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NASB | James 4:3 You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, so that you may spend it on your pleasures. |
AMPLIFIED 2015 | James 4:3 You ask [God for something] and do not receive it, because you ask with wrong motives [out of selfishness or with an unrighteous agenda], so that [when you get what you want] you may spend it on your [hedonistic] desires. |
Subject: Is coveting with a pure heart Godly? |
Bible Note: Greetings, Nolan, my friend; To "desire" God's blessings is not necessarily to "covet" them. Somewhere I read/heard that to "covet" is to not only the desire to posess something but to posess it at someone else's expense, i.e. to covet one's neighbor's wife. A quick word search in the NIV seems to support this notion. "Covet" is always used in the sense of desiring what someone else already posesses. It's a zero-sum game. If I'm to win, someone else has to lose. This is not true with God's blessings; they are limitless. I remember explaining to our older daughter when her little sister arrived that we wouldn't love her any less. We had a box of love and until then she had gotten the whole thing. She wouldn't get less now because when we got her sister, we got another box too. They would both get the whole thing. So it is with God's blessings. Had I been a Christian then, I'd have known what I was talking about! ;-) Peace and grace, Steve aka Indiana Jones |