Get ready to start a journey…a journey through the pages of the Bible and the pages of your life.
Mary was the first person to receive Jesus on his terms. Many people want Jesus to come and meet their needs, fix their problems, and heal their hurts. Their expectations are centered around what Jesus can do for them. Mary was different. Check out her response to the angel Gabriel, who told her she would have a child.
Light and darkness are not opposing forces. Dark is simply the absence of light. When light enters, darkness is dispelled. There was a time when we lived in spiritual darkness. That’s all we knew. It was natural and normal. Then we met the Light of the world.
Andre Agassi was a great tennis player. During his career, he won eight Grand Slam singles tournaments, an Olympic Gold medal, and $31 million in prize money, not to mention the millions of endorsement dollars he earned. And yet Agassi hated tennis.
Living in the light is living in confidence. We can see where we are going, and we know we will arrive at our destination. There is no “we might make it.” We will experience eternal life in heaven with the Lord! How can we be confident of heaven? Check out today’s passage.
To introduce this devotional, I wanted to show all the different decisions that make life complex. There are multiple choices for everything from household appliances to tires for your car.
Why did God put you on this earth? What’s your purpose? Some people live their entire lives trying to figure out what their life was supposed to be about. They come to the end wondering where they should have started.
When an angel appears, you can bet that something amazing is going to happen! The amazing certainly took place when the angel Gabriel told Zechariah that he would be having a son. For Zechariah and his wife, Elizabeth, that dream had died long ago.
Years ago, a group of us walked through Hezekiah’s tunnel in Jerusalem. In the days of King Hezekiah, it provided water for the city. This tunnel is about a third of a mile long and takes approximately thirty minutes to wade through from one opening to the other, with water mid-thigh deep in some sections.
“Be a light!” That’s what Beth Ann Schaeber said to her three boys every day. Before she dropped them off at a friend’s house or their sporting event or when they walked out the door to go to school, “Be a light!” was the last thing they heard.
Temptation comes from three sources: The world. The flesh. The devil (Ephesians 2:1-3). While all three of these sources are involved in temptation, one will lead the way. Today, let’s focus on the times when the world takes the lead.
One of the first classes I taught at The Bible Chapel was a class on parenting teenagers. Lori and I had two children at the time, both under the age of three. But I had been a middle school teacher, a middle school and high school coach, a youth group leader, and had read a lot of books on parenting, so I was an “expert”, or so I thought. About fifteen minutes into my introduction, I broke into a sweat.
One writer captures our need to trust God when he writes, “You’re a soul made by God, made for God, and made to need God, which means you were not made to be self-sufficient.”[1] Trusting in ourselves, our achievements, and our accomplishments is a losing proposition. Great men and women of God were people of faith. Abraham trusted God’s leading, even when he didn’t know where he was going.