September 2 “Lord, I will follow thee whithersoever thou goest.” (Lu. 9:57) Sometimes I think we talk and sing too glibly about the Lordship of Christ, about total commitment, and about absolute surrender. We parrot neat little cliches like, “If He’s not Lord of all, then He’s not Lord at all.” We sing, “All to…
September 1 “And ye shall hallow the fiftieth year, and proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof: it shall be a jubilee unto you; and ye shall return every man unto his possession, and ye shall return every man unto his family.” (Lev. 25:10) Every fiftieth year in Israel’s calendar was…
August 31 “What things were gain to me, those I counted loss for Christ. Yea doubtless, and I count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord: for whom I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but dung, that I may win Christ.”…
August 30 “Take heed unto thyself, and unto the doctrine.” (1 Tim. 4:16) One of the many noteworthy features of the Word of God is that it never isolates doctrine from duty. Take Philippians 2:1-13, for example. It is one of the classic passages in the New Testament on the doctrine of Christ. We learn…
August 29 “Christ is all.” (Col. 3:11) There is a tendency for us Christians to spend a great deal of our time looking for new spiritual experiences that will somehow guarantee permanent victory or freedom from the ups and downs of daily living. We rush around to conventions, conferences, seminars and workshops in search of…
August 28 “Be sure your sin will find you out.” (Num. 32:23) God has built certain unalterable principles into this world of ours, and not all man’s ingenuity can escape the outworking of these principles. One of them is that you can’t sin and get away with it. Some of us learned this early when…
August 27 “Lord, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? Who shall dwell in thy holy hill?…He that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not.” (Psa. 15:1, 4) In Psalm 15, David is describing the person who is qualified to be a companion of the Great God. One of the aspects of this man’s character…
August 26 “Establish thou the work of our hands upon us.” (Psa. 90:17) The margin of the New American Standard Bible reads “…give permanence to the work of our hands.” Now that is a thought worth pondering and a request worth praying! We should make it our ambition to spend our lives doing that which…
August 25 “But we had the sentence of death in ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in God which raiseth the dead.” (2 Cor. 1:9) Paul had a narrow scrape with death in the province of Asia. We cannot be sure exactly what happened, but it was so serious that if we…
August 24 “Thus saith the Lord; Refrain thy voice from weeping, and thine eyes from tears: for thy work shall be rewarded, saith the Lord; and they shall come again from the land of the enemy.” (Jer. 31:16) Stephen had been brought up on the mission field. He professed faith in Christ at an early…