Book of Common Prayer

26 Dismiss all the charges against me, Lord, for I have tried to keep your laws and have trusted you without wavering. ² Cross-examine me, O Lord, and see that this is so; test my motives and affections too. ³ For I have taken your loving-kindness and your truth as my ideals. ⁴ I do not have fellowship with tricky, two-faced men; they are false and hypocritical. ⁵ I hate the sinners’ hangouts and refuse to enter them. ⁶ I wash my hands to prove my innocence and come before your altar, ⁷ singing a song of thanksgiving and telling about your miracles.

⁸ Lord, I love your home, this shrine where the brilliant, dazzling splendor of your presence lives.

^9-10 Don’t treat me as a common sinner or murderer who plots against the innocent and demands bribes.

¹¹ No, I am not like that, O Lord; I try to walk a straight and narrow path of doing what is right; therefore in mercy save me.

¹² I publicly praise the Lord for keeping me from slipping and falling.

28 I plead with you to help me, Lord, for you are my Rock of safety. If you refuse to answer me, I might as well give up and die. ² Lord, I lift my hands to heaven^[a] and implore your help. Oh, listen to my cry.

³ Don’t punish me with all the wicked ones who speak so sweetly to their neighbors while planning to murder them. ⁴ Give them the punishment they so richly deserve! Measure it out to them in proportion to their wickedness; pay them back for all their evil deeds. ⁵ They care nothing for God or what he has done or what he has made; therefore God will dismantle them like old buildings, never to be rebuilt again.

⁶ Oh, praise the Lord, for he has listened to my pleadings! ⁷ He is my strength, my shield from every danger. I trusted in him, and he helped me. Joy rises in my heart until I burst out in songs of praise to him. ⁸ The Lord protects his people and gives victory to his anointed king.

⁹ Defend your people, Lord; defend and bless your chosen ones. Lead them like a shepherd and carry them forever in your arms.

36 Sin lurks deep in the hearts of the wicked, forever urging them on to evil deeds. They have no fear of God to hold them back. ² Instead, in their conceit, they think they can hide their evil deeds and not get caught. ³ Everything they say is crooked and deceitful; they are no longer wise and good. ⁴ They lie awake at night to hatch their evil plots instead of planning how to keep away from wrong.

⁵ Your steadfast love, O Lord, is as great as all the heavens. Your faithfulness reaches beyond the clouds. ⁶ Your justice is as solid as God’s mountains. Your decisions are as full of wisdom as the oceans are with water. You are concerned^[a] for men and animals alike. ⁷ How precious is your constant love, O God! All humanity takes refuge in the shadow of your wings. ⁸ You feed them with blessings from your own table and let them drink from your rivers of delight.

⁹ For you are the Fountain of life; our light is from your light. ¹⁰ Pour out your unfailing love on those who know you! Never stop giving your blessings^[b] to those who long to do your will.

¹¹ Don’t let these proud men trample me. Don’t let their wicked hands push me around. ¹² Look! They have fallen. They are thrown down and will not rise again.

39 I said to myself, I’m going to quit complaining! I’ll keep quiet, especially when the ungodly are around me. ^2-3 But as I stood there silently the turmoil within me grew to the bursting point. The more I mused, the hotter the fires inside. Then at last I spoke and pled with God: ⁴ Lord, help me to realize how brief my time on earth will be. Help me to know that I am here for but a moment more. ^5-6 My life is no longer than my hand! My whole lifetime is but a moment to you. Proud man! Frail as breath! A shadow! And all his busy rushing ends in nothing. He heaps up riches for someone else to spend. ⁷ And so, Lord, my only hope is in you.

⁸ Save me from being overpowered by my sins, for even fools will mock me then.

⁹ Lord, I am speechless before you. I will not open my mouth to speak one word of complaint, for my punishment is from you.^[a]

¹⁰ Lord, don’t hit me anymore—I am exhausted beneath your hand. ¹¹ When you punish a man for his sins, he is destroyed, for he is as fragile as a moth-infested cloth; yes, man is frail as breath.

¹² Hear my prayer, O Lord; listen to my cry! Don’t sit back, unmindful of my tears. For I am your guest. I am a traveler passing through the earth, as all my fathers were.

¹³ Spare me, Lord! Let me recover and be filled with happiness again before my death.

9 God blessed Noah and his sons and told them to have many children and to repopulate the earth.

^2-3 “All wild animals and birds and fish will be afraid of you,” God told him; “for I have placed them in your power, and they are yours to use for food, in addition to grain and vegetables. ⁴ But never eat animals unless their life-blood has been drained off. ^5-6 And murder is forbidden. Man-killing animals must die, and any man who murders shall be killed; for to kill a man is to kill one made like God. ⁷ Yes, have many children and repopulate the earth and subdue it.”

⁸ Then God told Noah and his sons, ^9-11 “I solemnly promise you and your children^[a] and the animals you brought with you—all these birds and cattle and wild animals—that I will never again send another flood to destroy the earth. ¹² And I seal this promise with this sign: ¹³ I have placed my rainbow in the clouds as a sign of my promise until the end of time, to you and to all the earth. ¹⁴ When I send clouds over the earth, the rainbow will be seen in the clouds, ¹⁵ and I will remember my promise to you and to every being, that never again will the floods come and destroy all life. ^16-17 For I will see the rainbow in the cloud and remember my eternal promise to every living being on the earth.”

⁷ Yet while Christ was here on earth he pleaded with God, praying with tears and agony of soul to the only one who would save him from premature^[a] death. And God heard his prayers because of his strong desire to obey God at all times.

⁸ And even though Jesus was God’s Son, he had to learn from experience what it was like to obey when obeying meant suffering. ⁹ It was after he had proved himself perfect in this experience that Jesus became the Giver of eternal salvation to all those who obey him. ¹⁰ For remember that God has chosen him to be a High Priest with the same rank as Melchizedek.

¹¹ There is much more I would like to say along these lines, but you don’t seem to listen, so it’s hard to make you understand.

^12-13 You have been Christians a long time now, and you ought to be teaching others, but instead you have dropped back to the place where you need someone to teach you all over again the very first principles in God’s Word. You are like babies who can drink only milk, not old enough for solid food. And when a person is still living on milk it shows he isn’t very far along in the Christian life, and doesn’t know much about the difference between right and wrong. He is still a baby Christian! ¹⁴ You will never be able to eat solid spiritual food and understand the deeper things of God’s Word until you become better Christians and learn right from wrong by practicing doing right.

¹⁶ For God loved the world so much that he gave his only Son^[a] so that anyone who believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. ¹⁷ God did not send his Son into the world to condemn it, but to save it.

¹⁸ “There is no eternal doom awaiting those who trust him to save them. But those who don’t trust him have already been tried and condemned for not believing in the only Son of God. ¹⁹ Their sentence is based on this fact: that the Light from heaven came into the world, but they loved the darkness more than the Light, for their deeds were evil. ²⁰ They hated the heavenly Light because they wanted to sin in the darkness. They stayed away from that Light for fear their sins would be exposed and they would be punished. ²¹ But those doing right come gladly to the Light to let everyone see that they are doing what God wants them to.”