Psalm 139
The Inescapable God
To the leader. Of David. A Psalm.1 O Lord, you have searched me and known me.2 You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away.3 You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways.4 Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely.5 You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.
7 Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence?8 If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.9 If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,10 even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.11 If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night’,12 even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.
13 For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.14 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works;that I know very well.15 My frame was not hidden from you,when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.16 Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.17 How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!18 I try to count them—they are more than the sand; I come to the end —I am still with you.
1 Corinthians 13
The Gift of Love
13If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.2And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.3If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant5or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;6it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.7It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
8 Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end.9For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part;10but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.11When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.12For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.13And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.