Revised Common Lectionary (Semicontinuous)

A song by David for going up to worship.

God Remembers Noah

8 God remembered Noah and all the wild and domestic animals with him in the ship. So God made a wind blow over the earth, and the water started to go down. ² The deep springs and the sky had been shut, and the rain had stopped pouring. ³ The water began to recede from the land. At the end of 150 days the water had decreased. ⁴ On the seventeenth day of the seventh month, the ship came to rest in the mountains of Ararat. ⁵ The water kept decreasing until the tenth month. On the first day of the tenth month, the tops of the mountains appeared.

⁶ After 40 more days Noah opened the window he had made in the ship ⁷ and sent out a raven. It kept flying back and forth until the water on the land had dried up. ⁸ Next, he sent out a dove to see if the water was gone from the surface of the ground. ⁹ The dove couldn’t find a place to land because the water was still all over the earth. So it came back to Noah in the ship. He reached out and brought the dove back into the ship. ¹⁰ He waited seven more days and again sent the dove out of the ship. ¹¹ The dove came to him in the evening, and in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf. Then Noah knew that the water was gone from the earth. ¹² He waited seven more days and sent out the dove again, but it never came back to him.

¹³ By the first day of the first month of Noah’s six hundred and first year, the water on the land had dried up. Noah opened the top of the ship, looked out, and saw the surface of the ground. ¹⁴ By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the land was dry.

¹⁵ Then God spoke to Noah, ¹⁶ “Come out of the ship with your wife, your sons, and your sons’ wives. ¹⁷ Bring out every animal that’s with you: birds, domestic animals, and every creature that crawls on the earth. Be fertile, increase in number, and spread over the earth.”

¹⁸ So Noah came out with his sons, his wife, and his sons’ wives. ¹⁹ Every animal, crawling creature, and bird—everything that moves on the earth—came out of the ship, one kind after another.

No Longer Slaves to Sin, but God’s Servants

6 What should we say then? Should we continue to sin so that God’s kindness ^[a] will increase? ² That’s unthinkable! As far as sin is concerned, we have died. So how can we still live under sin’s influence?

³ Don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? ⁴ When we were baptized into his death, we were placed into the tomb with him. As Christ was brought back from death to life by the glorious power of the Father, so we, too, should live a new kind of life. ⁵ If we’ve become united with him in a death like his, certainly we will also be united with him when we come back to life as he did. ⁶ We know that the person we used to be was crucified with him to put an end to sin in our bodies. Because of this we are no longer slaves to sin. ⁷ The person who has died has been freed from sin.

⁸ If we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. ⁹ We know that Christ, who was brought back to life, will never die again. Death no longer has any power over him. ¹⁰ When he died, he died once and for all to sin’s power. But now he lives, and he lives for God. ¹¹ So consider yourselves dead to sin’s power but living for God in the power Christ Jesus gives you.