The Letter of James can easily be seen as a tool by which shock therapy is performed just to make sure we are paying attention to what God is saying to us. We read in 4.1-4: What causes fights and quarrels among you? Don’t they come from your desires that battle within you? You want something but don’t get it. One might even raise the question as to whether this is written to believers at all. YES, IT IS!

It is as if these believers have come to hold that it is their faith and lives which gives them the power to be viewed as servants of God: You kill and covet, but you cannot have what you want. You quarrel and fight. You do not have, because you do not ask God. They seem to be relying on themselves to be successful believers by whom God will be victorious in getting his will and work accomplished on earth.

When these who are so caught-up in themselves and their own value to God do turn to their Lord it is to get what they want rather than to hear his wants: When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. Some would inform God that if he would simply do things their way everything will turn out alright, and the Kingdom will be affirmed.

Talk about being shaken: You adulterous people, don’t you know that friendship with the world is hatred toward God? Anyone who chooses to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. It is not that they are misbehaving in their social relationships, but that they are in love with another god than the one who brought them to life. Left alone these believers would end by destruction, so God shakes ‘em.