Book of Common Prayer
18 This song of David was written at a time when the Lord had delivered him from his many enemies, including Saul.
Lord, how I love you! For you have done such tremendous things for me.
2 The Lord is my fort where I can enter and be safe; no one can follow me in and slay me. He is a rugged mountain where I hide; he is my Savior, a rock where none can reach me, and a tower of safety. He is my shield. He is like the strong horn of a mighty fighting bull. 3 All I need to do is cry to him—oh, praise the Lord—and I am saved from all my enemies!
4 Death bound me with chains, and the floods of ungodliness mounted a massive attack against me. 5 Trapped and helpless, I struggled against the ropes that drew me on to death.
6 In my distress I screamed to the Lord for his help. And he heard me from heaven;[a] my cry reached his ears. 7 Then the earth rocked and reeled, and mountains shook and trembled. How they quaked! For he was angry. 8 Fierce flames leaped from his mouth, setting fire to the earth;[b] smoke blew from his nostrils. 9 He bent the heavens down and came to my defense;[c] thick darkness was beneath his feet. 10 Mounted on a mighty angel,[d] he sped swiftly to my aid with wings of wind. 11 He enshrouded himself with darkness, veiling his approach with dense clouds dark as murky waters. 12 Suddenly the brilliance of his presence broke through the clouds with lightning[e] and a mighty storm of hail.
13 The Lord thundered in the heavens; the God above all gods has spoken—oh, the hailstones; oh, the fire! 14 He flashed his fearful arrows of lightning and routed all my enemies. See how they run! 15 Then at your command, O Lord, the sea receded from the shore. At the blast of your breath the depths were laid bare.
16 He reached down from heaven and took me and drew me out of my great trials. He rescued me from deep waters. 17 He delivered me from my strong enemy, from those who hated me—I who was helpless in their hands.
18 On the day when I was weakest, they attacked. But the Lord held me steady. 19 He led me to a place of safety, for he delights in me.
20 The Lord rewarded me for doing right and being pure. 21 For I have followed his commands and have not sinned by turning back from following him. 22 I kept close watch on all his laws; I did not refuse a single one. 23 I did my best to keep them all, holding myself back from doing wrong. 24 And so the Lord has paid me with his blessings, for I have done what is right, and I am pure of heart. This he knows, for he watches my every step.
25 Lord, how merciful you are to those who are merciful. And you do not punish those who run from evil.[f] 26 You give blessings to the pure but pain to those who leave your paths. 27 You deliver the humble but condemn the proud and haughty ones. 28 You have turned on my light! The Lord my God has made my darkness turn to light. 29 Now in your strength I can scale any wall, attack any troop.
30 What a God he is! How perfect in every way! All his promises prove true. He is a shield for everyone who hides behind him. 31 For who is God except our Lord? Who but he is as a rock?
32 He fills me with strength and protects me wherever I go. 33 He gives me the surefootedness of a mountain goat upon the crags. He leads me safely along the top of the cliffs. 34 He prepares me for battle and gives me strength to draw an iron bow![g]
35 You have given me your salvation as my shield. Your right hand, O Lord, supports me; your gentleness has made me great. 36 You have made wide steps beneath my feet so that I need never slip. 37 I chased my enemies; I caught up with them and did not turn back until all were conquered. 38 I pinned them to the ground; all were helpless before me. I placed my feet upon their necks. 39 For you have armed me with strong armor for the battle. My enemies quail before me and fall defeated at my feet. 40 You made them turn and run; I destroyed all who hated me. 41 They shouted for help, but no one dared to rescue them; they cried to the Lord, but he refused to answer them. 42 So I crushed them fine as dust and cast them to the wind. I threw them away like sweepings from the floor. 43-45 You gave me victory in every battle. The nations came and served me. Even those I didn’t know before come now and bow before me. Foreigners who have never seen me submit instantly. They come trembling from their strongholds.
46 God is alive! Praise him who is the great rock of protection. 47 He is the God who pays back those who harm me and subdues the nations before me.
48 He rescues me from my enemies; he holds me safely out of their reach and saves me from these powerful opponents. 49 For this, O Lord, I will praise you among the nations. 50 Many times you have miraculously rescued me, the king you appointed. You have been loving and kind to me and will be to my descendants.
6 “I sent you hunger,” says the Lord, “but it did no good; you still would not return to me. 7 I ruined your crops by holding back the rain three months before the harvest. I sent rain on one city but not another. While rain fell on one field, another was dry and withered. 8 People from two or three cities would make their weary journey for a drink of water to a city that had rain, but there wasn’t ever enough. Yet you wouldn’t return to me,” says the Lord.
9 “I sent blight and mildew on your farms and your vineyards; the locusts ate your figs and olive trees. And still you wouldn’t return to me,” says the Lord. 10 “I sent you plagues like those of Egypt long ago. I killed your lads in war and drove away your horses. The stench of death was terrible to smell. And yet you refused to come. 11 I destroyed some of your cities, as I did Sodom and Gomorrah; those left are like half-burned firebrands snatched away from fire. And still you won’t return to me,” says the Lord.
12 “Therefore, I will bring upon you all these further evils I have spoken of. Prepare to meet your God in judgment, Israel. 13 For you are dealing with the One who formed the mountains, made the winds, and knows your every thought; he turns the morning to darkness and crushes down the mountains underneath his feet: Jehovah, the Lord, the Lord Almighty, is his name.”
11 And so since everything around us is going to melt away, what holy, godly lives we should be living! 12 You should look forward to that day and hurry it along—the day when God will set the heavens on fire, and the heavenly bodies will melt and disappear in flames. 13 But we are looking forward to God’s promise of new heavens and a new earth afterwards, where there will be only goodness.[a]
14 Dear friends, while you are waiting for these things to happen and for him to come, try hard to live without sinning; and be at peace with everyone so that he will be pleased with you when he returns.
15-16 And remember why he is waiting. He is giving us time to get his message of salvation out to others. Our wise and beloved brother Paul has talked about these same things in many of his letters. Some of his comments are not easy to understand, and there are people who are deliberately stupid, and always demand some unusual interpretation—they have twisted his letters around to mean something quite different from what he meant, just as they do the other parts of the Scripture—and the result is disaster for them.
17 I am warning you ahead of time, dear brothers, so that you can watch out and not be carried away by the mistakes of these wicked men, lest you yourselves become mixed up too. 18 But grow in spiritual strength and become better acquainted with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be all glory and splendid honor, both now and forevermore. Good-bye.
Peter
33 “Now listen to this story: A certain landowner planted a vineyard with a hedge around it, and built a platform for the watchman, then leased the vineyard to some farmers on a sharecrop basis, and went away to live in another country.
34 “At the time of the grape harvest he sent his agents to the farmers to collect his share. 35 But the farmers attacked his men, beat one, killed one, and stoned another.
36 “Then he sent a larger group of his men to collect for him, but the results were the same. 37 Finally the owner sent his son, thinking they would surely respect him.
38 “But when these farmers saw the son coming, they said among themselves, ‘Here comes the heir to this estate; come on, let’s kill him and get it for ourselves!’ 39 So they dragged him out of the vineyard and killed him.
40 “When the owner returns, what do you think he will do to those farmers?”
41 The Jewish leaders replied, “He will put the wicked men to a horrible death and lease the vineyard to others who will pay him promptly.”
42 Then Jesus asked them, “Didn’t you ever read in the Scriptures: ‘The stone rejected by the builders has been made the honored cornerstone;[a] how remarkable! what an amazing thing the Lord has done’?
43 “What I mean is that the Kingdom of God shall be taken away from you, and given to a nation that will give God his share of the crop.[b] 44 All who stumble on this rock of truth[c] shall be broken, but those it falls on will be scattered as dust.”
45 When the chief priests and other Jewish leaders realized that Jesus was talking about them—that they were the farmers in his story— 46 they wanted to get rid of him but were afraid to try because of the crowds, for they accepted Jesus as a prophet.
The Living Bible copyright © 1971 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.