Consider the power of the Almighty

Old Testament Reading

Psalm 71 (MSG)

^1-3 I run for dear life to God,
    I’ll never live to regret it.
Do what you do so well:
    get me out of this mess and up on my feet.
Put your ear to the ground and listen,
    give me space for salvation.
Be a guest room where I can retreat;
    you said your door was always open!
You’re my salvation—my vast, granite fortress.

^4-7 My God, free me from the grip of Wicked,
    from the clutch of Bad and Bully.
You keep me going when times are tough—
    my bedrock, God, since my childhood.
I’ve hung on you from the day of my birth,
    the day you took me from the cradle;
    I’ll never run out of praise.
Many gasp in alarm when they see me,
    but you take me in stride.

^8-11 Just as each day brims with your beauty,
    my mouth brims with praise.
But don’t turn me out to pasture when I’m old
    or put me on the shelf when I can’t pull my weight.
My enemies are talking behind my back,
    watching for their chance to knife me.
The gossip is: “God has abandoned him.
    Pounce on him now; no one will help him.”

^12-16 God, don’t just watch from the sidelines.
    Come on! Run to my side!
My accusers—make them lose face.
    Those out to get me—make them look
Like idiots, while I stretch out, reaching for you,
    and daily add praise to praise.
I’ll write the book on your righteousness,
    talk up your salvation the livelong day,
    never run out of good things to write or say.
I come in the power of the Lord God,
    I post signs marking his right-of-way.

^17-24 You got me when I was an unformed youth,
    God, and taught me everything I know.
Now I’m telling the world your wonders;
    I’ll keep at it until I’m old and gray.
God, don’t walk off and leave me
    until I get out the news
Of your strong right arm to this world,
    news of your power to the world yet to come,
Your famous and righteous
    ways, O God.
God, you’ve done it all!
    Who is quite like you?
You, who made me stare trouble in the face,
    Turn me around;
Now let me look life in the face.
    I’ve been to the bottom;
Bring me up, streaming with honors;
    turn to me, be tender to me,
And I’ll take up the lute and thank you
    to the tune of your faithfulness, God.
I’ll make music for you on a harp,
    Holy One of Israel.
When I open up in song to you,
    I let out lungsful of praise,
    my rescued life a song.
All day long I’m chanting
    about you and your righteous ways,
While those who tried to do me in
    slink off looking ashamed.

 

New Testament Reading

 

1 Corinthians 1:18-31 (MSG)

^18-21 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. It’s written,

I’ll turn conventional wisdom on its head,
I’ll expose so-called experts as crackpots.

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? 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.

^22-25 While Jews clamor for miraculous demonstrations and Greeks go in for philosophical wisdom, we go right on proclaiming Christ, the Crucified. Jews treat this like an anti-miracle—and Greeks pass it off as absurd. 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. 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.”
^26-31 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. Isn’t it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these “nobodies” to expose the hollow pretensions of the “somebodies”? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have—right thinking and right living, a clean slate and a fresh start—comes from God by way of Jesus Christ. That’s why we have the saying, “If you’re going to blow a horn, blow a trumpet for God.”