. If you judge another believer, then you are judging the law too. When you do that, you are not obeying the Law. You are giving yourself authority to decide what the Law says.

12God is the one who gave his Law to people. Only he has the authority to judge whether people have done what is right. Only he can decide to save people or to destroy them. So you must not judge your friends. You do not have that authority.

13Some of you say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to a certain city. We will stay there for a year. We will buy and sell things, and we will become rich.’ If you say things like that, listen to me.

14You do not know what will happen tomorrow. Your life is like a cloud which appears for a short time and then it quickly goes away.

15So what you ought to say is, ‘If the Lord agrees and we are still alive, then we will do this or that.’

16But instead, you talk about what you have decided to do. You speak as if you have the power to make it happen. It is wrong to speak like that.

17So you know the right thing that you ought to do. But if you know that and you do not do the right thing, then you have done a wrong thing.