Insights of Hope
Your Servant Is Listening
What is God calling on you to do for the kingdom? Are you someone who is willing to answer God‘s call? Will you answer Him, “Your servant is listening.”?
Understanding Without Excusing
I've written about empathy for years, and I still find most of us mixing it up with sympathy. Sympathy sees a man stealing groceries because he's hungry and says, "That's okay." Empathy sees the same hunger and says, "I understand. It's still wrong."
That's easy to hold until they're our groceries. Then we remember how much we've been forgiven ourselves, and suddenly we're not sure which one we owe. Jude, a brother of Jesus, wrote a short letter about walking that narrow line. Before he tells anyone how to show mercy, he tells them where they need to be standing first.
This week's devotional is about loving people like Christ without making peace with what's hurting them.
He Wants All of Us, Yet Asks for Nothing
I've been told I'm not a real Christian more times than I can count. Those moments taught me something: when we're busy defending what we believe, it's easy to forget who we serve.
Jesus doesn't keep score. He wants all of us, and yet He asks for nothing. Weeks after Peter denied Him, that same community was giving nearly everything away with joy. They brought what they had. God did the growing.
This week's devotional is about the freedom of simply saying, "Here it is."
A Blessing Out Of Left Field
God can send us blessings and deliver us in ways that we nor our enemies ever expected.
The Father Who Runs to Meet Us
Some seasons feel like a high school conditioning drill. Sprint, touch the line, turn, sprint again, until you're bent over with your hands on your knees.
When we've drifted from God in the middle of that, the trip back feels like one more sprint we don't have. So, we rehearse our apology, just like the prodigal son on his long walk home.
He never got to finish it.
Finding Our Wilderness in the Noise
One scene in Steel Magnolias makes the whole room disappear for me. So why does the noise win when I sit down to pray?
When the crowds grew, Jesus didn't push harder. He stepped away, and He did it often.
Me And My House Serve The LORD
Good leadership is essential to the well-being of everyone following that leadership. As we look around us, and particularly look at the political landscape in our country, we find that there are too few good leaders.
We are all leaders in some aspect of our lives. So the question is… Are you a good leader? Good leadership begins with serving God.
The Most Dangerous Liar
We guard against the liars around us. But the one I trust most? His name is Kent.
I'll always be this way. I'm not good enough for God to love me. Tell that story long enough, and we stop noticing it's a story. We assume it is truth. God however knows better, and understanding this, Paul knew real change starts with a new way of thinking.
When God Hands Us a Harder Problem
My grandson got stuck on a math problem. It couldn't be solved until another one was solved first. So, we went back a step. Then it made sense.
Faith has worked that way for me. It felt simple, until God started pressing on the parts of my life I wanted to keep. Saul knew God too. Then he met Jesus on the road to Damascus, and the man who understood everything had to be led by the hand.
That wasn't failure. It was God giving him more. That is what today’s devotion is about.
Trust & Obedience To God For His Promises
Joshua was obedient and trusted God to defeat the Canaanite armies that tried to stop Israel from possessing the Promised Land. What do you need to trust and obey God for so that He can give you the victory and possession of His promise to you?
Room To Grow
Growth exposes what we can't carry alone. The early church learned that fast. As it grew, a group of widows started getting overlooked. Rather than tighten their grip, the apostles made room for others to lead.
One of them was Stephen, handed the unglamorous job of getting meals to people in need. Yet the first time we meet Saul, the church's fiercest opponent and future greatest missionary, he's watching what Stephen's faithfulness cost him.
Stephen never saw what his small assignment would become. Most of us won't either.
This week's devotional asks whether we love our church because we're growing or because we're comfortable, and who might grow if we made room.
Remembering How He Brought Us Through
What are the “12 stones” that you use as a reminder and a testimony of what God has brought you through?
The Prayer That Didn’t Ask Permission
Someone who shares my faith told me I must be an enemy. I hadn't attacked their position. I'd offered a different one, and said this wasn't about being Christian — it was about being truthful.
That was the last time we spoke.
Days later, a message from someone who's never shared any of it. Their father had a frightening test in the morning. Would I pray? They joked that they weren't exactly the praying kind and needed to outsource this one.
No preamble. No credentials. No apology for how long it had been.
One conversation made belonging conditional on agreement. The other assumed no belonging at all, and asked anyway.
This week's devotional is about the ledgers we keep, and what actually gets received when we come with nothing but the truth.
Go Get Your Blessing (But Don’t Forget Your God!)
God’s promises are true, and what He’s promised you, you can be courageous to possess. But once you’ve got your blessing, don’t forget the One who gave it to you!
The Letter I Wrote to God
Yesterday was World Letter Writing Day.
When I was young, I wrote my then-girlfriend letters across whole summers apart. I thought it was silly. She kept every one.
I still write — lately about the sermons I hear. So maybe I should not have been surprised when, this week, I wrote a letter to God.
My mind was scattered. The room was quiet; I was not. But somewhere in the writing, the focus I had chased all day just arrived.
Turns out I am in old company. Jesus stepped away from the noise on purpose. Paul poured out his heart one page at a time. Not techniques — just turning, deliberately, toward the One already turned toward them.
This week's devotional is about the small ways we make room for God in a world built to keep us from ever being still.
An Open Heart For God’s Mission
What is God trying to open up your heart and vision to do in accordance with His plan?
The Life Behind the Number
My mother turned ninety last weekend. She spent part of the evening dancing. Forty years ago she told me she didn't expect to see fifty. She had the medical history to back it up.
There was a season when she could have recited Footprints in the Sand the way you'd repeat one side of an argument. At ninety, that's a memory. She doesn't wonder anymore whose footprints those are.
Isaiah wrote to people convinced God had moved on — people hauling around gods they had to carry themselves. He drew the contrast plain. You carry yours. Mine has carried you since before you were born.
She isn't thankful for ninety years. She's thankful for Who was in every one of them.
This week's devotional is about what makes a life full — and why none of us need ninety years to learn it.
