Book of Common Prayer
(A)A Hymn in Time of National Trouble[a]
89 O Lord, I will always sing of your constant love;
I will proclaim your faithfulness forever.
2 I know that your love will last for all time,
that your faithfulness is as permanent as the sky.
3 You said, “I have made a covenant with the man I chose;
I have promised my servant David,
4 (B)‘A descendant of yours will always be king;
I will preserve your dynasty forever.’”
5 The heavens sing of the wonderful things you do;
the holy ones sing of your faithfulness, Lord.
6 No one in heaven is like you, Lord;
none of the heavenly beings is your equal.
7 You are feared in the council of the holy ones;
they all stand in awe of you.
8 Lord God Almighty, none is as mighty as you;
in all things you are faithful, O Lord.
9 You rule over the powerful sea;
you calm its angry waves.
10 You crushed the monster Rahab[b] and killed it;
with your mighty strength you defeated your enemies.
11 Heaven is yours, the earth also;
you made the world and everything in it.
12 You created the north and the south;
Mount Tabor and Mount Hermon sing to you for joy.
13 How powerful you are!
How great is your strength!
14 Your kingdom is founded on righteousness and justice;
love and faithfulness are shown in all you do.
15 How happy are the people who worship you with songs,
who live in the light of your kindness!
16 Because of you they rejoice all day long,
and they praise you for your goodness.
17 You give us great victories;
in your love you make us triumphant.
18 You, O Lord, chose our protector;
you, the Holy God of Israel, gave us our king.
God's Promise to David
19 In a vision long ago you said to your faithful servants,
“I have given help to a famous soldier;
I have given the throne to one I chose from the people.
20 (C)I have made my servant David king
by anointing him with holy oil.
21 My strength will always be with him,
my power will make him strong.
22 His enemies will never succeed against him;
the wicked will not defeat him.
23 I will crush his foes
and kill everyone who hates him.
24 I will love him and be loyal to him;
I will make him always victorious.
25 I will extend his kingdom
from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates River.
26 He will say to me,
‘You are my father and my God;
you are my protector and savior.’
27 (D)I will make him my first-born son,
the greatest of all kings.
28 I will always keep my promise to him,
and my covenant with him will last forever.
29 His dynasty will be as permanent as the sky;
a descendant of his will always be king.
30 “But if his descendants disobey my law
and do not live according to my commands,
31 if they disregard my instructions
and do not keep my commandments,
32 then I will punish them for their sins;
I will make them suffer for their wrongs.
33 But I will not stop loving David
or fail to keep my promise to him.
34 I will not break my covenant with him
or take back even one promise I made him.
35 “Once and for all I have promised by my holy name:
I will never lie to David.
36 He will always have descendants,
and I will watch over his kingdom as long as the sun shines.
37 It will be as permanent as the moon,
that faithful witness in the sky.”
Lament over the Defeat of the King
38 But you are angry with your chosen king;
you have deserted and rejected him.
39 You have broken your covenant with your servant
and thrown his crown in the dirt.
40 You have torn down the walls of his city
and left his forts in ruins.
41 All who pass by steal his belongings;
all his neighbors laugh at him.
42 You have given the victory to his enemies;
you have made them all happy.
43 You have made his weapons useless
and let him be defeated in battle.
44 You have taken away his royal scepter[c]
and knocked his throne to the ground.
45 You have made him old before his time
and covered him with disgrace.
A Prayer for Deliverance
46 Lord, will you hide yourself forever?
How long will your anger burn like fire?
47 Remember how short my life is;
remember that you created all of us mortal!
48 Who can live and never die?
How can we humans keep ourselves from the grave?
49 Lord, where are the former proofs of your love?
Where are the promises you made to David?
50 Don't forget how I, your servant, am insulted,
how I endure all the curses[d] of the heathen.
51 Your enemies insult your chosen king, O Lord!
They insult him wherever he goes.
52 Praise the Lord forever!
Amen! Amen!
10 “When you tell them all this, they will ask you why I have decided to punish them so harshly. They will ask what crime they are guilty of and what sin they have committed against the Lord their God. 11 Then tell them that the Lord has said, ‘Your ancestors turned away from me and worshiped and served other gods. They abandoned me and did not obey my teachings. 12 But you have done even worse than your ancestors. All of you are stubborn and evil, and you do not obey me. 13 So then, I will throw you out of this land into a land that neither you nor your ancestors have ever known. And there you will serve other gods day and night, and I will show you no mercy.’”
The Return from Exile
14 The Lord says, “The time is coming when people will no longer swear by me as the living God who brought the people of Israel out of the land of Egypt. 15 Instead, they will swear by me as the living God who brought the people of Israel out of a northern land and out of all the other countries where I had scattered them. I will bring them back to their own country, to the land that I gave their ancestors. I, the Lord, have spoken.”
The Coming Punishment
16 The Lord says, “I am sending for many fishermen to come and catch these people. Then I will send for many hunters to hunt them down on every mountain and hill and in the caves among the rocks. 17 I see everything they do. Nothing is hidden from me; their sins do not escape my sight. 18 I will make them pay double for their sin and wickedness, because they have defiled my land with idols that are as lifeless as corpses, and have filled it with their false gods.”
Jeremiah's Prayer of Confidence in the Lord
19 Lord, you are the one who protects me and gives me strength; you help me in times of trouble. Nations will come to you from the ends of the earth and say, “Our ancestors had nothing but false gods, nothing but useless idols. 20 Can people make their own gods? No, if they did, those would not really be gods.”
21 “So then,” says the Lord, “once and for all I will make the nations know my power and my might; they will know that I am the Lord.”
An Illustration from Marriage
7 Certainly you will understand what I am about to say, my friends, because all of you know about law. The law rules over people only as long as they live. 2 A married woman, for example, is bound by the law to her husband as long as he lives; but if he dies, then she is free from the law that bound her to him. 3 So then, if she lives with another man while her husband is alive, she will be called an adulteress; but if her husband dies, she is legally a free woman and does not commit adultery if she marries another man. 4 That is how it is with you, my friends. As far as the Law is concerned, you also have died because you are part of the body of Christ; and now you belong to him who was raised from death in order that we might be useful in the service of God. 5 For when we lived according to our human nature, the sinful desires stirred up by the Law were at work in our bodies, and all we did ended in death. 6 Now, however, we are free from the Law, because we died to that which once held us prisoners. No longer do we serve in the old way of a written law, but in the new way of the Spirit.
Law and Sin
7 (A)Shall we say, then, that the Law itself is sinful? Of course not! But it was the Law that made me know what sin is. If the Law had not said, “Do not desire what belongs to someone else,” I would not have known such a desire. 8 But by means of that commandment sin found its chance to stir up all kinds of selfish desires in me. Apart from law, sin is a dead thing. 9 I myself was once alive apart from law; but when the commandment came, sin sprang to life, 10 and I died. And the commandment which was meant to bring life, in my case brought death. 11 (B)Sin found its chance, and by means of the commandment it deceived me and killed me.
12 So then, the Law itself is holy, and the commandment is holy, right, and good.
Jesus Feeds Five Thousand(A)
6 After this, Jesus went across Lake Galilee (or, Lake Tiberias, as it is also called). 2 A large crowd followed him, because they had seen his miracles of healing the sick. 3 Jesus went up a hill and sat down with his disciples. 4 The time for the Passover Festival was near. 5 Jesus looked around and saw that a large crowd was coming to him, so he asked Philip, “Where can we buy enough food to feed all these people?” (6 He said this to test Philip; actually he already knew what he would do.)
7 Philip answered, “For everyone to have even a little, it would take more than two hundred silver coins[a] to buy enough bread.”
8 Another one of his disciples, Andrew, who was Simon Peter's brother, said, 9 “There is a boy here who has five loaves of barley bread and two fish. But they will certainly not be enough for all these people.”
10 “Make the people sit down,” Jesus told them. (There was a lot of grass there.) So all the people sat down; there were about five thousand men. 11 Jesus took the bread, gave thanks to God, and distributed it to the people who were sitting there. He did the same with the fish, and they all had as much as they wanted. 12 When they were all full, he said to his disciples, “Gather the pieces left over; let us not waste a bit.” 13 So they gathered them all and filled twelve baskets with the pieces left over from the five barley loaves which the people had eaten.
14 Seeing this miracle that Jesus had performed, the people there said, “Surely this is the Prophet[b] who was to come into the world!” 15 Jesus knew that they were about to come and seize him in order to make him king by force; so he went off again to the hills by himself.
Good News Translation® (Today’s English Version, Second Edition) © 1992 American Bible Society. All rights reserved. For more information about GNT, visit www.bibles.com and www.gnt.bible.