Gospel.com Blog

Ravi Zacharias’ Slice of Infinity daily devotional is always a worthwhile read—it’s a short daily devotional that nevertheless manages to dig a little deeper into its topics than most such devotionals.

But even if you aren’t already a reader, I recommend paying Slice of Infinity a visit each day during Lent. They’ve published some excellent reflections on Lent and Easter and why this is such a powerful part of the church year. Here’s a bit from today’s entry, on how Lent challenges us:

The time leading up to the promise of Easter and the hope of resurrection is something like the early signs of spring. Indications of new life spring forth all around us, each with the shocking call that we must prepare ourselves for what is coming, reflect on the place of hope via the road of suffering, and face the forces and temptations that come at us along the way. It is not always easy to prepare our hearts for the Cross of Christ, but the changing of seasons is upon us, and God beckons us forward. Henri Nouwen describes the tension eloquently: “The season of Lent, during which winter and spring struggle with each other for dominance, helps us in a special way to cry out for God’s mercy.” For forty contemplative days, the season of Lent calls us to the wakeful awareness that we are human, we are dust, and we are falling short, but that there is a story reaching beyond our lifetimes, our deaths, and our shortcomings, speaking new life where death stings and tears flow.

The latest reading is always available here, and you can browse back through the archives here. If you want to start with their Lent reflections, here’s the Ash Wednesday Slice that kicks it off.

How are you commemorating Lent? There’s no Scriptural requirement to mark the season of Lent, of course. But many Christians find it helpful to mark the period of time before Easter with some sort of deliberate spiritual activity, whether it’s giving up a specific habit, denying yourself something, or engaging in a regular practice like devotions or Scripture reading.

Several writers from the IVPress community are engaging in Lent journeys and are sharing them online—and they invite anyone to participate along with them. The Strangely Dim blog has a good roundup of these; here’s a quick look at what these writers are doing for Lent:

• At Likewise Books, author Tamara Park is sending out a short email each week of Lent with a reflection, song, Scripture, and image to help you focus on Christ. Likewise encourages anyone who wants to receive the weekly emails to write to likewise@ivpress.com and put “Lenten Sacred Encounter” on the subject line.
• Author Kimberlee Conway Ireton is posting a devotional reflection on her blog each week of Lent. Her reflections are based on readings from the Revised Common Lectionary.
• David Zimmerman, author of Deliver Us from Me-ville, is posting a quote from that book on his blog each day of Lent. Accompanying those quotes is a Me-ville reading guide you can follow to read through the book along with him during Lent. It’s all at his Loud Time blog, where he’s begun posting excerpts.

These are three solid ways of journeying through Lent—and there are certainly many more good Lent resources out there. We’ll share them here as we come across them in the weeks to come!

Do you have any Bible passages memorized? If you were brought up in a church community like mine, Scripture memorization was a staple of the Sunday school experience. Every Sunday morning, on the car ride to church, I’d find myself hastily memorizing that week’s Bible (or catechism) passage, knowing that my Sunday school teacher would show no mercy if I mangled Romans 8:28 or stammered my way through Heidelberg Catechism question and answer #1.

Over at the Addenda and Errata blog, Dan Reid admits to living through a similarly demanding Scripture-memorization routine as a child. But as an adult, he’s developed a new perspective toward memorization. Memorizing Scripture needn’t be just an onerous Sunday school routine: it can be a wonderful way to internalize and reflect on passages of the Bible.

His memorization strategy is more ambitious than most Christians’ (he does some of his memorization in the original Greek!), but there’s no reason anyone couldn’t get a lot out of memorizing Bible verses in good old English. Here’s some encouragement from Dan for anyone considering embarking on Scripture memorization:

First, I learned that memorizing doesn’t come as easily at age 59 as it did at age 9 or 20. Though I’m sure there are many other folks my age who can memorize with much less effort than I! But it’s possible. Just don’t set your expectations too high. Don’t beat yourself up when it doesn’t seem to be “taking” fast enough. If you keep at it, the text will work its way into the cranium, laying down its patterns and crystallizing in words, sentences and paragraphs. Keep inching forward and keep reviewing. Nothing is lost and much is gained by taking more time. Think of it as meditation. [...]

And here is another benefit: walk the dog, go on a drive or a run, and lines and paragraphs of the Greek text come to mind unbidden. Not bad.

If you’re looking to dive into the teachings of the Bible in a new way this year, I can think of few better ways to do so. So grab a Bible, pick a passage or two (start with some short and easy ones), and see if you can’t commit some Scripture to memory!

We just announced a major overhaul of our Bible reading plans over at The Bible Gateway, head over there to check them out.

There are few things more spiritually rewarding than reading through Scripture in its entirety. We’ve added new tools to help you read through the entire Bible in a year: our new Bible reading plans. Starting on January 1, 2009, you can start reading through the Bible, one short daily reading at a time. You can read your daily reading online here at the Bible Gateway, or receive the daily readings via RSS or iCal.

There are four different ways you can read through the Bible—choose the one that works best for you! These plans are graciously provided by BibleYear.com:

• Old/New Testament: each day features a reading from both the Old and the New Testaments, so you read through both Testaments together.
• Chronological: reads through the Bible in the order that its events occurred historically. For example, Job lived sometime after the beginning of creation (Genesis 1) but before Abraham was born (Genesis 12). As a result, the Book of Job is integrated into the Book of Genesis.
• Beginning: starts at the very beginning of the Bible and reads straight through to the end.
• Historical: reads through the books of the Bible in the order in which they were written historically, according to the estimated dates of their writing.

To get your daily reading, visit the daily reading page each day starting on New Year’s Day, where your Bible reading for the day will be displayed. You might want to bookmark that page for easy reference (right click on this link and choose “Add to favorites/bookmarks”). You can also receive your reading via RSS or iCal.

We hope you find the new reading plans useful—and we hope you’ll use them to make your way through the Bible in 2009, whether you’ve read through it many times before or have never done so!

There are thousands of different topics here at Gospel.com, but one of the things people seem most interested in is the vast collection of devotionals—short, easy-to-read reflections on the Christian faith to help us start the day on the right foot. Here’s a review of some of our favorites:

• The classics: few devotionals have stood the test of time as well as those by Oswald Chambers, A.W. Tozer, and Charles Spurgeon. If you’re interested in trying a new devotional, why not start with one of the classics?
• On a more modern note, three of the most enduringly popular daily devotionals at Gospel.com are Our Daily Bread, Daily Wisdom, and Daily Encounter. Back to the Bible’s collection of devotionals is noteworthy too.
• If you want to listen to your daily devotional (via podcast or an online stream), take a look through our list of audio devotionals.
• Some people prefer to just read Scripture as their daily devotional. If you’re such a person, you’re in luck: there are a lot of different Bible reading plans to help you work your way slowly but surely through the Bible (or parts thereof).

All of these and more are listed at the Devotionals page—so have fun exploring around until you find the devotional that’s just right for you.

Looking for a way to start out each day on the right foot? Sports Spectrum has a devotional that will help you keep grounded—it’s called Training Table (formerly Power Up), and it provides a short devotional message by a different author each day, each with a sports-focused theme. You can download the September edition (PDF) at the Sports Spectrum website.

In addition to Training Table, Sports Spectrum has a number of changes and new additions coming up later this month, when their magazine switches to a quarterly format. A more interactive The Daily blog and an online version of their magazine are among the promised features—so check their site on September 15 to see all the improvements!

Even if you aren’t a student of church history, you may have heard of the preacher and author Charles Spurgeon—his Morning and Evening daily devotionals have stood the test of time and remain extremely popular today.

While Spurgeon was quite serious about the Gospel message he preached, he was also known for his wit and sense of humor. While browsing through the article archives at the Evangelical Press Association website, I came across an interesting article about the great value that Spurgeon placed on humor in his life and ministry:

Spurgeon laughed as often as he could. He laughed at the ironies of life, he laughed at comical incidents, he laughed at the amusing elements of nature. He sometimes laughed at his critics. He loved to share wholesome jokes with his friends and colleagues in ministry. He was known to tell humorous stories from the pulpit. [...]

Spurgeon considered humor such an integral part of his ministry that a whole chapter in his autobiography is devoted to it. Humor permeates his sermons and writings, often woven into the fabric of his messages. It’s one reason among many why he is still so readable today.

You can get a feel for Spurgeon’s wit by reading some of the many sermons and devotionals he wrote. There’s the Morning and Evening devotional mentioned above, and if you really want to get to know your Spurgeon, there are over 700 sermons by Spurgeon awaiting your perusal over at SermonIndex.

There are an awful lot of Bible reading plans out there, and if we keep talking about them here on the Gospel.com blog, we’re going to start sounding like a broken record. But there’s a new one out from Back to the Bible that’s well worth checking out: it’s called Powered by 4.

What’s with that name? Well, if you read up on Bible study strategies, one thing that comes up repeatedly is that when you’re starting out with reading the Bible, taking small but regular steps is much more effective than well-intentioned but overzealous plans that involve a whole lot of daily reading. In other words, if you can get into the habit of spending just a few minutes reading the Bible a couple times each week, you’re better off than trying to read the Bible for an hour each day and inevitably giving up when that becomes too much.

And that’s the theory behind Powered by 4: you make a commitment to yourself to read the Bible just four times a week, for less than ten minutes at a time. You might not have time in your schedule for an hour of Bible reading each day, but most anybody can carve ten minutes out of their daily schedule—and once you get into the habit of reading the Bible four times a week, you’ll find it’s much easier to increase your reading to whatever level you feel comfortable with.

The Powered by 4 site lays out the basics and lets you sign up to receive your Bible readings via email. Give it a try!

We’ll close off this week’s focus on devotionals with a quick look at some good audio devotionals—daily devotionals that you can listen to via a podcast or online radio stream. Some of us find it easier to listen to Bible verses and devotionals read out loud, rather than reading them. If that describes you, see if one of these devotionals appeals:

• Just Thinking is a daily fifteen-minute message broadcast by Ravi Zacharias International Ministries. If your local radio station plays it, you can tune in there, or you can subscribe to the MP3 podcast feed. The RZIM ministry takes a fairly intellectual approach to faith and Christianity; in their own words, Just Thinking explores “issues such as life’s meaning, the credibility of the Christian message and the Bible, the weakness of modern intellectual movements, and the uniqueness of Jesus Christ.”
• If fifteen minutes is a bit too much to fit into your daily schedule, you can go the short, inspirational route with the Bible Minute with Woodrow Kroll. It’s one of many programs by Back to the Bible, and aims to start off your day with a short but meaningful Bible reflection. Here’s a list of the different ways you can tune in.
• We’ve mentioned RBC Ministries’ popular Our Daily Bread devotional already this week. But it’s not the only audio devotional they’ve got—Daily Strength is another excellent choice. Each day you’ll hear a short reflection about issues that confront us in our daily lives. One nice touch is that each message closes with several life-application questions to get you thinking about how the words you’ve heard apply to your situation. As with the other devotionals here, you can get the audio in a variety of ways, but it’s probably easiest to just subscribe to the podcast feed.
• The Words of Hope daily devotional is another good short devotional—each short reflection is based around a particular Bible passage and closes with a prayer you can use to get your day started on the right foot. You can listen at their website or grab the podcast feed.
• Last but not least, if you prefer to spend your devotional time just reading the Bible (without any additional commentary or devotional), the Bible Gateway has several audio Bibles you can listen to. If you stop by the Bible Gateway each day to read a Bible passage (perhaps using one of the reading plans), check at the top of the passage you’re reading for the “audio” button. If there’s audio available for the Bible version you’re reading, you can listen to it right there on the Bible Gateway.

There are plenty more devotionals (in text, audio, and pretty much every format you can imagine) to discover if you explore around the Gospel.com community. Hopefully, at least one of the devotionals we’ve mentioned this week caught your eye. Have fun exploring all these devotionals, and we’ll see you next week as we look ahead to Easter!

Albeit lighter on Christian theology than some devotionals, Daily Wisdom strives to offer insightful advice for all people, whether they follow Christ or not. They publish a devotional the majority of days that you can have sent to your inbox or RSS reader.

The following excerpt from their author’s page does a perfect job of explaining their mission and direction:

DW is not a conventional “devotional” but a daily message with an evangelistic or apologetic emphasis. Since DW is meant to appeal to a not-necessarily-Christian audience, we avoid phrases like “we, as Christians…” and words like “sanctification” that only believers understand. We steer away from “Christianese” - cliches only Christians use - and references to Bible verses, etc. understood exclusively by Christians. That’s not to say we don’t quote Scripture, only that when we do, we quote the verse itself, avoiding phrases like, “In Matthew where Jesus talks about the narrow gate…” We prefer “Revelation chapter 3, verse 6 says…” to “In Revelation 3:6, God says…” Submissions must not assume the reader is familiar with Bible stories or books of the Bible.

Read the latest from Daily wisdom here. Or, if you’re interested, you can read their archives.

The site also publishes a quotation every day called 1liner. While not always written by theologians, they often have theological implications.