Daily Reading
May 21, 2024
Most of you have heard of the famous Cross, the assurance of forgiveness (and Lord knows we’ll need buckets of that as we go along). In the Cross God undergoes utter forsakenness so that we will never be forsaken. He understands sorrow, pain, rejecti...
Daily Reading
May 20, 2024
I never assume I know what the new prayer need before me requires. If someone asks me, “Pray that my mother and my father reconcile,” I don’t simply start praying that. For one thing, I do not know with any sort of certainty that reconciliation is wh...
Daily Reading
May 19, 2024
Satan has an ace up his sleeve — even if his captives want out of the POW camp, he has a legal claim to them. A claim that can be broken only by blood. These prisoners can be ransomed, but only at a terrible price.It appears the evil one doesn’t unde...
Daily Reading
May 18, 2024
You will be tested. Like Jesus’ desert trial, the enemy comes, probing the perimeter. He knows your story, knows where the weak spots are. But this is our training. This is the spiritual equivalent of, “Take a high guard, like this. Strike from high....
Daily Reading
May 17, 2024
At one point in the long, arduous campaign of delivering to Judah the bad news of coming judgment and futile calls for repentance, Jeremiah explodes with thoughts that have apparently been building in him for a while with regard to God's use of him:O...
Daily Reading
May 16, 2024
Today’s Daily Reading is an excerpt from Morgan Snyder's book “Becoming a King”Whatever else we observe about the life of Jesus, we know this to be true: at every moment, Jesus modeled what it looks like to live as God’s Son. It was the bedrock of hi...
Daily Reading
May 15, 2024
The crisis of hope that afflicts the church today is a crisis of imagination. Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft writes: Medieval imagery (which is almost totally biblical imagery) of light, jewels, stars, candles, trumpets, and angels no longer fits ...
Daily Reading
May 14, 2024
What exactly are you perfectly clear on these days? How about your life — why have things gone the way they have? Where was God in all that? And do you know what you ought to do next, with a deep, settled confidence that it will work out? Neither do ...
Daily Reading
May 13, 2024
Let the morning bring me word of your unfailing love, for I have put my trust in you. Show me the way I should go, for to you I entrust my life. Rescue me from my enemies, Lord, for I hide myself in you. (Psalm 143:8–9)David wrote this—the man who co...
Daily Reading
May 12, 2024
Once we come to accept that we can never find or hang on to the life we have been seeking, what then? As Dallas Willard writes, it matters for all the world to know that life is ahead of us.I meet many faithful Christians who, in spite of their faith...
Daily Reading
May 11, 2024
If you want to turn your children off to Jesus, ignore holiness (or choose the technical rule-keeping impostor). Be a jerk and then insist the family pray at mealtimes; let them see you lie to your boss or your aging parents and then insist you all g...
Daily Reading
May 10, 2024
The Evil One lied to us about where true life was found ... and we believed him.God gave us the wondrous world as our playground, and he told us to enjoy it fully and freely. Yet despite his extravagant generosity, we had to reach for the one forbidd...
Daily Reading
May 9, 2024
I continue to be stunned by the level of deadness that most people consider normal and seem to be content to live with. It had been more than a year since Diane and Ted first came to see me for counseling. As with most marriages, the real issues lay ...
Daily Reading
May 8, 2024
Where would we be today if Abraham had carefully weighed the pros and cons of God’s invitation and decided that he’d rather hang on to his medical benefits, three weeks paid vacation, and retirement plan in Ur? What would have happened if Moses had l...
Daily Reading
May 7, 2024
Even Jesus endured assault — not the open accusation that he had a wicked heart, but the more subtle kind, the seemingly "innocent" Arrows that come through "misunderstanding."After this, Jesus went around in Galilee, purposely staying away from Jude...
Daily Reading
May 6, 2024
Many people think the theme of war ends with the Old Testament. Not at all. Jesus says, "I did not come to bring peace, but a sword" (Matt. 10:34). In fact, his birth involved another battle in heaven (Rev. 12:1-5, 7-8, 17). The birth of Christ was a...
Daily Reading
May 5, 2024
Suffering will try to separate you from Jesus. You must not let it.The worst part of suffering is the damage it can do to your view of God, your relationship with him. Feelings of abandonment creep in: Why did he let this happen? Anger. A loss of hop...
Daily Reading
May 4, 2024
Indeed, part of God's victory over the enemy of our souls, which we will be invited to take part in, will be an open mocking of Satan and his forces in view of all the peoples of the earth along with the angelic hosts. We are given a picture of the e...
Daily Reading
May 3, 2024
We need to look into what has damaged our union with God.I realize this is a very poignant thing I’m raising, and I want to proceed tenderly. Do you know what’s damaged your soul’s union with God?Suffering in all its forms will slowly erode union, if...
Daily Reading
May 2, 2024
An old saint who first taught me to pray — may he be blessed forever — would often say, “When you think you are finished praying, you are probably just getting warmed up.”Often when we first turn to prayer we are coming in out of the Matrix — that wh...
Daily Reading
May 1, 2024
The Greek of Revelation 21:1 speaks of one world “passing away” so that a remade world may take its place. Therefore Eugene Peterson in The Message translates the passage, “I saw Heaven and earth new-created. Gone the first Heaven, gone the first ear...
Daily Reading
April 30, 2024
In the mythic story of The Lion King, the lion cub Simba is separated in his youth from his father through a murder engineered by his uncle, Scar, the character symbolizing the evil one in our story. Scar arranges for the cub to be caught in a stampe...
Daily Reading
April 29, 2024
What have we come to accept as "discipleship"? A friend of mine recently handed me a program from a large and successful church somewhere in the Midwest. It's a rather exemplary model of what the idea has fallen to. Their plan for discipleship involv...
Daily Reading
April 28, 2024
It is possible to recover the lost life of our heart and with it the intimacy, beauty, and adventure of life with God. To do so we must leave what is familiar and comfortable — perhaps even parts of the religion in which we have come to trust — and t...
Daily Reading
April 27, 2024
I ran across a news release so shocking I had to read it twice. It didn’t make the front page but it should have: the average person now spends 93 percent of their life indoors (this includes your transportation time in car, bus, or metro). Ninety-t...
Daily Reading
April 26, 2024
The kingdom of heaven is like a king who prepared a wedding banquet for his son. He sent his servants to those who had been invited to the banquet to tell them to come, but they refused to come. Then he sent some more servants and said, "Tell those w...
Daily Reading
April 25, 2024
We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. (T. S. Eliot) Look, I am making all things new! (Jesus of Nazareth) See! The winter is past; the rains are ...
Daily Reading
April 24, 2024
If for all practical purposes we believe that this life is our best shot at happiness, if this is as good as it gets, we will live as desperate, demanding, and eventually despairing men and women. We will place on this world a burden it was never int...
Daily Reading
April 23, 2024
Because Jesus drank from the cup of suffering and wrath, that cup became the cup of salvation. The cup of suffering became the cup of joy. Turns out, it’s the same cup. Hebrews 12 says that it was for the joy that was set before Him that Jesus endure...
Daily Reading
April 22, 2024
Once upon a time the earth was whole and beautiful, shimmering like an emerald, filled with glory, bursting with anticipation. Such wonders waiting to be unveiled, such adventures waiting to be ours. Creation was like a fairy tale, a great legend—onl...