Book of Common Prayer

David wrote this song to ask God not to forget him.

Lord, please remember me^[a]

DALETH

HE

WAW

Fruit that is ready to eat

8 Then the Lord God showed another vision to me. I saw a basket with summer fruit in it. ² He asked me, ‘Amos, what do you see?’ I answered him, ‘I see a basket of summer fruit.’ Then the Lord said to me, ‘The time has now come to punish my people. I will not forgive them any longer.

³ On the day that I come to punish them, people will not sing in the temple. Instead they will weep loudly. There will be dead bodies everywhere. Be quiet now!’ That is what the Lord God says.

Trouble will come to Israel's people

⁴ So listen to me, you who are cruel to helpless people. You try to destroy people who are poor and weak. ⁵ You say to yourselves, ‘We want the new moon festival to finish so that we can sell food again. We want our Sabbath day of rest to finish so that we can sell grain.’ But when you sell things, you cheat the people who buy from you. You deceive them with false weights, and you make the price too high. ⁶ When poor people cannot pay their debts, you buy them as your slaves. You pay a silver coin to buy them, which would not even buy a pair of shoes. You also mix dust with the grain that you sell.

⁷ The Lord has promised this: ‘You proud descendants of Jacob, I will never forget the wrong things that you have done. ⁸ The whole country will shake because of your sins. Everyone who lives there will weep. The ground will rise up, like the floods of the Nile river in Egypt. Then it will go down again, like the water of the Nile.’

⁹ The Lord God says, ‘At that time, I will make the sun go down at noon. I will make the earth become dark in the daytime. ¹⁰ Your parties will become funerals. You will not sing happy songs but you will weep. You will wear rough clothes and you will cut off all your hair. You will be as sad as if your only son had died. That will be a very bad day for you.’

¹¹ The Lord God says, ‘Listen to me! At that time, I will cause you to be very hungry. It will not be because you need food and water. Instead, everyone in the land will want to hear a message from me. ¹² People will travel everywhere in the country, north and south, east and west. They will want to hear a message from the Lord, but there will be nothing for them to hear.

¹³ At that time, your beautiful young women and your young men will become very thirsty. They will be weak and tired. ¹⁴ They worship Samaria's idols. They use the names of those false gods to make promises. They say, “In the name of the god of Dan,” or “In the name of the god of Beersheba.” Those people will fall down and they will never get up again.’

¹⁷ When I saw him, I fell down at his feet like a dead person. Then he put his right hand on me, and he said to me, ‘Do not be afraid! I am the one who is the first and also the last. ¹⁸ I am the one who always lives. I died once. But look! Now I am alive and I will be alive for ever. I have authority over death and over Hades, the place for dead people.^{[a] 19} So write down the things that you have seen. Write about what you see that is happening now. Also write about the things that will happen later.

²⁰ You saw seven stars that I held in my right hand. You saw seven lights in their gold lampstands. Now I will tell you what they mean. The seven stars show what the angels of the seven churches are like.^[b] The seven lights in their lampstands show what the seven churches themselves are like.’

Jesus' message to the believers at Ephesus

2 ‘Now write this to the angel of the church at Ephesus:^[c]

“This is the message to you from the one who holds the seven stars. He holds them carefully in his right hand. He walks among the seven gold lampstands.

² I know everything that you do. You have worked much for me. You have continued to work patiently. I know that you do not accept bad people as your friends. Some of these bad people say that they are apostles of Jesus. You have thought carefully about what they teach people. And you have discovered that it is not true. ³ You have been patient and strong in times of trouble. You have continued to serve me because you believe in me. You have not stopped when you become tired.

⁴ But I have something to say against you. You loved me very much when you first believed in me. You do not love me as much now. ⁵ Think carefully about this! You do not now live in the way you did at the beginning. So you must change the way you live. Do again the good things that you did at the beginning. If you do not change the way you live, I will come to punish you. I will take away your lampstand from its place. ⁶ But this is something that you do well: you hate the bad things that the Nicolaitans are doing. I also hate what they do.^[d]

⁷ God's Spirit is now speaking to people in the churches. You should recognize that the Spirit is speaking. Everyone who knows that should listen to what he says. I will let everyone who wins against Satan eat my fruit. This fruit is from the tree that makes us alive. And this tree grows in God's garden.” ’^[e]

Jesus talks about dangerous teachers

23 After that, Jesus spoke to the crowds and to his disciples. ² He said, ‘The teachers of God's Law and the Pharisees have authority to explain the Law of Moses. ³ So you must obey everything that they teach you. But you should not do the same things that they do. They tell you what the Law of Moses teaches. But then they themselves do not obey it. ⁴ The rules that they give you are difficult to obey. Their rules are like heavy luggage, which they make you carry. But they themselves will not help you to carry that luggage. They will not agree to use even one finger to help you.^[a]

⁵ The Pharisees do things only so that people will see them. They wear little boxes with words from the Bible in them, but they make them really big. They also make the tassels on their clothes very long.^{[b] 6} They like to sit in the important places at special meals. They also choose to sit in the best seats in the meeting places. ⁷ They like people to praise them in the market place. They want people to call them “Teacher.”

⁸ You all belong to God's family. You have only one Teacher. So nobody should call another person, “Teacher”.^{[c] 9} Also, do not call any other person in the world, “Father”. You have only one Father, and he is in heaven.^{[d] 10} And do not call each other “Leader”. You have only one Leader. He is the Messiah that God has chosen. ¹¹ The person among you who is most important will be your servant. ¹² Some people lift themselves up to be important. But God will bring them down low. Other people are humble. God will lift up those people to a good place.’