Book of Common Prayer

5 ^1-2 O Lord, hear me praying; listen to my plea, O God my King, for I will never pray to anyone but you. ³ Each morning I will look to you in heaven and lay my requests before you, praying earnestly.

⁴ I know you get no pleasure from wickedness and cannot tolerate the slightest sin. ⁵ Therefore, proud sinners will not survive your searching gaze, for how you hate their evil deeds. ⁶ You will destroy them for their lies; how you abhor all murder and deception.

⁷ But as for me, I will come into your Temple protected by your mercy and your love; I will worship you with deepest awe.

⁸ Lord, lead me as you promised me you would; otherwise my enemies will conquer me. Tell me clearly what to do, which way to turn. ⁹ For they cannot speak one truthful word. Their hearts are filled to the brim with wickedness. Their suggestions are full of the stench of sin and death. Their tongues are filled with flatteries to gain their wicked ends. ¹⁰ O God, hold them responsible. Catch them in their own traps; let them fall beneath the weight of their own transgressions, for they rebel against you.

¹¹ But make everyone rejoice who puts his trust in you. Keep them shouting for joy because you are defending them. Fill all who love you with your happiness. ¹² For you bless the godly man, O Lord; you protect him with your shield of love.

6 No, Lord! Don’t punish me in the heat of your anger. ² Pity me, O Lord, for I am weak. Heal me, for my body is sick, ³ and I am upset and disturbed. My mind is filled with apprehension and with gloom. Oh, restore me soon.

⁴ Come, O Lord, and make me well. In your kindness save me. ⁵ For if I die, I cannot give you glory by praising you before my friends.^{[a] 6} I am worn out with pain; every night my pillow is wet with tears. ⁷ My eyes are growing old and dim with grief because of all my enemies.

⁸ Go, leave me now, you men of evil deeds, for the Lord has heard my weeping ⁹ and my pleading. He will answer all my prayers. ¹⁰ All my enemies shall be suddenly dishonored, terror-stricken, and disgraced. God will turn them back in shame.

10 Lord, why are you standing aloof and far away? Why do you hide when I need you the most?

² Come and deal with all these proud and wicked men who viciously persecute the poor. Pour upon these men the evil they planned for others! ³ For these men brag of all their evil lusts; they revile God and congratulate those the Lord abhors, whose only goal in life is money.

⁴ These wicked men, so proud and haughty, seem to think that God is dead.^[a] They wouldn’t think of looking for him! ⁵ Yet there is success in everything they do, and their enemies fall before them. They do not see your punishment awaiting them. ⁶ They boast that neither God nor man can ever keep them down—somehow they’ll find a way!

⁷ Their mouths are full of profanity and lies and fraud. They are always boasting of their evil plans. ⁸ They lurk in dark alleys of the city and murder passersby. ⁹ Like lions they crouch silently, waiting to pounce upon the poor. Like hunters they catch their victims in their traps. ¹⁰ The unfortunate are overwhelmed by their superior strength and fall beneath their blows. ¹¹ “God isn’t watching,” they say to themselves; “he’ll never know!”

¹² O Lord, arise! O God, crush them! Don’t forget the poor or anyone else in need. ¹³ Why do you let the wicked get away with this contempt for God? For they think that God will never call them to account. ¹⁴ Lord, you see what they are doing. You have noted each evil act. You know what trouble and grief they have caused. Now punish them. O Lord, the poor man trusts himself to you; you are known as the helper of the helpless. ¹⁵ Break the arms of these wicked men. Go after them until the last of them is destroyed.

¹⁶ The Lord is King forever and forever. Those who follow other gods shall be swept from his land.

¹⁷ Lord, you know the hopes of humble people. Surely you will hear their cries and comfort their hearts by helping them. ¹⁸ You will be with the orphans and all who are oppressed, so that mere earthly man will terrify them no longer.

11 How dare you tell me, “Flee^[b] to the mountains for safety,” when I am trusting in the Lord?

² For the wicked have strung their bows, drawn their arrows tight against the bowstrings, and aimed from ambush at the people of God. ³ “Law and order have collapsed,”^[c] we are told. “What can the righteous do but flee?”

⁴ But the Lord is still in his holy temple; he still rules from heaven. He closely watches everything that happens here on earth. ⁵ He puts the righteous and the wicked to the test; he hates those loving violence. ⁶ He will rain down fire and brimstone on the wicked and scorch them with his burning wind.

⁷ For God is good, and he loves goodness; the godly shall see his face.^[d]

¹⁵ “But beware! You didn’t see the form of God that day as he spoke to you from the fire at Mount Horeb, ^16-17 so do not defile yourselves by trying to make a statue of God—an idol in any form, whether of a man, woman, animal, bird, ¹⁸ a small animal that runs along the ground, or a fish. ¹⁹ And do not look up into the sky to worship the sun, moon, or stars. The Lord may permit other nations to get away with this, but not you. ²⁰ The Lord has rescued you from prison—Egypt—to be his special people, his own inheritance; this is what you are today. ^21-22 But he was angry with me because of you; he vowed that I could not go over the Jordan River into the good land he has given you as your inheritance. I must die here on this side of the river. ²³ Beware lest you break the contract the Lord your God has made with you! You will break it if you make any idols, for the Lord your God has utterly forbidden this. ²⁴ He is a devouring fire, a jealous God.

11 I hope you will be patient with me as I keep on talking like a fool. Do bear with me and let me say what is on my heart. ² I am anxious for you with the deep concern of God himself—anxious that your love should be for Christ alone, just as a pure maiden saves her love for one man only, for the one who will be her husband. ³ But I am frightened, fearing that in some way you will be led away from your pure and simple devotion to our Lord, just as Eve was deceived by Satan in the Garden of Eden. ⁴ You seem so gullible: you believe whatever anyone tells you even if he is preaching about another Jesus than the one we preach, or a different spirit than the Holy Spirit you received, or shows you a different way to be saved. You swallow it all.

⁵ Yet I don’t feel that these marvelous “messengers from God,” as they call themselves, are any better than I am. ⁶ If I am a poor speaker, at least I know what I am talking about, as I think you realize by now, for we have proved it again and again.

⁷ Did I do wrong and cheapen myself and make you look down on me because I preached God’s Good News to you without charging you anything? ^8-9 Instead I “robbed” other churches by taking what they sent me and using it up while I was with you so that I could serve you without cost. And when that was gone^[a] and I was getting hungry, I still didn’t ask you for anything, for the Christians from Macedonia brought me another gift. I have never yet asked you for one cent, and I never will. ¹⁰ I promise this with every ounce of truth I possess—that I will tell everyone in Greece about it! ¹¹ Why? Because I don’t love you? God knows I do. ¹² But I will do it to cut out the ground from under the feet of those who boast that they are doing God’s work in just the same way we are.

¹³ God never sent those men at all; they are “phonies” who have fooled you into thinking they are Christ’s apostles. ¹⁴ Yet I am not surprised! Satan can change himself into an angel of light, ¹⁵ so it is no wonder his servants can do it too, and seem like godly ministers. In the end they will get every bit of punishment their wicked deeds deserve.

¹⁶ Again I plead, don’t think that I have lost my wits to talk like this; but even if you do, listen to me anyway—a witless man, a fool—while I also boast a little as they do. ¹⁷ Such bragging isn’t something the Lord commanded me to do, for I am acting like a brainless fool. ¹⁸ Yet those other men keep telling you how wonderful they are, so here I go: ^19-20 (You think you are so wise—yet you listen gladly to those fools; you don’t mind at all when they make you their slaves and take everything you have, and take advantage of you, and put on airs, and slap you in the face. ²¹ I’m ashamed to say that I’m not strong and daring like that!

But whatever they can boast about—I’m talking like a fool again—I can boast about it, too.)

¹⁶ “And now about fasting. When you fast, declining your food for a spiritual purpose, don’t do it publicly, as the hypocrites do, who try to look wan and disheveled so people will feel sorry for them. Truly, that is the only reward they will ever get. ¹⁷ But when you fast, put on festive clothing, ¹⁸ so that no one will suspect you are hungry, except your Father who knows every secret. And he will reward you.

¹⁹ “Don’t store up treasures here on earth where they can erode away or may be stolen. ²⁰ Store them in heaven where they will never lose their value and are safe from thieves. ²¹ If your profits are in heaven, your heart will be there too.

²² “If your eye is pure, there will be sunshine in your soul. ²³ But if your eye is clouded with evil thoughts and desires, you are in deep spiritual darkness. And oh, how deep that darkness can be!