Book of Common Prayer
83 O God, don’t sit idly by, silent and inactive when we pray. Answer us! Deliver us!
2 Don’t you hear the tumult and commotion of your enemies? Don’t you see what they are doing, these proud men who hate the Lord? 3 They are full of craftiness and plot against your people, laying plans to slay your precious ones. 4 “Come,” they say, “and let us wipe out Israel as a nation—we will destroy the very memory of her existence.” 5 This was their unanimous decision at their summit conference—they signed a treaty to ally themselves against Almighty God— 6 these Ishmaelites and Edomites and Moabites and Hagrites; 7 people from the lands of Gebal, Ammon, Amalek, Philistia and Tyre; 8 Assyria has joined them too, and is allied with the descendants of Lot.[a]
9 Do to them as once you did to Midian, or as you did to Sisera and Jabin at the river Kishon, 10 and as you did to your enemies at Endor, whose decaying corpses fertilized the soil. 11 Make their mighty nobles die as Oreb did, and Zeeb;[b] let all their princes die like Zebah and Zalmunna, 12 who said, “Let us seize for our own use these pasturelands of God!”
13 O my God, blow them away like dust; like chaff before the wind— 14 as a forest fire that roars across a mountain. 15 Chase them with your fiery storms, tempests, and tornados. 16 Utterly disgrace them until they recognize your power and name, O Lord. 17 Make them failures in everything they do; let them be ashamed and terrified 18 until they learn that you alone, Jehovah, are the God above all gods in supreme charge of all the earth.
145 1-2 I will praise you, my God and King, and bless your name each day and forever.
3 Great is Jehovah! Greatly praise him! His greatness is beyond discovery! 4 Let each generation tell its children what glorious things he does. 5 I will meditate about your glory, splendor, majesty, and miracles. 6 Your awe-inspiring deeds shall be on every tongue; I will proclaim your greatness. 7 Everyone will tell about how good you are and sing about your righteousness.
8 Jehovah is kind and merciful, slow to get angry, full of love. 9 He is good to everyone, and his compassion is intertwined with everything he does. 10 All living things shall thank you, Lord, and your people will bless you. 11 They will talk together about the glory of your kingdom and mention examples of your power. 12 They will tell about your miracles and about the majesty and glory of your reign. 13 For your kingdom never ends. You rule generation after generation.
14 The Lord lifts the fallen and those bent beneath their loads. 15 The eyes of all mankind look up to you for help; you give them their food as they need it. 16 You constantly satisfy the hunger and thirst of every living thing.
17 The Lord is fair in everything he does and full of kindness. 18 He is close to all who call on him sincerely. 19 He fulfills the desires of those who reverence and trust him; he hears their cries for help and rescues them. 20 He protects all those who love him, but destroys the wicked.
21 I will praise the Lord and call on all men everywhere to bless his holy name forever and forever.
85 Lord, you have poured out amazing blessings on this land! You have restored the fortunes of Israel,[a] 2 and forgiven the sins of your people—yes, covered over each one, 3 so that all your wrath, your blazing anger, is now ended.
4 Now bring us back to loving you,[b] O Lord, so that your anger will never need rise against us again. 5 (Or will you be always angry—on and on to distant generations?) 6 Oh, revive us! Then your people can rejoice in you again. 7 Pour out your love and kindness on us, Lord, and grant us your salvation.
8 I am listening carefully to all the Lord is saying—for he speaks peace to his people, his saints, if they will only stop their sinning. 9 Surely his salvation is near to those who reverence him; our land will be filled with his glory.
10 Mercy and truth have met together. Grim justice[c] and peace have kissed! 11 Truth rises from the earth, and righteousness smiles down from heaven.
12 Yes, the Lord pours down his blessings on the land, and it yields its bountiful crops. 13 Justice goes before him to make a pathway for his steps.[d]
86 Bend down and hear my prayer, O Lord, and answer me, for I am deep in trouble.
2 Protect me from death, for I try to follow all your laws. Save me, for I am serving you and trusting you. 3 Be merciful, O Lord, for I am looking up to you in constant hope. 4 Give me happiness, O Lord, for I worship only you. 5 O Lord, you are so good and kind, so ready to forgive, so full of mercy for all who ask your aid.
6 Listen closely to my prayer, O God. Hear my urgent cry. 7 I will call to you whenever trouble strikes, and you will help me.
8 Where among the heathen gods is there a god like you? Where are their miracles? 9 All the nations—and you made each one—will come and bow before you, Lord, and praise your great and holy name. 10 For you are great and do great miracles. You alone are God.
11 Tell me where you want me to go and I will go there. May every fiber of my being unite in reverence to your name. 12 With all my heart I will praise you. I will give glory to your name forever, 13 for you love me so much! You are constantly so kind! You have rescued me from deepest hell.
14 O God, proud and insolent men defy me; violent, godless men are trying to kill me. 15 But you are merciful and gentle, Lord, slow in getting angry, full of constant loving-kindness and of truth; 16 so look down in pity and grant strength to your servant and save me. 17 Send me a sign of your favor. When those who hate me see it, they will lose face because you help and comfort me.
11 In the spring of the following year, at the time when wars begin, David sent Joab and the Israeli army to destroy the Ammonites. They began by laying siege to the city of Rabbah. But David stayed in Jerusalem.
2 One night he couldn’t get to sleep[a] and went for a stroll on the roof of the palace. As he looked out over the city, he noticed a woman of unusual beauty taking her evening bath. 3 He sent to find out who she was and was told that she was Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam and the wife of Uriah. 4 Then David sent for her and when she came he slept with her. (She had just completed the purification rites after menstruation.) Then she returned home. 5 When she found that he had gotten her pregnant she sent a message to inform him.
6 So David dispatched a memo to Joab: “Send me Uriah the Hittite.” 7 When he arrived, David asked him how Joab and the army were getting along and how the war was prospering. 8 Then he told him to go home and relax, and he sent a present to him at his home. 9 But Uriah didn’t go there. He stayed that night at the gateway of the palace with the other servants of the king.
10 When David heard what Uriah had done, he summoned him and asked him, “What’s the matter with you? Why didn’t you go home to your wife last night after being away for so long?”
11 Uriah replied, “The Ark and the armies and the general and his officers are camping out in open fields, and should I go home to wine and dine and sleep with my wife? I swear that I will never be guilty of acting like that.”
12 “Well, stay here tonight,” David told him, “and tomorrow you may return to the army.”
So Uriah stayed around the palace. 13 David invited him to dinner and got him drunk; but even so he didn’t go home that night, but again he slept at the entry to the palace.
14 Finally the next morning David wrote a letter to Joab and gave it to Uriah to deliver. 15 The letter instructed Joab to put Uriah at the front of the hottest part of the battle—and then pull back and leave him there to die! 16 So Joab assigned Uriah to a spot close to the besieged city where he knew that the enemies’ best men were fighting; 17 and Uriah was killed along with several other Israeli soldiers.
18 When Joab sent a report to David of how the battle was going, 19-21 he told his messenger, “If the king is angry and asks, ‘Why did the troops go so close to the city? Didn’t they know there would be shooting from the walls? Wasn’t Abimelech killed at Thebez by a woman who threw down a millstone on him?’—then tell him, ‘Uriah was killed too.’”
22 So the messenger arrived at Jerusalem and gave the report to David.
23 “The enemy came out against us,” he said, “and as we chased them back to the city gates, 24 the men on the wall attacked us; and some of our men were killed, and Uriah the Hittite is dead too.”
25 “Well, tell Joab not to be discouraged,” David said. “The sword kills one as well as another![b] Fight harder next time, and conquer the city; tell him he is doing well.”
26 When Bathsheba heard that her husband was dead, she mourned for him; 27 then, when the period of mourning was over, David sent for her and brought her to the palace and she became one of his wives; and she gave birth to his son. But the Lord was very displeased with what David had done.
11 And God gave Paul the power to do unusual miracles, 12 so that even when his handkerchiefs or parts of his clothing were placed upon sick people, they were healed, and any demons within them came out.
13 A team of itinerant Jews who were traveling from town to town casting out demons planned to experiment by using the name of the Lord Jesus. The incantation they decided on was this: “I adjure you by Jesus, whom Paul preaches, to come out!” 14 Seven sons of Sceva, a Jewish priest, were doing this. 15 But when they tried it on a man possessed by a demon, the demon replied, “I know Jesus and I know Paul, but who are you?” 16 And he leaped on two of them and beat them up, so that they fled out of his house naked and badly injured.
17 The story of what happened spread quickly all through Ephesus, to Jews and Greeks alike; and a solemn fear descended on the city, and the name of the Lord Jesus was greatly honored. 18-19 Many of the believers who had been practicing black magic confessed their deeds and brought their incantation books and charms and burned them at a public bonfire. (Someone estimated the value of the books at $10,000.
2 Six days later Jesus took Peter, James and John to the top of a mountain. No one else was there.
Suddenly his face began to shine with glory, 3 and his clothing became dazzling white, far more glorious than any earthly process could ever make it! 4 Then Elijah and Moses appeared and began talking with Jesus!
5 “Teacher, this is wonderful!” Peter exclaimed. “We will make three shelters here, one for each of you. . . . ”
6 He said this just to be talking, for he didn’t know what else to say and they were all terribly frightened.
7 But while he was still speaking these words, a cloud covered them, blotting out the sun, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my beloved Son. Listen to him.”
8 Then suddenly they looked around and Moses and Elijah were gone, and only Jesus was with them.
9 As they descended the mountainside he told them never to mention what they had seen until after he had risen[a] from the dead. 10 So they kept it to themselves, but often talked about it, and wondered what he meant by “rising from the dead.”
11 Now they began asking him about something the Jewish religious leaders often spoke of, that Elijah must return before the Messiah could come.[b] 12-13 Jesus agreed that Elijah must come first and prepare the way—and that he had, in fact, already come! And that he had been terribly mistreated, just as the prophets had predicted. Then Jesus asked them what the prophets could have been talking about when they predicted that the Messiah[c] would suffer and be treated with utter contempt.
The Living Bible copyright © 1971 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.