Deepen Your Faith: Daily Devotionals

DAY 1 — MONDAY
God Could Have Picked Anywhere

Think about the most consequential decision you’ve ever made. Now imagine you had unlimited options, no constraints, no limitations, no wrong answers, and you still chose the same one. That’s not a default. That’s a conviction.

God owned every hillside on earth. He could have planted the cross anywhere he wanted.

Scripture: Luke 23:33
Additional reading: Psalm 48:1–2 — “”Great is the LORD, and most worthy of praise, in the city of our God, his holy mountain.””

When Luke writes that they came to “the place called the Skull,” he names it like it’s already significant, because it is. Mount Moriah. Jerusalem. The geographic center of the ancient world, sitting at the crossroads of every major trade route connecting Africa, Asia, and Europe. An ancient map from 1580 depicts the world as a three-leaf clover: Africa on one leaf, Europe on another, Asia on the third. And right in the center, where the leaves meet, Jerusalem.

God didn’t land there by accident. He chose it because it was the optimal location to send a message to the world. Whatever happened on that hill would travel. He chose it because it was already holy ground, the mountain where he had met with Abraham, where David had wept and built an altar, where Solomon’s Temple had stood. He chose it because the story he was finishing had been building on that exact plot of ground for a thousand years.

The cross was not a crisis response. It was a destination. God had been walking toward it, toward you, for a very long time.

Reflect: God could have placed the most important moment in history anywhere. He chose a specific hill, a specific city, a specific crossroads. What does that level of intentionality say to you about how God sees your life — the moments that feel random, the places that feel forgotten?

DAY 2 — TUESDAY
The Ram in the Thicket — And What Came After

Has something ever cost you more than you bargained for? You said yes to something — a commitment, a relationship, a promise — and you meant it. But when the moment came to actually pay the price, you found out just how much you’d signed up for.

Abraham had that moment on a mountain.

Scripture: Genesis 22:1–14
Additional reading: Romans 8:32 — “”He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all — how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?””

God told Abraham to take Isaac, his only son, the son through whom all the promises rested, to a mountain he would show him, and sacrifice him there. This was Mount Moriah. And what God was asking Abraham to do was exactly what the pagan nations around him were already doing: sacrificing their firstborn to appease their gods.

Abraham obeyed. On the way up, Isaac noticed they had the flint and the wood, but no sacrifice. Abraham told him, “God will provide for himself the sacrifice.” He said it as faith. He may not have known how true it was.

When Abraham raised the blade, an angel stopped him. He looked up and saw a ram caught in a thicket. God provided. The writer of Hebrews tells us Abraham was so convinced of God’s power that he believed God could raise Isaac from the dead if it came to that.

Centuries later, on that same mountain, Jesus prayed the same kind of prayer: “Father, all things are possible for you. Let this cup pass from me.” This time, God did not stay his hand. What he withheld at the thicket, he gave completely at the cross.

Reflect: Abraham said “God will provide for himself the sacrifice.” And he was more right than he knew. Where in your life are you holding onto something God may be asking you to trust him with? What would it look like to believe he can provide, even when you can’t see the ram in the thicket?

DAY 3 — WEDNESDAY
A Sacrifice That Actually Costs Something

There’s a difference between being sorry and being willing to pay. Most of us have said the right words after doing something wrong. Far fewer of us have been willing to absorb the full consequence ourselves rather than let someone else carry it.

King David learned that difference the hard way — on the same hill where Abraham had stood.

Scripture: 2 Samuel 24:18–25
Additional reading: Hebrews 9:14 — “”How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death.””

David sinned by numbering his people in a moment of pride, leaning on his own resources instead of trusting God. When the prophet Gad came to deliver God’s judgment, David was given a choice: three years of famine, three months fleeing from enemies, or three days of pestilence. If David was the king he wanted to be, he would have chosen the option that fell hardest on himself. Instead, he chose the three days. And thousands of people suffered and died for what he had done.

The very next morning, broken by what his choice had cost others, David went to the threshing floor at the top of Mount Moriah to build an altar. The man who owned it, Araunah, offered everything for free. David refused: “I cannot offer to the Lord my God sacrifices that cost me nothing.” Beautiful words. But David had just taken the cheap road.

Jesus didn’t. He surrendered himself fully, to his enemies, to the nails, to the grave — for something he did not do. He never once shifted the cost onto us. The sacrifice that was offered on that same threshing floor cost him everything.

Reflect: David said the right words but took the easy path when his own comfort was on the line. Where in your own life is there a gap between what you say you’re willing to give and what you’re actually willing to offer? What would it mean to bring God a sacrifice that genuinely costs you something?

DAY 4 — THURSDAY
The Poles That Were Too Long on Purpose

Have you ever been kept at a distance by someone you wanted to be close to? Maybe it was a relationship with rules and conditions. Maybe it was an institution that felt like it existed to remind you how far you had to go before you’d be welcome. Distance can feel like the whole system is working against you.

The entire system of Temple religion was built around distance. God designed it. And then he designed something else into it that most people miss.

Scripture: 1 Kings 8:6–11
Additional reading: Matthew 27:50–51 — “”And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.””

When Solomon completed the Temple and the priests carried the Ark of the Covenant into the Holy of Holies, there was a problem. The inner room was twenty cubits deep. The carrying poles were twenty cubits long (not accounting for the thickness of the walls). There was no way the poles would fit inside the room. They pressed outward, through the thick curtain that separated the Holy of Holies from the rest of the Temple.

The Holy of Holies was the one place in all the earth where God’s presence dwelt most fully. And the one rule about that place was this: no one goes in. Only the high priest, only once a year, only with blood. The curtain was the barrier.

But God designed the blueprint. He gave Solomon the dimensions. He knew those poles would stick through the curtain. Those two staves pressed outward like the arms of a father reaching as far as he can toward a child he wants desperately to hold. Even inside a system built on distance, God was reaching out.

When Jesus died on that same mountain, the curtain tore, from top to bottom, not bottom to top. A person tears from the bottom. God tore it from the top.

Reflect: In what ways have you approached God as if you need to earn your way past a curtain, as if distance is the default? How does the image of those poles pressed through the veil change the way you picture God’s posture toward you?

DAY 5 — FRIDAY
From One Family to the Whole World

Some prayers are bigger than the person praying them. You ask for one thing, and God answers in a way that stretches far beyond what you imagined. Solomon had one of those moments. Though he likely didn’t fully understand it yet.

Scripture: 1 Kings 8:41–43
Additional reading: Acts 2:1–11 — “”When they heard this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard their own language being spoken.””

When Solomon dedicated the Temple, he prayed a long prayer. Most of us remember the famous portion — “If my people, who are called by my name…” But tucked inside that prayer is something extraordinary. Solomon prayed specifically for the foreigner: the person from a distant country who has heard of God’s great name and comes to pray toward this place. He asked God to hear them. To answer them. So that all the people of the earth may know your name.

Solomon was praying for the nations before the nations had arrived. And he was doing it on Mount Moriah, at the Temple, just a few hundred feet from where the cross would one day stand.

Look at the progression across this same hill. With Abraham, God showed mercy to a family. With David, to a city. With Solomon’s prayer, he was already reaching toward the whole earth. And at the cross, on a hill at the geographic crossroads of every ancient trade route, the message went everywhere.

That progression didn’t stop. At Pentecost, when the disciples gathered in Jerusalem after the resurrection, cloven tongues of fire appeared, and they spoke in such a way that every person in the crowd heard them in their own language. What Babel had scattered, the gospel began to reunite. What happened at the Tower, the fragmentation of humanity, was being undone by the Spirit, right there in the same city.

You and I are the proof that the message traveled. We are the answer to Solomon’s prayer.

Reflect: The gospel was always designed to move outward,  from a family, to a city, to a nation, to the world. Who in your life is still waiting to hear the story that started on that hill? And what is one specific, concrete thing you could do this week to carry it further?