You Can’t Fool God

Read  Isaiah 1:1 through 5:30 Everyone has played charades. One player acts out a word or phrase silently, and the other players attempt to guess the term. This can be a fun game—as long as we don’t play it with God. Many people put on a show for God, going through the motions with no intent of living genuinely for …

Holy and Faithful

Read Colossians 1:1 through 3:4 Sometimes when we read the New Testament or the history of the Early Church, we do so with idealistic filters. We imagine the early Christians as almost sinless dynamos of faith who risked everything in order to follow the Lord. But Christians then, like Christians today, were sinners redeemed by God’s grace. Foxe’s Book of Martyrs …

A Desperate Search

Read  Song of Solomon 1:1 through 8:14 Most people have at least one “lost-as-a-child” story. I have two. I was gazing at a huge wall of linens mother was buying. Suddenly a cold dread struck me as I realized that she, and the shopping cart holding my younger sister, had vanished. The solitude, the fear one feels when one is …

Your Part of the Battle

Read  Proverbs 21:1 through 24:34 The horse is made ready for the day of battle, but victory rests with the Lord (Proverbs 21:31). In the midst of life’s struggles have you ever asked yourself, “How much should I do, and what should I wait for God to do?” God expects us to trust Him. There is no success in the …