Daily Reading
September 6, 2025
The way to begin to get free of this debris, to remove these limits you’ve unknowingly placed on Jesus, is first to name what the problem is. Where are you having a hard time with Jesus? Where is your struggle with him? Do you find it hard to believe...
Daily Reading
September 5, 2025
This is what Jesus nearly always does when he comes to mend those rifts in our hearts. He brings his comfort and mercy to those times and places where we suffered the shattering blow, and the heart in that place often feels the same age as it was at ...
Daily Reading
September 4, 2025
Once we begin thinking of all the deceptions the Enemy is about with regard to our lives, we have a tendency to become obsessed with him, fearful of what he is going to do next. Once we take him seriously, he switches from his tactic of “I’m not here...
Daily Reading
September 3, 2025
We all have a way that we do life. We might call it our personality, or our natural bent — the way we handle pressure, the way we listen, the way we look for happiness, the way we control our world. We didn’t sit down one day and willfully choose to ...
Daily Reading
September 2, 2025
Maybe the most devastating limit is simply the idea that “Jesus doesn’t act like that anymore.” (Or, “Jesus doesn’t act like that with me.”) Sure —he was amazing in the Gospels. But that was then and this is now and things have changed. Or so the ide...
Daily Reading
September 1, 2025
Let me say this again: the story of your life is the story of the long and brutal assault on your heart by the one who knows what you could be and fears it. I hope you are beginning to see that more clearly now. Otherwise, much of the Bible will not ...
Daily Reading
April 4, 2025
I think if we could recover a vision of what holiness actually is, we would be absolutely captured by it. I think we would see it as not only completely desirable, but attainable as well. King David was a man who knew well his character flaws, felt t...
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
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, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!”Mark 9:23–24 NKJV Faith has always been a fragile thing in th...
Daily Reading
January 3, 2025
Communion with God is replaced by activity for God. There is little time in this outer world for deep questions. Given the right plan, everything in life can be managed ... except your heart. The inner life, the story of our heart, is the life of the...
Daily Reading
December 11, 2024
It seems at times that God will go to any length to thwart the very thing we most deeply want. We can’t get a job. Our attempt to find a spouse never pans out. The doctors aren’t able to help us with our infertility. Isn’t this precisely the reason w...
Daily Reading
December 2, 2024
It's better to stay in the safety of the camp than venture forth on a wing and a prayer. Who knows what dangers lie ahead? This was the counsel of the ten faithless spies sent in to have a look at the Promised Land when the Jews came out of Egypt. On...
Daily Reading
November 7, 2024
The awakening of his heart is essential if a man would truly love a woman. Look at things from her point of view. What does she long for in a man? Every little girl dreams of the day her prince will come. Look at the movies women love — the hero is a...
Daily Reading
November 1, 2024
Have we forgotten that God relocated the temple? In a stunning shift of geography, God changed the playing field. He moved the temple from a physical building to the hearts of his people: Don’t you know you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’...
Daily Reading
July 6, 2024
Early on in the fanfare of his public appearances, Jesus gives what will become known as the famous Sermon on the Mount. This is a “big moment” for Jesus. He has laid out in detail his understanding of a life that pleases God; he has, so to speak, dr...
Daily Reading
July 1, 2024
Guys are unanimously embarrassed by their emptiness and woundedness; it is for most of us a tremendous source of shame, as I've said. But it need not be. From the very beginning, back before the Fall and the assault, ours was meant to be a desperatel...
Daily Reading
June 30, 2024
Now Peter was sitting out in the courtyard, and a servant girl came to him. “You also were with Jesus of Galilee,” she said. But he denied it before them all. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. Then he went out to the gateway, where a...
Daily Reading
June 29, 2024
God interferes with us a lot. He interferes with our inner diatribes; He interferes with our style of relating; He blocks the paths we wrongly think will lead to life. He interferes to bring us up short so that we might see where we are taking the wr...
Daily Reading
June 28, 2024
Denial is a favorite method of coping for many Christians. But not with Jesus. He wants truth in the inmost being, and to get it there he's got to take us into our inmost being. One way he'll do this is by bringing up an old memory. You'll be driving...
Daily Reading
June 27, 2024
The Evil One has basically two ploys. If he cannot get us to kill our hearts and bury our desire, then he is delighted to seduce our desire into a trap. Once we give over our desire for life to any object other than God, we become ensnared. Think of ...
Daily Reading
June 26, 2024
We are looking for more of God. You’re far more likely to find him in a walk through an orchard or a sit by a pond than you are in a subway terminal. Of course God is with us and for us wherever we are, but in terms of refreshment, renewal, restorati...
Daily Reading
June 25, 2024
Love Jesus. Let him be himself with you. Allow his life to fill yours. Every day, give him your life to be filled with his. This is part of what I now pray,every morning: Lord Jesus, I give my life to you today, to live your life. Of course, this ass...
Daily Reading
June 24, 2024
The book “Killing Lions” is a conversation between John and Sam Eldredge about the trials young men face. [Sam] Obviously we’ve been told to chase our dreams. Over and over again every high school and college graduation speech challenged us to reac...
Daily Reading
June 23, 2024
The question is not, Are we spiritually oppressed, but Where and How? Think of it — why does every story have a villain? Little Red Riding Hood is attacked by a wolf. Dorothy must face and bring down the Wicked Witch of the West. Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi...
Daily Reading
June 22, 2024
In C. S. Lewis's novel The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, of The Chronicles of Narnia series, four children, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy, pass through the wardrobe's portal to find the kingdom of Narnia imprisoned under the spell of the White ...
Daily Reading
June 21, 2024
The mistake folks are making in this rough hour is trying to figure out how to fit a little more of God into their crowded lives.We need to do the opposite. Start with God, center your life on him, and work outward from there. Our spirituality moves ...
Daily Reading
June 20, 2024
The history of a man's relationship with God is the story of how God calls him out, takes him on a journey, and gives him his true name. Most of us have thought it was the story of how God sits on his throne waiting to whack a man broadside when he s...
Daily Reading
June 19, 2024
We aren't meant to figure life out on our own. God wants to father us. The truth is, he has been fathering us for a long time — we just haven't had the eyes to see it. He wants to father us much more intimately, but we have to be in a posture to rece...
Daily Reading
June 18, 2024
Today’s Daily Reading is an excerpt from Morgan Snyder's book “Becoming a King”Years ago I came across a very revealing story recounted by Gordon Dalbey. He told of a nun who worked in a men’s prison. One year she brought some Mother’s Day cards to d...
Daily Reading
June 17, 2024
Scripture tells us that we might at any time entertain an angel simply by welcoming a stranger. The serpent in the garden is really the Prince of Darkness. The carpenter from Nazareth — there is more to him than meets the eye as well. Things are not ...