Book of Common Prayer

⁷ During the time of Jesus’ earthly life, he offered up prayers and supplications, with loud shouts and tears, to the one who was able to save him from death. He was heard because of his devotion. ⁸ Son though he was, he learned obedience through what he suffered. ⁹ When he had been made complete and perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him, ¹⁰ since he has been designated by God as a high priest according to the order of Melchizedek.

Are you ready for solid food?

¹¹ We have plenty to say about all this. But it may be hard to make it clear, because your capacity to take things in has become sluggish. ¹² Yes: by now you really should have become teachers, but you need someone to teach you the basic elementary beginnings of God’s oracles. You need milk, not solid food! ¹³ Everyone who drinks milk, you see, is unskilled in the word of God’s justice; such people are just babies. ¹⁴ Mature people need solid food—and by “mature” I mean people whose faculties have been trained by practice, to distinguish good from evil.

¹⁶ This, you see, is how much God loved the world: enough to give his only, special son, so that everyone who believes in him should not be lost but should share in the life of God’s new age. ¹⁷ After all, God didn’t send the son into the world to condemn the world, but so that the world could be saved by him.

¹⁸ “Anyone who believes in him is not condemned. But anyone who doesn’t believe is condemned already, because they didn’t believe in the name of God’s only, special son. ¹⁹ And this is the condemnation: that light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light, because what they were doing was evil. ²⁰ For everyone who does evil hates the light; people like that don’t come to the light, in case their deeds get shown up and reproved. ²¹ But people who do the truth come to the light, so that it can become clear that what they have done has been done in God.”