The time has come for us to quit playing chess with God over our lives. We cannot win, but we can delay the victory, dragging on the pain of grasping and the poison of possessing. You see, there are two kinds of losses in life. The first is...
READ MOREWhen God comes to call Jeremiah to be his prophet of hard sayings to Judah, Jeremiah protests, saying, "'Ah, Sovereign LORD ... I do not know how to speak; I am only a child.' But the LORD said to me, 'Do not say, "I am only a child." You must go...
READ MOREToday’s Daily Reading is an excerpt from Morgan Snyder's book “Becoming a King”
The first doorway we must travel through on our path toward becoming a king is to choose sonship. It is a choice.
Are we willing to...
READ MOREJoy does not simply happen to us. We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day. —Henri J. M. Nouwen
When I was young, I thought that following God and being a Christian would lead to a life that was kind of easy, filled...
READ MORETo wait is to learn the spiritual grace of detachment, the freedom of desire. Not the absence of desire, but desire at rest. St. John of the Cross lamented that “the desires weary and fatigue the soul; for they are like restless and...
READ MORENow the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?"
The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees...
READ MORELately, the surge is toward “justice Christianity” — intervening to prevent human trafficking or slavery, caring for indigenous cultures or for the planet itself. And it is right and it is wrong. My goodness, yes, of course God cares about...
READ MOREWhy don’t I wake with a joyful heart? Joy was just here. Where did it go?
I began to realize that what I’ve done for most of my life is resign myself to this idea: I’m really not going to have any lasting joy. And from that...
READ MOREWe are not what we were meant to be, and we know it. If, when passing a stranger on the street, we happen to meet eyes, we quickly avert our glance. Cramped into the awkward community of an elevator, we search for something, anything to look at...
READ MOREThe book “Killing Lions” is a conversation between John and Sam Eldredge about the trials young men face.
[Sam] Our adolescent culture really does play into our confusion; with so many answers...
READ MOREI’ve come to the place where I have had to stop telling people, “I’ll pray for you.”
I simply know that despite my good intentions — and these promises are almost always spoken with good intent — I know that nine times out of ten I just...
READ MOREThe only person that can satisfy the aching abyss of the human heart is Jesus Christ.
—Oswald Chambers
I hate Valentines Day. There, I said it.
Most of the guys reading this just thought, Yes! I can’t...
READ MOREJohn Wesley was thirty-five when he experienced the now famous "warming" of his heart — not his mind — toward Christ, and knew in that moment he had become not merely a Christian, but something more — a lover of God. Shortly after, he penned the...
READ MOREThere are three desires that I have found essential to a woman’s heart, which are not entirely different from a man’s and yet they remain distinctly feminine. Not every woman wants a battle to fight, but every woman yearns to be fought for...
READ MOREHis ability to live with all these qualities we’ve seen, in such a way that no one quality dominates—as is so often the case in our personalities—eclipsing the richness of the others. To live in such a way that there is always something of an...
READ MOREThe reason a woman wants a beauty to unveil, the reason she asks, Do you delight in me? is simply that God does as well. God is captivating beauty. As David prays, “One thing I ask of the LORD, this is what I seek: that I may...gaze upon...
READ MOREHallelujah! Salvation and glory and power belong to our God, for true and just are his judgments. (Revelation 19:1–2)
Evil judged and utterly destroyed. Forever and ever. Not just in the fairy tale, but in your story. Satan...
In [Christ] you were also circumcised, in the putting off of the sinful nature, not with a circumcision done by the hands of men but with the circumcision done by Christ. (Col. 2:11)
It’s not just that the Cross did something for...
READ MOREI always felt it strange that God needed to command us to love him. (It is the first and greatest of all the commandments.) Now I see better. When God calls us to love him as our “first love,” it is not only because he deserves to hold that place...
READ MOREChoosing love will open spaces of immense beauty and joy for you, but you will be hurt. You already know this. You have retreated from love countless times in your life because of it. We all have. We have been and will be hurt by the loss of...
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