Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

⁵ Your steadfast love, O Lord, is as great as all the heavens. Your faithfulness reaches beyond the clouds. ⁶ Your justice is as solid as God’s mountains. Your decisions are as full of wisdom as the oceans are with water. You are concerned^[a] for men and animals alike. ⁷ How precious is your constant love, O God! All humanity takes refuge in the shadow of your wings. ⁸ You feed them with blessings from your own table and let them drink from your rivers of delight.

⁹ For you are the Fountain of life; our light is from your light. ¹⁰ Pour out your unfailing love on those who know you! Never stop giving your blessings^[b] to those who long to do your will.

¹⁹ And I thought how wonderful it would be for you to be here among my children. I planned to give you part of this beautiful land, the finest in the world. I looked forward to your calling me “Father” and thought that you would never turn away from me again. ²⁰ But you have betrayed me; you have gone off and given yourself to a host of foreign gods; you have been like a faithless wife who leaves her husband.

²¹ I hear a voice high upon the windswept mountains, crying, crying. It is the sons of Israel who have turned their backs on God and wandered far away. ²² O my rebellious children, come back to me again and I will heal you from your sins.

And they reply, Yes, we will come, for you are the Lord our God. ²³ We are weary of worshiping idols on the hills and of having orgies on the mountains. It is all a farce. Only in the Lord our God can Israel ever find her help and her salvation. ²⁴ From our childhood we have seen everything our fathers had—flocks and herds and sons and daughters—squandered on priests and idols. ²⁵ We lie in shame and in dishonor, for we and our fathers have sinned from childhood against the Lord our God; we have not obeyed him.

7 Now about those questions you asked in your last letter: my answer is that if you do not marry, it is good. ² But usually it is best to be married, each man having his own wife, and each woman having her own husband, because otherwise you might fall back into sin.

³ The man should give his wife all that is her right as a married woman, and the wife should do the same for her husband: ⁴ for a girl who marries no longer has full right to her own body, for her husband then has his rights to it, too; and in the same way the husband no longer has full right to his own body, for it belongs also to his wife. ⁵ So do not refuse these rights to each other. The only exception to this rule would be the agreement of both husband and wife to refrain from the rights of marriage for a limited time, so that they can give themselves more completely to prayer. Afterwards, they should come together again so that Satan won’t be able to tempt them because of their lack of self-control.

⁶ I’m not saying you must marry, but you certainly may if you wish. ⁷ I wish everyone could get along without marrying, just as I do. But we are not all the same. God gives some the gift of a husband or wife, and others he gives the gift of being able to stay happily unmarried.