1001 On your feet now - applaud God! 2 Bring a gift of laughter, sing yourselves into his presence. 3 Know this: God is God, and God, God. He made us; we didn't make him. We're his people, his well-tended sheep. 4 Enter with the password: "Thank you!" Make yourselves at home, talking praise. Thank him. Worship him. 5 For God is sheer beauty, all-generous in love, loyal always and ever.
1011 My theme song is God's love and justice, and I'm singing it right to you, God. 2 I'm finding my way down the road of right living, but how long before you show up? I'm doing the very best I can, and I'm doing it at home, where it counts. 3 I refuse to take a second look at corrupting people and degrading things. I reject made-in-Canaan gods, stay clear of contamination. 4 The crooked in heart keep their distance; I refuse to shake hands with those who plan evil. 5 I put a gag on the gossip who bad-mouths his neighbor; I can't stand arrogance. 6 But I have my eye on salt-of-the-earth people - they're the ones I want working with me; Men and women on the straight and narrow - these are the ones I want at my side. 7 But no one who traffics in lies gets a job with me; I have no patience with liars. I've rounded up all the wicked like cattle and herded them right out of the country. 8 I purged God's city of all who make a business of evil. A prayer of one whose life is falling to pieces, and who lets God know just how bad it is.
1021 God, listen! Listen to my prayer, listen to the pain in my cries. 2 Don't turn your back on me just when I need you so desperately. Pay attention! This is a cry for help! And hurry - this can't wait! 3 I'm wasting away to nothing, I'm burning up with fever. 4 I'm a ghost of my former self, half-consumed already by terminal illness. 5 My jaws ache from gritting my teeth; I'm nothing but skin and bones. 6 I'm like a buzzard in the desert, a crow perched on the rubble. 7 Insomniac, I twitter away, mournful as a sparrow in the gutter. 8 All day long my enemies taunt me, while others just curse. 9 They bring in meals - casseroles of ashes! I draw drink from a barrel of my tears. 10 And all because of your furious anger; you swept me up and threw me out. 11 There's nothing left of me - a withered weed, swept clean from the path.
12 Yet you, God, are sovereign still, always and ever sovereign. 13 You'll get up from your throne and help Zion - it's time for compassionate help. 14 Oh, how your servants love this city's rubble and weep with compassion over its dust! 15 The godless nations will sit up and take notice - see your glory, worship your name - 16 When God rebuilds Zion, when he shows up in all his glory, 17 When he attends to the prayer of the wretched. He won't dismiss their prayer. 18 Write this down for the next generation so people not yet born will praise God: 19 "God looked out from his high holy place; from heaven he surveyed the earth. 20 He listened to the groans of the doomed, he opened the doors of their death cells." 21 Write it so the story can be told in Zion, so God's praise will be sung in Jerusalem's streets 22 And wherever people gather together along with their rulers to worship him.
23 God sovereignly brought me to my knees, he cut me down in my prime. 24 "Oh, don't," I prayed, "please don't let me die. You have more years than you know what to do with! 25 You laid earth's foundations a long time ago, and handcrafted the very heavens; 26 You'll still be around when they're long gone, threadbare and discarded like an old suit of clothes. You'll throw them away like a worn-out coat, 27 but year after year you're as good as new. 28 Your servants' children will have a good place to live and their children will be at home with you."
11 I, Paul, have been called and sent by Jesus, the Messiah, according to God's plan, along with my friend Sosthenes. 2 I send this letter to you in God's church at Corinth, Christians cleaned up by Jesus and set apart for a God-filled life. I include in my greeting all who call out to Jesus, wherever they live. He's their Master as well as ours! 3 May all the gifts and benefits that come from God our Father, and the Master, Jesus Christ, be yours.
4 Every time I think of you - and I think of you often! - I thank God for your lives of free and open access to God, given by Jesus. 5 There's no end to what has happened in you - it's beyond speech, beyond knowledge. 6 The evidence of Christ has been clearly verified in your lives. 7 Just think - you don't need a thing, you've got it all! All God's gifts are right in front of you as you wait expectantly for our Master Jesus to arrive on the scene for the Finale. 8 And not only that, but God himself is right alongside to keep you steady and on track until things are all wrapped up by Jesus. 9 God, who got you started in this spiritual adventure, shares with us the life of his Son and our Master Jesus. He will never give up on you. Never forget that. The Cross: The Irony of God's Wisdom
10 I have a serious concern to bring up with you, my friends, using the authority of Jesus, our Master. I'll put it as urgently as I can: You must get along with each other. You must learn to be considerate of one another, cultivating a life in common. 11 I bring this up because some from Chloe's family brought a most disturbing report to my attention - that you're fighting among yourselves! 12 I'll tell you exactly what I was told: You're all picking sides, going around saying, "I'm on Paul's side," or "I'm for Apollos," or "Peter is my man," or "I'm in the Messiah group." 13 I ask you, "Has the Messiah been chopped up in little pieces so we can each have a relic all our own? Was Paul crucified for you? Was a single one of you baptized in Paul's name?"
14 I was not involved with any of your baptisms - except for Crispus and Gaius - and on getting this report, I'm sure glad I wasn't. 15 At least no one can go around saying he was baptized in my name. 16 (Come to think of it, I also baptized Stephanas's family, but as far as I can recall, that's it.)
17 God didn't send me out to collect a following for myself, but to preach the Message of what he has done, collecting a following for him. And he didn't send me to do it with a lot of fancy rhetoric of my own, lest the powerful action at the center - Christ on the Cross - be trivialized into mere words.
18 The Message that points to Christ on the Cross seems like sheer silliness to those hellbent on destruction, but for those on the way of salvation it makes perfect sense. This is the way God works, and most powerfully as it turns out. 19 It's written, I'll turn conventional wisdom on its head, I'll expose so-called experts as crackpots. 20 So where can you find someone truly wise, truly educated, truly intelligent in this day and age? Hasn't God exposed it all as pretentious nonsense? 21 Since the world in all its fancy wisdom never had a clue when it came to knowing God, God in his wisdom took delight in using what the world considered dumb - preaching, of all things! - to bring those who trust him into the way of salvation. 22 While Jews clamor for miraculous demonstrations and Greeks go in for philosophical wisdom, 23 we go right on proclaiming Christ, the Crucified. Jews treat this like an anti-miracle - and Greeks pass it off as absurd. 24 But to us who are personally called by God himself - both Jews and Greeks - Christ is God's ultimate miracle and wisdom all wrapped up in one. 25 Human wisdom is so tinny, so impotent, next to the seeming absurdity of God. Human strength can't begin to compete with God's "weakness." 26 Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don't see many of "the brightest and the best" among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. 27 Isn't it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, 28 chose these "nobodies" to expose the hollow pretensions of the "somebodies"? 29 That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. 30 Everything that we have - right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start - comes from God by way of Jesus Christ. 31 That's why we have the saying, "If you're going to blow a horn, blow a trumpet for God."
