Revised Common Lectionary (Semicontinuous)

¹⁵ “Look, today I have set before you life and death, depending on whether you obey or disobey. ¹⁶ I have commanded you today to love the Lord your God and to follow his paths and to keep his laws, so that you will live and become a great nation, and so that the Lord your God will bless you and the land you are about to possess. ¹⁷ But if your hearts turn away and you won’t listen—if you are drawn away to worship other gods— ¹⁸ then I declare to you this day that you shall surely perish; you will not have a long, good life in the land you are going in to possess.

¹⁹ “I call heaven and earth to witness against you that today I have set before you life or death, blessing or curse. Oh, that you would choose life; that you and your children might live! ²⁰ Choose to love the Lord your God and to obey him and to cling to him, for he is your life and the length of your days. You will then be able to live safely in the land the Lord promised your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

119 Happy are all who perfectly follow the laws of God. ² Happy are all who search for God and always do his will, ³ rejecting compromise with evil and walking only in his paths. ⁴ You have given us your laws to obey— ⁵ oh, how I want to follow them consistently. ⁶ Then I will not be disgraced, for I will have a clean record.

⁷ After you have corrected me,^[a] I will thank you by living as I should! ⁸ I will obey! Oh, don’t forsake me and let me slip back into sin again.^[b]

3 Dear brothers, I have been talking to you as though you were still just babies in the Christian life who are not following the Lord but your own desires; I cannot talk to you as I would to healthy Christians who are filled with the Spirit. ² I have had to feed you with milk and not with solid food because you couldn’t digest anything stronger. And even now you still have to be fed on milk. ³ For you are still only baby Christians, controlled by your own desires, not God’s. When you are jealous of one another and divide up into quarreling groups, doesn’t that prove you are still babies, wanting your own way? In fact, you are acting like people who don’t belong to the Lord at all. ⁴ There you are, quarreling about whether I am greater than Apollos, and dividing the church. Doesn’t this show how little you have grown in the Lord?^[a]

⁵ Who am I, and who is Apollos, that we should be the cause of a quarrel? Why, we’re just God’s servants, each of us with certain special abilities, and with our help you believed. ⁶ My work was to plant the seed in your hearts, and Apollos’ work was to water it, but it was God, not we, who made the garden grow in your hearts. ⁷ The person who does the planting or watering isn’t very important, but God is important because he is the one who makes things grow. ⁸ Apollos and I are working as a team, with the same aim, though each of us will be rewarded for his own hard work. ⁹ We are only God’s coworkers. You are God’s garden, not ours; you are God’s building, not ours.

²¹ “Under the laws of Moses the rule was, ‘If you murder, you must die.’ ²² But I have added to that rule and tell you^[a] that if you are only angry, even in your own home, you are in danger of judgment! If you call your friend an idiot, you are in danger of being brought before the court. And if you curse him, you are in danger of the fires of hell.

²³ “So if you are standing before the altar in the Temple, offering a sacrifice to God, and suddenly remember that a friend has something against you, ²⁴ leave your sacrifice there beside the altar and go and apologize and be reconciled to him, and then come and offer your sacrifice to God. ²⁵ Come to terms quickly with your enemy before it is too late and he drags you into court and you are thrown into a debtor’s cell, ²⁶ for you will stay there until you have paid the last penny.

²⁷ “The laws of Moses said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ ²⁸ But I say: Anyone who even looks at a woman with lust in his eye has already committed adultery with her in his heart. ²⁹ So if your eye—even if it is your best eye!^[b]—causes you to lust, gouge it out and throw it away. Better for part of you to be destroyed than for all of you to be cast into hell. ³⁰ And if your hand—even your right hand—causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. Better that than find yourself in hell.

³¹ “The law of Moses says, ‘If anyone wants to be rid of his wife, he can divorce her merely by giving her a letter of dismissal.’ ³² But I say that a man who divorces his wife, except for fornication, causes her to commit adultery if she marries again. And he who marries her commits adultery.

³³ “Again, the law of Moses says, ‘You shall not break your vows to God but must fulfill them all.’ ³⁴ But I say: Don’t make any vows! And even to say ‘By heavens!’ is a sacred vow to God, for the heavens are God’s throne. ³⁵ And if you say ‘By the earth!’ it is a sacred vow, for the earth is his footstool. And don’t swear ‘By Jerusalem!’ for Jerusalem is the capital of the great King. ³⁶ Don’t even swear ‘By my head!’ for you can’t turn one hair white or black. ³⁷ Say just a simple ‘Yes, I will’ or ‘No, I won’t.’ Your word is enough. To strengthen your promise with a vow shows that something is wrong.