Daily Reading
February 19, 2025
John's new book, Experience Jesus. Really., is releasing March 4th! Pre-order your copy today!In the dawn of our childhood, we lived with God in a garden paradise. We walked with our Abba Father in the cool of the day, in conversational intimacy. We ...
Daily Reading
February 18, 2025
I have counseled thousands of men and women, and I can tell you with utter confidence — both from their experiences and my own — that whatever else the enemy brings against you, he will always bring with it a feeling of I don’t want to fight this. Th...
Daily Reading
February 17, 2025
Chesterton conducted something of a personal experiment to see what the overall impression would be if a person simply read the Gospels without any previous information regarding Jesus. What he found surprised him:It is full of sudden gestures eviden...
Daily Reading
February 16, 2025
John's new book, Experience Jesus. Really., is releasing March 4th! Pre-order your copy today!Repeated processes shape the soul; this has been core to discipleship for millennia.It was inevitable that years of Internet life would shape our souls whet...
Daily Reading
February 15, 2025
If then you are wise, you will show yourself rather as a reservoir than as a canal. A canal spreads abroad water as it receives it, but a reservoir waits until it is filled before overflowing, and thus without loss to itself [it shares] its superabun...
Daily Reading
February 14, 2025
Waiting can be an experience of emptiness. Our hands are empty. Our desires unfulfilled. Our hearts feel empty as well. George MacDonald described it this way: ’Tis hard for man to rouse his spirit up— It is the human creative agony, Though but to h...
Daily Reading
February 13, 2025
John's new book, Experience Jesus. Really., is releasing March 4th! Pre-order your copy today!The Internet has taught its disciples that there shall be no mystery to anything. We can get to the bottom of any question, lay open the bare facts to any s...
Daily Reading
February 12, 2025
The book “Killing Lions” is a conversation between John and Sam Eldredge about the trials young men face. [Sam] Should you have killed a lion before you commit? Many traditional cultures like the Maasai require a young man to prove himself before ...
Daily Reading
February 11, 2025
It might help you to ask, How is my hope these days? Where is my hope these days? To shepherd your first hope for the treasure it is, you need to be aware of what you are currently doing with hope right now. Have you attached precious hopes to causa...
Daily Reading
February 10, 2025
John's new book, Experience Jesus. Really., is releasing March 4th! Pre-order your copy today!Jesus said to him, “If you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes.” Immediately the father of the child cried out and said with tears, “Lo...
Daily Reading
February 9, 2025
It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger for them. (George Eliot)And I still haven't found what I'm looking for. (U2)There is a secret se...
Daily Reading
February 8, 2025
Jesus is more impressed with the cunning of “the people of this world” than he is the naïveté so common to “the people of the light.” And then — back to the doves and snakes analogy — he urges us to be cunning: “I want you to be smart in the same way...
Daily Reading
February 7, 2025
Look again at the story — when God gave us the earth, he gave us a mission. God blessed them: “Prosper! Reproduce! Fill earth! Take charge! Be responsible for fish in the sea and birds in the air, for every living thing that moves on the face of the...
Daily Reading
February 6, 2025
I shudder at how easily my heart can be divided. I do love God, I really do. I know you do too. The double-mindedness is revealed when we only sort of want God. Our longing for life to be good again becomes the test we hold up against God — if he see...
Daily Reading
February 5, 2025
Abiding in the love of God is our only hope, the only true home for our hearts. It's not that we mentally acknowledge that God loves us. It's that we let our hearts come home to him, and stay in his love. MacDonald says it this way: When our hearts t...
Daily Reading
February 4, 2025
We do need more of God, much more. Little sips between long droughts will not sustain us. We need more of God in our bodies, our souls, our relationships, our work, everywhere in our lives. But when you live in a culture of the incessant upgrade of e...
Daily Reading
February 3, 2025
In our own times of severe testing, we want to be made “holy in every way,” our entire “spirit and soul and body ... kept blameless” (1 Thessalonians 5:23 NLT). Let me be quick to add, I think much of the testing and the Falling Away takes place very...
Daily Reading
February 2, 2025
Do we form no friendships because our friends might be taken from us? Do we refuse to love because we may be hurt? Do we forsake our dreams because hope has been deferred? To desire is to open our hearts to the possibility of pain; to shut down our h...
Daily Reading
February 1, 2025
The most essential gift you have to give is yourself. When you aren’t entirely true about that, you aren’t true. But we’ve all grown accustomed to committing dozens of little white lies about ourselves every day.Except this man. He is Faithful and he...
Daily Reading
January 31, 2025
Who is this God who is so determined that we know His presence that He is willing to allow so much that hinders us to be stripped away, including at times our health and well-being? Where do my beliefs of what well-being actually is not align with my...
Daily Reading
January 30, 2025
Ask Jesus to show you his kingdom.Sanctify your imagination to him, all your spiritual gifting, and ask him to reveal to you pictures of the coming kingdom. Be specific — if you want to see the city, ask to see the city. If you want to see those wate...
Daily Reading
January 29, 2025
When the religious (spirit) is operating, knowing about God substitutes for knowing God. And therefore, teaching is exalted. Church feels like a seminar — could be intellectual, could be motivational. Good content is what matters. Doctrine is fiercel...
Daily Reading
January 28, 2025
Jesus ran because he wanted to, not simply because he had to or because the Father told him to. He ran "for the joy set before him," which means he ran out of desire. To use the familiar phrase, his heart was fully in it. We call the final week of ou...
Daily Reading
January 27, 2025
The exodus of the people of Israel and their journey through the Sinai desert is one of the greatest survival stories of all time. More than two million people wandering through a land of sand and barren rock, homeless, looking for the land of abunda...
Daily Reading
January 26, 2025
There is wisdom, and there is revelation. They go together, hand in hand. “I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better” (Ephesians 1:17). ...
Daily Reading
January 25, 2025
You don't need to travel far to find beauty. God has strewn beauty across the globe in such generous portions we have only to stop and notice, paying particular attention to the intimate. Yes, epic beauty is worth traveling to see–the Himalaya, the M...
Daily Reading
January 24, 2025
The child who cries out in the dark feels very differently when mother comes in and switches on a light. What felt so real and inevitable vanishes. Let us be careful we don’t embrace the pain in such a way that we forbid God to turn on the light and ...
Daily Reading
January 23, 2025
Emasculation happens in marriage as well. Women are often attracted to the wilder side of a man, but once having caught him they settle down to the task of domesticating him. Ironically, if he gives in he'll resent her for it, and she in turn will wo...
Daily Reading
January 22, 2025
During a long layover at O'Hare, I studied the man who sells popcorn from a little stand in one of the terminal hallways. He sat silently on a stool as thousands of people rushed by. Occasionally, every fifteen minutes or so, someone would stop and b...
Daily Reading
January 21, 2025
The book “Killing Lions” is a conversation between John and Sam Eldredge about the trials young men face. [Sam] “We live in the age of information,” says the old recording of an announcer in my head; so why does finding direction feel like a parad...