Book of Common Prayer

104 ^1-2 I bless the Lord: O Lord my God, how great you are! You are robed with honor and with majesty and light! You stretched out the starry curtain of the heavens, ³ and hollowed out the surface of the earth to form the seas. The clouds are his chariots. He rides upon the wings of the wind. ⁴ The angels^[a] are his messengers—his servants of fire!

⁵ You bound the world together so that it would never fall apart. ⁶ You clothed the earth with floods of waters covering up the mountains. ^7-8 You spoke, and at the sound of your shout the water collected into its vast ocean beds, and mountains rose and valleys sank to the levels you decreed. ⁹ And then you set a boundary for the seas so that they would never again cover the earth.

¹⁰ He placed springs in the valleys and streams that gush from the mountains. ¹¹ They give water for all the animals to drink. There the wild donkeys quench their thirst, ¹² and the birds nest beside the streams and sing among the branches of the trees. ¹³ He sends rain upon the mountains and fills the earth with fruit. ¹⁴ The tender grass grows up at his command to feed the cattle, and there are fruit trees, vegetables, and grain for man to cultivate, ¹⁵ and wine to make him glad, and olive oil as lotion for his skin, and bread to give him strength. ¹⁶ The Lord planted the cedars of Lebanon. They are tall and flourishing. ¹⁷ There the birds make their nests, the storks in the firs. ¹⁸ High in the mountains are pastures for the wild goats, and rock badgers burrow in among the rocks and find protection there.

¹⁹ He assigned the moon to mark the months and the sun to mark the days. ²⁰ He sends the night and darkness, when all the forest folk come out. ²¹ Then the young lions roar for their food, but they are dependent on the Lord. ²² At dawn they slink back into their dens to rest, ²³ and men go off to work until the evening shadows fall again. ²⁴ O Lord, what a variety you have made! And in wisdom you have made them all! The earth is full of your riches.

²⁵ There before me lies the mighty ocean, teeming with life of every kind, both great and small. ²⁶ And look! See the ships! And over there, the whale you made to play in the sea. ²⁷ Every one of these depends on you to give them daily food. ²⁸ You supply it, and they gather it. You open wide your hand to feed them, and they are satisfied with all your bountiful provision.

²⁹ But if you turn away from them, then all is lost. And when you gather up their breath, they die and turn again to dust.

³⁰ Then you send your Spirit, and new life is born^[b] to replenish all the living of the earth. ³¹ Praise God forever! How he must rejoice in all his work! ³² The earth trembles at his glance; the mountains burst into flame at his touch.

³³ I will sing to the Lord as long as I live. I will praise God to my last breath! ³⁴ May he be pleased by all these thoughts about him, for he is the source of all my joy. ³⁵ Let all sinners perish—all who refuse to praise him. But I will praise him. Hallelujah!

61 The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the suffering and afflicted. He has sent me to comfort the brokenhearted, to announce liberty to captives, and to open the eyes of the blind. ² He has sent me to tell those who mourn that the time of God’s favor to them has come, and the day of his wrath to their enemies. ³ To all who mourn in Israel he will give: beauty for ashes; joy instead of mourning; praise instead of heaviness. For God has planted them like strong and graceful oaks for his own glory.

⁴ And they shall rebuild the ancient ruins, repairing cities long ago destroyed, reviving them though they have lain there many generations. ⁵ Foreigners shall be your servants; they shall feed your flocks and plow your fields and tend your vineyards. ⁶ You shall be called priests of the Lord, ministers of our God. You shall be fed with the treasures of the nations and shall glory in their riches. ⁷ Instead of shame and dishonor, you shall have a double portion of prosperity and everlasting joy.

⁸ For I, the Lord, love justice; I hate robbery and wrong. I will faithfully reward my people for their suffering and make an everlasting covenant with them. ⁹ Their descendants shall be known and honored among the nations; all shall realize that they are a people God has blessed.

²³ Until Christ came we were guarded by the law, kept in protective custody, so to speak, until we could believe in the coming Savior.

²⁴ Let me put it another way. The Jewish laws were our teacher and guide until Christ came to give us right standing with God through our faith. ²⁵ But now that Christ has come, we don’t need those laws any longer to guard us and lead us to him. ²⁶ For now we are all children of God through faith in Jesus Christ, ²⁷ and we who have been baptized into union with Christ are enveloped by him. ²⁸ We are no longer Jews or Greeks or slaves or free men or even merely men or women, but we are all the same—we are Christians; we are one in Christ Jesus. ²⁹ And now that we are Christ’s we are the true descendants of Abraham, and all of God’s promises to him belong to us.

⁴ But when the right time came, the time God decided on, he sent his Son, born of a woman, born as a Jew, ⁵ to buy freedom for us who were slaves to the law so that he could adopt us as his very own sons. ⁶ And because we are his sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, so now we can rightly speak of God as our dear Father. ⁷ Now we are no longer slaves but God’s own sons. And since we are his sons, everything he has belongs to us, for that is the way God planned.