Jeremiah 48:29
There’s a certain feeling that comes when you finish something hard. The project that fought you for weeks is finally done. The repair holds. The goal you set back in January is checked off. You step back, look at the work, and something in you says, that’s good. Most of us know that feeling, and there’s nothing wrong with it.
Continue reading “The Sin Hiding in a Job Well Done”
Jeremiah 37:17
Most of us know what it is to want a word from God. Not a sign in the sky, just some quiet sense that He sees what we are facing and has something to say about it. The trouble is, that hunger usually shows up after we have spent a long time keeping His voice at arm’s length. That was Zedekiah’s problem, and he is about the last man we would expect to come looking.
Continue reading “Is There Any Word from the Lord?”
Jeremiah 35:5-6
Most of us know what it feels like to be the only person in the room saying no. Everyone else seems comfortable with the choice. Going along would be easier, and we can usually find a good reason to do it. That is when a conviction stops being an idea and becomes a decision.
Continue reading “When Convictions Are Tested”
Jeremiah 13:23
There is a question tucked inside the book of Jeremiah that is easy to read past. It sounds almost like a riddle. “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots?” (Jeremiah 13:23). Jeremiah was speaking to a people who had drifted so far from God that their rebellion had become second nature. They weren’t just breaking rules; they had broken their covenant, the deep, binding promise they had made with the Lord Himself. And the honest answer to the question was no. You can’t change what you’ve become.
Continue reading “Can a Leopard Change Its Spots?”
Jeremiah 5:28, ESV
We are pretty good at keeping up appearances. Most of us have learned how to look put-together even when things are falling apart inside. We smile at the right moments, say the right things, show up when we’re supposed to. And the world rewards that. A polished image opens doors that a messy, honest one sometimes doesn’t.
Continue reading “The Danger of Looking Good”
John 20:19–29
Every scar has a story. The one on my finger is from a knife I was told to leave alone. I didn’t listen. The one on my leg is from a bicycle crash I’d rather forget. And the one on my stomach is from a piece of metal that chipped off a steel chisel at exactly the wrong moment.
Continue reading “The Hope of Easter: Day 10”
John 20:11–18
A man I read about was adopted at birth and grew up with no knowledge of his biological family. In his forties, a DNA service connected him with a half-sister he had never known. They exchanged careful, tentative messages for weeks. Then one afternoon she called him, and the moment he heard her voice, something unexpected happened. She said his name, and he wept.
Continue reading “The Hope of Easter: Day 9”
1 Corinthians 15:12–24
A historian I read about spent two years trying to disprove the resurrection. He was not a believer, he was a skeptic, and he approached the accounts of Easter the way a detective approaches a crime scene: looking for inconsistencies, alternate explanations, reasons to dismiss. He catalogued the evidence on both sides. He interviewed scholars. He traced the manuscript traditions.
Continue reading “The Hope of Easter: Day 8”
Psalm 2
A photojournalist who covered conflict zones for twenty years described what she called the hardest moment of her career. Not the violence she’d witnessed, but a single night in a city under siege when she genuinely believed darkness was going to win. The brutality seemed total, the cruelty organized, the hope of liberation absurd.
Continue reading “The Hope of Easter: Day 7”