Daily Reading
October 21, 2023
As a wise old sage was praying with me through some of the painful memories of my life, I was immediately reminded of the time in middle school when my first girlfriend broke my heart. These wounds can linger for a lifetime if you let them — the firs...
Daily Reading
October 19, 2023
Our life is a story. A rather long and complicated story that has unfolded over time. There are many scenes, large and small, and many "firsts." Your first step; your first word; your first day of school. There was your first best friend; your first ...
Daily Reading
October 18, 2023
God created us in freedom to be his intimate allies, and he will not give up on us. He seeks his allies still. Not religion. Not good church people. Lovers. Allies. Friends of the deepest sort.I will give them a heart to know me, that I am the LORD. ...
Daily Reading
October 17, 2023
Today’s Daily Reading is an excerpt from Morgan Snyder's new book, Becoming a King“What does a man need to survive?” I posed this question years ago to my very young son as we were headed out on an adventure.After careful and honest consideration, he...
Daily Reading
October 16, 2023
"The King is enthralled by your beauty." Psalm 45:11Lovely little six-year-old Lacey was visiting our ministry headquarters the other day, going from office to office, swinging on the door frame and asking with a smile, "Would you like to hear my son...
Daily Reading
October 15, 2023
The word I choose to describe Jesus is life. Pure, lush, exuberant Life. Life that proves to be unquenchable, unstoppable, indestructible. As John summarized the whole affair, “In him was life, and that light was the light of men” (1:4). It sure was....
Daily Reading
October 14, 2023
I had my own tin-foil-brain, fried-soul kind of day. My rescue didn't take place until I had thrashed through most of the calamity. It was the kind of day when everything seems to go sideways from the moment you get out of bed; I’ll bet you’ve had on...
Daily Reading
October 13, 2023
Life is a journey of the heart that requires the mind—not the other way around. The church sometimes gets this backward and makes knowing the right things the center of life. It’s not; the heart is the center of life. Desire is always where the actio...
Daily Reading
October 12, 2023
Love your neighbor, Jesus urged, as you love yourself. (Which, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, is a pretty sick command if we are to hate ourselves.) How you handle people is the second great test of your character. Again, Jesus is cutting through both a...
Daily Reading
October 11, 2023
The book “Killing Lions” is a conversation between John and Sam Eldredge about the trials young men face. [Sam] I know so many of us long for words of validation, but few ever hear them. An acquaintance of mine who lived down the street went out an...
Daily Reading
October 10, 2023
What do I pray, Lord? What is this about? Pause. This is a really, really helpful place to begin — to ask God what to pray. I don’t know what’s going on. I’m looking at the equivalent of a two-headed rooster on my windowsill. I don’t know why God bro...
Daily Reading
October 9, 2023
I thought of Jesus’ warning about the end of the age, how as times grow dark and people feel more keenly pressed, love will grow rare. “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom … Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of ...
Daily Reading
October 8, 2023
But you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, t...
Daily Reading
October 7, 2023
I cannot say this more emphatically—life affected Jesus. “We have spread so many ashes over the historical Jesus that we scarcely feel the glow of His presence anymore,” lamented Brennan Manning. “He is a man in a way that we have forgotten men can b...
Daily Reading
October 6, 2023
We value independence. Mobility. Self-sufficiency. Yay. But we are a dependent people. Dependent on air, food, water. Needful of others. Needful of God. He is our divine helper, our ezer, without whom we will not be able to live a life of meaning fil...
Daily Reading
October 5, 2023
One of the saddest of all the sad stories in the history of the people of God comes shortly after the dramatic exodus from Egypt, as they stand on the brink of a whole new life in the land God had promised: But you were unwilling to go up; you rebell...
Daily Reading
October 4, 2023
Sometimes we feel hopeless to ever change simply because our personal history is filled with our failed attempts to change. Where was that angel who was supposed to be guarding our tongue and preventing those harsh words from lashing out at our child...
Daily Reading
October 3, 2023
Where do we go from here? "This life," wrote Jonathan Edwards, "ought to be spent by us only as a journey towards heaven." That's the only story worth living in now. The road goes out before us and our destination awaits. In the imagery of Hebrews, a...
Daily Reading
October 2, 2023
The deeper reason we fear our own glory is that once we let others see it, they will have seen the truest us, and that is nakedness indeed. We can repent of our sin. We can work on our "issues." But there is nothing to be "done" about our glory. It's...
Daily Reading
October 1, 2023
Believing in God is not the same thing as union with God. Doing various God — activities is not the same as union with God. Obeying God isn’t necessarily union with God. These things can all be done while there is a kind of distance between our soul ...
Daily Reading
September 30, 2023
Do not give way to fear. (1 Peter 3:6) The reason we fear to step out is because we know that it might not go well (is that an understatement?). We have a history of wounds screaming at us to play it safe. We feel so deeply that if it doesn’t go well...
Daily Reading
September 29, 2023
Christianity is often presented as essentially the transfer of a body of knowledge. We learn about where the Philistines were from, and how much a drachma would be worth today, and all sorts of things about the original Greek. The information present...
Daily Reading
September 28, 2023
We long for beauty, and when the biblical writers speak of heaven, they use the most beautiful imagery they can. You can almost hear the agony of the writer trying to get it right while knowing he falls far short of what he sees. In the book of Revel...
Daily Reading
September 26, 2023
Let me tell you, few things can mess you up as badly as trying to do your best. For the tender heart, the earnest heart, it is so discouraging to give all you have trying to do what you think Jesus would have you do, and find yourself falling short, ...
Daily Reading
September 25, 2023
If you'll recall, Moses put a veil over his face, first to hide his glory, then to hide the fact that it was fading away. That, too, was a picture of a deeper reality. We all do that. We all have veiled our glory, or someone has veiled it for us. Usu...
Daily Reading
September 24, 2023
The Israelites had to fight to get to the promised land, and they had to fight to get in. Once there, they had to fight to clear it of enemies, and then fight to keep it so. David had to fight to secure his throne, and he too had to fight to keep it....
Daily Reading
September 23, 2023
All good things come to an end. I hate that phrase. It's a lie. Even our troubles and our heartbreaks tell us something about our true destiny. The tragedies that strike us to the core and elicit the cry "this isn't the way it was supposed to be!" ar...
Daily Reading
September 22, 2023
Today’s Daily Reading is an excerpt from Morgan Snyder's book Becoming a King.Let’s face it, there’s nothing like marriage to allure us and at the same time make us spontaneously combust with fear or anger at a moment’s notice. In the middle years of...
Daily Reading
September 21, 2023
We are invited to become followers of Jesus. Not just believers. Followers. There is a difference. Follower assumes that someone else is doing the leading. As in “He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. ...He goes on ahead of them, and his...
Daily Reading
September 20, 2023
“What people think of me” is a very powerful motivator. It is still shaping us more than we’d like to admit. It shapes our theology, our politics, our values.Do any of us go through one entire day being utterly true no matter how many different envir...