Book of Common Prayer

5 ^1-2 O Lord, hear me praying; listen to my plea, O God my King, for I will never pray to anyone but you. ³ Each morning I will look to you in heaven and lay my requests before you, praying earnestly.

⁴ I know you get no pleasure from wickedness and cannot tolerate the slightest sin. ⁵ Therefore, proud sinners will not survive your searching gaze, for how you hate their evil deeds. ⁶ You will destroy them for their lies; how you abhor all murder and deception.

⁷ But as for me, I will come into your Temple protected by your mercy and your love; I will worship you with deepest awe.

⁸ Lord, lead me as you promised me you would; otherwise my enemies will conquer me. Tell me clearly what to do, which way to turn. ⁹ For they cannot speak one truthful word. Their hearts are filled to the brim with wickedness. Their suggestions are full of the stench of sin and death. Their tongues are filled with flatteries to gain their wicked ends. ¹⁰ O God, hold them responsible. Catch them in their own traps; let them fall beneath the weight of their own transgressions, for they rebel against you.

¹¹ But make everyone rejoice who puts his trust in you. Keep them shouting for joy because you are defending them. Fill all who love you with your happiness. ¹² For you bless the godly man, O Lord; you protect him with your shield of love.

6 No, Lord! Don’t punish me in the heat of your anger. ² Pity me, O Lord, for I am weak. Heal me, for my body is sick, ³ and I am upset and disturbed. My mind is filled with apprehension and with gloom. Oh, restore me soon.

⁴ Come, O Lord, and make me well. In your kindness save me. ⁵ For if I die, I cannot give you glory by praising you before my friends.^{[a] 6} I am worn out with pain; every night my pillow is wet with tears. ⁷ My eyes are growing old and dim with grief because of all my enemies.

⁸ Go, leave me now, you men of evil deeds, for the Lord has heard my weeping ⁹ and my pleading. He will answer all my prayers. ¹⁰ All my enemies shall be suddenly dishonored, terror-stricken, and disgraced. God will turn them back in shame.

10 Lord, why are you standing aloof and far away? Why do you hide when I need you the most?

² Come and deal with all these proud and wicked men who viciously persecute the poor. Pour upon these men the evil they planned for others! ³ For these men brag of all their evil lusts; they revile God and congratulate those the Lord abhors, whose only goal in life is money.

⁴ These wicked men, so proud and haughty, seem to think that God is dead.^[a] They wouldn’t think of looking for him! ⁵ Yet there is success in everything they do, and their enemies fall before them. They do not see your punishment awaiting them. ⁶ They boast that neither God nor man can ever keep them down—somehow they’ll find a way!

⁷ Their mouths are full of profanity and lies and fraud. They are always boasting of their evil plans. ⁸ They lurk in dark alleys of the city and murder passersby. ⁹ Like lions they crouch silently, waiting to pounce upon the poor. Like hunters they catch their victims in their traps. ¹⁰ The unfortunate are overwhelmed by their superior strength and fall beneath their blows. ¹¹ “God isn’t watching,” they say to themselves; “he’ll never know!”

¹² O Lord, arise! O God, crush them! Don’t forget the poor or anyone else in need. ¹³ Why do you let the wicked get away with this contempt for God? For they think that God will never call them to account. ¹⁴ Lord, you see what they are doing. You have noted each evil act. You know what trouble and grief they have caused. Now punish them. O Lord, the poor man trusts himself to you; you are known as the helper of the helpless. ¹⁵ Break the arms of these wicked men. Go after them until the last of them is destroyed.

¹⁶ The Lord is King forever and forever. Those who follow other gods shall be swept from his land.

¹⁷ Lord, you know the hopes of humble people. Surely you will hear their cries and comfort their hearts by helping them. ¹⁸ You will be with the orphans and all who are oppressed, so that mere earthly man will terrify them no longer.

11 How dare you tell me, “Flee^[b] to the mountains for safety,” when I am trusting in the Lord?

² For the wicked have strung their bows, drawn their arrows tight against the bowstrings, and aimed from ambush at the people of God. ³ “Law and order have collapsed,”^[c] we are told. “What can the righteous do but flee?”

⁴ But the Lord is still in his holy temple; he still rules from heaven. He closely watches everything that happens here on earth. ⁵ He puts the righteous and the wicked to the test; he hates those loving violence. ⁶ He will rain down fire and brimstone on the wicked and scorch them with his burning wind.

⁷ For God is good, and he loves goodness; the godly shall see his face.^[d]

²¹ Jerusalem, once a faithful wife! And now a prostitute! Running after other gods! Once “The City of Fair Play,” but now a gang of murderers. ²² Once like sterling silver; now mixed with worthless alloy! Once so pure, but now diluted like watered-down wine! ²³ Your leaders are rebels, companions of thieves; all of them take bribes and won’t defend the widows and orphans. ²⁴ Therefore the Lord, the Mighty One of Israel, says: I will pour out my anger on you, my enemies! ²⁵ I myself will melt you in a smelting pot and skim off your slag.

²⁶ And afterwards I will give you good judges and wise counselors like those you used to have. Then your city shall again be called “The City of Justice” and “The Faithful Town.”

²⁷ Those who return to the Lord, who are just and good, shall be redeemed. ²⁸ (But all sinners shall utterly perish, for they refuse to come to me.) ²⁹ Shame will cover you, and you will blush to think of all those times you sacrificed to idols in your groves of “sacred” oaks. ³⁰ You will perish like a withered tree or a garden without water. ³¹ The strongest among you will disappear like burning straw; your evil deeds are the spark that sets the straw on fire, and no one will be able to put it out.

2 You yourselves know, dear brothers, how worthwhile that visit was. ² You know how badly we had been treated at Philippi just before we came to you and how much we suffered there. Yet God gave us the courage to boldly repeat the same message to you, even though we were surrounded by enemies. ³ So you can see that we were not preaching with any false motives or evil purposes in mind; we were perfectly straightforward and sincere.

⁴ For we speak as messengers from God, trusted by him to tell the truth; we change his message not one bit to suit the taste of those who hear it; for we serve God alone, who examines our hearts’ deepest thoughts. ⁵ Never once did we try to win you with flattery, as you very well know, and God knows we were not just pretending to be your friends so that you would give us money! ⁶ As for praise, we have never asked for it from you or anyone else, although as apostles of Christ we certainly had a right to some honor from you. ⁷ But we were as gentle among you as a mother feeding and caring for her own children. ⁸ We loved you dearly—so dearly that we gave you not only God’s message, but our own lives too.

⁹ Don’t you remember, dear brothers, how hard we worked among you? Night and day we toiled and sweated to earn enough to live on so that our expenses would not be a burden to anyone there, as we preached God’s Good News among you. ¹⁰ You yourselves are our witnesses—as is God—that we have been pure and honest and faultless toward every one of you. ¹¹ We talked to you as a father to his own children—don’t you remember?—pleading with you, encouraging you and even demanding ¹² that your daily lives should not embarrass God but bring joy to him who invited you into his Kingdom to share his glory.

⁹ Now he turned to the people again and told them this story: “A man planted a vineyard and rented it out to some farmers, and went away to a distant land to live for several years. ¹⁰ When harvest time came, he sent one of his men to the farm to collect his share of the crops. But the tenants beat him up and sent him back empty-handed. ¹¹ Then he sent another, but the same thing happened; he was beaten up and insulted and sent away without collecting. ¹² A third man was sent and the same thing happened. He, too, was wounded and chased away.

¹³ “‘What shall I do?’ the owner asked himself. ‘I know! I’ll send my cherished son. Surely they will show respect for him.’

¹⁴ “But when the tenants saw his son, they said, ‘This is our chance! This fellow will inherit all the land when his father dies. Come on. Let’s kill him, and then it will be ours.’ ¹⁵ So they dragged him out of the vineyard and killed him.

“What do you think the owner will do? ¹⁶ I’ll tell you—he will come and kill them and rent the vineyard to others.”

“But they would never do a thing like that,” his listeners protested.

¹⁷ Jesus looked at them and said, “Then what does the Scripture mean where it says, ‘The Stone rejected by the builders was made the cornerstone’?” ¹⁸ And he added, “Whoever stumbles over that Stone shall be broken; and those on whom it falls will be crushed to dust.”