Daily Readings by Wild at Heart

A curious warning is given to us in Peter's first epistle. There he tells us to be ready to give the reason for the hope that lies within us to everyone who asks (3:15). Now, what's strange about that passage is this: no one ever asks. When was the last time someone stopped you to inquire about the reason for the hope that lies within you? You're at the market, say, in the frozen food section. A friend you haven't seen for some time comes up to you, grasps you by both shoulders and pleads, "Please, you've got to tell me. Be honest now. How can you live with such hope? Where does it come from? I must know the reason." In talking with hundreds of Christians, I've met only one or two who have experienced something like this. Yet God tells us to be ready, so what's wrong? To be blunt, nothing about our lives is worth asking about. There's nothing intriguing about our hopes, nothing to make anyone curious. Not that we don't have hopes; we do. We hope we'll have enough after taxes this year to take a summer vacation. We hope our kids don't wreck the car. We hope our favorite team goes to the World Series. We hope our health doesn't give out, and so on. Nothing wrong with any of those hopes; nothing unusual, either. Everyone has hopes like that, so why bother asking us? It's life as usual. Sanctified resignation has become the new abiding place of contemporary Christians. No wonder nobody asks. Do you want the life of any Christian you know? Want more? Order your copy of The Journey of Desire today

The mighty victory is staying true to God. It is maintaining a mature perspective — where God means everything to you — through glorious breakthrough and in the midst of terrible affliction. If you do not hold fast to this, you will be shaken when your prayers do not seem to prevail; you will fall prey to feelings of failure or despair. Or, you will be grasping at promises of unending victory, looking down on those who do not see things as you do. You will be forced to ignore the sufferings of Christ, and our honor in sharing in them. And you will miss the goal of this life, which is not unending breakthrough, but something far more beautiful and everlasting — the beauty of Jesus Christ, which your Father is committed to forming in you: “God knew what he was doing from the very beginning. He decided from the outset to shape the lives of those who love him along the same lines as the life of his Son. The Son stands first in the line of humanity he restored. We see the original and intended shape of our lives there in him” (Rom. 8:29 The Message). Want more? Order your copy of Moving Mountains today

Zechariah’s visions are recorded in a short book bearing his name toward the end of the Old Testament portion of your Bible. I want to focus on one mighty, mighty promise found in chapter 2: Then I looked up, and there before me was a man with a measuring line in his hand. I asked, “Where are you going?” He answered me, “To measure Jerusalem, to find out how wide and how long it is.” While the angel who was speaking to me was leaving, another angel came to meet him and said to him: “Run, tell that young man, ‘Jerusalem will be a city without walls because of the great number of people and animals in it. And I myself will be a wall of fire around it,’ declares the Lord, ‘and I will be its glory within.’” (Zechariah 2:1–5) God promises to be a wall of fire around his people, and within that shield, his Glory. Talk about refuge! Who could possibly assault us through the Fire and Glory of the Almighty? I do think we should be careful as we claim promises from the Scriptures that are extrapolated from vague references, especially Old Testament references. Isaiah 45:2–3 would be a good example: I will go before you and will level the mountains; I will break down gates of bronze and cut through bars of iron. I will give you hidden treasures, riches stored in secret places, so that you may know that I am the LORD, the God of Israel, who summons you by name. A wonderful promise, and one any son or daughter of the Most High would want to lay hold of! But verse 1 makes it very clear that this promise was given to a specific individual at a specific moment in history: Cyrus, the last king of Anshan and founder of the Persian Empire. This is what the LORD says to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I take hold of to subdue nations before him and to strip kings of their armor, to open doors before him so that gates will not be shut: I will go before you. Does this mean we are barred from laying hold of this promise in Isaiah 45:2–3? By no means! Despite the specific person and historical context in this passage, it reveals the kinds of things our God does. If we walk with humility, we, too, can ask God to do those kinds of things for us. The mystic reads and understands passages like this with a childlike heart and says, This is my God! This is the kind of thing he does! I’m going to ask him to do it for me! Our family and team have prayed Isaiah 45:2–3 into many circumstances needing breakthrough, with wonderful results. Humbly, with childlike faith. Why would our loving God, who promises to be our refuge and shield, limit this beautiful promise from Zechariah 2:5 to a single moment in time? He’s not like that, for the simple reason that his Fire and Glory are essential to his nature, his very being. So when we take refuge in him, Fire and Glory will of course surround us because he surrounds us! Want More? Order your copy of Experience Jesus. Really. today

Today's Daily Reading is from Stasi's new book The Ladder of Love, available now — order your copy today! Jesus honors our bodies with breathtaking glory through His incarnation. He has a body now— a glorified body, yes, but a body. Remember, after He resurrected, He visited the disciples and ate with them, dispelling their fear that He was merely an apparition, an ephemeral spirit. Later, to doubting Thomas, He said, “Touch my scars. Touch me. I am real. I am substantive” (John 20). Jesus took on a body, and He will have a body for all eternity. And so will you. We will be raised with Christ, and we will put on our new glorified body. If our bodies matter in eternity, why would we think they don’t matter now? And if they didn’t matter, why would our bodies, how we feel about them, and what we think about them be so endlessly assaulted? The warfare is sometimes the compliment. Our enemy’s rage reveals the great dignity of bearing the image of God and the fact that, as followers of Jesus, we embody Christ both physically and spiritually. We make Him concrete and visible. We are the tangible expression of His Person. Just as Jesus was the visible representation of His Father, we are the visible representation of Jesus. Or we are meant to be— we are growing in that, day by day, as we continue to yield to our Potter’s craftsmanship. Jesus lives in us and through us. We represent Him to the world. We live in the resurrected Christ, and He lives in us. We can say, “Christ is now my life, the One who strengthens me. He lives His life in and through my kintsugi humanity.” This clay becomes the vessel Christ fills, inhabits. We reveal Jesus. What characteristics of Jesus do you love? Which characteristic of His do you want to possess? What of Him would you like to carry to the world? You get to! You are designed to! What is out of reach? Nothing. Want more? Order your copy of The Ladder of Love today

Life is the offer, friends. Let us not forget that. For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16) The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. (John 10:10) This is the way to have eternal life — to know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, the one you sent to earth. (John 17:3 NLT) There is no simpler or more beautiful way to say it than this: Act Four is the restoration of life as it was always meant to be. It is the return of the beauty, the intimacy, and the adventure we were created to enjoy and have longed for every day of our lives. And yet, better, for it is immortal. We can never lose it again. It cannot be taken away. Sunrise and sunset tell the tale every day, remembering Eden's glory, foretelling Eden's return. And what adventures shall unfold when we are given the kingdom that was always meant to be ours? Listen to this: Then the King will say to those on his right, "Come,you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world." (Matt. 25:34, emphasis added) Adam and Eve, and all their sons and daughters after them, were created to reign over the earth — to explore and discover and create and do all those things you see people do when they are at their very best. That is our destiny. Want more? Order your copy of Epic today

You do know what God is after in your own life, don’t you? Maybe that’s why we stay so busy — to avoid knowing, so we can avoid dealing with it. And you do know that the “quick fix” doesn’t ever work. Simply telling myself, “You are too busy, John. You’ve got to slow down,” is about as effective as telling an addict to quit. (Has it worked for you?) There are forces driving the way I live, reasons and compulsions written deep in my soul. I know where my pushing and striving come from. They come from unbelief, from some deep fear that it’s all up to me. Life is up to me. I’ve got to make as much headway as I can before the bottom drops out. Make hay while the sun shines ’cause it isn’t always going to shine and what’s that underlying dread? God is not just after behavior modification (as in, stop it), but real and deep and lasting change. And that brings me to another assumption that we must hold if we would walk with God — true holiness requires the healing of our souls. How blessed is God! And what a blessing he is! He’s the Father of our Master, Jesus Christ, and takes us to the high places of blessing in him. Long before he laid down earth’s foundations, he had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus of his love, to be made whole and holy by his love. (Ephesians 1:3–4 The Message) Whole and holy. The two go hand in hand. Oh, how important this is. You can’t find the holiness you want without deep wholeness. And you can’t find the wholeness you want without deep holiness. You can’t simply tell the meth addict to quit. She does need to quit, but she requires profound healing to be able to quit. You can’t just tell a raging man to stop losing his temper. He would love to stop. He’d give anything to stop. He doesn’t know how. He doesn’t know all the forces within him that swell up and overwhelm him with anger. Telling him to stop raging is like telling him to hold back the sea. For too long there have been two camps in Christendom. One is the holiness, or “righteousness,” crowd. They are the folks holding up the standard, preaching a message of moral purity. The results have been ... mixed. Some morality, and a great deal of guilt and shame. Very little lasting change comes from this approach. Hey, I’m all for purity. It’s just that you can’t get there without the healing of your soul. God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it. Want more? Order your copy of Walking With God today

Eve is given to Adam as his ezer kenegdo — or as many translations have it, his "help meet" or "helper." Doesn't sound like much, does it? It makes me think of Hamburger Helper. But Robert Alter says this is "a notoriously difficult word to translate." It means something far more powerful than just "helper"; it means "lifesaver." The phrase is only used elsewhere of God, when you need him to come through for you desperately. "There is no one like the God of Jeshurun, who rides on the heavens to help you" (Deut. 33:26). Eve is a life giver; she is Adam's ally. It is to both of them that the charter for adventure is given. It will take both of them to sustain life. And they will both need to fight together. Eve is deceived...and rather easily, as my friend Jan Meyers points out. In The Allure of Hope, Jan says, "Eve was convinced that God was withholding something from her." Not even the extravagance of Eden could convince her that God's heart is good. "When Eve was [deceived], the artistry of being a woman took a fateful dive into the barren places of control and loneliness." Now every daughter of Eve wants to "control her surroundings, her relationships, her God." No longer is she vulnerable; now she will be grasping. No longer does she want simply to share in the adventure; now she wants to control it. And as for her beauty, she either hides it in fear and anger, or she uses it to secure her place in the world. "In our fear that no one will speak on our behalf or protect us or fight for us, we start to recreate both ourselves and our role in the story. We manipulate our surroundings so we don't feel so defenseless." Fallen Eve either becomes rigid or clingy. Put simply, Eve is no longer simply inviting. She is either hiding in busyness or demanding that Adam come through for her; usually, an odd combination of both. Want more? Order your copy of Wild at Heart today

Today's Daily Reading is from Stasi's new book The Ladder of Love, available now — order your copy today! Take a moment and check in with your own heart. What are you feeling? What are you believing? About yourself? About your life? About God? What have you been wounded into believing? Take note of what you are believing. Are your thoughts based on the Word of God? Dear reader, we need to recognize if our thoughts align with the truth of what God says. In order to do that, we need to know what the Word says. Time spent in the Scriptures is a necessity, one we cannot do without. To stand firm, we need to repent of, turn away from, and reject where our thoughts are not consistent with the Scriptures and where we have instead come into alignment with our enemy. We repent of the ways we have not been living as we know the Holy Spirit has been inviting us to. We repent of unforgiveness of others— we choose to forgive, and we even forgive ourselves. “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). We name the agreements we have been making with the enemy, and we break them. We break all the agreements we have been making with Satan against ourselves, against others, against our lives, and against our God. Children of God, valiant ones, you cannot resist hatred, death, ambivalence, despair, or anything else sourced against you by the evil one if you are actively agreeing with those powers. Even the feeling of being overwhelmed or exhausted, validated by your schedule, is made worse by the presence of darkness. Break agreements with it. By faith, not by our feelings or our circumstances, we make agreement with what the God of all hope says. And we invite Jesus to come and heal us where we have been wounded into believing lies. We ask Him to come for us in the places where harm has made us vulnerable. This is the first way that we stand firm: We resist the devil, and that makes him flee. We take our thoughts captive to the obedience of Christ. We grow in being quick to recognize when our hearts are spiraling down, and when they are, we check in with our thought life. If it doesn’t align with what God says, then we reject it as a lie from the pit of hell. There are other ways to stand firm, of course. The choices in what we think about is a beginning point, but we also want to guard our hearts— the wellspring of life within us (Proverbs 4:23)— by being careful about what we take in, what we read, what we watch, how we spend our time, how we speak, how we live in the day- to- day, and what we entertain in our imaginations. We need to fight for our freedom by choosing Jesus. And friends, you are. You are. You must. If we don’t battle for our own hearts, then we won’t be able to battle for others and love them into the Kingdom of God and deeper freedom in Christ. There is freedom to be had. There is life to be enjoyed. There is love to be saturated with. Want more? Order your copy of The Ladder of Love today

John the Beloved, also called John the Seer because of his authorship of the book of Revelation, was taken into the Kingdom of God by the Spirit. He visited the city of God, and there he saw the River: Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. (Revelation 22:1–2) The City of God is a real thing, certainly; the Tree of Life is real; the River is real. It is critical for the ordinary mystic to understand the availability of the River in this current life: On the last and greatest day of the festival, Jesus stood and said in a loud voice, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as Scripture has said, rivers of living water will flow from within them.” (John 7:37–38) It is an invitation as powerful as when Christ said, “If anyone opens the door, I will come in.” Jesus comes, really; the River comes too. We also have the wonderful promise of Psalm 1, which links our humanity to the Tree of Life planted by the River in the City of God: That person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither— whatever they do prospers. (Psalm 1:3) A human life can only be evergreen if it is drawing upon the River of Life! Want More? Order your copy of Experience Jesus. Really. today

The story of Cinderella turns upon an invitation. Up until the moment that the courier from the palace arrives at her door, Cinderella’s life seems set in stone. She will always be a washerwoman, a cellar girl. Her enemies will forever have the upper hand. She will live a life of enduring disappointments, though she will suffer them nobly. No other life seems possible. This is her fate. Then, word from the prince arrives—an invitation to a ball. It is at this point that all hell breaks loose. Her longings are awakened. Her enemies become enraged. And her life is never the same. How gracious that it comes by invitation. As a woman, you don’t need to strive or arrange; you don’t need to make it happen. You only need to respond. Granted—Cinderella’s response took immense courage, courage that came only out of a deep desire to find the life her heart knew it was meant for. She wanted to go. But it took steadfastness to press through her fears just to get to the ball. It took courage not to abandon all hope even after she danced with the prince. (She ran back to the cellar, as we all do.) But she became the woman she was born to be, and the kingdom was never the same. It is a beautiful parable. The same holds true for Mary, the mother of Jesus—only it’s far, far more weighty. Her life also turned upon an invitation. The angel came as the courier of the King. But still, she needed to say yes. He would not force the whole thing upon her. Her heart needed to be willing. She would need her heart through all that followed. Accepting God’s invitation required remarkable courage, and once again all hell broke loose. Her Enemy raged. She nearly lost her marriage. She and Joseph certainly lost their standing in the synagogue. Her life became an incredible story. Mary needed a steadfastness of heart to keep saying yes to God. But she became the woman she was born to be, and the Kingdom was never the same. It all started with an invitation. The invitations of our Prince come to us in all sorts of ways. Your heart itself, as a woman, is an invitation. An invitation delivered in the most intimate and personalized way. Your Lover has written something on your heart. It is a call to find a life of Romance and to protect that love affair as your most precious treasure. A call to cultivate the beauty you hold inside, and to unveil your beauty on behalf of others. And it is a call to adventure, to become the ezer the world desperately needs you to be. Want more? Order your copy of Captivating today

I will go before you and will level the mountains; I will break down gates of bronze and cut through bars of iron. I will give you the treasures of darkness, riches stored in secret places, so that you may know that I am the Lord, the God of Israel, who summons you by name. (Isa. 45:2-3) God's imagery of going before us lets us know that he desires us to go on a journey. This is not so frightening. Most of us are aware that the Christian life requires a pilgrimage of some sort. We know we are sojourners. What we have sometimes not given much thought to is what kind of a journey we are to be taking. Not realizing it is a journey of the heart that is called for, we make a crucial mistake. We come to a place in our spiritual life where we hear God calling us. We know he is calling us to give up the less-wild lovers that have become so much a part of our identity, embrace our nakedness, and trust in his goodness. As we stand at this intersection of God's calling, we look down two highways that appear to travel in very different directions. The first highway quickly takes a turn and disappears from our view. We cannot see clearly where it leads, but there are ominous clouds in the near distance. Standing still long enough to look down this road makes us aware of an anxiety inside, an anxiety that threatens to crystallize into unhealed pain and forgotten disappointment. We check our valise and find no up-to-date road map but only the torn and smudged parchment containing the scribbled anecdotes and travelers' warnings by a few who have traveled the way of the heart before us. They encourage us to follow them, but their rambling journals give no real answers to our queries on how to navigate the highway. Want more? Order your copy of The Sacred Romance today

Today's Daily Reading is from Stasi's new book The Ladder of Love, available now — order your copy today! The word “servant” doesn’t translate well into our modern- day vernacular. It’s a word that feels like you’re welcome in the house— but only in certain rooms. You must stand up straight. Keep your eyes cast down. You are less than. But that is not what it means to be a servant of Jesus or a servant of the ones He loves. We are not less than. We don’t have parameters around our access to God— indeed, we have unlimited access. We can walk in the front door, and into His throne room, boldly. What if we renamed “Servant” to “Devoted Ones”? Or how about “the Smitten”? Because that is the heart of a servant of our King— both in pouring out our lives to Him in secret and in pouring them out visibly on behalf of others. It is the heart of Jesus. “Be dressed ready for service and keep your lamps burning, like servants waiting for their master to return from a wedding banquet, so that when he comes and knocks they can immediately open the door for him. It will be good for those servants whose master finds them watching when he comes. Truly I tell you, he will dress himself to serve, will have them recline at the table and will come and wait on them” (Luke 12:35–37). In a stunning twist of the story, Jesus says He longs to serve us. There must be a dignity here we have lost, a beauty worth recovering. Want more? Order your copy of The Ladder of Love today

We must open our hearts to all the other ways God is bringing beauty into our lives. The beauty of a flower garden or moonlight on water, the beauty of music or a written word. Our souls crave Beauty, and if we do not find it we will be famished. We must take in Beauty, often, or we will be taken out by beauty. Learning to be loved, and learning to love, learning to be romanced, and learning to romance — that is what this stage is all about. Not duty. Not merely discipline. But an awakening of our hearts to the Beauty and Love of God, and at the same time (we cannot wait until some later time), we offer our hearts as well — to God, to the women in our lives, to our sons and daughters, to others. This is a love story, after all. As William Blake said, “And we are put on earth a little space / To learn to bear the beams of love.” Or, in Paul’s words, “Be imitators of God ... and live a life of love” (Eph. 5:1–2 NIV). He is a great Romancer. Want more? Order your copy of Fathered By God today

Every great story involves a quest. In J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins ran from the door at a quarter till eleven without even so much as a pocket handkerchief and launched on an adventure that would change his life forever. Alice stepped through the looking glass into Wonderland; Lucy, Edmund, Susan, and Peter stumbled through the wardrobe into Narnia. Abraham left his country, his people, and his father's household to follow the most outlandish sort of promise from a God he'd only just met, and he never came back. Jacob and his sons went to Egypt for some groceries and four hundred years later the Israel nation pulled up stakes and headed for home. Peter, Andrew, James, and John all turned on a dime one day to follow the Master, their fishing nets heaped in wet piles behind them. The Sacred Romance involves for every soul a journey of heroic proportions. And while it may require for some a change of geography, for every soul it means a journey of the heart. The choice before us now is to journey or to homestead, to live like Abraham, the friend of God, or like Robinson Crusoe, the lost soul cobbling together some sort of existence with whatever he can salvage from the wreckage of the world. Crusoe was no pilgrim; he was a survivor, hunkered down for the duration. He lived in a very, very small world where he was the lead character and all else found its focus in him. Of course, to be fair, Crusoe was stranded on an island with little hope of rescue. We have been rescued, but still the choice is ours to stay in our small stories, clutching our household gods and false lovers, or to run in search of life. Want more? Order your copy of The Sacred Romance today

Giving up has always been a struggle for frail humanity. But when Jesus urges us to ask for strength to escape, he has something particular in mind, something he sees coming: “At that time many will turn away from the faith” (Matthew 24:10). Saint Paul was deeply troubled by this as he wrote his friends living in Thessalonica: “Let no one deceive you by any means; for that Day [the day Christ returns] will not come unless the falling away comes first” (2 Thessalonians 2:3 NKJV). Prior to the climax of this story, and the wonderful return of Jesus to make everything new, there will be some sort of global Falling Away. The Greek word here is apostasia, and that is why some translations put it this way: “No one is to deceive you in any way! For it will not come unless the apostasy comes first” (2 Thessalonians 2:3 NASB). But the word apostasy conjures up more zombie apocalypse imagery, and that’s not helpful in our effort to understand our situation. I don’t think we’re going to see millions of people tattooing “I hate God; I love Satan” on their chests, or marches in every major city blaspheming Jesus Christ. Satan is much cleverer than all that. I believe what we will see — what we see happening now — is simply people giving up on God in large numbers. Which is why I think the New Life Version has it right: “For the Lord will not come again until many people turn away from God” (2 Thessalonians 2:3). I believe we may be witnessing the Great Falling Away. Let me be quick to say that there isn’t a simple explanation nor simplistic solution. Some people are fed up with religion. But much of the turning from God is born out of heartache and disappointment — God did not seem to help. He did not seem to hear. These are the deepest hurts of the human heart. We will explore what to do with those hurts as we go along, but let me say here that giving up your faith is like finding yourself in a desert, your weary legs throbbing with pain. You can’t find your way out by cutting your legs off. God can handle your anger, disappointment, even bitterness. But walking away from Jesus is forsaking your only hope out of the heartache. I bring this up because the enemy is wickedly skilled at pouncing on our vulnerabilities. He is using these trying times to cloud our hearts with unbelief. If in fact the Falling Away is sweeping the earth, we want to have advance warning. It gets in the air like poison, and we don’t want to slowly succumb to it ourselves. It gains a social momentum, and since we are social creatures, we can get swept up in it without a conscious decision on our part. But this is our moment, and Jesus offers us strength, so let us seize it now with both hands while we still can. Want more? Order your copy of Resilient today

Today's Daily Reading is from Stasi's new book The Ladder of Love, available now — order your copy today! My heart is not proud, Lord, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. But I have calmed and quieted myself, I am like a weaned child with its mother; like a weaned child I am content. Israel, put your hope in the Lord both now and for evermore. (vv. 1–3) Weaned means “satisfied.” It means to have had enough. It means having had hunger assuaged not just temporarily but abundantly. They are full! A weaned child is at rest, knowing that more is always available. We can have that experience. We are meant to know that. In Ephesians 1:3, Paul writes, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places” (esv). Every spiritual blessing, not some spiritual blessings. It doesn’t say He’s blessed us with a couple of things that will help us as we sojourn Home. It says He’s blessed us with every single one. What are they? Paul goes on to outline “every spiritual blessing.” First, we have God’s gift of being chosen by Him to be His particular treasure. We have “adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ” (v. 5). Then Paul speaks of the “glorious grace” that God has “poured out on us who belong to his dear Son. He is so rich in kindness and grace that he purchased our freedom with the blood of his Son and forgave our sins. He has showered his kindness on us, along with all wisdom and understanding” (vv. 6–8 nlt). Our heavenly Father is rich in grace, kindness, forgiveness, freedom, wisdom and understanding, and every fruit of the Spirit, and He makes us rich in the same, in Jesus. For this reason Paul could say, “And my God will meet all your needs according to the riches of his glory in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:19). All you need. Remember that 1 John 3:1 encourages us to “see what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” His love isn’t stingy. He doesn’t parcel it out depending upon His mood or current state. His love is abundant. His love is lavish. Always. And it always has been. Want more? Order your copy of The Ladder of Love today

Your sin has been dealt with. Your Father has removed it from you "as far as the east is from the west" (Ps. 103:12). Your sins have been washed away (1 Cor. 6:11). When God looks at you he does not see your sin. He has not one condemning thought toward you (Rom. 8:1). But that's not all. You have a new heart. That's the promise of the new covenant: "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws" (Ezek. 36:26 -27). There's a reason that it's called good news. Too many Christians today are living back in the old covenant. They've had Jeremiah 17:9 drilled into them and they walk around believing my heart is deceitfully wicked. Not anymore it's not. Read the rest of the book. In Jeremiah 31:33, God announces the cure for all that: "I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people." I will give you a new heart. That's why Paul says in Romans 2:29, "No, a man is a Jew if he is one inwardly; and circumcision is circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit." Sin is not the deepest thing about you. You have a new heart. Did you hear me? Your heart is good. What God sees when he sees you is the real you, the true you, the man he had in mind when he made you. Want more? Order your copy of Wild at Heart today

The Ephesians passage warns about spiritual strongholds created in our lives when we let “the sun go down” on something. Note that in this case that something isn’t necessarily sin. Paul says, “in your anger do not sin,” so anger does not equal sin. Anger can be a very appropriate reaction to life’s injustices. Nonetheless, failure to deal with that anger (letting the sun go down on it) clearly gives our enemy an opportunity to create footholds or places of bondage in our lives. (By the way, this is a letter written to Christians; it is therefore quite clear that Christians can have demonic strongholds in their lives.) If you let the sun go down on these unresolved issues in your life — the emotional issues, wounds, pain, and the sin that goes with them — you are going to create a mess for yourself down the road. And so a genuine pursuit of holiness requires going back into those places to deal with them now. Want more? Order your copy of Free to Live today

Today's Daily Reading is from Stasi's new book The Ladder of Love, available now — order your copy today! “He predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves” (Ephesians 1:5–6). We have been chosen by God. We belong to Him. We have been adopted into God’s family. We have all the rights and privileges that come with that, including inheritance. We are His now and forever. We can believe Him when he says, “You are mine” (Isaiah 43:1). “For those whom [God] foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers” (Romans 8:29 esv). Hebrews 2:11 states, “For he who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one source. That is why he is not ashamed to call them brothers” (esv). Jesus is our Brother. We have a bond that is unbreakable. He understands our struggles, empathizes with our pain, and is always on our side. He has shared in our humanity and experienced everything that we have experienced, including temptation, fear, exhaustion, despair, and even disappointing people. Jesus is filled with compassion toward us. Like the closest of siblings, Jesus is always interested in hearing the outpouring of our words flowing from our hearts. He listens attentively and patiently even as we talk long into the night. No one knows your heart the way He does. He is our Defender. He knows where and how we are weak. He is our support. He comprehends that we can’t save ourselves, and He has stepped in on our behalf. He has intervened for us in the mightiest of ways possible. His blood shed on the cross purchased the right for us to be forgiven and be restored to our God and paved the way for us to call our God “Father.” No one has ever been as “for you” as Jesus has. “Dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have an advocate with the Father— Jesus Christ, the Righteous One” (1 John 2:1). Jesus is our Advocate. He intercedes for us day and night before the throne saying, “Don’t blame them, blame Me.” He speaks truth over our lives that we belong to God, we have been purchased with a price, we have been made new. This reality brings us such comfort! “Even now, behold, my witness is in heaven, and my advocate is on high” (Job 16:19 nasb). Jesus is also our Brother in arms. He stands shoulder to shoulder with us as we face the various battles that arise against us and within us. Not only is He our Great Captain, our valiant Champion, in whom we have ultimate trust and confidence, but He brings assurance to us by His steady and constant Presence. He fights with us and for us. “So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God” (Isaiah 41:10). “And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). Want more? Order your copy of The Ladder of Love today

Down through the ages, followers of Christ have believed that to be able to give God our attention as a regular practice was a very important thing. After vividly recounting the many challenges of faith and character before us, the author of Hebrews says, Let us run with endurance the race God has set before us. We do this by keeping [fixing] our eyes on Jesus, the champion who initiates and perfects our faith (Hebrews 12:1–2 NLT). Those who look to him are radiant (Psalm 34:5 NIV) Oh, how I love your law! I meditate on it all day long. Your commands are always with me and make me wiser than my enemies. I have more insight than all my teachers, for I meditate on your statutes. (Psalm 119:97–99 NIV) I don’t think we realize how much our use of technology and its assault on our attention has made this difficult to do. You can’t give God your attention when your attention is constantly being targeted and taken captive ... and you’re cooperating. In a blog post entitled "Mobile Blindness," marketing guru Seth Godin writes, We swipe instead of click, we scan instead of read, even our personal email. We get exposure to far more at the surface, but we rarely dig in. Mobile blindness. The quick pass. The inability to linger, and dig deep. It’s just the next thing, the next thing, the next thing. Our precious attention has been groomed and taken hostage. The key is this: the rooted person is able to meditate — give sustained attention to — the revelation of God. Not swipe, not multitask. Lingering focus. So Crawford wonders, “As our mental lives become more fragmented, what is at stake often seems to be nothing less than the question of whether one can maintain a coherent self. I mean a self that is able to act according to settled purposes and ongoing projects, rather than flitting about.” Dear reader — you can’t find more of God when all you’re able to give him is a flit and flicker of your attention. The good news is that we actually have a choice. Unlike persecution, the things currently assaulting us are things we can choose not to participate in. Want more? Order your copy of Get Your Life Back today