Daily Reading for Tuesday, May 21st, 2024

Reading 1, James 4:1-10

¹ Where do these wars and battles between yourselves first start? Is it not precisely in the desires fighting inside your own selves?

² You want something and you lack it; so you kill. You have an ambition that you cannot satisfy; so you fight to get your way by force. It is because you do not pray that you do not receive;

³ when you do pray and do not receive, it is because you prayed wrongly, wanting to indulge your passions.

⁴ Adulterers! Do you not realise that love for the world is hatred for God? Anyone who chooses the world for a friend is constituted an enemy of God.

⁵ Can you not see the point of the saying in scripture, 'The longing of the spirit he sent to dwell in us is a jealous longing.'?

⁶ But he has given us an even greater grace, as scripture says: God opposes the proud but he accords his favour to the humble.

⁷ Give in to God, then; resist the devil, and he will run away from you.

⁸ The nearer you go to God, the nearer God will come to you. Clean your hands, you sinners, and clear your minds, you waverers.

⁹ Appreciate your wretchedness, and weep for it in misery. Your laughter must be turned to grief, your happiness to gloom.

¹⁰ Humble yourselves before the Lord and he will lift you up.

Responsorial Psalm, Psalms 55:7-8, 9-10, 10-11, 23

⁷ How far I would escape, and make a nest in the desert!

⁸ I would soon find a refuge from the storm of abuse, from the

⁹ destructive tempest, Lord, from the flood of their tongues. For I see violence and strife in the city,

¹⁰ day and night they make their rounds along the city walls, Inside live malice and mischief,

¹¹ inside lives destruction, tyranny and treachery never absent from its central square.

²³ You, God, will thrust them down to the abyss of destruction, men bloodthirsty and deceptive, before half their days are spent. For my part, I put my trust in you.

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