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 ho...
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, ...
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 w...
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...
Daily Reading
April 21, 2024
Peter was one of Jesus' closest friends, one of only three that were invited into his innermost circle. In Gethsemane, at his hour of greatest need, Jesus again took Peter aside, poured his heart out to him; he looked to Peter for strength. Three yea...
Daily Reading
April 20, 2024
Faith looks back and draws courage; hope looks ahead and keeps desire alive. And meantime? In the meantime we need one more item for our journey. To appreciate what it may be, we have to step back and ask, what is all this for? The resurrection of ou...
Daily Reading
April 19, 2024
Before we go any farther in our search, I need to make the offer of Christianity clear: There is a way to be good again. The hope of Christianity is that we get to live life like Jesus. That beautiful goodness can be ours. He can heal what has gone w...
Daily Reading
April 18, 2024
I'm simply sitting on my back porch. Warm summer evening, cool breeze, beautiful sky now turning that deep navy blue just before dark. That's when the carnival started. Some agitated place in me started clamoring for relief. Even though the evening w...
Daily Reading
April 17, 2024
Today's Daily Reading is an excerpt from Morgan Snyder's book Becoming a King Since the beginning of time, every age has faced unprecedented battles. Today’s Western world lives and breathes a gospel of now. Instant gratification is the way of our cu...
Daily Reading
April 16, 2024
Oh that I once past changing were Fast in thy paradise, where no flower can wither. (George Herbert) I think of the woman I helped in the grocery store last week. She was only in her thirties, I’m guessing, but she was bent over in her wheelchair, ti...
Daily Reading
April 14, 2024
Anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun! (2 Corinthians 5:17 NLT) We haven’t yet seen anyone in their true glory. Including you. Yes, Mozart wrote symphonies as a child, and Picasso could dra...
Daily Reading
April 13, 2024
I drove you in disgrace from the mount of God, and I expelled you, O guardian cherub, from among the fiery stones. (Ezekiel 28:16) So evil entered the Story. I am staggered by the level of naïveté that most people live with regarding evil. They don...
Daily Reading
April 12, 2024
Jesus’ freedom is a difficult thing to teach on for many reasons; let me name two. First, there are certain types who will hear this and find it an excuse to live as they please. Many characters in our irreverent age “don’t care what others think.” T...
Daily Reading
April 11, 2024
By “mystery” we don’t mean “forever beyond your knowing,” but “something to be explored.” “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter,” says the book of Proverbs, “to search out a matter is the glory of kings” (25:2). God yearns to be known. But he w...
Daily Reading
April 10, 2024
The new covenant has two parts to it: "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh" (Ezek. 36:26). God removed your old heart when he circumcised your heart; he giv...
Daily Reading
April 9, 2024
The book “Killing Lions” is a conversation between John and Sam Eldredge about the trials young men face. [John] Sam, What have you been learning as you pursue your dreams, especially as it relates to writing this book? Has it gone easily? What...
Daily Reading
April 8, 2024
The human heart has an infinite capacity for happiness and an unending need for love, because it is created for an infinite God who is unending love. The desperate turn is when we bring the aching abyss of our hearts to one another with the hope, the...
Daily Reading
April 7, 2024
Maybe it would be better to turn our search to the headwaters, to that mighty root from which these branches grow. Who is this One we allegedly come from, whose image every man bears? What is he like? In a man's search for his strength, telling him t...
Daily Reading
April 6, 2024
God promises every man futility and failure; he guarantees every woman relational heartache and loneliness. We spend most of our waking hours attempting to end-run the curse. We will fight this truth with all we've got. Sure, other people suffer defe...
Daily Reading
April 5, 2024
This motive — reverence for God — is a slippery one. This lets in a great deal of the clutter that gets between us and God, because it seems like the proper thing to do. “Papa, I come to you this morning” has a totally different feel than “Almighty G...