Where do all the fights and quarrels among you come from? They come from your desires for pleasure, which are constantly fighting within you.

You want things, but you cannot have them, so you are ready to kill; you strongly desire things, but you cannot get them, so you quarrel and fight. You do not have what you want because you do not ask God for it.

When the LORD saw how wicked everyone on earth was and how evil their thoughts were all the time,

The odor of the sacrifice pleased the LORD, and he said to himself, "Never again will I put the earth under a curse because of what people do; I know that from the time they are young their thoughts are evil. Never again will I destroy all living beings, as I have done this time.

Among the things we seized I saw a beautiful Babylonian cloak, about five pounds of silver, and a bar of gold weighing over one pound. I wanted them so much that I took them. You will find them buried inside my tent, with the silver at the bottom."

They brought them out of the tent, took them to Joshua and all the Israelites, and laid them down in the presence of the LORD.

One day, late in the afternoon, David got up from his nap and went to the palace roof. As he walked around up there, he saw a woman taking a bath in her house. She was very beautiful.

So he sent a messenger to find out who she was, and learned that she was Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam and the wife of Uriah the Hittite.

One day Ahab said to Naboth, "Let me have your vineyard; it is close to my palace, and I want to use the land for a vegetable garden. I will give you a better vineyard for it or, if you prefer, I will pay you a fair price."

Ahab went home, depressed and angry over what Naboth had said to him. He lay down on his bed, facing the wall, and would not eat.

If I have been attracted to my neighbor's wife, and waited, hidden, outside her door,

I have not been led astray to honor them by kissing my hand in reverence to them.

Be careful how you think; your life is shaped by your thoughts.

It makes as much sense as eating ashes. His foolish ideas have so misled him that he is beyond help. He won't admit to himself that the idol he holds in his hand is not a god at all.

"I will destroy you, people of Israel! Then who can help you?

But now I tell you: anyone who looks at a woman and wants to possess her is guilty of committing adultery with her in his heart.

But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and these are the things that make you ritually unclean.

These are the things that make you unclean. But to eat without washing your hands as they say you should---this doesn't make you unclean."

For from the inside, from your heart, come the evil ideas which lead you to do immoral things, to rob, kill,

commit adultery, be greedy, and do all sorts of evil things; deceit, indecency, jealousy, slander, pride, and folly---

Sin found its chance, and by means of the commandment it deceived me and killed me.

But does this mean that what is good caused my death? By no means! It was sin that did it; by using what is good, sin brought death to me, in order that its true nature as sin might be revealed. And so, by means of the commandment sin is shown to be even more terribly sinful.

So get rid of your old self, which made you live as you used to---the old self that was being destroyed by its deceitful desires.

Instead, in order that none of you be deceived by sin and become stubborn, you must help one another every day, as long as the word "Today" in the scripture applies to us.