Daily Readings by Wild at Heart

Our life is a story. A rather long and complicated story that has unfolded over time. There are many scenes, large and small, and many "firsts." Your first step; your first word; your first day of school. There was your first best friend; your first recital; your first date; your first love; your first kiss; your first heartbreak. If you stop and think of it, your heart has lived through quite a s...

God created us in freedom to be his intimate allies, and he will not give up on us. He seeks his allies still. Not religion. Not good church people. Lovers. Allies. Friends of the deepest sort. I will give them a heart to know me, that I am the LORD. They will be my people, and I will be their God, for they will return to me with all their heart. (Jer. 24:7) It is the most beautiful of all love st...

Today’s Daily Reading is an excerpt from Morgan Snyder's new book, Becoming a King “What does a man need to survive?” I posed this question years ago to my very young son as we were headed out on an adventure. After careful and honest consideration, he responded, “A wallet and a phone.” It was brilliant. And painful. Brilliant because of his perceptivity about our culture, painful because the cult...

"The King is enthralled by your beauty." Psalm 45:11 Lovely little six-year-old Lacey was visiting our ministry headquarters the other day, going from office to office, swinging on the door frame and asking with a smile, "Would you like to hear my song?" Her face kissed by the sun with charming freckles, two front teeth missing and eyes dancing with merriment, who could refuse her? She didn't real...

The word I choose to describe Jesus is life . Pure, lush, exuberant Life. Life that proves to be unquenchable, unstoppable, indestructible. As John summarized the whole affair, “In him was life, and that light was the light of men” (1:4). It sure was.   Let’s turn back to nature one more time. It is such a liberating force from the religious fog, because it is God’s and it speaks volumes about his...

I had my own tin-foil-brain, fried-soul kind of day. My rescue didn't take place until I had thrashed through most of the calamity. It was the kind of day when everything seems to go sideways from the moment you get out of bed; I’ll bet you’ve had one of these: There’s no milk, so there’s no cereal, and you’re late anyways, so there’s no breakfast. You’re halfway to work when you realize you forgo...

Life is a journey of the heart that requires the mind—not the other way around. The church sometimes gets this backward and makes knowing the right things the center of life. It’s not; the heart is the center of life. Desire is always where the action is. However, staying alive to our desire is not enough; we know that only too well. We must bring the truth into our hearts to guard and to guide ou...

Love your neighbor, Jesus urged, as you love yourself. (Which, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, is a pretty sick command if we are to hate ourselves.) How you handle people is the second great test of your character.   Again, Jesus is cutting through both all the complexity and our dodging by helping us focus on our motives. It’s pretty hard to be a racist and still love that person. It’s pretty hard t...

The book “Killing Lions” is a conversation between John and Sam Eldredge about the trials young men face .     [Sam]   I know so many of us long for words of validation, but few ever hear them. An acquaintance of mine who lived down the street went out and bought a new (used) car one day. He spent quite a bit and took out a loan to boot. When he pulled up he started dancing around the driveway cha...

What do I pray, Lord? What is this about?   Pause. This is a really, really helpful place to begin — to ask God what to pray. I don’t know what’s going on. I’m looking at the equivalent of a two-headed rooster on my windowsill. I don’t know why God brought this up. So I ask him. Remember the disciples asking Jesus, “Teach us to pray”? Too many times we just jump in and start praying (making prayer...

I thought of Jesus’ warning about the end of the age, how as times grow dark and people feel more keenly pressed, love will grow rare. “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom … Because of the increase of wickedness, the love of most will grow cold” (Matthew 24:7, 12). These are trying times, for all of us. I venture we will see even more trying times. But Auden was right. We...

But you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the Judge of all, to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a bette...

I cannot say this more emphatically—life affected Jesus. “We have spread so many ashes over the historical Jesus that we scarcely feel the glow of His presence anymore,” lamented Brennan Manning. “He is a man in a way that we have forgotten men can be: truthful, blunt, emotional, non-manipulative, sensitive, compassionate.” Jesus never did anything halfheartedly. When he embraced our humanity, he...

We value independence. Mobility. Self-sufficiency. Yay. But we are a dependent people. Dependent on air, food, water. Needful of others. Needful of God. He is our divine helper, our ezer , without whom we will not be able to live a life of meaning filled with what matters most. Truth. Beauty. Goodness. Love.  How do we get our thirst quenched when we are unable to quench it ourselves? How do we ca...

One of the saddest of all the sad stories in the history of the people of God comes shortly after the dramatic exodus from Egypt, as they stand on the brink of a whole new life in the land God had promised:   But you were unwilling to go up; you rebelled against the command of the Lord your God. You grumbled in your tents and said, “The Lord hates us; so he brought us out of Egypt to deliver us in...

Sometimes we feel hopeless to ever change simply because our personal history is filled with our failed attempts to change. Where was that angel who was supposed to be guarding our tongue and preventing those harsh words from lashing out at our children? What happened to that fruit of the Spirit that was empowering us to be self-controlled and pass by the donut section? God has not given me a spir...

Where do we go from here? "This life," wrote Jonathan Edwards, "ought to be spent by us only as a journey towards heaven." That's the only story worth living in now. The road goes out before us and our destination awaits. In the imagery of Hebrews, a race is set before us and we must run for all we're worth. Our prayers will have been answered if we've helped to lift some of the deadweight so that...

The deeper reason we fear our own glory is that once we let others see it, they will have seen the truest us, and that is nakedness indeed. We can repent of our sin. We can work on our "issues." But there is nothing to be "done" about our glory. It's so naked. It's just there — the truest us. It is an awkward thing to shimmer when everyone else around you is not, to walk in your glory with an unve...

Believing in God is not the same thing as union with God. Doing various God — activities is not the same as union with God. Obeying God isn’t necessarily union with God.  These things can all be done while there is a kind of distance between our soul and God. You can read all about Italy but that is very different from actually living there. You can do things for your spouse but that’s not the sam...

Do not give way to fear. (1 Peter 3:6)   The reason we fear to step out is because we know that it might not go well (is that an understatement?). We have a history of wounds screaming at us to play it safe. We feel so deeply that if it doesn’t go well, if we are not received well, their reaction becomes the verdict on our lives, on our very beings, on our hearts. We fear that our deepest doubts a...

Christianity is often presented as essentially the transfer of a body of knowledge. We learn about where the Philistines were from, and how much a drachma would be worth today, and all sorts of things about the original Greek. The information presented could not seem more irrelevant to our deepest desires. Then there are the systems aimed at getting our behavior in line, one way or another. Regard...

We long for beauty, and when the biblical writers speak of heaven, they use the most beautiful imagery they can. You can almost hear the agony of the writer trying to get it right while knowing he falls far short of what he sees. In the book of Revelation, John uses the word like again and again. “And He who was sitting was like a jasper stone and a sardius in appearance; and there was a rainbow a...

Let me tell you, few things can mess you up as badly as trying to do your best. For the tender heart, the earnest heart, it is so discouraging to give all you have trying to do what you think Jesus would have you do, and find yourself falling short, sabotaging your own efforts at every turn. Discouragement and shame settle in like a long Seattle rain.   And this is what most Christians experience...

If you'll recall, Moses put a veil over his face, first to hide his glory, then to hide the fact that it was fading away. That, too, was a picture of a deeper reality. We all do that. We all have veiled our glory, or someone has veiled it for us. Usually some combination of both. But the time has come to set all veils aside: Now if the ministry that brought death, which was engraved in letters on...

The Israelites had to fight to get to the promised land, and they had to fight to get in. Once there, they had to fight to clear it of enemies, and then fight to keep it so. David had to fight to secure his throne, and he too had to fight to keep it. God has long fought for the romance he desires with us, and he fights on even now. You needn’t be afraid of the fight. The battle can be won, and it...