Gospel.com Blog

In this Morning and Evening devotional, Charles Spurgeon observes a simple yet profound truth of the Christian life: no matter how low we sink, no matter what we do or what trials we face, God is always there:

God—the eternal God—is himself our support at all times, and especially when we are sinking in deep trouble. There are seasons when the Christian sinks very low in humiliation. Under a deep sense of his great sinfulness, he is humbled before God till he scarcely knows how to pray, because he appears, in his own sight, so worthless. Well, child of God, remember that when thou art at thy worst and lowest, yet underneath thee are everlasting arms. Sin may drag thee ever so low, but Christs great atonement is still under all. You may have descended into the deeps, but you cannot have fallen so low as the uttermost; and to the uttermost he saves. Again, the Christian sometimes sinks very deeply in sore trial from without. Every earthly prop is cut away. What then? Still underneath him are the everlasting arms. He cannot fall so deep in distress and affliction but what the covenant grace of an ever-faithful God will still encircle him. The Christian may be sinking under trouble from within through fierce conflict, but even then he cannot be brought so low as to be beyond the reach of the everlasting armsthey are underneath him; and, while thus sustained, all Satans efforts to harm him avail nothing.

Does knowing that we can never “be beyond the reach of the everlasting arms’ comfort you? How does that knowledge change how you approach situations in your life?

What’s your purpose in life? What do you feel called to do? Christians often talk about discerning God’s purpose for our lives, or about learning “what God wants us to do” with our talents and skills.

These are reasonable things to ponder. But in this devotional from My Utmost for His Highest, Oswald Chambers cautions us against presuming to know for certain what God has in mind for our lives:

After sanctification, it is difficult to state what your purpose in life is, because God has moved you into His purpose through the Holy Spirit. He is using you now for His purposes throughout the world as He used His Son for the purpose of our salvation. If you seek great things for yourself, thinking, God has called me for this and for that, you barricade God from using you. As long as you maintain your own personal interests and ambitions, you cannot be completely aligned or identified with Gods interests. This can only be accomplished by giving up all of your personal plans once and for all, and by allowing God to take you directly into His purpose for the world. Your understanding of your ways must also be surrendered, because they are now the ways of the Lord.

The truth is that we simply cannot know for certain how, exactly, God plans to use us. God might use us in exactly the way we expect… or His plans for our lives might be completely at odds with what we want or imagine. Christians must be prepared for the possibility that at any time, God might pull us out of our carefully planned routines and present us with challenges and opportunities we never imagined.

Does this frighten you or reassure you? Have you ever had the experience of serving God in a way you would never have planned or guessed?

As a child, I participated in the Calvinist Cadet Corps, my church denomination’s variant on the Boy Scouts. At each monthly meeting, we would gather in our gray uniforms (heavy-laden with merit badges) and recite the Cadet motto:

A Cadet must be reverent, obedient, compassionate, consecrated, trustworthy, pure, grateful, loyal, industrious, and cheerful.

Most of those are fairly straightforward spiritual virtues. But the last word always struck me as slightly out of place: is cheerfulness really a Christian virtue in the same sense as compassion and obedience?

That question sprang to mind today as I read a Charles Swindoll devotional explaining the importance of cordiality. The outward grace and politeness (or lack thereof) with which we treat others is a strong indicator of the state of our heart:

Being cordial literally starts from the heart, as I see it. It begins with the deep-seated belief that the other person is important, genuinely significant, deserving of my undivided attention, my unrivaled interest, if only for a few seconds. Encouraged by such a belief, I am prompted to be sensitive to that person’s feelings. If he is uneasy and self-conscious, cordiality alerts me to put him at ease. lf she is shy, cordiality provides a relief. If he is bored, cordiality stimulates and invigorates him. If she is sad, cordiality brings cheer. What a needed and necessary virtue it is!

What does cordiality look like in a Christian’s life? Swindoll lists out four simple ways we can communicate our love, care, and respect for others in day-to-day interactions.

Are you a cordial person? Have you ever considered that even your most minor everyday interactions with others can reflect the state of your heart? Consider applying these simple practices of cordiality in your conversations at work and home this week.

If you’re like most people, whenever your income increases you start dreaming about the possibilities that that new cash opens up to you. Oftentimes—and I’m very guilt of this—those possibilities are of the “fun toys” variety. Giving it away barely crosses my mind, but as Joe Stowell argues in this devotional from Strength for the Journey, giving should be our first thought.

His main point is that if we don’t practice giving when financial times are tough, we’ll find it to be much harder to give when we’re prosperous:

Often our seasons of financial prosperity draw our attention to bigger homes, bigger cars, bigger mutual funds, and bigger TVs, rather than to bigger opportunities for advancing the cause of Christ. The lure of more is highly seductive. Giving to Gods work is not a habit that starts when were experiencing material success. Its a habit best cultivated and nurtured in seasons of depending on God through lean times.

Paul points that fact out [in 2 Corinthians: 8] when, speaking of the Macedonian churchs generosity, he writes, Out of the most severe trial, their overflowing joy and their extreme poverty welled up in rich generosity (2 Corinthians 8:2). Which all goes to prove that an attitude of joyful generosity starts now, right where you are, with whatever you have. What a joy it is to be addicted to proving that God and His work is worthy of the very best that we have—regardless of how much that might be!

And, speaking of being rich, viewed from a global perspective even the poorest of us have much more than most people do in this world. For reasons best known to God, Christians in our corner of the world have staggering resources by comparison. Which gives us an unusual opportunity to use our wealth to abound in every good work (2 Cor. 9:8).

Do you practice disciplined giving? What are some ways you could start practicing generosity?

I’ve often thought of the Christian life as a continual process of opening oneself up to God. We start our Christian journey by saying yes to Jesus—and then the difficult work of actually giving over every part of our being to God begins. A.W. Tozer questions whether or not any of us fully understands the extent to which the Spirit wants to take over our lives. Have we truly counted the costs of letting God be the Lord of our Lives?

Before a man can be filled with the Spirit he must be sure he wants to be. And let this be taken seriously. Many Christians want to be filled, but their desire is a vague romantic kind of thing hardly worthy to be called desire. They have almost no knowledge of what it will cost them to realize it.

Let us imagine that we are talking to an inquirer, some eager young Christian, let us say, who has sought us out to learn about the Spirit-filled life. As gently as possible, considering the pointed nature of the questions, we would probe his soul somewhat as follows: “Are you sure you want to be filled with a Spirit who, though He is like Jesus in His gentleness and love, will nevertheless demand to be Lord of your life? Are you willing to let your personality be taken over by another, even if that other be the Spirit of God Himself?

What areas in your life are you holding back from God? Is it out of fear, pride, or something else?

Our life circumstances can change in an instant. A car crash, a fire, a diagnosis: it doesn’t take much to make us feel like we’ve gone from a life of blessing to a life filled with trials. Our Daily Bread reminds us that despite our circumstances, God deserves our gratitude:

Actor Christopher Reeve was paralyzed in a horseback riding accident in 1995. Prior to this tragedy, he had played the part of a paraplegic in a movie. In preparation, Reeve visited a rehabilitation facility. He recalled: Every time I left that rehab center, I said, Thank God thats not me. After his accident, Reeve regretted that statement: I was so setting myself apart from those people who were suffering without realizing that in a second that could be me. And sadly, for him, it was.

We too may look at the troubles of others and think that it could never happen to us. Especially if our life journey has led to a measure of success, financial security, and family harmony. In a moment of vanity and self-sufficiency, King David admitted to falling into the trap of feeling invulnerable: Now in my prosperity I said, I shall never be moved (Ps. 30:6). But David quickly caught himself and redirected his heart away from self-sufficiency. He remembered that he had known adversity in the past and God had delivered him: You have turned for me my mourning into dancing (v.11).

Are you going through a time of trial or a time of blessing? How have you expressed gratitude and trust to God despite your cirucmstances?

Reason. Logic. Evidence. These are among the defining keywords of our contemporary era—they’re values and ideas that shape our approach to science, and to most other aspects of our lives. We like our lives to be organized, quantifiable, and understandable.

That’s certainly not a bad way to approach human life—the rational worldview has spawned countless good advances in science, medicine, and many other fields. But in this Slice of Infinity devotional, Margarat Manning wonders if, in our fascination with this Enlightenment-era worldview, we may be pushing aside some equally important concepts: mystery, wonder, and faith.

Inherent in this Enlightenment mindset, and common in our day as well, is the assumption that knowledge is good, certain, and objective. We often uncritically accept this Enlightenment idea as we look at Christian faith today, and we leave little room for ways of knowing that go beyond the rational or the scientific. As Blaise Pascal once said, “The heart has its reasons which reason cannot know.” But Christians do well to re-think this Enlightenment assumption, for we acknowledge that the fall of humanity impacted the whole self–including the mind.

Without jettisoning intellectual rigor and study, or succumbing to a faith without content, we must make room for the concept of “mystery” and be cautious about assuming an Enlightenment way of viewing knowledge and truth. Sometimes we simply do not know. Our minds are limited and God is infinite. We must reject the hubristic optimism of the endless, upward progress of human rationality to attain to omniscience. Moreover, our faith cannot be “reduced” to a set of fixed doctrines, even while it surely contains them. Rather, we must acknowledge “that the fundamental reality of God transcends human rationality” and “the heart of being a Christian is a personal encounter with God in Christ, who shapes us and molds us.” We come to know in and through personal encounter–both with God and with God’s people in community–and we must reject the notion that we are ultimately and only autonomous, thinking selves. We are reminded by the apostle John that Truth is ultimately and completely revealed in a person–“The Word (logos) became flesh and dwelt among us”–and it is as a result of this person that we come to know anything that is worth knowing at all.

Does your faith ever feel overly-quantified? Have the doctrines that define your faith ever started to feel less like proclamations of our savior Jesus Christ, and more like a laundry list of lifeless rules and annotations? Maybe it’s time to step back and reclaim the mystery and personal relationship that lie at the heart of Christianity.

Joseph’s life was filled with evil actions that he had no control over. His brother’s—jealous of their father’s favor—faked his death and sold him into slavery. Later, he would be falsely accused by Potiphar’s wife of rape and thrown into prison. Joseph had much to be angry about, but he didn’t give into bitterness. Instead, he let God turn his horrible circumstances into something great.

We can learn a lot from how Joseph reacted to each new challenge in his life. At every step of the way he had to make a decision whether to give into the temptation to despair, or to move forward. This devotional from Day by Day points out that holding onto bitterness often ends up hurting us and making us miss out on the good that God has for us:

For many of us, we would sooner withdraw than to seek to find greater purpose in our place. We victimize ourselves and consider ourselves deserving of the bitterness we harbor, all the while ignoring how the bitterness is only hurting us and making matters worse. We turn our entire situation inward and grow more angry with each passing day, and then we convince ourselves that no one could possibly understand, and that no one is worthy of identifying with the pain we have felt. Granted, the pain was real and the hurt very personal. But, the bottom line is that we have a choice as to what that pain and hurt becomes. It can either be evil that remains evil—or it can be turned around by God to bring something that is good.

There is so much in this world meant for evil, and there is so much we will suffer as a result of that evil. But there is a God who is far greater, and there is a potential for good to be brought out from all things. We do not have to allow the evil to hurt us to the point of permanently stealing our joy. We do not have to allow the evil to imprison us in an eternal withdrawal and disillusionment. There is a victory that can come out of the worse circumstances, and a joy that can radiate from a wounded heart. All because God can take what some mean for evil, and use it to accomplish greater things.

Are you holding onto bitterness? What would it take for you to let go of it and trust God?

What makes a Bible translation accurate? Is accuracy defined by exact faithfulness to the wording of the original text? Or is accuracy a matter of capturing the meaning behind the original words?

That’s the opening discussion question at the brand-new Perspectives in Translation forum, which just launched at our sister site BibleGateway.com. The forum, hosted by Collin Hansen of The Gospel Coalition, is dedicated to scholarly dialogue about the tough questions of English Bible translation. A team of respected Bible and translation scholars will be debating every aspect of Bible translation.

You’ll find the dialogue there insightful and thought-provoking—and we hope you’ll not only read it, but particpate in the discussion yourself. Stop by Perspectives in Translation to watch the discussion unfold and to share your own questions and observations!

Like Adam and Eve after their fall, we strive to hide our nakedness from each other. We dress ourselves up and put on a happy face, and when people ask us how we are, we cheerfully answer “fine!”

When God looks at us, however, He sees right through our facade… straight into our sinful hearts. Before God, we are wretched condemned criminals. Thankfully, as Joe Stowell reminds us in this devotional, God has extended an amazing grace to us:

If we were to look at ourselves the way God sees us even when we have it all together, we would see something totally different. He sees through all of our efforts to be lookin good. His vision probes far deeper than the all-too-cool clothes we wear, our makeup, our rippling abs and our great tan. He strips away the layers of self-delusion and penetrates deep into our hearts where each of us is a desperately lost sinner. And, no matter how good you think you are, its not until we know that we are like condemned criminals before Him that we can begin to understand how amazing His grace really is. When you can honestly say that His grace saved a wretch like you, you can begin to stand in amazement at the greatness of His grace. In fact, His grace is only a sweet sound when you know how deep it had to go to clean you up!

What is Gods amazing grace? Its the outstretched love of Jesus whose agonizing death and victorious resurrection saves us from who we really arenot from who we think we are. Romans 5:8 says: While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. He died the worst kind of death imaginable, because it needed to cover the wretchedness of our desperately lost souls. We werent lookin good when He died for us. If we were as cool as we think we are, He could have stayed in heaven. But like hopeless beggars trapped in the sludge of sin, we needed Him. And so He came and died in our place. Now thats what I call amazing!

Do you feel like a wretch before God? How does knowing that God doesn’t care about your outward appearance change how you live?