Devotionals
A Prayer and Fasting Devotional
Obedience is important to God.
Perhaps that sounds to you like the understatement of the century. You may be saying to yourself, “Of course obedience is important to God…what a remarkably unimpressive way to start to a devotional!” And that may be a fair summation of your perspective on the Christian life. However, I’d like to suggest that the importance God gives to our obedience is an often-underemphasized reality in substantial portions of the American church.
A Prayer and Fasting Devotional
In 2 Kings 17, we read of how the Israelites were deported to Assyria “because the people of Israel had sinned against the LORD their God” (2 Kings 17:7). In their place, the king of Assyria settled peoples from other nations to take possession of the cities and the land. After lions attacked and killed some of them, they sent for a priest to teach them the “law of the god of the land.” Responding to the teaching of these priests, the people learned to “fear the LORD,” but they also continued to serve and worship their former gods.
A Prayer and Fasting Devotional
Media Gone Mad: Living with Information Overload: How can we be sure of staying ‘unspun’ in a world where we have never been so connected—and where it has never been so apparent that knowledge is power?
What’s Next: Hinge Events Ahead in 2015: The perils in prediction—in geopolitics as in other walks of life—arise from the fact that we simply do not have enough information.
A Prayer and Fasting Devotional
Have you heard the screams of a hungry newborn? As a new father, this was rather eye-opening (read: sleep-depriving) for me. I thought: “How can something so little scream so piercingly?” The hungry baby screams for milk with an intensity and an urgency that is virtually unparalleled in our world. We should crave spiritual nourishment with such urgency and desperation.
A Prayer and Fasting Devotional
I have recently had the wild blessing of witnessing a powerful conversion. I have seen a man who has never known what it is like to be excluded, who has proven his worth through successful business, who lives the seemingly charmed life of prosperity, a good name and the love of many, step out of darkness and into glorious light.
A Prayer and Fasting Devotional
A Prayer and Fasting Devotional
Unfortunately, Psalm 23 has often become associated with death and funerals within American culture. Yet in reality, this psalm is a psalm about living, and it provides the reader with the needed assurance in order to be radical for God. It is, as one commentator puts it, “…one that puts daily activities, such as eating, drinking, and seeking security, in a radically God-centered perspective. This psalm invites people into a declaration of trust that is both extraordinarily courageous and coldly rational.”A Devotional on Seeking God
It is intrinsic to our conception of God that God is inherently invisible. “You cannot see my face,” God famously told Moses on the mountain, “for man shall not see me and live” (Exod 33:20, esv). God in himself cannot be seen directly. If he is to be seen at all, it must be through some sort of manifestation in another form, some kind of epiphany.A Prayer and Fasting Devotional
“See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” - 1 John 3:1aDo you look like your parents or siblings? Those of us who do have inevitably experienced a moment when someone meets our family, or sees their picture, and exclaims that (goodness gracious!) you look just like them! Familial resemblance does not just involve our good looks; in even deeper ways we can see it in our behavior. This can go from the mundane (we laugh like our grandfather) to the good (we are compassionate like our mother) to the bad (we have a temper like our older brother). Our families resemble each other in deep and meaningful ways, and this comes into especially sharp focus when we get married. Marriage brings together two people from different families who immediately notice that they have developed different (and sometimes wonderfully complementary!) practices because, "that's how my family does it."
A Parable on Prayer
We won’t always see our prayers answered. If there is no guarantee for answered prayer, why should we persist in prayer?In Luke 18:1-8, Jesus addressed this issue head-on:
And he told them a parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart. He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected man. And there was a widow in that city who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Give me justice against my adversary.’ For a while he refused, but afterward he said to himself, ‘Though I neither fear God nor respect man, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice, so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.’” And the Lord said, “Hear what the unrighteous judge says. And will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? I tell you, he will give justice to them speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?