Book of Common Prayer

63 A psalm of David when he was hiding in the wilderness of Judea.

O God, my God! How I search for you! How I thirst for you in this parched and weary land where there is no water. How I long to find you! ² How I wish I could go into your sanctuary to see your strength and glory, ³ for your love and kindness are better to me than life itself. How I praise you! ⁴ I will bless you as long as I live, lifting up my hands to you in prayer. ⁵ At last I shall be fully satisfied; I will praise you with great joy.

⁶ I lie awake at night thinking of you— ⁷ of how much you have helped me—and how I rejoice through the night beneath the protecting shadow of your wings. ⁸ I follow close behind you, protected by your strong right arm. ⁹ But those plotting to destroy me shall go down to the depths of hell. ¹⁰ They are doomed to die by the sword, to become the food of jackals. ¹¹ But I^[a] will rejoice in God. All who trust in him exult, while liars shall be silenced.

98 Sing a new song to the Lord telling about his mighty deeds! For he has won a mighty victory by his power and holiness. ^2-3 He has announced this victory and revealed it to every nation by fulfilling his promise to be kind to Israel. The whole earth has seen God’s salvation of his people. ⁴ That is why the earth breaks out in praise to God and sings for utter joy!

⁵ Sing your praise accompanied by music from the harp. ⁶ Let the cornets and trumpets shout! Make a joyful symphony before the Lord, the King! ⁷ Let the sea in all its vastness roar with praise! Let the earth and all those living on it shout, “Glory to the Lord.”

^8-9 Let the waves clap their hands in glee and the hills sing out their songs of joy before the Lord, for he is coming to judge the world with perfect justice.

103 I bless the holy name of God with all my heart. ² Yes, I will bless the Lord and not forget the glorious things he does for me.

³ He forgives all my sins. He heals me. ⁴ He ransoms me from hell. He surrounds me with loving-kindness and tender mercies. ⁵ He fills my life with good things! My youth is renewed like the eagle’s! ⁶ He gives justice to all who are treated unfairly. ⁷ He revealed his will and nature to Moses and the people of Israel.

⁸ He is merciful and tender toward those who don’t deserve it; he is slow to get angry and full of kindness and love. ⁹ He never bears a grudge, nor remains angry forever. ¹⁰ He has not punished us as we deserve for all our sins, ¹¹ for his mercy toward those who fear and honor him is as great as the height of the heavens above the earth. ¹² He has removed our sins as far away from us as the east is from the west. ¹³ He is like a father to us, tender and sympathetic to those who reverence him. ¹⁴ For he knows we are but dust ¹⁵ and that our days are few and brief, like grass, like flowers, ¹⁶ blown by the wind and gone forever.

^17-18 But the loving-kindness of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting to those who reverence him; his salvation is to children’s children of those who are faithful to his covenant and remember to obey him!

¹⁹ The Lord has made the heavens his throne; from there he rules over everything there is. ²⁰ Bless the Lord, you mighty angels of his who carry out his orders, listening for each of his commands. ²¹ Yes, bless the Lord, you armies of his angels who serve him constantly.

²² Let everything everywhere bless the Lord. And how I bless him too!

8 “You must obey all the commandments I give you today. If you do, you will not only live, you will multiply and will go in and take over the land promised to your fathers by the Lord. ² Do you remember how the Lord led you through the wilderness for all those forty years, humbling you and testing you to find out how you would respond, and whether or not you would really obey him? ³ Yes, he humbled you by letting you go hungry and then feeding you with manna, a food previously unknown to both you and your ancestors. He did it to help you realize that food isn’t everything, and that real life comes by obeying every command of God. ⁴ For all these forty years your clothes haven’t grown old, and your feet haven’t been blistered or swollen. ⁵ So you should realize that, as a man punishes his son, the Lord punishes you to help you.

⁶ “Obey the laws of the Lord your God. Walk in his ways and fear him. ⁷ For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land of brooks, pools, gushing springs, valleys, and hills; ⁸ it is a land of wheat and barley, of grapevines, fig trees, pomegranates, olives, and honey; ⁹ it is a land where food is plentiful, and nothing is lacking; it is a land where iron is as common as stone, and copper is abundant in the hills. ¹⁰ When you have eaten your fill, bless the Lord your God for the good land he has given you.

¹⁷ For Christ didn’t send me to baptize, but to preach the Gospel; and even my preaching sounds poor, for I do not fill my sermons with profound words and high-sounding ideas, for fear of diluting the mighty power there is in the simple message of the cross of Christ.

¹⁸ I know very well how foolish it sounds to those who are lost,^[a] when they hear that Jesus died to save them. But we who are saved recognize this message as the very power of God. ¹⁹ For God says, “I will destroy all human plans of salvation no matter how wise they seem to be, and ignore the best ideas of men, even the most brilliant of them.”

²⁰ So what about these wise men, these scholars, these brilliant debaters of this world’s great affairs? God has made them all look foolish and shown their wisdom to be useless nonsense. ²¹ For God in his wisdom saw to it that the world would never find God through human brilliance, and then he stepped in and saved all those who believed his message, which the world calls foolish and silly. ²² It seems foolish to the Jews because they want a sign from heaven as proof that what is preached is true; and it is foolish to the Gentiles because they believe only what agrees with their philosophy and seems wise to them. ²³ So when we preach about Christ dying to save them, the Jews are offended and the Gentiles say it’s all nonsense. ²⁴ But God has opened the eyes of those called to salvation, both Jews and Gentiles, to see that Christ is the mighty power of God to save them; Christ himself is the center of God’s wise plan for their salvation. ²⁵ This so-called “foolish” plan of God is far wiser than the wisest plan of the wisest man, and God in his weakness—Christ dying on the cross—is far stronger than any man.

²⁶ Notice among yourselves, dear brothers, that few of you who follow Christ have big names or power or wealth. ²⁷ Instead, God has deliberately chosen to use ideas the world considers foolish and of little worth in order to shame those people considered by the world as wise and great. ²⁸ He has chosen a plan despised by the world, counted as nothing at all, and used it to bring down to nothing those the world considers great, ²⁹ so that no one anywhere can ever brag in the presence of God.

³⁰ For it is from God alone that you have your life through Christ Jesus. He showed us God’s plan of salvation; he was the one who made us acceptable to God; he made us pure and holy^[b] and gave himself to purchase our salvation. ³¹ As it says in the Scriptures, “If anyone is going to boast, let him boast only of what the Lord has done.”

¹⁸ John’s disciples and the Jewish leaders sometimes fasted, that is, went without food as part of their religion. One day some people came to Jesus and asked why his disciples didn’t do this too.

¹⁹ Jesus replied, “Do friends of the bridegroom refuse to eat at the wedding feast? Should they be sad while he is with them? ²⁰ But some day he will be taken away from them, and then they will mourn. ²¹ Besides, going without food is part of the old way of doing things.^[a] It is like patching an old garment with unshrunk cloth! What happens? The patch pulls away and leaves the hole worse than before. ²² You know better than to put new wine into old wineskins. They would burst. The wine would be spilled out and the wineskins ruined. New wine needs fresh wineskins.”