Revised Common Lectionary (Semicontinuous)
A Prayer for the Nation's Welfare[a]
85 Lord, you have been merciful to your land;
you have made Israel prosperous again.
2 You have forgiven your people's sins
and pardoned all their wrongs.
3 You stopped being angry with them
and held back your furious rage.
4 Bring us back, O God our savior,
and stop being displeased with us!
5 Will you be angry with us forever?
Will your anger never cease?
6 Make us strong again,
and we, your people, will praise you.
7 Show us your constant love, O Lord,
and give us your saving help.
8 I am listening to what the Lord God is saying;
he promises peace to us, his own people,
if we do not go back to our foolish ways.
9 Surely he is ready to save those who honor him,
and his saving presence will remain in our land.
10 Love and faithfulness will meet;
righteousness and peace will embrace.
11 Human loyalty will reach up from the earth,
and God's righteousness will look down from heaven.
12 The Lord will make us prosperous,
and our land will produce rich harvests.
13 Righteousness will go before the Lord
and prepare the path for him.
11 The people of Judah and the people of Israel will be reunited. They will choose for themselves a single leader, and once again they will grow and prosper in their land. Yes, the day of Jezreel[a] will be a great day!
2 So call your fellow Israelites “God's People” and “Loved-by-the-Lord.”
Unfaithful Gomer—Unfaithful Israel
2 My children, plead with your mother—though she is no longer a wife to me, and I am no longer her husband. Plead with her to stop her adultery and prostitution. 3 If she does not, I will strip her as naked as she was on the day she was born. I will make her like a dry and barren land, and she will die of thirst. 4-5 I will not show mercy to her children; they are the children of a shameless prostitute.[b] She herself said, “I will go to my lovers—they give me food and water, wool and linen, olive oil and wine.”
6 So I am going to fence her in with thorn bushes and build a wall to block her way. 7 She will run after her lovers but will not catch them. She will look for them but will not find them. Then she will say, “I am going back to my first husband—I was better off then than I am now.”
8 She would never acknowledge that I am the one who gave her the grain, the wine, the olive oil, and all the silver and gold that she used in the worship of Baal. 9 So at harvest time I will take back my gifts of grain and wine, and will take away the wool and the linen I gave her for clothing. 10 I will strip her naked in front of her lovers, and no one will be able to save her from my power. 11 I will put an end to all her festivities—her annual and monthly festivals and her Sabbath celebrations—all her religious meetings. 12 I will destroy her grapevines and her fig trees, which she said her lovers gave her for serving them. I will turn her vineyards and orchards into a wilderness; wild animals will destroy them. 13 I will punish her for the times that she forgot me, when she burned incense to Baal and put on her jewelry to go chasing after her lovers. The Lord has spoken.
The Lord's Love for His People
14 So I am going to take her into the desert again; there I will win her back with words of love. 15 (A)I will give back to her the vineyards she had and make Trouble Valley a door of hope. She will respond to me there as she did when she was young, when she came from Egypt.
Jesus Calms a Storm(A)
22 One day Jesus got into a boat with his disciples and said to them, “Let us go across to the other side of the lake.” So they started out. 23 As they were sailing, Jesus fell asleep. Suddenly a strong wind blew down on the lake, and the boat began to fill with water, so that they were all in great danger. 24 The disciples went to Jesus and woke him up, saying, “Master, Master! We are about to die!”
Jesus got up and gave an order to the wind and to the stormy water; they quieted down, and there was a great calm. 25 Then he said to the disciples, “Where is your faith?”
But they were amazed and afraid, and said to one another, “Who is this man? He gives orders to the winds and waves, and they obey him!”
Good News Translation® (Today’s English Version, Second Edition) © 1992 American Bible Society. All rights reserved. For more information about GNT, visit www.bibles.com and www.gnt.bible.