Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

^40-42 I long to obey them! Therefore in fairness renew my life, for this was your promise—yes, Lord, to save me! Now spare me by your kindness and your love. Then I will have an answer for those who taunt me, for I trust your promises.

⁴³ May I never forget your words, for they are my only hope. ^44-46 Therefore I will keep on obeying you forever and forever, free within the limits of your laws. I will speak to kings about their value, and they will listen with interest and respect.

⁴⁷ How I love your laws! How I enjoy your commands! ⁴⁸ “Come, come to me,” I call to them, for I love them and will let them fill my life.

¹⁰ “As I said before, I stayed on the mountain before the Lord for forty days and nights the second time, just as I had the first, and the Lord again yielded to my pleas and didn’t destroy you.

¹¹ “But he said to me, ‘Arise and lead the people to the land I promised their fathers. It is time to go in and possess it.’

^12-13 “And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you except to listen carefully to all he says to you, and to obey for your own good the commandments I am giving you today, and to love him, and to worship him with all your hearts and souls? ¹⁴ Earth and highest heaven belong to the Lord your God. ¹⁵ And yet he rejoiced in your fathers and loved them so much that he chose you, their children, to be above every other nation, as is evident today. ¹⁶ Therefore, cleanse your sinful hearts and stop your stubbornness.

¹⁷ “Jehovah your God is God of gods and Lord of lords. He is the great and mighty God, the God of terror who shows no partiality and takes no bribes. ¹⁸ He gives justice to the fatherless and widows. He loves foreigners and gives them food and clothing. ¹⁹ (You too must love foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in the land of Egypt.) ²⁰ You must fear the Lord your God and worship him and cling to him, and take oaths by his name alone. ²¹ He is your praise and he is your God, the one who has done mighty miracles you yourselves have seen. ²² When your ancestors went down into Egypt there were only seventy of them, but now the Lord your God has made you as many as the stars in the sky!

¹⁴ Dear brothers, what’s the use of saying that you have faith and are Christians if you aren’t proving it by helping others? Will that kind of faith save anyone? ¹⁵ If you have a friend who is in need of food and clothing, ¹⁶ and you say to him, “Well, good-bye and God bless you; stay warm and eat hearty,” and then don’t give him clothes or food, what good does that do?

¹⁷ So you see, it isn’t enough just to have faith. You must also do good to prove that you have it. Faith that doesn’t show itself by good works is no faith at all—it is dead and useless.

¹⁸ But someone may well argue, “You say the way to God is by faith alone, plus nothing; well, I say that good works are important too, for without good works you can’t prove whether you have faith or not; but anyone can see that I have faith by the way I act.”

¹⁹ Are there still some among you who hold that “only believing” is enough? Believing in one God? Well, remember that the demons believe this too—so strongly that they tremble in terror! ²⁰ Fool! When will you ever learn that “believing” is useless without doing what God wants you to? Faith that does not result in good deeds is not real faith.

²¹ Don’t you remember that even our father Abraham was declared good because of what he did when he was willing to obey God, even if it meant offering his son Isaac to die on the altar? ²² You see, he was trusting God so much that he was willing to do whatever God told him to; his faith was made complete by what he did—by his actions, his good deeds. ²³ And so it happened just as the Scriptures say, that Abraham trusted God, and the Lord declared him good in God’s sight, and he was even called “the friend of God.” ²⁴ So you see, a man is saved by what he does, as well as by what he believes.

²⁵ Rahab, the prostitute, is another example of this. She was saved because of what she did when she hid those messengers and sent them safely away by a different road. ²⁶ Just as the body is dead when there is no spirit in it, so faith is dead if it is not the kind that results in good deeds.