Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

95 Oh, come, let us sing to the Lord! Give a joyous shout in honor of the Rock of our salvation!

² Come before him with thankful hearts. Let us sing him psalms of praise. ³ For the Lord is a great God, the great King of^[a] all gods. ⁴ He controls the formation of the depths of the earth and the mightiest mountains; all are his. ⁵ He made the sea and formed the land; they too are his. ⁶ Come, kneel before the Lord our Maker, ⁷ for he is our God. We are his sheep, and he is our Shepherd. Oh, that you would hear him calling you today and come to him!

⁸ Don’t harden your hearts as Israel did in the wilderness^[b] at Meribah and Massah. ⁹ For there your fathers doubted me, though they had seen so many of my miracles before. My patience was severely tried by their complaints. ¹⁰ “For forty years I watched them in disgust,” the Lord God says. “They were a nation whose thoughts and heart were far away from me. They refused to accept my laws. ¹¹ Therefore, in mighty wrath I swore that they would never enter the Promised Land, the place of rest I planned for them.”

11 Then the leaders of Israel went to David at Hebron and told him, “We are your relatives,^{[a] 2} and even when Saul was king, you were the one who led our armies to battle and brought them safely back again. And the Lord your God has told you, ‘You shall be the shepherd of my people Israel. You shall be their king.’”

³ So David made a contract with them before the Lord, and they anointed him as king of Israel, just as the Lord had told Samuel. ⁴ Then David and the leaders went to Jerusalem (or Jebus, as it used to be called) where the Jebusites—the original inhabitants of the land—lived. ^5-6 But the people of Jebus refused to let them enter the city. So David captured the fortress of Zion, later called the City of David, and said to his men, “The first man to kill a Jebusite shall be made commander-in-chief!” Joab, the son of Zeruiah, was the first, so he became the general of David’s army. ⁷ David lived in the fortress and that is why that area of Jerusalem is called the City of David. ⁸ He extended the city out around the fortress while Joab rebuilt the rest of Jerusalem. ⁹ And David became more and more famous and powerful, for the Lord of the heavens was with him.

¹³ Then one of the twenty-four Elders asked me, “Do you know who these are, who are clothed in white, and where they come from?”

¹⁴ “No, sir,” I replied. “Please tell me.”

“These are the ones coming out of the Great Tribulation,” he said; “they washed their robes and whitened them by the blood of the Lamb. ¹⁵ That is why they are here before the throne of God, serving him day and night in his temple. The one sitting on the throne will shelter them; ¹⁶ they will never be hungry again, nor thirsty, and they will be fully protected from the scorching noontime heat. ¹⁷ For the Lamb standing in front of the throne^[a] will feed them and be their Shepherd and lead them to the springs of the Water of Life. And God will wipe their tears away.”