Daily Readings - 28/01/2026

^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.

^4:1 Again he began to teach by the lakeside, but such a huge crowd gathered round him that he got into a boat on the lake and sat there. The people were all along the shore, at the water’s edge.

^4:2 He taught them many things in parables, and in the course of his teaching he said to them,

^4:3 ‘Listen!, Imagine a sower going out to sow.

^4:4 Now it happened that, as he sowed, some of the seed fell on the edge of the path, and the birds came and ate it up.

^4:5 Some seed fell on rocky ground where it found little soil and sprang up straightaway, because there was no depth of earth;

^4:6 and when the sun came up it was scorched and, not having any roots, it withered away.

^4:7 Some seed fell into thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it, and it produced no crop.

^4:8 And some seeds fell into rich soil and, growing tall and strong, produced crop; and yielded thirty, sixty, even a hundredfold.’

^4:9 And he said, ‘Listen, anyone who has ears to hear!’

^4:10 When he was alone, the Twelve, together with the others who formed his company, asked what the parables meant.

^4:11 He told them, ‘The secret of the kingdom of God is given to you, but to those who are outside everything comes in parables,

^4:12 so that they may see and see again, but not perceive; may hear and hear again, but not understand; otherwise they might be converted and be forgiven’.[*a]

^4:13 He said to them, ‘Do you not understand this parable? Then how will you understand any of the parables?

^4:14 What the sower is sowing is the word.

^4:15 Those on the edge of the path where the word is sown are people who have no sooner heard it than Satan comes and carries away the word that was sown in them.

^4:16 Similarly, those who receive the seed on patches of rock are people who, when first they hear the word, welcome it at once with joy.

^4:17 But they have no root in them, they do not last; should some trial come, or some persecution on account of the word, they fall away at once.

^4:18 Then there are others who receive the seed in thorns. These have heard the word,

^4:19 but the worries of this world, the lure of riches and all the other passions come in to choke the word, and so it produces nothing.

^4:20 And there are those who have received the seed in rich soil: they hear the word and accept it and yield a harvest, thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.’