Revised Common Lectionary (Complementary)

Turn to the Lord

1 ^(A) I am the prophet Zechariah, the son of Berechiah and the grandson of Iddo.

In the eighth month of the second year that Darius was king of Persia,^[a] the Lord told me to say:

^2-3 Israel, I, the Lord All-Powerful, was very angry with your ancestors. But if you people will return to me, I will turn and help you. ⁴ Don't be stubborn like your ancestors. They were warned by the earlier prophets^[b] to give up their evil and turn back to me, but they paid no attention.

⁵ Where are your ancestors now? Not even prophets live forever. ⁶ But my warnings and my words spoken by the prophets caught up with your ancestors. So they turned back to me and said, “Lord All-Powerful, you have punished us for our sins, just as you had planned.”

An Example from Marriage

7 My friends, you surely understand enough about law to know that laws only have power over people who are alive. ² For example, the Law says that a man's wife must remain his wife as long as he lives. But once her husband is dead, she is free ³ to marry someone else. However, if she goes off with another man while her husband is still alive, she is said to be unfaithful.

⁴ That is how it is with you, my friends. You are now part of the body of Christ and are dead to the power of the Law. You are free to belong to Christ, who was raised to life so we could serve God. ⁵ When we thought only of ourselves, the Law made us have sinful desires. It made every part of our bodies into slaves who are doomed to die. ⁶ But the Law no longer rules over us. We are like dead people, and it cannot have any power over us. Now we can serve God in a new way by obeying his Spirit, and not in the old way by obeying the written Law.