Deepen Your Faith: Daily Devotionals

Maybe you have watched a house go up on an old foundation. It saves money. It saves time. But if the old foundation is cracked, everything built on top of it inherits the cracks. A lot of us try to build our lives that way. We take what we have done, good and bad, and...

Every church has one. A room, a program or a tradition that once meant the world to people. It met a need. It marked a season when God was clearly at work. At one of my first churches, it was a mural. Seven or eight years before we arrived, the youth had gotten...

Think about the thing you would least want anyone to know about you. Not the small stuff. The memory that still makes your face hot when it surfaces at two in the morning. Most of us carry something like that. A decision we cannot undo. Words we cannot take back. A...

Have you ever been given an instruction that made no sense at the moment? A doctor tells you to stop the medicine that seems to be working. A coach pulls you out right when you are hitting your stride. A boss asks you to slow down when every deadline says speed up....

Close your eyes for a moment and picture a creature from a planet on the far side of the universe. Make it completely new. Nothing like anything you have ever seen. Now open your eyes. Did your creature have eyes? A mouth? Arms or legs? Most of us build our "totally...

Walk through most homes and you will find a few odd things on the walls or shelves. A faded photo. A seashell. A ticket stub in a frame. An old key on a hook. To a visitor, they might look like clutter. To the family, every one of them has a story. In our home there...

Nobody writes their own story and watches it play out exactly as planned. You had a picture of how things would go. The career. The marriage. The kids. The health. The retirement. Then life took a turn you never saw coming. Maybe it was a loss. Maybe it was a door...

Most of the movies we love follow a familiar pattern. There is a hero with a problem. Somewhere along the way the hero meets a guide. A wise old mentor, a coach, a teacher. The guide offers advice and a little push. Then the hero goes out and wins. Think of Luke...

"How have you been?" "Good. God's been good." We say it all the time. And it is true. But have you noticed how little it tells the other person? It is a bit like someone telling you they took a great vacation and leaving it there. No beach. No mountain. No story about...

Think about the last time someone tried to convince you of something with a list. Five reasons. Three steps. A chart full of bullet points. You might remember a point or two. Probably not all of them. Now think about the last time someone told you a story. Maybe a...

Before phones gave us turn-by-turn directions, somebody would say, "Just follow me." You would pull out of the parking lot behind them and try to keep up. If you have ever done that, you know the trick. You cannot ride their bumper. You cannot pull up beside them...

Think back to a wedding day. The bride spends hours getting ready. There is the dress, the hair, the flowers, and a team of bridesmaids making sure every detail is right. The groom gets ready too. Guys, be honest. You never smelled better than you did on your wedding...

"Science will win because it works." Stephen Hawking said that in a 2010 interview with Diane Sawyer. Whether we would say it out loud or not, a lot of us believe some version of it. We trust progress. We trust that the right research, the right technology, or the...

Some invitations are easy to ignore. A flyer on the windshield. An email you delete before you finish reading the subject line. Other invitations stop you in your tracks. A grandparent pats the seat beside them and says, "Come sit with me. I want to tell you...

Think about the plans you had twenty years ago. Where you would live. What you would be doing. How your family would look. How many of them worked out the way you imagined? I had things mapped out too. Very little of it went the way I drew it up. You can probably say...