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Day 1

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Living Under the Influence Romans 6:14: "For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace." My wife loves going to the beach. She reads as she rests in the sand. Eventually, she will wander into the waves to cool off. She loves the sand and ocean, but I love to walk the beach looking for hidden treasures and pondering the meaning of life. The distant horizon prompts me to gaze at the setting sun as I walk along the shore. But my favorite time comes a few hours later, when the waves are quiet and very few people are moving around. I see the occasional seagull fly close by. As the sun rises, it beckons for a new day of beachgoers.  I look for these early morning moments to share with God. I scan my surroundings to see what God has in store for me. I feel the wind sweeping the coastline from far beyond the horizon. I hear the waves ending their journey as they gently succumb to the boundary of the shoreline. I see the wide expanse of the...
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Day 2

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  Grace Finds Us, Raises Us, and Carries Us 2 Corinthians 12:9 “My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is perfected in weakness.”  He gazed into the heavens with a lot of prayer, but little hope. His eyes were filled with a hazy mixture of tears and blood. His wounds ran deep. He lay alone, vulnerable and exposed to the lurking enemy. "Please God, save me! I can't do this on my own!" Then with murky vision, a friendly face appeared as a blurry silhouette against the glaring sun. A few moments later, he awoke bouncing on the shoulders of a comrade running him to safety. This is the story of grace. Our wounds run deep. We are broken, left vulnerable to every attack of the enemy. We regret the mistakes we’ve made, and our guilt is a daily reminder that there is nothing good enough we could do to fix what is broken. Grace doesn’t give us a license to do whatever we want to do. In fact, grace reminds us why we are completely dependent on God to heal and accept us, broken...
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Day 3

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"One More Project, Boys" Hebrews 4:10- “for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God rested from his.” Thirteen acres of land surrounded by fence placed by digging holes by hand in the heat of Summer. It was a time I will never forget with my dad. We used posthole diggers and dug one hole after another around the entire 13 acres. It was an exhausting job that seemed to never end. Sweat poured into my eyes every hour we worked. My hands became numb from the pain and grind of hitting hardened ground with every hole. It was a job of utter exhaustion with very little reward, other than the irreplaceable time sharing this experience with my dad. Our spirits can become as exhausted as our bodies sometimes. Maybe you can relate to this. Prayers that are prayed over and over for change with no change. Hope we hold onto until we’re not sure we can hold on any longer. A habit that we just keep doing when we don’t want to; but here we go again. Keep try...
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Day 4

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  Living Under the Influence of the Law Romans 6:14 "For sin shall no longer be your master, because you are not under the law, but under grace." He exploded with anger when a technical foul was called for arguing with the referees. The coach walked back to the bench, picked up a chair, and threw it across the court with indignation towards the injustice of it all. Bobby Knight, the great Indiana coach, was known for his fiery temper, and it is this explosion of anger that many remember him by. Some have been hard on Knight over the years, but we respond the same way when we perceive injustice leveled against us. We express anger when someone mistreats us. We lash out when we receive blame for someone else’s mistake. Rules are the source of a lot of emotion when we feel constrained by them or unjustly accused. Like rules provide structure for a civil society, the law of God gave guidance for thousands of years. The purpose of the law was to show us our sin (Romans 3:20). The ...
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Loving God with a First Love Kind of Love

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  Revelation 2:4- "But I have this against you, that you have left your first love." Have you ever made a priority list? Having priorities is important for me. I use to-do lists because I am prone to distraction. As important as priorities are, though, I want to say something that may sound contradictory to what is normally taught. Avoid prioritizing God! You read it right.  Why do I say that? Revelation 2 tells the story of a church that worked hard for the faith. They persevered during persecution. They even cleaned house when they discovered false teachers in their midst. But somehow they had lost their way. Detrimentally, they abandoned their first love.  We teach in the church that losing our first love means we have put other things above God. Maybe we prioritized some sin in our life or we put all of our energy into our careers. While prioritizing other things over God may have implicated Ephesus (Revelation 2:5), the wider context of scripture speaks to a deeper m...
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Day 6

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  The Truth of Who We Are and the Grace to Change John 1:17 "For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ." He avoided looking into the mirror. He didn't like what he saw. An unexpected divorce with a lost ministry. At one time in his life, he compelled respect. He stood upright with a message that resonated with the hardest hearts. When he spoke, crowds responded. He preached for years as a sought-out speaker. But now, he couldn't even look at himself in the mirror. All he saw was a disgraced has-been.  The image of himself removed the grace of God from his thoughts. Only the truth, at least the truth as he saw in the mirror, kept him focused on what was and what could have been. That man in the mirror was me. There were many times I did not like what I saw in the mirror. I couldn’t see what still could be because all I could see was what was. I could not see grace because the truth constantly turned my attention to what I lost. ...
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The Meaning of being a Follower of Jesus: Made in the Hand of God

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  Jeremiah 18:4- "But the vessel that he was making of clay was spoiled in the hand of the potter; so he remade it into another vessel, as it pleased the potter to make" (NASB). As followers of Jesus, our desire to do great things in the kingdom of God conditions us to conclude that being a disciple relates more to what we do than who we are becoming. In "Art + Faith: A Theology of Making", Makoto Fujimura calls for a refocus on what God is creating in us than what we are doing for God. As followers of Jesus, I have found when we focus on our usefulness, or the lack thereof, we make God out to be utilitarian. We strive to know his purpose for our lives. We pray to be used by God. When we focus on our usefulness for God, though, we reduce God to a divine wishing well where we imagine we can access His promises. Fujimura's book challenged me to turn my attention to what God is creating in me as opposed to how God may use me.  Peter became the premier follower of J...
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