christian living on Devotional Life

If your devotional life is sleepy and tired—God is probably as tired of it as you are.

In the midst of a busy schedule of activities—healing suffering people, casting out devils, responding to impatient disciples, traveling from town to town, and preaching from synagogue to synagogue—we...

Susanne Wesley, wife of Pastor Samuel Wesley, lived in the late 1600’s and early 1700’s She gave birth to nineteen children, ten survived. Everyday she would take her Bible to her favorite chair and...

Daily life becomes a discipline of asking how one may move more squarely into the realm of God’s reign and how one may welcome and receive it into the fabric of one’s life this day more than ever befo...

When our will wholeheartedly enters into the prayer of Christ, then we pray correctly. Only in Jesus Christ are we able to pray, and with him we also know that we shall be heard. And so we must learn ...

For some people the brokenness in these foundational relationships results in material poverty, that is their not having sufficient money to provide for the basic physical needs of themselves and thei...

Ancient Lens What’s the historical context? Background Structure This Psalm of David is unique. “It is the only hymn in the Old Testament composed completely as a direct address to God.” [1] It e...

The Christian’s life in all its aspects—intellectual and ethical, devotional and relational, upsurging in worship and outgoing in witness—is supernatural; only the Spirit can initiate and sustain it.

My Daily Soundtrack Often, my daily life is filled with a soundtrack of my own choosing. When I sit for long periods of time to do something rather mundane, like reconcile the checkbook, pay bills, ...

In The Good and Beautiful God , James Bryan Smith describes a new Christian he happened to know who came to him one day feeling dejected. He was so excited to be a follower of Jesus, but he just co...

A life of prayer, fasting, and spiritual disciplines can easily be a life of empty religious effort if the goal isn’t communion with God. We don’t need self-improvement; we need to come home.

Amy Carmichael was a passionate missionary to India. She gave her life for the sake of those who had suffered the consequences of an unyielding caste system. She also had her suffering, due to physica...

Does reading the Bible really change us? Does it have the ability, through the power of the Holy Spirit, to shape and form our characters? That's what The Center for Bible Engagement wanted to fin...

Many of us have been involved in small group ministry, and if we are honest with ourselves, there are seasons when the groups can lack the dynamism of a fully-flourishing Christian ministry. This is w...

Because they are the devotional poetry of a particular community, the Psalms train us to pray with others who have prayed, and are still praying. They put our knees on the level with other bent knees;...

An Unhurried Practice: Reading Scripture Slowly One of the disciplines that has been an important part of my spiritual journey over the years is reading and reflecting on Scripture.  In recent years,...

Thus a Christian finds himself called to drab and lowly tasks, which seem less remarkable than monastic life, mortifications, and other distractions from our vocations. For him who heeds his vocation,...

In his devotional guide on preparing for the rite of confession in the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard says that true repentance from the persp...

The liturgy is the place where we wait for Jesus to show up. We don't have to do much. The liturgy is not an act of will. It is not a series of activities designed to attain a spiritual mental sta...

When he was 7 years old, his family was forced out of their home because of a legal technicality. He had to work to help support them. At age 9, while still a backward, shy little boy, his mother die...

The Christian life is not a life dripping with personal satisfaction or one of basking in feeling “positive.” It isn’t a life baptized in stimulation or excitement. It definitely isn’t a life of conse...

The problem is that if we are regularly taught to understand the spiritual life as mainly, if not exclusively, about giving up things, we will never hear the call to engage with life or particular iss...

Liturgical time raises our sights above the dailiness of life to the essence of life.

Too often people think about their “spiritual lives” as just one more aspect of their existence, alongside and largely separate from their “financial lives” or their “vocational lives.” Periodically t...

God’s primary assessment of our lives is not going to be measured by the number of journal entries…The real issue is what kind of people we are becoming. Practices such as reading Scripture and prayin...

Alfred Hitchcock said movies are “life with the dull bits cut out.” Car chases and first kisses, interesting plot lines and good conversations. We don’t want to watch our lead character going on a wal...

In his excellent book, An Unhurried Life, Alan Fadling shares the powerful story of the missionary Frank Laubach: Frank Laubach, a missionary to the Philippines known for his Letters by a Modern Myst...

We must offer all our acts to God and believe that He accepts them. Then hold firmly to that position and keep insisting that every act of every hour of the day and night be included in the transactio...

The fact that our works are done in the service of God is not enough, by itself, to prevent us from losing our interior life if we let them devour all our time and all our strength. Work is good and n...

For those who recite The Lord's Prayer on a regular basis, it can easily become a rote exercise. In this excerpt, Edwin Muir is on a pilgrimage when the prayer took on new significance: Last nigh...