Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)
5 1-2 O Lord, hear me praying; listen to my plea, O God my King, for I will never pray to anyone but you. 3 Each morning I will look to you in heaven and lay my requests before you, praying earnestly.
4 I know you get no pleasure from wickedness and cannot tolerate the slightest sin. 5 Therefore, proud sinners will not survive your searching gaze, for how you hate their evil deeds. 6 You will destroy them for their lies; how you abhor all murder and deception.
7 But as for me, I will come into your Temple protected by your mercy and your love; I will worship you with deepest awe.
8 Lord, lead me as you promised me you would; otherwise my enemies will conquer me. Tell me clearly what to do, which way to turn. 9 For they cannot speak one truthful word. Their hearts are filled to the brim with wickedness. Their suggestions are full of the stench of sin and death. Their tongues are filled with flatteries to gain their wicked ends. 10 O God, hold them responsible. Catch them in their own traps; let them fall beneath the weight of their own transgressions, for they rebel against you.
11 But make everyone rejoice who puts his trust in you. Keep them shouting for joy because you are defending them. Fill all who love you with your happiness. 12 For you bless the godly man, O Lord; you protect him with your shield of love.
4 This change of plans made Jonah very angry. 2 He complained to the Lord about it: “This is exactly what I thought you’d do, Lord, when I was there in my own country and you first told me to come here. That’s why I ran away to Tarshish. For I knew you were a gracious God, merciful, slow to get angry, and full of kindness; I knew how easily you could cancel your plans for destroying these people.
3 “Please kill me, Lord; I’d rather be dead than alive when nothing that I told them happens.[a]”
4 Then the Lord said, “Is it right to be angry about this?”
5 So Jonah went out and sat sulking[b] on the east side of the city, and he made a leafy shelter to shade him as he waited there to see if anything would happen to the city. 6 And when the leaves of the shelter withered in the heat, the Lord arranged for a vine to grow up quickly and spread its broad leaves over Jonah’s head to shade him. This made him comfortable and very grateful.
7 But God also prepared a worm! The next morning the worm ate through the stem of the plant, so that it withered away and died.
8 Then when the sun was hot, God ordered a scorching east wind to blow on Jonah, and the sun beat down upon his head until he grew faint and wished to die. For he said, “Death is better than this!”
9 And God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry because the plant died?”
“Yes,” Jonah said, “it is; it is right for me to be angry enough to die!”
10 Then the Lord said, “You feel sorry for yourself when your shelter is destroyed, though you did no work to put it there, and it is, at best, short-lived. 11 And why shouldn’t I feel sorry for a great city like Nineveh with its 120,000 people in utter spiritual darkness[c] and all its cattle?”
26 But as for Philip, an angel of the Lord said to him, “Go over to the road that runs from Jerusalem through the Gaza Desert, arriving around noon.” 27 So he did, and who should be coming down the road but the Treasurer of Ethiopia, a eunuch of great authority under Candace the queen. He had gone to Jerusalem to worship 28 and was now returning in his chariot, reading aloud from the book of the prophet Isaiah.
29 The Holy Spirit said to Philip, “Go over and walk along beside the chariot.”
30 Philip ran over and heard what he was reading and asked, “Do you understand it?”
31 “Of course not!” the man replied. “How can I when there is no one to instruct me?” And he begged Philip to come up into the chariot and sit with him.
32 The passage of Scripture he had been reading from was this:
“He was led as a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb is silent before the shearers, so he opened not his mouth; 33 in his humiliation, justice was denied him; and who can express the wickedness of the people of his generation?[a] For his life is taken from the earth.”
34 The eunuch asked Philip, “Was Isaiah talking about himself or someone else?”
35 So Philip began with this same Scripture and then used many others to tell him about Jesus.
36 As they rode along, they came to a small body of water, and the eunuch said, “Look! Water! Why can’t I be baptized?”
37 [b]“You can,” Philip answered, “if you believe with all your heart.”
And the eunuch replied, “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.”
38 He stopped the chariot, and they went down into the water and Philip baptized him. 39 And when they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord caught away Philip, and the eunuch never saw him again, but went on his way rejoicing. 40 Meanwhile, Philip found himself at Azotus! He preached the Good News there and in every city along the way, as he traveled to Caesarea.
The Living Bible copyright © 1971 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.