21 June 2020 Sunday Morning Service
Bible
Habakkuk 1:1-11
John 5:1-18
Habakkuk
1:1 The oracle that Habakkuk the prophet received.
1:2 How long, O LORD, must I call for help, but you do not listen? Or cry out to you, “Violence!” but you do not save?
1:3 Why do you make me look at injustice? Why do you tolerate wrong? Destruction and violence are before me; there is strife, and conflict abounds.
1:4 Therefore the law is paralyzed, and justice never prevails. The wicked hem in the righteous, so that justice is perverted.
1:5 “Look at the nations and watch–and be utterly amazed. For I am going to do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you were told.
1:6 I am raising up the Babylonians, that ruthless and impetuous people, who sweep across the whole earth to seize dwelling places not their own.
1:7 They are a feared and dreaded people; they are a law to themselves and promote their own honor.
1:8 Their horses are swifter than leopards, fiercer than wolves at dusk. Their cavalry gallops headlong; their horsemen come from afar. They fly like a vulture swooping to devour;
1:9 they all come bent on violence. Their hordes advance like a desert wind and gather prisoners like sand.
1:10 They deride kings and scoff at rulers. They laugh at all fortified cities; they build earthen ramps and capture them.
1:11 Then they sweep past like the wind and go on–guilty men, whose own strength is their god.”
John
5:1 Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for a feast of the Jews.
5:2 Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades.
5:3 Here a great number of disabled people used to lie–the blind, the lame, the paralyzed.
5:4
5:5 One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years.
5:6 When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to get well?”
5:7 “Sir,” the invalid replied, “I have no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred. While I am trying to get in, someone else goes down ahead of me.”
5:8 Then Jesus said to him, “Get up! Pick up your mat and walk.”
5:9 At once the man was cured; he picked up his mat and walked. The day on which this took place was a Sabbath,
5:10 and so the Jews said to the man who had been healed, “It is the Sabbath; the law forbids you to carry your mat.”
5:11 But he replied, “The man who made me well said to me, ‘Pick up your mat and walk.'”
5:12 So they asked him, “Who is this fellow who told you to pick it up and walk?”
5:13 The man who was healed had no idea who it was, for Jesus had slipped away into the crowd that was there.
5:14 Later Jesus found him at the temple and said to him, “See, you are well again. Stop sinning or something worse may happen to you.”
5:15 The man went away and told the Jews that it was Jesus who had made him well.
5:16 So, because Jesus was doing these things on the Sabbath, the Jews persecuted him.
5:17 Jesus said to them, “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I, too, am working.”
5:18 For this reason the Jews tried all the harder to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.