Old/New Testament

100 Shout with joy before the Lord, O earth! ² Obey him gladly; come before him, singing with joy.

³ Try to realize what this means—the Lord is God! He made us—we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.

⁴ Go through his open gates with great thanksgiving; enter his courts with praise. Give thanks to him and bless his name. ⁵ For the Lord is always good. He is always loving and kind, and his faithfulness goes on and on to each succeeding generation.

101 I will sing about your loving-kindness and your justice, Lord. I will sing your praises!

² I will try to walk a blameless path, but how I need your help, especially in my own home, where I long to act as I should.

³ Help me to refuse the low and vulgar things; help me to abhor all crooked deals of every kind, to have no part in them. ⁴ I will reject all selfishness and stay away from every evil. ⁵ I will not tolerate anyone who secretly slanders his neighbors; I will not permit conceit and pride. ⁶ I will make the godly of the land my heroes and invite them to my home. Only those who are truly good shall be my servants. ⁷ But I will not allow those who deceive and lie to stay in my house. ⁸ My daily task will be to ferret out criminals and free the city of God from their grip.

102 A prayer when overwhelmed with trouble.

Lord, hear my prayer! Listen to my plea!

² Don’t turn away from me in this time of my distress. Bend down your ear and give me speedy answers, ^3-4 for my days disappear like smoke. My health is broken, and my heart is sick; it is trampled like grass and is withered. My food is tasteless, and I have lost my appetite. ⁵ I am reduced to skin and bones because of all my groaning and despair. ⁶ I am like a vulture in a far-off wilderness or like an owl alone in the desert. ⁷ I lie awake, lonely as a solitary sparrow on the roof.

⁸ My enemies taunt me day after day and curse at me. ^9-10 I eat ashes instead of bread. My tears run down into my drink because of your anger against me, because of your wrath. For you have rejected me and thrown me out. ¹¹ My life is passing swiftly as the evening shadows. I am withering like grass, ¹² while you, Lord, are a famous King forever. Your fame will endure to every generation.

¹³ I know that you will come and have mercy on Jerusalem—and now is the time to pity her—the time you promised help. ¹⁴ For your people love every stone in her walls and feel sympathy for every grain of dust in her streets. ¹⁵ Now let the nations and their rulers tremble before the Lord, before his glory. ¹⁶ For Jehovah will rebuild Jerusalem! He will appear in his glory!

¹⁷ He will listen to the prayers of the destitute, for he is never too busy to heed their requests. ¹⁸ I am recording this so that future generations will also praise the Lord for all that he has done. And a people that shall be created shall praise the Lord. ¹⁹ Tell them that God looked down from his temple in heaven ²⁰ and heard the groans of his people in slavery—they were children of death—and released them, ^21-22 so that multitudes would stream to the Temple in Jerusalem to praise him, and his praises were sung throughout the city; and many rulers throughout the earth came to worship him.

²³ He has cut me down in middle life, shortening my days. ²⁴ But I cried to him, “O God, you live forever and forever! Don’t let me die halfway through my years! ²⁵ In ages past you laid the foundations of the earth and made the heavens with your hands! ²⁶ They shall perish, but you go on forever. They will grow old like worn-out clothing, and you will change them like a man putting on a new shirt and throwing away the old one! ²⁷ But you yourself never grow old. You are forever, and your years never end.

²⁸ “But our families will continue; generation after generation will be preserved by your protection.”

1 From: Paul, chosen by God to be Jesus Christ’s missionary, and from brother Sosthenes.

² To: The Christians in Corinth, invited by God to be his people and made acceptable to him by Christ Jesus.^[a] And to: All Christians everywhere—whoever calls upon the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord and theirs.

³ May God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ give you all of his blessings, and great peace of heart and mind.

⁴ I can never stop thanking God for all the wonderful gifts he has given you, now that you are Christ’s: ⁵ he has enriched your whole life. He has helped you speak out for him and has given you a full understanding of the truth; ⁶ what I told you Christ could do for you has happened! ⁷ Now you have every grace and blessing; every spiritual gift and power for doing his will are yours during this time of waiting for the return of our Lord Jesus Christ. ⁸ And he guarantees right up to the end that you will be counted free from all sin and guilt on that day when he returns. ⁹ God will surely do this for you, for he always does just what he says, and he is the one who invited you into this wonderful friendship with his Son, even Christ our Lord.

¹⁰ But, dear brothers, I beg you in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ to stop arguing among yourselves. Let there be real harmony so that there won’t be splits in the church. I plead with you to be of one mind, united in thought and purpose. ¹¹ For some of those who live at Chloe’s house have told me of your arguments and quarrels, dear brothers. ¹² Some of you are saying, “I am a follower of Paul”; and others say that they are for Apollos or for Peter; and some that they alone are the true followers of Christ. ¹³ And so, in effect, you have broken Christ into many pieces.

But did I, Paul, die for your sins? Were any of you baptized in my name? ¹⁴ I am so thankful now that I didn’t baptize any of you except Crispus and Gaius. ¹⁵ For now no one can think that I have been trying to start something new, beginning a “Church of Paul.” ¹⁶ Oh, yes, and I baptized the family of Stephanas. I don’t remember ever baptizing anyone else. ¹⁷ For Christ didn’t send me to baptize, but to preach the Gospel; and even my preaching sounds poor, for I do not fill my sermons with profound words and high-sounding ideas, for fear of diluting the mighty power there is in the simple message of the cross of Christ.

¹⁸ I know very well how foolish it sounds to those who are lost,^[b] when they hear that Jesus died to save them. But we who are saved recognize this message as the very power of God. ¹⁹ For God says, “I will destroy all human plans of salvation no matter how wise they seem to be, and ignore the best ideas of men, even the most brilliant of them.”

²⁰ So what about these wise men, these scholars, these brilliant debaters of this world’s great affairs? God has made them all look foolish and shown their wisdom to be useless nonsense. ²¹ For God in his wisdom saw to it that the world would never find God through human brilliance, and then he stepped in and saved all those who believed his message, which the world calls foolish and silly. ²² It seems foolish to the Jews because they want a sign from heaven as proof that what is preached is true; and it is foolish to the Gentiles because they believe only what agrees with their philosophy and seems wise to them. ²³ So when we preach about Christ dying to save them, the Jews are offended and the Gentiles say it’s all nonsense. ²⁴ But God has opened the eyes of those called to salvation, both Jews and Gentiles, to see that Christ is the mighty power of God to save them; Christ himself is the center of God’s wise plan for their salvation. ²⁵ This so-called “foolish” plan of God is far wiser than the wisest plan of the wisest man, and God in his weakness—Christ dying on the cross—is far stronger than any man.

²⁶ Notice among yourselves, dear brothers, that few of you who follow Christ have big names or power or wealth. ²⁷ Instead, God has deliberately chosen to use ideas the world considers foolish and of little worth in order to shame those people considered by the world as wise and great. ²⁸ He has chosen a plan despised by the world, counted as nothing at all, and used it to bring down to nothing those the world considers great, ²⁹ so that no one anywhere can ever brag in the presence of God.

³⁰ For it is from God alone that you have your life through Christ Jesus. He showed us God’s plan of salvation; he was the one who made us acceptable to God; he made us pure and holy^[c] and gave himself to purchase our salvation. ³¹ As it says in the Scriptures, “If anyone is going to boast, let him boast only of what the Lord has done.”