Old/New Testament

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!

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!

2 Dear brothers, even when I first came to you I didn’t use lofty words and brilliant ideas to tell you God’s message. ² For I decided that I would speak only of Jesus Christ and his death on the cross. ³ I came to you in weakness—timid and trembling. ⁴ And my preaching was very plain, not with a lot of oratory and human wisdom, but the Holy Spirit’s power was in my words, proving to those who heard them that the message was from God. ⁵ I did this because I wanted your faith to stand firmly upon God, not on man’s great ideas.

⁶ Yet when I am among mature Christians I do speak with words of great wisdom, but not the kind that comes from here on earth, and not the kind that appeals to the great men of this world, who are doomed to fall. ⁷ Our words are wise because they are from God, telling of God’s wise plan to bring us into the glories of heaven. This plan was hidden in former times, though it was made for our benefit before the world began. ⁸ But the great men of the world have not understood it; if they had, they never would have crucified the Lord of Glory.

⁹ That is what is meant by the Scriptures which say that no mere man has ever seen, heard, or even imagined what wonderful things God has ready for those who love the Lord. ¹⁰ But we know about these things because God has sent his Spirit to tell us, and his Spirit searches out and shows us all of God’s deepest secrets. ¹¹ No one can really know what anyone else is thinking or what he is really like except that person himself. And no one can know God’s thoughts except God’s own Spirit. ¹² And God has actually given us his Spirit (not the world’s spirit) to tell us about the wonderful free gifts of grace and blessing that God has given us. ¹³ In telling you about these gifts we have even used the very words given to us by the Holy Spirit, not words that we as men might choose. So we use the Holy Spirit’s words to explain the Holy Spirit’s facts.^{[a] 14} But the man who isn’t a Christian can’t understand and can’t accept these thoughts from God, which the Holy Spirit teaches us. They sound foolish to him because only those who have the Holy Spirit within them can understand what the Holy Spirit means. Others just can’t take it in. ¹⁵ But the spiritual man has insight into everything, and that bothers and baffles the man of the world, who can’t understand him at all. ¹⁶ How could he? For certainly he has never been one to know the Lord’s thoughts, or to discuss them with him, or to move the hands of God by prayer.^[b] But, strange as it seems, we Christians actually do have within us a portion of the very thoughts and mind of Christ.