Book of Common Prayer
The call to holy living
12 So don’t allow sin to rule in your mortal body, to make you obey its desires. 13 Nor should you present your limbs and organs to sin to be used for its wicked purposes. Rather, present yourselves to God, as people alive from the dead, and your limbs and organs to God, to be used for the righteous purposes of his covenant. 14 Sin won’t actually rule over you, you see, since you are not under law but under grace.
The two types of slavery
15 What then? Shall we sin, because we are not under law but under grace? Certainly not! 16 Don’t you know that if you present yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you really are slaves of the one you obey, whether that happens to be sin, which leads to death, or obedience, which leads to final vindication? 17 Thank God that, though you once were slaves to sin, you have become obedient from the heart to the pattern of teaching to which you were committed. 18 You were freed from sin, and now you have been enslaved to God’s covenant justice. 19 (I’m using a human picture because of your natural human weakness!) For just as you presented your limbs and organs as slaves to uncleanness, and to one degree of lawlessness after another, so now present your limbs and organs as slaves to covenant justice, which leads to holiness.
Where the two roads lead
20 When you were slaves of sin, you see, you were free in respect of covenant justice. 21 What fruit did you ever have from the things of which you are now ashamed? Their destination is death. 22 But now that you have been set free from sin and enslaved to God, you have fruit for holiness. Its destination is the life of the age to come. 23 The wages paid by sin, you see, are death; but God’s free gift is the life of the age to come, in the Messiah, Jesus our Lord.
The Temple and the fig tree
12 Jesus went into the Temple and threw out all the people who were buying and selling in the Temple. He overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of the dove-sellers.
13 “This is what the Bible says,” he said to them,
My house will be called a house of prayer—
but you have made it a brigands’ lair!”
14 The blind and the lame came to him in the Temple, and he healed them. 15 But when the chief priests and the scribes saw the remarkable things he was doing, and the children shouting out “Hosanna to David’s son!” in the Temple, they were very cross.
16 “Do you hear what they’re saying?” they asked Jesus.
“Yes,” said Jesus. “Did you never read what it says,
You called forth praise to rise to you
from newborn babes and infants too!”
17 Then he left them, and went out of the city to Bethany, where he stayed the night.
18 Early the next morning Jesus went back to the city. He was hungry. 19 He saw a single fig tree beside the road, but when he came up to it he found nothing on it except leaves.
“May you never bear fruit, ever again!” he said to it. Instantly the fig tree withered up.
20 The disciples saw it, and were astonished.
“Look how quickly the fig tree has withered up!” they said.
21 “I’m telling you the truth,” replied Jesus. “If you have faith, and don’t doubt, you will not only be able to do this to a fig tree, but if you say to this mountain, ‘Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,’ it will happen. 22 Whatever you ask in prayer, you’ll get it, if you believe.”
Scripture quotations from The New Testament for Everyone are copyright © Nicholas Thomas Wright 2011, 2018, 2019.