Matthew 25:24

²⁰Another came, saying, ‘Lord, behold, your mina, which I kept laid away in a handkerchief, ²¹for I feared you, because you are an exacting man. You take up that which you didn’t lay down, and reap that which you didn’t sow.’

²²“He said to him, ‘Out of your own mouth I will judge you, you wicked servant! You knew that I am an exacting man, taking up that which I didn’t lay down and reaping that which I didn’t sow.

²⁹But he answered his father, ‘Behold, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed a commandment of yours, but you never gave me a goat, that I might celebrate with my friends.

¹⁴You have said, ‘It is vain to serve God,’ and ‘What profit is it that we have followed his instructions and that we have walked mournfully before the LORD of Armies? ¹⁵Now we call the proud happy; yes, those who work wickedness are built up; yes, they tempt God, and escape.’

²⁵“Yet you say, ‘The way of the Lord is not equal.’ Hear now, house of Israel: Is my way not equal? Aren’t your ways unequal? ²⁶When the righteous man turns away from his righteousness, and commits iniquity, and dies in it, then he dies in his iniquity that he has done. ²⁷Again, when the wicked man turns away from his wickedness that he has committed, and does that which is lawful and right, he will save his soul alive. ²⁸Because he considers, and turns away from all his transgressions that he has committed, he shall surely live. He shall not die. ²⁹Yet the house of Israel says, ‘The way of the Lord is not fair.’ House of Israel, aren’t my ways fair? Aren’t your ways unfair?

³¹Generation, consider the LORD’s word. Have I been a wilderness to Israel? Or a land of thick darkness? Why do my people say, ‘We have broken loose. We will come to you no more’?

²¹“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.

¹⁶“As for the word that you have spoken to us in the LORD’s name, we will not listen to you. ¹⁷But we will certainly perform every word that has gone out of our mouth, to burn incense to the queen of the sky and to pour out drink offerings to her, as we have done, we and our fathers, our kings and our princes, in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem; for then we had plenty of food, and were well, and saw no evil. ¹⁸But since we stopped burning incense to the queen of the sky, and pouring out drink offerings to her, we have lacked all things, and have been consumed by the sword and by the famine.”

⁷because the mind of the flesh is hostile toward God, for it is not subject to God’s law, neither indeed can it be.

³‘Why have we fasted,’ they say, ‘and you don’t see? Why have we afflicted our soul, and you don’t notice?’ “Behold, in the day of your fast you find pleasure, and oppress all your laborers.

²⁰But indeed, O man, who are you to reply against God? Will the thing formed ask him who formed it, “Why did you make me like this?”