Devotionals

The Bible tells us that we need to take a good, long look at what is going on in our hearts when we partake in the Lord’s Supper. “Let a person examine himself, and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup...

We may imagine it an easy thing to pray a simple prayer. But it turns out to be an incredible challenge to pray often and pray well. Even so, God calls his people to a kind of continual and thoughtful communication that saturates every...

The Bible has a lot to say about working hard, being disciplined, and fighting all slothful tendencies. The Christian work ethic we derive from the teaching of both the Old and New Testament leaves no room for leisurely lives...

Hebrews 2:1 tells us that “we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it.” Much like a leisurely float down a meandering river, if we choose to relax in the Christian life we can be assured that the tide of our culture...

For years on playgrounds everywhere church kids have been stymied by the agitator’s questions, “Can God do anything? And if so, can he make a rock so big he can’t move it?” While children may struggle with the answer, I hope the rest of us do not...

Followers of Christ always need to be on the look out for opportunities to stand up for Christ and to speak up for his cause. And the more sinful the culture, the more critical it is that God’s people exploit...

We all work to make our lives as comfortable and pain-free as possible. We buy all sorts of appliances and gadgets to make hard jobs easy, and seek out any available remedy to alleviate our bodily aches and pains. And this makes perfect sense. Only a masochist would...

The Bible is a “God-breathed” book (2Tim.3:16)—which vividly depicts a set of written words that are so closely associated with the Author that they are to be pictured as though God himself were speaking them with the breath of his own mouth. As such, the written “word of God” is described...

As we read through the Book of Jeremiah we are confronted with a very familiar refrain, “God would never do that!” This is what the Lord’s faithful spokesman encountered when he exposed the gaping distance between the standards God had commanded in his word, and the values...

In the model prayer that Jesus provided to guide us into the kinds of prayer concerns we ought to habitually bring before the Father, he included the request: “lead us not into temptation” (Mt.6:13). I would hope this recurring appeal for God to direct us around sinfully enticing...

Many take offense at our call to trust Christ for the forgiveness of their sins because it is so exclusive. They stumble over the words of Jesus when he said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn.14:6). They despise the tone of our evangelism when it echoes...

The Bible often reminds us of the Christian calling to please those with whom we interact from day to day. Servants should please their masters (1Tim.6:1), children their parents (Col.3:20), citizens their governing authorities (Rom.13:1), parents should parent without exasperating their children (Eph.6:4), and the list goes...