We long for beauty, and when the biblical writers speak of heaven, they use the most beautiful imagery they can. You can almost hear the agony of the writer trying to get it right while knowing he falls far short of what he sees. In the book of...
READ MORE“In all their distress he too was distressed” (Isa. 63:9). We can know that in our distress God too is distressed. Jesus understands heartbreak, betrayal, abandonment, loneliness, sorrow, and pain. He is acquainted with grief. He cares. He cares...
READ MOREIn Romans 8, Paul says something outrageous. He says that all our sufferings are "not worth comparing" with the glory that will be revealed in us. The human race has seen an unspeakable amount of suffering. What can possibly make that seem like...
READ MOREAccording to the Scriptures, the heart can be troubled, wounded, pierced, grieved, even broken. How well we all know that. Thankfully, it can also be cheerful, glad, merry, joyful, rejoicing. The heart can be whole or divided—as in that phrase we...
READ MOREEvery human being has some vital place in their life where they are not living in the victory they long for, and it colors how they view themselves. Every woman’s personal struggle rooted in her past, be it fear of intimacy or a deep-rooted self-...
READ MOREGod has a battle to fight, and the battle is for our freedom. As Tremper Longman says, "Virtually every book of the Bible—Old and New Testaments—and almost every page tells us about God's warring activity." I wonder if the Egyptians who kept...
READ MORECaring for your heart is how you protect your relationship with God.
Now there’s a new thought. But isn’t our heart the new dwelling place of God? It is where we commune with him. It is where we hear his voice. Most of the folks I know who...
READ MOREWhen we set out to hear God's voice, we do not listen as though it will come from somewhere above us or in the room around us. It comes to us from within, from the heart, the dwelling place of God. Now, most of us haven't been trained in...
READ MOREThe story of my life and the struggles I have lived with—make that “live with”—have helped to shape me into the woman I am today and the woman I am becoming. My scars, my struggles, my failures, my joys, my private lonely agonies have been...
READ MOREThey left, running, and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby lying in the manger. Seeing was believing. They told everyone they met what the angels had said about this child. All who heard the sheepherders were impressed. (Luke 2:17-18,...
READ MORENow Beauty feared that she had caused his death. She ran throughout the palace, sobbing loudly. After searching everywhere, she recalled her dream and ran into the garden toward the canal, where she had seen him in her sleep. There she found the...
READ MOREPhilip said, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.” Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time?” (John 14:8-9)
You can hear the disappointment in Jesus’ voice...
READ MOREThe gospel says that we, who are God's beloved, created a cosmic crisis. It says we, too, were stolen from our True Love and that he launched the greatest campaign in the history of the world to get us back. God created us for intimacy with him....
READ MORELife is now a battle and a journey. As Eugene Peterson reminds us, “We must fight the forces that oppose our becoming whole; we must find our way through difficult and unfamiliar territory to our true home.” It’s not that there aren’t joy and...
READ MOREI’ve always wondered why Jesus, having healed someone, would immediately tell them to keep quiet about it. After giving two blind men perfect vision, “Jesus warned them sternly, ‘See that no one knows about this’” (Matt. 9:30). Warned them...
READ MOREJesus was walking to Jairus’s house, but he didn’t go alone. A crowd went with him. He was being jostled, pushed against, pressed into when suddenly he stopped and asked the seemingly ridiculous question, “Who touched me?”
A woman...
Something awful has happened, something terrible. Something worse, even, than the fall of man. For in that greatest of all tragedies, we merely lost Paradise—and with it, everything that made life worth living. What has happened since is...
READ MOREWhen Isaiah promised that the Messiah will come to heal the brokenhearted, he was not speaking poetically. The Bible does use metaphor, as when Jesus says, "I am the gate" (John 10:9). Of course, he is not an actual gate like the kind...
READ MORELet us then remember who we truly are. Let us go further up and further in to all the riches and the joy and the intimacy and the healing that God has for us! Do you remember who you are? Whose you are?
First, you are the daughter...
Being unable to defeat God through raw power, Satan’s legions decide to wound God as deeply as possible by stealing the love of his Beloved through seduction. And having “seduced them to his party,” to ravish them body and soul; and having...
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