Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

⁸ Let everyone bless God and sing his praises; ⁹ for he holds our lives in his hands, and he holds our feet to the path. ¹⁰ You have purified us with fire,^[a] O Lord, like silver in a crucible. ¹¹ You captured us in your net and laid great burdens on our backs. ¹² You sent troops to ride across our broken bodies.^[b] We went through fire and flood. But in the end, you brought us into wealth and great abundance.

¹³ Now I have come to your Temple with burnt offerings to pay my vows. ¹⁴ For when I was in trouble, I promised you many offerings. ¹⁵ That is why I am bringing you these fat male goats, rams, and calves. The smoke of their sacrifice shall rise before you.

¹⁶ Come and hear, all of you who reverence the Lord, and I will tell you what he did for me: ¹⁷ For I cried to him for help with praises ready on my tongue. ¹⁸ He would not have listened if I had not confessed my sins. ¹⁹ But he listened! He heard my prayer! He paid attention to it!

²⁰ Blessed be God, who didn’t turn away when I was praying and didn’t refuse me his kindness and love.

⁵ When the Lord God saw the extent of human wickedness, and that the trend and direction of men’s lives were only towards evil, ⁶ he was sorry he had made them. It broke his heart.

⁷ And he said, “I will blot out from the face of the earth all mankind that I created. Yes, and the animals too, and the reptiles and the birds. For I am sorry I made them.”

⁸ But Noah was a pleasure to the Lord. Here is the story of Noah: ^9-10 He was the only truly righteous man living on the earth at that time. He tried always to conduct his affairs according to God’s will. And he had three sons—Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

¹¹ Meanwhile, the crime rate was rising rapidly across the earth, and, as seen by God, the world was rotten to the core.

^12-13 As God observed how bad it was, and saw that all mankind was vicious and depraved, he said to Noah, “I have decided to destroy all mankind; for the earth is filled with crime because of man. Yes, I will destroy mankind from the earth. ¹⁴ Make a boat from resinous wood, sealing it with tar; and construct decks and stalls throughout the ship. ¹⁵ Make it 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high. ¹⁶ Construct a skylight all the way around the ship, eighteen inches below the roof; and make three decks inside the boat—a bottom, middle, and upper deck—and put a door in the side.

¹⁷ “Look! I am going to cover the earth with a flood and destroy every living being—everything in which there is the breath of life. All will die. ¹⁸ But I promise to keep you safe in the ship, with your wife and your sons and their wives. ^19-20 Bring a pair of every animal—a male and a female—into the boat with you, to keep them alive through the flood. Bring in a pair of each kind of bird and animal and reptile. ²¹ Store away in the boat all the food that they and you will need.” ²² And Noah did everything as God commanded him.

27 Arrangements were finally made to start us on our way to Rome by ship; so Paul and several other prisoners were placed in the custody of an officer named Julius, a member of the imperial guard. ² We left on a boat^[a] that was scheduled to make several stops along the Turkish coast. I should add that Aristarchus, a Greek from Thessalonica, was with us.

³ The next day when we docked at Sidon, Julius was very kind to Paul and let him go ashore to visit with friends and receive their hospitality. ⁴ Putting to sea from there, we encountered headwinds that made it difficult to keep the ship on course, so we sailed north of Cyprus between the island and the mainland^{[b] 5} and passed along the coast of the provinces of Cilicia and Pamphylia, landing at Myra, in the province of Lycia. ⁶ There our officer found an Egyptian ship from Alexandria, bound for Italy, and put us aboard.

^7-8 We had several days of rough sailing, and finally neared Cnidus;^[c] but the winds had become too strong, so we ran across to Crete, passing the port of Salome. Beating into the wind with great difficulty and moving slowly along the southern coast, we arrived at Fair Havens, near the city of Lasea. ⁹ There we stayed for several days. The weather was becoming dangerous for long voyages by then because it was late in the year,^[d] and Paul spoke to the ship’s officers about it.

¹⁰ “Sirs,” he said, “I believe there is trouble ahead if we go on—perhaps shipwreck, loss of cargo, injuries, and death.” ¹¹ But the officers in charge of the prisoners listened more to the ship’s captain and the owner than to Paul. ¹² And since Fair Havens was an exposed^[e] harbor—a poor place to spend the winter—most of the crew advised trying to go further up the coast to Phoenix in order to winter there; Phoenix was a good harbor with only a northwest and southwest exposure.