Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)
7 Listen to my pleading, Lord! Be merciful and send the help I need.
8 My heart has heard you say, “Come and talk with me, O my people.” And my heart responds, “Lord, I am coming.”
9 Oh, do not hide yourself when I am trying to find you. Do not angrily reject your servant. You have been my help in all my trials before; don’t leave me now. Don’t forsake me, O God of my salvation. 10 For if my father and mother should abandon me, you would welcome and comfort me.
11 Tell me what to do, O Lord, and make it plain because I am surrounded by waiting enemies. 12 Don’t let them get me, Lord! Don’t let me fall into their hands! For they accuse me of things I never did, and all the while are plotting cruelty. 13 I am expecting the Lord to rescue me again, so that once again I will see his goodness to me here in the land of the living.
14 Don’t be impatient. Wait for the Lord, and he will come and save you! Be brave, stouthearted, and courageous. Yes, wait and he will help you.
11 But one day the Angel of the Lord came and sat beneath the oak tree at Ophrah, on the farm of Joash the Abiezrite. Joash’s son, Gideon, had been threshing wheat by hand in the bottom of a grape press—a pit where grapes were pressed to make wine—for he was hiding from the Midianites.
12 The Angel of the Lord appeared to him and said, “Mighty soldier, the Lord is with you!”
13 “Stranger,” Gideon replied, “if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us? And where are all the miracles our ancestors have told us about—such as when God brought them out of Egypt? Now the Lord has thrown us away and has let the Midianites completely ruin us.”
14 Then the Lord turned to him and said, “I will make you strong! Go and save Israel from the Midianites! I am sending you!”
15 But Gideon replied, “Sir, how can I save Israel? My family is the poorest in the whole tribe of Manasseh, and I am the least thought of in the entire family!”
16 Whereupon the Lord said to him, “But I, Jehovah,[a] will be with you! And you shall quickly destroy the Midianite hordes!”
17 Gideon replied, “If it is really true that you are going to help me like that, then do some miracle to prove it! Prove that it is really Jehovah who is talking to me! 18 But stay here until I go and get a present for you.”
“All right,” the Angel agreed. “I’ll stay here until you return.”
19 Gideon hurried home and roasted a young goat and baked some unleavened bread from a bushel of flour. Then, carrying the meat in a basket and broth in a pot, he took it out to the Angel, who was beneath the oak tree, and presented it to him.
20 The Angel said to him, “Place the meat and the bread upon that rock over there, and pour the broth over it.”
When Gideon had followed these instructions, 21 the Angel touched the meat and bread with his staff, and fire flamed up from the rock and consumed them! And suddenly the Angel was gone!
22 When Gideon realized that it had indeed been the Angel of the Lord, he cried out, “Alas, O Lord God, for I have seen the Angel of the Lord face-to-face!”
23 “It’s all right,” the Lord replied. “Don’t be afraid! You shall not die.”
24 And Gideon built an altar there and named it “The Altar of Peace with Jehovah.” (The altar is still there in Ophrah in the land of the Abiezrites.)
6 Don’t be fooled by those who try to excuse these sins, for the terrible wrath of God is upon all those who do them. 7 Don’t even associate with such people. 8 For though once your heart was full of darkness, now it is full of light from the Lord, and your behavior should show it! 9 Because of this light within you, you should do only what is good and right and true.
10 Learn as you go along what pleases the Lord.[a] 11 Take no part in the worthless pleasures of evil and darkness, but instead, rebuke and expose them. 12 It would be shameful even to mention here those pleasures of darkness that the ungodly do. 13 But when you expose them, the light shines in upon their sin and shows it up, and when they see how wrong they really are, some of them may even become children of light! 14 That is why God says in the Scriptures, “Awake, O sleeper, and rise up from the dead; and Christ shall give you light.”
The Living Bible copyright © 1971 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.