Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

⁵ Your mercy and loving-kindness, O Lord, extend to the skies, and Your faithfulness to the clouds.

⁶ Your righteousness is like the mountains of God, Your judgments are like the great deep. O Lord, You preserve man and beast.

⁷ How precious is Your steadfast love, O God! The children of men take refuge and put their trust under the shadow of Your wings.

⁸ They relish and feast on the abundance of Your house; and You cause them to drink of the stream of Your pleasures.

⁹ For with You is the fountain of life; in Your light do we see light.^(A)

¹⁰ O continue Your loving-kindness to those who know You, Your righteousness (salvation) to the upright in heart.

¹⁹ And I thought how [gloriously and honorably] I would set you among My children and give you a pleasant land, a goodly heritage, the most beautiful and best [inheritance] among all nations! And I thought you would call Me My Father and would not turn away from following Me.

²⁰ Surely, as a wife treacherously and faithlessly departs from her husband, so have you dealt treacherously and faithlessly with Me, O house of Israel, says the Lord.

²¹ A voice is heard on the bare heights, the weeping and pleading of the sons of Israel, because they have perverted their ways, they have [eagerly] forgotten the Lord their God.

²² Return, O faithless sons, [says the Lord, and] I will heal your faithlessness. [And they answer] Behold, we come to You, for You are the Lord our God.

²³ Truly in vain is the hope of salvation from the hills and from the tumult and noisy throng on the mountains; truly in and with the Lord our God rests the salvation of Israel.

²⁴ [We have been ruined as a nation by our faithlessness and idolatry] for the shameful thing has consumed all for which our fathers toiled from our youth—their flocks and their herds, their sons and their daughters.

²⁵ Let us lie prostrate in our shame, and let our dishonor and confusion cover us; for we have sinned against the Lord our God, we and our fathers; from our youth even to this day we have not obeyed the voice of the Lord our God.

7 Now as to the matters of which you wrote me. It is well [and by that I mean advantageous, expedient, profitable, and wholesome] for a man not to touch a woman [to cohabit with her] but to remain unmarried.

² But because of the temptation to impurity and to avoid immorality, let each [man] have his own wife and let each [woman] have her own husband.

³ The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights (goodwill, kindness, and what is due her as his wife), and likewise the wife to her husband.

⁴ For the wife does not have [exclusive] authority and control over her own body, but the husband [has his rights]; likewise also the husband does not have [exclusive] authority and control over his body, but the wife [has her rights].

⁵ Do not refuse and deprive and defraud each other [of your due marital rights], except perhaps by mutual consent for a time, so that you may devote yourselves unhindered to prayer. But afterwards resume marital relations, lest Satan tempt you [to sin] through your lack of restraint of sexual desire.^(A)

⁶ But I am saying this more as a matter of permission and concession, not as a command or regulation.

⁷ I wish that all men were like I myself am [in this matter of self-control]. But each has his own special gift from God, one of this kind and one of another.