Revised Common Lectionary (Semicontinuous)

⁶ ¶ Sacrifice and offering thou didst not desire; mine ears hast thou opened; burnt offering and sin offering thou hast not required.

⁷ Then said I, Behold, I come; in the volume of the book it is written of me,

⁸ I delight to do thy will, O my God; thy law is within my bowels.

⁹ I have preached righteousness in the great congregation; behold, I have not refrained my lips, O LORD, thou knowest.

¹⁰ I have not hid thy righteousness within my heart; I have declared thy truth and thy salvation; I have not concealed thy mercy and thy truth from the great congregation.

¹¹ ¶ Do not withhold thy tender mercies from me, O LORD; let thy mercy and thy truth continually preserve me.

¹² For innumerable evils have compassed me about; my iniquities have taken hold upon me, so that I am not able to see; they are more than the hairs of my head; therefore my heart fails me.

¹³ Be pleased, O LORD, to deliver me; O LORD, make haste to help me.

¹⁴ Let them be ashamed and confounded together that seek after my life to destroy it; let them be driven backward and put to shame that wish me evil.

¹⁵ Let them be desolate for a reward of their shame that say unto me, Aha, aha.

¹⁶ Let all those that seek thee rejoice and be glad in thee; let such as love thy salvation say continually, The LORD be magnified.

¹⁷ When I am poor and needy; the Lord will remember me; thou art my help and my deliverer; make no tarrying, O my God.

¹² Hearken unto me, O Jacob and Israel, my called; I am he; I am the first, I also am the last.

¹³ Certainly my hand founded the earth, and my right hand measured the heavens with the palm; as I named them, they appeared together.

¹⁴ All ye, assemble yourselves and hear; who is there among them that declares these things? The LORD has loved him, the one who will execute his will on Babylon and his arm upon the Chaldeans.

¹⁵ I, even I, have spoken; I have called him: I have brought him, and therefore his way shall be prospered.

¹⁶ ¶ Come near unto me, hear ye this; I have not spoken in secret from the beginning; from the time that it was done, I was there: and now the LORD God has sent me and his Spirit.

¹⁷ Thus has the LORD, thy Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel said: I am the LORD thy God who teaches thee to profit, who causes thee to walk by the way in which thou dost walk.

¹⁸ O that thou would look unto my commandments! Then thy peace would be as a river and thy righteousness as the waves of the sea:

¹⁹ Thy seed would be as the sand, and the offspring of thy bowels like the gravel thereof; his name would never be cut off nor destroyed from before me.

²⁰ Come out of Babylon, flee from among the Chaldeans. Give news of this with a voice of joy; publish this; take this news to the end of the earth; say, The LORD has redeemed his slave Jacob.

²¹ And they did not thirst when he led them through the deserts; he caused water to flow out of the rock for them; he clave the rock, and the waters gushed out.

¹⁴ ¶ Then the disciples of John came to him, saying, Why do we and the Pharisees fast often, but thy disciples do not fast?

¹⁵ And Jesus said unto them, Can the sons of the bridechamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them? But the days will come when the bridegroom shall be taken from them, and then they shall fast.

¹⁶ No one mends an old garment with a piece of new cloth, for that patch takes from the garment, and the rent is made worse.

¹⁷ Neither do they put new wine into old wineskins, otherwise the wineskins break, and the wine runs out, and the wineskins perish; but they put new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved together.