A few taps can broadcast someone else’s failure before you’ve felt any of their pain. In 2 Corinthians 2, Paul describes correcting a troubled church through affliction, anguish, and many tears—insisting the words came from abundant love, not a desire to wound. His example presses a searching question: what is actually happening in your heart when someone else must be corrected?
A dashboard warning light can glow long before the engine stops; anxiety, fear and self-protection can signal a similar loss of peace in the heart. Colossians 3:15 calls for the peace of God to “rule” there, while Proverbs 4:23 says the issues of life flow from that same place. When the gauge falls toward empty, who has taken the throne?
You can sit in a room full of people and still feel like the only one. In Genesis 2, Adam is the lone human until he sees someone who is bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, and the first words from human lips are delight. We were wired for that face-to-face connection, and most of us still know the ache when it is missing.
When the wicked seem to win and justice feels nowhere in sight, fury rises faster than faith. At the close of Psalm 10, God does justice for the fatherless and the oppressed—that’s the firm promise. As we look to that, will we choose faith, or will we choose fury?
It’s easy to be busy with the Christian life—programs, good intentions, real effort—and still be missing the one thing that keeps it all from exploding. In Ephesians 1:15–16, Paul looks at believers whose faith in Jesus is visibly pouring out as love toward one another, and what he does in response is the piece we most often skip.
We keep reaching for more—a better version of the Christian life, a deeper secret, some upgrade that will finally make everything click—when Ephesians 1 says God has already lavished wisdom and insight on us and made known the mystery of His will. What does it look like to actually live in that, rather than keep reaching past it?
We try to draw out what reverence and recognition of God looks like, but our drawings end up a mess unless we let God guide us.
We continue to explore Psalm 9 by returning to what God values. Are we keeping our focus and our actions on Him or veering off course?
When we read about God’s judgment, we can wonder if God is the one putting us into bad places and how it could possibly be that someone who is loving would do that. Scripture helps us see things are actually a “tad” different than that.
A special fifth anniversary Steadfast takes us to the next part of Psalm 9.