UCB Word For Today

The worship pathway. When you’re on the worship pathway, you resonate with the psalmist: ‘I was glad when they said to me, “Let us go into the house of the LORD.”’ Something deep inside you feels released when praise is given. Your heart opens up and you come alive. You find yourself in tears, sometimes in moments of deep joy, because God seems so close. But here are two cautions if you’re on this...

The serving pathway. On the serving pathway, you find God’s presence seems most tangible when you’re helping others. You identify with the words of Jesus: ‘Inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these…you did it to Me’ (Matthew 25:40 NKJV). And you may find that you are uncomfortable in a setting where you don’t have a role to play or a service to perform. An example of this would be Dorcas...

The relational pathway. People who follow the relational pathway find that they have a deep sense of God’s presence when they are involved in significant relationships. Jesus’ words, ‘For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them’ (Matthew 18:20 NKJV), makes perfect sense to the relational type. If you are on the relational pathway, you may feel guilty wh...

The relational pathway. People who follow the relational pathway find that they have a deep sense of God’s presence when they are involved in significant relationships. Jesus’ words, ‘For where two or three are gathered together in My name, I am there in the midst of them’ (Matthew 18:20 NKJV), makes perfect sense to the relational type. If you are on the relational pathway, you may feel guilty wh...

A spiritual pathway has to do with the way you most naturally sense God’s presence and experience spiritual growth. We all have at least one pathway that comes most easily to us. And there’s enormous freedom in identifying and embracing your spiritual pathway. It means you can focus on relating to God in that way. For the next few days, let’s look at some different spiritual pathways and see which...

God can deliver you from anything in a single day, but you’ve got to back it up with daily discipline. If you don’t practise spiritual discipline day in and day out, your deliverance will be short-lived. You’ll fall back into whatever it was that God delivered you from. Anybody can set a life goal; the hard part is going after it every day. You get into shape one workout at a time. You get out of...

Much could be said about Rahab without mentioning her profession. She was a Canaanite. She provided cover for the spies of Joshua. She came to believe in the God of Abraham before she ever met the children of Abraham. She was spared in the destruction of her city. She married a contemporary of Joshua’s, bore a son named Boaz, had a great-grandson named Jesse, a great-great-grandson named David, an...

In his classic book called Prayer, Dr O. Hallesby wrote: ‘Prayer and helplessness are inseparable. Only those who are helpless can truly pray…Prayer therefore consists simply in telling God day by day in what ways we feel helpless. We are moved to pray every time the Spirit of God…emphasises anew to us our helplessness, and we realise how impotent we are by nature to believe, to love, to hope, to...

After David killed Goliath, four other men, including his nephew Jonathan, killed giants that rose up against the Israelites. ‘In still another battle, which took place at Gath, there was a huge man with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot – twenty-four in all. He was also descended from Rapha. When he taunted Israel, Jonathan son of Shimeah, David’s brother, killed him’ (2 Samuel 2...

In 1985 Tim Burke saw his boyhood dream come true when the Montreal Expos baseball team took him on as a pitcher, giving him an annual salary of $600,000. (Back then, that was big money for a player.) After four years in the minor leagues, he was finally given a chance to play in the big leagues. And he quickly proved his worth by setting a record for the most relief appearances by any rookie pitc...

The Bible likens the Christian life to a marathon. The writer of the book of Hebrews said: ‘Let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured’ (Hebrews 12:1-2 NKJV). Paul wrote to the Philippian believers: ‘The...

God is the giver of dreams. ‘For God does speak…in a dream, in a vision…when deep sleep falls on people’ (vv. 14-15 NIV). Unless you want to spend the rest of your life being unfulfilled and uninspired, take your dream out of the closet and blow the dust off. It’s easy to get caught up in the ‘have tos’ of life – working; caring for children, spouses, and ageing parents; taking care of homes, etc....

Marcial Losada is an organisational psychologist who studies the power of positivity. He argues that we need a negative feedback loop to survive. Without midcourse corrections, we mindlessly make the same mistakes. But if you want to thrive, you also need a positive feedback loop. His studies have produced what is known as the Losada ratio: it’s the ratio of positive feedback to negative feedback...

Fanny Crosby, the noted hymn writer, said she never attempted to write a hymn without first kneeling in prayer. Given that she wrote about 8,000 songs, she was obviously a woman of prayer! Beloved hymns such as ‘Blessed Assurance’, ‘To God Be The Glory’, and ‘I Am Thine, O Lord’ were born from times of prayer. But like many creative people, she was often under pressure to meet deadlines. One time...

Before leaving the leaders of the church at Ephesus for the last time, Paul told them: ‘The Holy Spirit testifies in every city, saying that chains and tribulations await me. But none of these things move me; nor do I count my life dear to myself, so that I may finish my race with joy’ (vv. 23-24 NKJV). There are two ways to deal with a problem: 1) Pray and believe God to remove it, like He did wi...

The Lord charged the church at Ephesus with having ‘left your first love’ (see Revelation 2:4) and the church of Laodicea with being ‘neither hot nor cold, but lukewarm’ (see Revelation 3:15-16). R.T. Kendall said, ‘The greatest opposition to what God wants to do next comes from those who were on the cutting edge of what God did last.’ Read the following Scriptures carefully and prayerfully: ‘Do n...

Just as Jericho was a stronghold in Canaan, we have strongholds in our lives. Paul wrote: ‘The weapons of our warfare are…mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God’ (vv. 4-5 NKJV). A stronghold is an ‘argument’ or a ‘high thing’ that ‘exalts itself against the knowledge of God’. It is a conviction, outloo...

Someone said: ‘The secret of success is to be like a duck – smooth and unruffled on top, and paddling furiously underneath.’ Niccolò Paganini, the well-known nineteenth-century violinist, illustrated the truth of this. His most memorable concert was marked by ‘furious paddling under the surface’ rather than easy success. The concert was performed with a full orchestra before a packed house in Ital...

Paul asked: ‘Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?’ And the answer is nothing! Then he came up with a laundry list of worst-case scenarios, from trouble to danger and anything in between: ‘Trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword’ (NIV). When Paul wrote ‘hardship’, he was back in the Mediterranean Sea during a terrible typhoon. ‘Persecution’ pinged his...

Thomas Aquinas was one of the most prolific writers and thinkers of the Middle Ages. His Summa Theologica is one of history’s most exhausting and enduring theologies. But Aquinas never finished it because of something that happened on 6th December 1273, that caused him to give up writing. ‘All that I have written seems to be like straw,’ Aquinas said, ‘compared to what has now been revealed to me....

Anxiety is the curse of the modern era, but it’s not a new trend. Throughout Scripture, Jesus talked a lot about anxiety, stress, and fear. In fact, He mentioned them repeatedly in His teachings. In Matthew 6:25-27, He said, ‘Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or…what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; the...

If you are impulsive, you tend to lack discipline. You can be thoughtless, or insensitive to others, or driven by appetite. You may have a hard time with delayed gratification. You have a low frustration tolerance. You get bored easily. You can fly off the handle. If this describes you, here are six principles you should try to incorporate into your life: 1) Ask counsel from wise friends before pl...