Written by Chuck Swindoll, these encouraging devotional thoughts are published seven days per week.
We are grateful, Father, that Your Son did not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance. By Your grace, You have invited people who are imperfect, who are sinful, who have every reason to be ashamed of themselves, who are failures, who are guilty of wrong, to come to You and to find in You relief from their burdens, hope beyond the present, and relief from shame.
Refresh us with frequent flashbacks from Your inerrant and reliable Word. "If God is for us, who is against us?... Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?... But in all these things we overwhelmingly conquer through Him who loved us."
Teach us in these tender days the value of genuine humility—of a self-forgetful life. We ask this so that we might become for You messengers whose message makes sense because our lives are like Your Son's life—the One who is gentle and humble of heart.
Lord, words of hope from others can fall flat if things aren't right in our own lives. When we're consumed by rage and resentment, somehow words about joy and purpose sound hollow...they seem meaningless. But when our hearts are right with You, we have ears to hear the message of hope.
Sovereign God, all of us would be quick to say that we do need to be relieved of our anxieties—they are too many and too frequent. And because we want to call our own shots, we need to be levelled and removed from the realm of pride.
In light of Your sovereign grace, we thank You for blindness, for paralysis, for loss, for death, for broken dreams, for dissolved partnerships, and for disillusionment. In faith, we praise You for times of insecurity, failure, divorce, and even those when others have treated us unjustly. We see the storm, but You enable us to also see beyond the storm, so we trust You to make all things just in Your time.
Our only source of relief comes through Your grace. Bring it to our attention again and again in those critical moments when discouragement does a number on us...and make us grateful.
Our Father in heaven, as a result of Your Word we pray that You might grant to us insight into our homes, our nation, and this world. We ask You to raise up from this world that is given to passivity and compromise a body of people who will live for and, if necessary, fight for the truth.
Our Father, encourage us—especially we who often doubt and feel ashamed of our doubt. May we realize that You are in the midst of our reflections and, through such inner searching, we can come to new insights and deeper depths that otherwise we would never have known.
For those who are in a difficult strait, under pressure, up against a wall, facing a test—perhaps the greatest in their lives—we ask that You remind them that the saint who advances on his or her knees never retreats.
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