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Pride and Forgiveness This is the theme that the LORD gently placed on my heart this morning. Because of our nature, without exception we all have a problem with these two things. Our tendency to be prideful often makes us compare ourselves to others. Yes, even as Christians we may admit that we are

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Receiving God’s Amazing Love I was prompted to go to today’s devotional by something that we just read about in Luke chapter 12. When Jesus was teaching His disciples about how much God takes care of His children (and that they should not worry), He told them in Luke 12:32 that “…it gives your Father great

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Jesus Talks to the Masses Part 5 – Don’t Get Ready, Be Ready! In today’s scripture verses from this section of the Gospel of Luke, we will circle back as we will end where this series began. You see, in part 1 of this series we started at the end of chapter 12 in verse 49 where Jesus talked about how He came into this world not to bring

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Jesus Talks to the Masses Part 4 – Don’t Worry About Your Life Today we will continue in this encounter in the gospel of Luke where Jesus had just addressed the issue of covetousness and greed with the person from the crowd. Now He once again turns to His disciples and continues to expand on that parable about the rich fool, telling them why

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Jesus Talks to the Masses Part 3 – The Dangers of Covetousness In today’s message, we will continue on from yesterday to look closely at this particular encounter that Jesus is having in front of the crowds in the middle of the Gospel of Luke. Yesterday He turned to His disciples (as that crowd continued to grow) and warned them about the

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Jesus Talks to the Masses Part 2 - Fear God, Not Man Yesterday in part 1 of this series, we started with the end of Luke chapter 12. Today we will go back and cover the beginning of that chapter and provide some context. At this point in His journey, Jesus is at the top of His ministry. He has been traveling from place to place

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Jesus Talks to the Masses Part 1 In recent mornings we have read in John 10 about how the words that Jesus spoke caused division among the crowd of Jews that had gathered to hear Him. This morning we are going to go to the Gospel of Luke to see his perspective on this gathering. We will begin a series looking at

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The Division in the Jews Continues – Some Still Refuse to Believe Over the past few days, we have been looking at the attempts of Jesus to get the Jews to see and understand the evidence that He is the real Good Shepherd and the Christ. He has been trying to help them to distinguish between good and evil so that they could identify the lies of

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Jesus Demonstrates His Love for His Father Yesterday we talked about how Jesus is the Good Shepherd and how He lays down His life for the sheep. We ended when He said that He lays down His life not just for His sheep, but for others who have not yet heard His voice but who will eventually. He gave this of Himself even for

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Real Life with the Real Shepherd This morning the LORD woke me up with this theme of the “real life” that He promised to us. Then He pointed me to His teaching about the Good Shepherd in John chapter 10. This is another lesson about the promises of God. You see, He reminded me that He promised us life eternal

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The Blessings of Meekness – From the Old Testament A few years ago, the LORD had me going through a devotional series talking about the Sermon on the Mount when He taught the Beatitudes. This morning He woke me up and sent me back to the Old Testament for a word about the importance of meekness (which is humility or the opposite

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When Conflicts Arise, How Do We Respond? Yes, we all deeply desire justice and fairness in our world. In the Kingdom of Heaven, there is only one standard goodness and truth (see yesterday’s devotional). But we as believers struggle even within the church over differences in what is just. We still live in a fallen world

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Our World View Changes Everything The world view that we maintain everyday shapes so very much of our lives. It helps us with discerning that which is good from the bad. It helps us as we navigate unknown and uncharted territories. Our world view helps us understand how to relate to the world all around us and

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Promises Made, Promises Kept – Our True Identity We serve a God who is all-powerful and not capable of lying or breaking His promise. When fully understood, this gives us great comfort.

When we truly believe in what the LORD has done for us (and the impact of His constant presence with us), He seals us with a promise (a

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The Blessings of Patience It does not matter, my brothers and sisters, what the situation may look like right now. When we see or experience problems in our lives (either health, financial/material, relational, emotional, and a host of others), we can know deep in our hearts and souls that those problems

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Blessings of the Age of Understanding It is a tremendous blessing to us all when we hunger first to listen and to understand. The bible is a very special book (unique among all others) in that instead of us reading it, it reads us. It speaks clearly to us in every situation. But the problem is that when we have our

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Truth and Justice – The Hunger Deep down inside, we all have an insatiable hunger and desire for justice… for fairness in every situation. We will say and do whatever we have to in order to achieve that justice. In order to determine what is just and fair, we all use a compass that points at what we see as

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Praying for Patience in God’s Sanctuary A timeless prayer of David, from a place of desperation, seeking God’s sanctuary. Although not perfect and a broken man himself, David understood the nature of his conflict and the source of his help and strength. Great are You LORD!!

1 O God, listen to my complaint.

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The Power of Waiting for the LORD There is tremendous power and blessing for all of God’s children today when we learn what it means to truly wait on Him. Psalms 27 gives us a great illustration of this in the words of David. It describes how he went through so very many situations involving attacks and distress

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Jesus Walks With Us, Even When We Don’t Acknowledge Him This is the addendum to my devotional from yesterday (the one that I mentioned was forth coming). This addendum is in the form of a brief story that will give a real-life example with an illustration of the devotion’s point and how we can live it out today. Here is the story:

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Jesus Walks With Us, Even When We Don’t Acknowledge Him When we believe in the LORD our Savior, He says that He will never leave nor forsake us. As covered in my recent devotionals, the enemy will step up his attacks and keep prodding us to lose hope and think there is no solution. But the LORD has a way of also prodding us to remind