Hi there, this is Mary DeMuth. This is Pray Every Day, where I pray through the Bible verse by verse almost to the end of this month and the season of Christmas is coming. Ah, it's crazy. Today I'm reading from Jeremiah 22 verses 13 through 30 in the World English Bible, and this is what it says.

Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness and his rooms by injustice, who uses

his neighbor's service without wages and doesn't give him his hire, who says, I will build

for myself a wide house and a spacious rooms and cuts out windows for himself with a cedar

ceiling and painted red. Should you reign because you strive to excel in cedar? Didn't your

father eat and drink and do justice and righteousness? Then it was well with him. He judged the

cause of the poor and needy so that it was well. Wasn't this to know me? Says Yahweh. But your eyes and

your heart are only for your covetousness for shedding innocent blood for oppression and for doing violence.

Therefore, Yahweh says concerning Joachim, the son of Josiah, king of Judah, they won't lament for him, saying,

ah, my brother, oh, sister.

They won't lament for him, saying, ah, Lord, or ah, his glory glory he will be buried with the burial of a donkey drawn

and cast out beyond the gates of jerusalem go up to lebanon and cry out lift up your voice in

bashing and cry from abiram for all your lovers have been destroyed i spoke to you in your

prosperity but you said i will not listen this has been your from youth, that you didn't obey my voice. The wind will feed all your shepherds and your lovers will go into captivity. Surely then you will be ashamed and confounded for all your wickedness. Inhabitants of Lebanon who make your heart in the ceders, how greatly to be pitied you will be when pangs come on you the pain as of a woman in travail as i live says yahway though canaya the son of joachim king of judah were the signet of my right hand i would still pluck you there. I would give you into the hands of those

who seek your life and into the hand of them, of whom you are afraid, even into the hand of

Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, and into the hand of the Chaldeans. I will cast you out with your

mother, who bore you into another country where you are not born and there you will die,

but to the land to which their soul

longs to return they will not return is this man canaya a despised broken vessel is he a

vessel in which no one delights why are they cast out he and his offspring and cast into a land

which they don't know oh earth earth earth, earth, earth, hear Yahweh's word.

Yahweh says, record this man as childless, a man who will not prosper in his days.

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