Most of us are quicker to panic over a dying phone battery than over a dying spiritual one—we coast along, confident we’re fine, while the indicator drops lower than we’d ever admit. As Jesus calls a written-off man in Jericho, He challenges all of us on this: “Do we know how much we need Him?”
We love remembering that Jesus overturned tables in the temple—especially when we imagine them belonging to someone else. But in Luke 19:45–48 when Jesus drives out those who sold, and declares, “My house shall be a house of prayer,” His challenge isn’t just to those people who annoy us. What might He overturn when our own convenience, usefulness, and preferences begin to define worship?
You think the picnic went great until you start to itch and realize you brought ticks home with you. What tick bites—those sneaky sins whose venom is already inside before you notice—do you have? Those are the ones Jesus came to rescue us from.
We can be inclined to delay approaching God, too busy obsessing on our doubts to come, much like Thomas in John 20. But Thomas did come and so should we.
When the wicked seem to win and justice feels nowhere in sight, fury rises faster than faith. At the close of Psalm 10, God does justice for the fatherless and the oppressed—that’s the firm promise. As we look to that, will we choose faith, or will we choose fury?
We tend to skip the genealogy at the start of Matthew—all those names, so many of them people we know nothing about. In doing so we miss something that matters deeply to ordinary people like us who wonder whether God actually works through lives like theirs.
Deep down, even people who come to God carry a fear that He will eventually give up on them — that sooner or later they’ll be shown the door. That fear is exactly what Jesus meets head-on in John 6.
We know the word fool, but do we recognize who the fools are? Do we recognize when we’re the one playing the fool? Psalm 14 helps us better understand real foolishness.