Daily Reading
November 20, 2023
The question lodged deep in our hearts, hidden from our conscious minds, is: "Do you care for me, God?"What's under that question?Blaise Pascal, in his Pensées, says, "The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of." What's under that questi...
Daily Reading
November 19, 2023
Our experience of Jesus is limited most often by the limits we put on him! A painful truth, but also a hopeful one. Perhaps we can take down some of those barriers. Most of the limits we put on Jesus happen unconsciously. Sometimes we place the limit...
Daily Reading
November 18, 2023
If we forget — no, when we forget — who God is, what He has done, and who we are in Him and to Him, we put ourselves in great peril. We cannot live well nor arrive at the end of our journey triumphant unless we remember. Yes, there are many things th...
Daily Reading
November 17, 2023
Life 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 beauty,...
Daily Reading
November 16, 2023
When we forget (and oh, how we forget), our senses can trigger an awakening of remembrance and place, and suddenly we are back as though it were yesterday. Sense-memory is such an exquisite gift from God, especially our sense of smell; the olfactory ...
Daily Reading
November 15, 2023
Walking with God leads to receiving his intimate counsel, and counseling leads to deep restoration. As we learn to walk with God and hear his voice, he is able to bring up issues in our hearts that need speaking to. Some of those wounds were enough t...
Daily Reading
November 14, 2023
Today’s Daily Reading is an excerpt from Morgan Snyder's book “Becoming a King”For many years, we were like just about everybody else: unconsciously forsaking honest soul rest, always going, with overfilled calendars and little to show in the categor...
Daily Reading
November 13, 2023
Every era has its problems when it comes to knowing Jesus. One of ours is this: Having lost all confidence in the noble, the heroic, even the consistently good, we have come to celebrate the neurotic. Really. The heroes of our novels and movies are a...
Daily Reading
November 12, 2023
Your wounds brought messages with them. Lots of messages. Somehow they all usually land in the same place. They had a similar theme. “You’re worthless.” “You’re not a woman.” “You’re too much ... and not enough.” “You’re a disappointment.” “You are r...
Daily Reading
November 11, 2023
This stream of Counseling doesn't just flow to us directly from Christ, only from him; it flows through his people as well. We need others—and need them deeply. Yes, the Spirit was sent to be our Counselor. Yes, Jesus speaks to us personally. But oft...
Daily Reading
November 10, 2023
Remain in me, and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fr...
Daily Reading
November 9, 2023
Who among us has not suffered betrayal at the hands of a trusted friend? Who among us has not shrunk away in response to being hurt? Which one of us has not been responsible for wounding another? We all have.We all have.We need Jesus. We need mercy. ...
Daily Reading
November 8, 2023
If you have any doubts as to whether or not God loves wildness, spend a night in the woods ... alone. Take a walk out in a thunderstorm. Go for a swim with a pod of killer whales. Get a bull moose mad at you. Whose idea was this, anyway? The Great Ba...
Daily Reading
November 7, 2023
A Story. An Epic.Something hidden in the ancient past.Something dangerous now unfolding.Something waiting in the future for us to discover.Some crucial role for us to play.Christianity, in its true form, tells us that there is an Author and that he i...
Daily Reading
November 6, 2023
What does it mean to be defiantly joyful in this moment when I am dwelling on the ancient path of shame and disappointment in myself? Those paths are made of quicksand. I need a Savior. I have one. My friend Lisa Beck says that God planned our rescu...
Daily Reading
November 5, 2023
Now, I know my fellow evangelicals will rush to protest that it is the cross of Jesus Christ alone that opens the way to heaven for any person. No amount of personal righteousness could ever suffice. I believe this. It is grace alone — the unmerited ...
Daily Reading
November 4, 2023
The thing you are made for is the renewal of all things. God has given you a heart for his kingdom—not the wispy vagaries of a cloudy heaven, but the sharp reality of the world made new. This is one of the most important things you can know about you...
Daily Reading
November 3, 2023
The book “Killing Lions” is a conversation between John and Sam Eldredge about the trials young men face. [John] Either we have God or we don’t. Either he is our ally, or we are on our own. What you believe about this affects everything else. If ...
Daily Reading
November 2, 2023
The heart is the connecting point, the meeting place between any two persons. The kind of deep soul intimacy we crave with God and with others can be experienced only from the heart. I know a man who took his daughter to dinner; she was surprised, de...
Daily Reading
November 1, 2023
Some of the sentences the Enemy accuses each of us with have been there since we were young; others were added in the ensuing years as Satan saw opportunity to strengthen our fear and cynicism through “interpreting” those events in our lives that see...
Daily Reading
October 31, 2023
I’ve often wondered at the long lists found many places in the Bible that recount a roster of men as “the son of so-and-so, who was the son of so-and-so.” You’ll find many of these rosters in the Scriptures, and elsewhere in ancient literature. Perha...
Daily Reading
October 30, 2023
The deepest convictions of our heart are formed by stories and reside there in the images and emotions of story. As a young boy, around the time my heart began to suspect that the world was a fearful place and I was on my own to find my way through i...
Daily Reading
October 29, 2023
Now—is Jesus more like Mother Teresa or William Wallace? The answer is ... it depends. If you're a leper, an outcast, a pariah of society whom no one has ever touched, if all you have ever longed for is just one kind word, then Christ is the incarnat...
Daily Reading
October 28, 2023
All sorts of awful things can seem to issue from your heart — anger, lust, fear, petty jealousies. If you think it's you, a reflection of what's really going on in your heart, it will disable you. It could stop your journey dead in its tracks. What y...
Daily Reading
October 27, 2023
Jesus is everywhere. But let me give you a grace that will help you see him: He said to them, “Therefore every teacher of the law who has been instructed about the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new tre...
Daily Reading
October 26, 2023
"The spiritual life cannot be made suburban,” said Howard Macey. “It is always frontier and we who live in it must accept and even rejoice that it remains untamed.” The greatest obstacle to realizing our dreams is the false self’s hatred of mystery. ...
Daily Reading
October 25, 2023
I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear. But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. (John 16:12-13)There's more that Jesus wants to say to you, much more, and now that his Spirit resides in your hear...
Daily Reading
October 24, 2023
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 unthinkabl...
Daily Reading
October 23, 2023
In order to understand what compels Jesus, you must keep in mind the distinction between the laws of God and the laws of men, and furthermore, that magnificent difference between the spirit of the law and the letter of the law.Jesus sets before us a ...
Daily Reading
October 22, 2023
"The glory of God is man fully alive." (Saint Irenaeus)When I first stumbled across this quote my initial reaction was ... You’re kidding me. Really? I mean, is that what you’ve been told? That the purpose of God — the very thing he’s staked his repu...