Daily Readings - 20/01/2026

^88:1 Yahweh my God, I call for help all day, I weep to you all night;

^88:2 may my prayer reach you hear my cries for help;

^88:3 for my soul is all troubled, my life is on the brink of Sheol;

^88:4 I am numbered among those who go down to the Pit, a man bereft of strength:

^88:5 a man alone, down among the dead, among the slaughtered in their graves, among those you have forgotten, those deprived of your protecting hand.

^88:6 You have plunged me to the bottom of the Pit, to its darkest, deepest place,

^88:7 weighted down by your anger, drowned beneath your waves. (pause)

^88:8 You have turned my friends against me and made me repulsive to them; in prison and unable to escape, my eyes are worn out with suffering.

^88:9 Yahweh, I invoke you all day, I stretch out my hands to you:

^88:10 are your marvels meant for the dead, can ghosts rise up to praise you?

^88:11 Who talks of your love in the grave, of your faithfulness in the place of perdition?

^88:12 Do they hear about your marvels in the dark, about your righteousness in the land of oblivion? (pause)

^88:13 But I am here, calling for your help, praying to you every morning:

^88:14 why do you reject me? Why do you hide your face from me?

^88:15 Wretched, slowly dying since my youth, I bore your terrors – now I am exhausted;

^88:16 your anger overwhelmed me, you destroyed me with your terrors

^88:17 which, like a flood, were round me, all day long, all together closing in on me.

^88:18 You have turned my friends and neighbours against me, now darkness is my one companion left.

^2:23 One sabbath day he happened to be taking a walk through the cornfields, and his disciples began to pick ears of corn as they went along.

^2:24 And the Pharisees said to him, ‘Look, why are they doing something on the sabbath day that is forbidden?’

^2:25 And he replied, ‘Did you never read what David did in his time of need when he and his followers were hungry –

^2:26 how he went into the house of God when Abiathar[*b] was high priest, and ate the loaves of offering which only the priests are allowed to eat, and how he also gave some to the men with him?’

^2:27 And he said to them, ‘The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath;

^2:28 the Son of Man is master even of the sabbath’.