Book of Common Prayer

95 Oh, come, let us sing to the Lord! Give a joyous shout in honor of the Rock of our salvation!

² Come before him with thankful hearts. Let us sing him psalms of praise. ³ For the Lord is a great God, the great King of^[a] all gods. ⁴ He controls the formation of the depths of the earth and the mightiest mountains; all are his. ⁵ He made the sea and formed the land; they too are his. ⁶ Come, kneel before the Lord our Maker, ⁷ for he is our God. We are his sheep, and he is our Shepherd. Oh, that you would hear him calling you today and come to him!

⁸ Don’t harden your hearts as Israel did in the wilderness^[b] at Meribah and Massah. ⁹ For there your fathers doubted me, though they had seen so many of my miracles before. My patience was severely tried by their complaints. ¹⁰ “For forty years I watched them in disgust,” the Lord God says. “They were a nation whose thoughts and heart were far away from me. They refused to accept my laws. ¹¹ Therefore, in mighty wrath I swore that they would never enter the Promised Land, the place of rest I planned for them.”

88 O Jehovah, God of my salvation, I have wept before you day and night. ² Now hear my prayers; oh, listen to my cry, ³ for my life is full of troubles, and death draws near. ⁴ They say my life is ebbing out—a hopeless case. ⁵ They have left me here to die, like those slain on battlefields from whom your mercies are removed.

⁶ You have thrust me down to the darkest depths. ⁷ Your wrath lies heavy on me; wave after wave engulfs me. ⁸ You have made my friends to loathe me, and they have gone away. I am in a trap with no way out. ⁹ My eyes grow dim with weeping. Each day I beg your help; O Lord, I reach my pleading hands to you for mercy.

¹⁰ Soon it will be too late! Of what use are your miracles when I am in the grave? How can I praise you then? ¹¹ Can those in the grave declare your loving-kindness? Can they proclaim your faithfulness? ¹² Can the darkness speak of your miracles? Can anyone in the Land of Forgetfulness talk about your help?

¹³ O Lord, I plead for my life and will keep on pleading day by day. ¹⁴ O Jehovah, why have you thrown my life away? Why are you turning your face from me and looking the other way?

¹⁵ From my youth I have been sickly and ready to die. I stand helpless before your terrors. ¹⁶ Your fierce wrath has overwhelmed me. Your terrors have cut me off. ¹⁷ They flow around me all day long. ¹⁸ Lover, friend, acquaintance—all are gone. There is only darkness everywhere.

27 The Lord is my light and my salvation; he protects me from danger—whom shall I fear? ² When evil men come to destroy me, they will stumble and fall! ³ Yes, though a mighty army marches against me, my heart shall know no fear! I am confident that God will save me.

⁴ The one thing I want from God, the thing I seek most of all, is the privilege of meditating in his Temple, living in his presence every day of my life, delighting in his incomparable perfections and glory. ⁵ There I’ll be when troubles come. He will hide me. He will set me on a high rock ⁶ out of reach of all my enemies. Then I will bring him sacrifices and sing his praises with much joy.

⁷ Listen to my pleading, Lord! Be merciful and send the help I need.

⁸ My heart has heard you say, “Come and talk with me, O my people.” And my heart responds, “Lord, I am coming.”

⁹ Oh, do not hide yourself when I am trying to find you. Do not angrily reject your servant. You have been my help in all my trials before; don’t leave me now. Don’t forsake me, O God of my salvation. ¹⁰ For if my father and mother should abandon me, you would welcome and comfort me.

¹¹ Tell me what to do, O Lord, and make it plain because I am surrounded by waiting enemies. ¹² Don’t let them get me, Lord! Don’t let me fall into their hands! For they accuse me of things I never did, and all the while are plotting cruelty. ¹³ I am expecting the Lord to rescue me again, so that once again I will see his goodness to me here in the land of the living.

¹⁴ Don’t be impatient. Wait for the Lord, and he will come and save you! Be brave, stouthearted, and courageous. Yes, wait and he will help you.

²¹ “Oh, my friends, pity me, for the angry hand of God has touched me. ²² Why must you persecute me as God does? Why aren’t you satisfied with my anguish? ^23-24 Oh, that I could write my plea with an iron pen in the rock forever.

²⁵ “But as for me, I know that my Redeemer lives, and that he will stand upon the earth at last. ²⁶ And I know that after this body has decayed, this body shall see God!^{[a] 27} Then he will be on my side! Yes, I shall see him, not as a stranger, but as a friend! What a glorious hope!

4 Although God’s promise still stands—his promise that all may enter his place of rest—we ought to tremble with fear because some of you may be on the verge of failing to get there after all. ² For this wonderful news—the message that God wants to save us—has been given to us just as it was to those who lived in the time of Moses. But it didn’t do them any good because they didn’t believe it. They didn’t mix it with faith. ³ For only we who believe God can enter into his place of rest. He has said, “I have sworn in my anger that those who don’t believe me will never get in,” even though he has been ready and waiting for them since the world began.

⁴ We know he is ready and waiting because it is written that God rested on the seventh day of creation, having finished all that he had planned to make.

⁵ Even so they didn’t get in, for God finally said, “They shall never enter my rest.” ⁶ Yet the promise remains and some get in—but not those who had the first chance, for they disobeyed God and failed to enter.

⁷ But he has set another time for coming in, and that time is now. He announced this through King David long years after man’s first failure to enter, saying in the words already quoted, “Today when you hear him calling, do not harden your hearts against him.”

⁸ This new place of rest he is talking about does not mean the land of Israel that Joshua led them into. If that were what God meant, he would not have spoken long afterwards about “today” being the time to get in. ⁹ So there is a full complete rest still waiting for the people of God. ¹⁰ Christ has already entered there. He is resting from his work, just as God did after the creation. ¹¹ Let us do our best to go into that place of rest, too, being careful not to disobey God as the children of Israel did, thus failing to get in.

¹² For whatever God says to us is full of living power: it is sharper than the sharpest dagger, cutting swift and deep into our innermost thoughts and desires with all their parts, exposing us for what we really are. ¹³ He knows about everyone, everywhere. Everything about us is bare and wide open to the all-seeing eyes of our living God; nothing can be hidden from him to whom we must explain all that we have done.

¹⁴ But Jesus the Son of God is our great High Priest who has gone to heaven itself to help us; therefore let us never stop trusting him. ¹⁵ This High Priest of ours understands our weaknesses since he had the same temptations we do, though he never once gave way to them and sinned. ¹⁶ So let us come boldly to the very throne of God and stay there to receive his mercy and to find grace to help us in our times of need.

8 So there is now no condemnation awaiting those who belong to Christ Jesus. ² For the power of the life-giving Spirit—and this power is mine through Christ Jesus—has freed me from the vicious circle of sin and death. ³ We aren’t saved from sin’s grasp by knowing the commandments of God because we can’t and don’t keep them, but God put into effect a different plan to save us. He sent his own Son in a human body like ours—except that ours are sinful—and destroyed sin’s control over us by giving himself as a sacrifice for our sins. ⁴ So now we can obey God’s laws if we follow after the Holy Spirit and no longer obey the old evil nature within us.

⁵ Those who let themselves be controlled by their lower natures live only to please themselves, but those who follow after the Holy Spirit find themselves doing those things that please God. ⁶ Following after the Holy Spirit leads to life and peace, but following after the old nature leads to death ⁷ because the old sinful nature within us is against God. It never did obey God’s laws and it never will. ⁸ That’s why those who are still under the control of their old sinful selves, bent on following their old evil desires, can never please God.

⁹ But you are not like that. You are controlled by your new nature if you have the Spirit of God living in you. (And remember that if anyone doesn’t have the Spirit of Christ living in him, he is not a Christian at all.) ¹⁰ Yet, even though Christ lives within you, your body will die because of sin; but your spirit will live, for Christ has pardoned it.^{[a] 11} And if the Spirit of God, who raised up Jesus from the dead, lives in you, he will make your dying bodies live again after you die, by means of this same Holy Spirit living within you.