We often treat sin as a handful of inconsequential debts, so asking God for forgiveness—or forgiving someone else—can feel unnecessary. In Matthew 6:12, Jesus places both debts before us in a single petition: “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” Do we understand the balance we have run up?
Sometimes the starting point in desperation is to realize just how desperate we really are.
We’ve all sensed it—a choice that seemed perfect in the moment, but leaves us listing further down the road. Matthew 7:24–27 presents two builders, two houses, nearly identical except for what lies beneath, and asks which foundation will hold when the rains come.
Jesus warns in Matthew 7 that the most dangerous kind of false teaching comes from one dressed like a sheep. By the time you realize there’s a wolf underneath, it’s frighteningly close. How do we keep alert when such sounds deceptively good?
Sometimes we become so fixed on where we want to go that we cannot see how we are defeating ourselves. Jonah runs in the opposite direction when God sends him to Nineveh, raising questions we often avoid: Do we understand who God is, who we are, and how He sees the people we would rather leave behind?
Most of us know what it feels like to start strong in our faith and then quietly fizzle out from that initial strength — and the churches in Revelation 2–3 knew that feeling, too. As Jesus responds to them with a reward for the one who “conquers,” what does conquering look like for ordinary, fizzle-prone people like us?
On Easter, we celebrate God’s great reversal, yet many of us still carry wildernesses where things feel anything but right. Mary Magdalene was in such a wilderness in John 20 as she wept outside of the tomb. In the wilderness, we often cannot see when Jesus is right in front of us.
God had been leading Israel every step of the way—parting the Red Sea, dropping food from the sky, guiding them with a pillar of fire at night—and still, when twelve spies came back from the promised land, ten of them said it couldn’t be done, and the crowd went with them. Numbers 13 and 14 ask a question we face too: when the majority says no, does that settle it?
As we enter the season of Lent, Habakkuk helps us think about righteousness and humility.
Thanksgiving takes planning, or you’ll fill the plate and miss the pie you were waiting for. Advent works the same way. The Gospel of Mark skips the manger and the angels and jumps right to the one the Gospels proclaim: Jesus. Do we get caught up in the details or get to Him in our own preparations?