M’Cheyne Bible Reading Plan

The Lord's covenant with David

17 King David was living in his palace. One day, he said to Nathan the prophet, ‘Now I am living in a beautiful palace that is made of cedar wood. But the Lord's Covenant Box is still in a tent.’

² Nathan replied to David, ‘Do what you think is right. God will help you.’

³ But that night God said to Nathan, ⁴ ‘Go and tell my servant David, “The Lord says this: You are not the right man to build a house for me to live in. ⁵ From the time that I brought the Israelites safely out of Egypt until now, I have never lived in a house. I have lived in a tent as my home as I travelled from place to place. ⁶ I have moved about to many different places with the Israelites. I chose leaders to take care of my people, like shepherds take care of their sheep. But I never said to any of them, ‘You should have built a beautiful house of cedar wood for me.’ ”

⁷ So tell my servant David that the Lord Almighty says this: “I took you from the fields where you were taking care of sheep. I took you from there to become the ruler of my people Israel. ⁸ I have been with you everywhere that you have gone. I destroyed all your enemies that were attacking you. Now I will make you famous. Your name will be as great as the names of the earth's greatest men. ⁹ I have chosen a place where my people Israel will live. I have put them in that place, were they can be safe. They will not be afraid of trouble from any enemy. Wicked people will not hurt them any more. That happened in the past, ¹⁰ from the time that I chose leaders to rule my people Israel. But now I will cause all your enemies to be weak.

I say to you, David: the Lord will give you descendants who will rule as kings after you. That will be the royal house that I build for you.^{[a] 11} When you die, people will bury you in the grave of your ancestors. Then I will choose your descendant, one of your own sons, to become king. I will make his kingdom strong. ¹² He is the man who will build a house for me. And I will cause his descendants to rule as kings for ever. ¹³ I will be his father and he will be my son. I will never remove my faithful love from him, as I took it away from the king who ruled before you. ¹⁴ I will cause him to rule my people and my kingdom for ever. Someone from his family will always be king.” ’

¹⁵ Nathan told David the whole message that the Lord had shown to him.

David thanks the Lord

¹⁶ Then King David went into the Lord's tent.^[b] He sat down and he prayed to the Lord. He said, ‘Lord, my God, I am not a special person and my family is not special. You have helped me very much and I do not deserve it. ¹⁷ And you have done more than that, my God. You have made a promise about the descendants of my family in the future. You, Lord God, have spoken to me as if I am a very important man. ¹⁸ I am your servant and you know me completely. You have given great honour to me. There is nothing more that I can say.

¹⁹ Lord, you have chosen to do all these great things for me, your servant. You are telling me what you have promised to do. ²⁰ There is nobody like you, Lord. You alone are God. What we have heard about you is true! ²¹ There is no other nation on earth like your people, Israel. We are the nation that you rescued so that we would belong to you. You did that to show that your name is great. You did great miracles as you rescued your people from Egypt. You chased out the nations who wanted to stop them. ²² You chose Israel to be your own people for all time. You, Lord became our God.

²³ Lord, please do the things that you have promised to do for me, your servant, and for my family. Continue to do for ever what you have promised to do, ²⁴ so that people see your promises are true. Then people will always give honour to your great name. They will say, “The Lord Almighty is Israel's God.” And David's descendants will continue to serve you as kings.

²⁵ My God, you have made this promise to me, your servant. You have said that I will always have descendants who will rule. That is the house that you will build for me. Because you have said that, I was not afraid to pray to you. ²⁶ Lord, you are the true God! You have promised these good things to me, your servant. ²⁷ Now please bless my family and my descendants. Then we will serve you faithfully for ever. Yes, Lord, you have blessed my descendants, and I know that you will continue to bless them for ever.’

Do not turn away from God

4 You fight and quarrel among yourselves. Do you know why that happens? It is because of the troubles in your thoughts. You want to do bad things that you think will make you happy. ² You want to have something for yourself, but you do not get what you want. You even kill other people. You try to take things that are not yours. But you cannot get them. So you fight and you quarrel with each other. But you do not have these things because you do not ask God for them. ³ Even when you do ask God, you do not receive anything. That is because you ask for the wrong reason. You just want to use these things to make yourselves happy.

⁴ You are turning away from God, like a woman who is not faithful to her husband. You choose to be friends with people who are against God. So you yourselves become enemies of God. You should know that! ⁵ The Bible says, ‘God has caused his Spirit to live in us. He wants very much to keep us for himself.’ Do you think that is not true? ⁶ But God will be very kind to us and he will help us. That is why the Bible says, ‘God is against those people who think that they are important. But he is kind to people who do not feel important.’ ⁷ So obey God's authority. Be strong against the Devil and he will run away from you. ⁸ Come near to God and he will come near to you. Be clean in the way that you live. Stop doing wrong things. Make your minds clean. You cannot love sin and love God at the same time. ⁹ Be sorry about your sins and weep. Stop laughing and instead be sad. Do not be happy but be very upset.

¹⁰ Be humble in front of the Lord God. Then he will lift you up to a good place.

¹¹ My Christian friends, do not say bad things against each other. If you speak against another believer, you are really speaking against God's Law. If you judge another believer, then you are judging the law too. When you do that, you are not obeying the Law. You are giving yourself authority to decide what the Law says. ¹² God is the one who gave his Law to people. Only he has the authority to judge whether people have done what is right. Only he can decide to save people or to destroy them. So you must not judge your friends. You do not have that authority.

Trust God every day

¹³ Some of you say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to a certain city. We will stay there for a year. We will buy and sell things, and we will become rich.’ If you say things like that, listen to me. ¹⁴ You do not know what will happen tomorrow. Your life is like a cloud which appears for a short time and then it quickly goes away. ¹⁵ So what you ought to say is, ‘If the Lord agrees and we are still alive, then we will do this or that.’ ¹⁶ But instead, you talk about what you have decided to do. You speak as if you have the power to make it happen. It is wrong to speak like that.

¹⁷ So you know the right thing that you ought to do. But if you know that and you do not do the right thing, then you have done a wrong thing.

Jonah runs away

1 The Lord spoke a message to Jonah, Amittai's son.^{[a] 2} He said, ‘Go now to the great city of Nineveh. Tell the people in the city that I know how wicked they are. Tell them that I will punish them because of their sins.’

³ But Jonah did not want to obey the Lord's command. He decided to run away to Tarshish.^[b] He went down to Joppa.^[c] There he found a ship that was ready to sail to Tarshish. After he had paid for the journey, he got into the ship. He wanted to go on the ship to Tarshish, to get far away from the Lord.

A big storm

⁴ Then the Lord sent a strong wind on the sea. The storm was so powerful that it almost broke the ship into pieces. ⁵ The sailors were very frightened. Each of them called out to his own god for help. They threw into the sea all the things that the ship carried. They wanted to make the ship as light as they could. Jonah had gone down into the bottom of the ship. He was lying down and he was asleep.

⁶ The ship's captain went to Jonah. He said, ‘Why are you sleeping like that? Get up now! Call to your god for help! Maybe he will listen to us and we will not die.’

⁷ Then the sailors said to each other, ‘We should throw dice to find out who has brought all this trouble to us.’ So they threw dice. The dice showed that Jonah had caused the storm.

⁸ So they said to Jonah, ‘Tell us, who has caused all this trouble for us? What is your job? Where do you come from? What country do you live in? Who is your family?’^[d]

⁹ Jonah answered them, ‘I am a Hebrew man. I worship the Lord who is the God of heaven. He made the sea and the land.’ ¹⁰ This made the sailors even more afraid. Jonah had already told them that he was running away from the Lord. So they said to him, ‘Why did you do a thing like that?’

¹¹ The waves in the sea were becoming bigger because of the storm. So the sailors asked Jonah, ‘What should we do to you so that the sea becomes quiet?’ ¹² Jonah replied, ‘Pick me up and throw me into the sea. Then the sea will become quiet. It is because of me that you are in danger from this great storm.’

¹³ But the sailors did not do what Jonah said. Instead, they tried to use oars to drive the ship back to the land. But the storm was too strong and they could not do that.

¹⁴ So the sailors called aloud to the Lord. They prayed, ‘Lord, please do not punish us with death if we have to kill this man! Do not say that we are guilty because we have killed someone who has done nothing wrong. Lord, we know that you have sent this storm because you wanted to do it.’

¹⁵ Then the sailors took hold of Jonah and they threw him into the sea. The storm stopped and the sea became quiet. ¹⁶ When they saw what had happened, the sailors became very afraid of the Lord's power. They offered a sacrifice to him and they promised that they would serve him.

¹⁷ But the Lord sent a great fish to swallow Jonah. Jonah was inside the fish's stomach for three days and three nights.^[e]

Jesus teaches about the Jewish day of rest

6 On a Jewish day of rest, Jesus and his disciples were walking through some fields where wheat was growing. His disciples began to pick some of the wheat. They were rubbing it between their hands and eating the seeds.

² Some of the Pharisees were walking with them. They said, ‘You should not be doing that on our day of rest. It is against God's Law.’

³ Jesus replied, ‘You have certainly read about what David did one day. He and the men who were with him were hungry. ⁴ He went into the temple. He took the special bread that was there. It is against God's Law for anyone except the priests to eat that bread. But David ate some of it. He gave some of the bread to his men to eat as well.’

⁵ Then Jesus said to them, ‘The Son of Man has authority over the Law about the day of rest.’^[a]

Jesus makes a man well on the day of rest

⁶ On another Jewish day of rest, Jesus went into the Jewish meeting place and he taught the people. A man was there. His right hand had become small and weak and he could not use it. ⁷ Some teachers of God's Law and some Pharisees were watching Jesus carefully. They wanted to find a reason to say that he was doing something wrong. So they watched Jesus to see if he would make the man well on the day of rest. ⁸ But Jesus knew what they were thinking. So he said to the man, ‘Get up and stand in front of everyone.’ The man got up and he stood there. ⁹ Then Jesus said to the people, ‘Let me ask you something. Is it right for us to do good things on our day of rest? Or should we do bad things? Should we save a person's life? Or should we destroy their life?’ ¹⁰ Jesus looked round at everyone. Then he said to the man, ‘Lift up your hand.’ When the man lifted his hand, it became well. He could use it again.

¹¹ Then the Pharisees and the teachers of God's Law were very angry. They began to talk to each other about what they could do to Jesus.

Jesus chooses 12 men

¹² One day Jesus went up a mountain to pray. He remained there all night and he was praying to God. ¹³ In the morning, he asked all his disciples to come to him. Then he chose 12 of them and he called them his apostles.^[b] These are their names:

Jesus teaches people

¹⁷ After Jesus had chosen these 12 men, they all came down the mountain. He stopped and he stood on a flat place. A large crowd of his disciples stood around him. There were also many people from Jerusalem, and from other towns of Judea, and from places on the coast near Tyre and Sidon. ¹⁸ These people had all come to hear Jesus teach. Those people who were ill wanted him to make them well. He also made well those people who had bad spirits. ¹⁹ All the people were trying to touch him, because he was using great power to make each person well.

²⁰ Jesus looked at his disciples. He spoke this message to them:

²² People may hate you, because you believe in me, the Son of Man. They may say bad things against you and make you go away from them. They may say that you are very bad. When that happens, be happy. ²³ God will prepare many good things for you in heaven. So be very happy when people do these bad things to you! Jump up and down because you are so happy. Their ancestors did the same bad things to God's prophets long ago.

²⁶ If people always say good things about you now, it will be very bad for you. Their ancestors also said good things about the false prophets long ago.’

Love people that want to hurt you

²⁷ Jesus then said, ‘I say this to you who are listening carefully to me: Love the people who want to hurt you. Do good things to people that hate you. ²⁸ Say good things to people that say bad things against you. Pray for people who give you pain.

²⁹ Someone may slap you on one side of your face. Then you should let him slap the other side of your face too. Someone may take away your coat. If he does, do not stop him from taking your shirt too. ³⁰ When anyone asks you for something, give it to him. Someone may take something that belongs to you. If he does, let him keep it. Do not ask to have it back again. ³¹ Do the good things for other people that you would want them to do for you.

³² Do you only love people who love you? God will not praise you just for doing that! Even bad people love those people who love them. ³³ Do you only do good things to people that do good things to you? God will not praise you just for doing that! Even bad people do the same thing. ³⁴ Do you lend things only to people that will give your things back to you? God will not praise you for doing that! Even bad people lend things to other people when they believe that they will get them back again. ³⁵ No! I am telling you to love people that want to hurt you. Do good things to them. Lend things to people even though you may not receive your things back again. Then God will prepare good things for you. He is kind even to people who do not say “thank you”. He is kind even to very bad people. If you live like this, you will show that you really are children of the powerful God who is over all. ³⁶ You should be kind to other people, as God your Father is kind.

³⁷ Do not say to anyone, “You are a bad person.” Then God will not say to you, “You are a bad person.” Do not say to anyone, “God should punish you because you are bad.” Then God will not say that you are guilty. Forgive other people and God will forgive you. ³⁸ Give to other people and God will give to you. He will give to you even more than you gave. He will fill your pocket until no more will go in.^[f] It will be so full that it will come out over the top. Think about how you give to other people. God will give in the same way to you.’

³⁹ Jesus also used a story to teach the people. He said, ‘A blind person cannot lead another blind person. If he does, then both of them will fall into a deep hole.

⁴⁰ A student is not more important than his teacher is. But each student who has learned everything will be like his teacher.

⁴¹ Perhaps you want to tell a friend about his little mistake. If you want to tell him, first remember your own bigger mistakes. ⁴² If you do not do that, you will be like a person who has a big piece of wood in his eye. But then he says to his friend, “My friend, you have a little piece of dirt in your eye. Let me take it out for you.” Do not be like that person. You think you are better than your friend. But you are not. First, you must take the big piece of wood out of your eye. After that, your eyes will be clear and you will see well. Then you can take the small piece of dirt out of your friend's eye.’

A story about a tree and its fruit

⁴³ Jesus said, ‘Good trees only make good fruit. Bad trees only make bad fruit. ⁴⁴ In this way you can know if a tree is good or bad. You can know this by the fruit that the tree makes. Figs and grapes do not grow on thorn bushes.

⁴⁵ People are also like that. A good man keeps good things in his mind. In his life, he brings those good things out from there. But a bad man keeps bad things in his mind. He brings those bad thoughts out from there. When a person speaks, his words show what is really in his mind.’

A story about men that are building a house

⁴⁶ Jesus said, ‘If you refuse to obey me, do not call me, “Master, Master.” ⁴⁷ Some people come to me. They listen to my message and they obey it. Let me tell you what those people are like. They are like a man who built a house. ⁴⁸ This man dug down in the ground to the rock. He put the first line of stones on the rock. After that, he built the house on top of the rock. Then a storm came and it brought a lot of water. The water hit the house but it could not move it. The water could not move the house because the man had built it very well.

⁴⁹ Some other people hear my message but they do not obey it. Those people are like another man who built a house. This man did not dig down deep to the rock. Instead, he put the first line of stones on the top of the ground. Then he built his house on them. A storm came and it brought a lot of water. It hit that house and it fell down immediately. The water completely destroyed it.’