Therefore I exhort you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a sacrifice – alive, holy, and pleasing to God – which is your reasonable service.

It is written in the law: “By people with strange tongues and by the lips of strangers I will speak to this people, yet not even in this way will they listen to me,” says the Lord.

after they were disobedient long ago when God patiently waited in the days of Noah as an ark was being constructed. In the ark a few, that is eight souls, were delivered through water.

Everyone who goes on ahead and does not remain in the teaching of Christ does not have God. The one who remains in this teaching has both the Father and the Son.

So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep, and while he was asleep, he took part of the man’s side and closed up the place with flesh.

But look, the word of the Lord came to him: “This man will not be your heir, but instead a son who comes from your own body will be your heir.”

My master made me swear an oath. He said, ‘You must not acquire a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I am living,

because they had too many possessions to be able to stay together and the land where they had settled was not able to support them because of their livestock.

Then Moses summoned all the elders of Israel, and told them, “Go and select for yourselves a lamb or young goat for your families, and kill the Passover animals.

“You are to make an atonement lid of pure gold; its length is to be three feet nine inches, and its width is to be two feet three inches.

You are to make its pots for the ashes, its shovels, its tossing bowls, its meat hooks, and its fire pans – you are to make all its utensils of bronze.

The fat and the kidneys and the protruding lobe of the liver from the sin offering he offered up in smoke on the altar just as the Lord had commanded Moses,

I will send the wild animals against you and they will bereave you of your children, annihilate your cattle, and diminish your population so that your roads will become deserted.

It is not because you were more numerous than all the other peoples that the Lord favored and chose you – for in fact you were the least numerous of all peoples.

Then the elders of the city nearest to the corpse must take from the herd a heifer that has not been worked – that has never pulled with the yoke –

The Lord will raise up a distant nation against you, one from the other side of the earth as the eagle flies, a nation whose language you will not understand,

But he said, “Whatever happens, I want to go!” So Joab said to him, “Then go!” So Ahimaaz ran by the way of the Jordan plain, and he passed the Cushite.

He looked and right there by his head was a cake baking on hot coals and a jug of water. He ate and drank and then slept some more.

So David again asked God what he should do. This time God told him, “Don’t march up after them; circle around them and come against them in front of the trees.

Now, Lord God, may your promise to my father David be realized, for you have made me king over a great nation as numerous as the dust of the earth.