James 1:22Plain English VersionAnd don’t just listen to that word from God, but you have to do everything it says too. If you don’t do the things it says, you will just trick yourself. See the chapter |
Listen. You know what will happen to bad people, right? They will not be in God’s family. They will never get the good things that God will give to his people. Don’t let anyone trick you about this. I’ll tell you now about the sort of people that will not be in God’s family. People that sleep with somebody that’s not their wife or husband, as if they are married. Those people will not be in God’s family. Or 2 men that sleep together as if one of them is a woman, they will not be in God’s family. And people that respect other spirits more than they respect God,
Listen, you’ve got to understand this properly. Nobody can ever trick God, so don’t ever think you can do that. I’ll tell you a picture story about seeds. A gardener plants different sorts of seeds in his garden, then later he gets the food from the plants that grow from those seeds. Whatever sort of seed he plants, that’s the sort of food he gets.
And one more thing, my Christian friends. Keep thinking about the things that are true, and the things that people should respect. Keep thinking about the things that are right, and good, and lovely. Think about things that everyone reckons are really good. Think about the things that we can thank God for.
You know, we were like that before we believed in Jesus. We did silly things too. We didn’t do what God told us to do. People tricked us, and we believed things that were not true. And we wanted to do all sorts of bad things. We couldn’t stop ourselves. If anybody had a lot of things, we wanted those things for ourselves, and we were angry with those people. We hated people, and people hated us.
My Christian friends, don’t say bad things about each other or rubbish each other. If you rubbish other people, it is like you reckon you are their judge. But God’s law says that you have to love other people, so if you rubbish them, you are really saying that you think God’s law is wrong. But you are not a judge, so you can’t say that God’s law is wrong. Your job is to do whatever God’s law says.
They do a lot of things that hurt other people, so God will hurt them. He will do payback to them. They think it’s fun to do any bad thing that they want to do, even in the day-light. And whenever you Christians have dinner together, they join in with you, and they laugh about their lies and the bad things they do. Now think about a white shirt. If it just has a few dirty spots on it, people say that the whole shirt is dirty. Well, you good people are like that white shirt, and those people are like the dirty spots on it. There are only a few of them, but they do bad things, and they shame all of you.