Lift Up Your Day

Send us Fan Mail Benjamin Franklin came to the meeting with his mind already made up. He would not put one coin in the collection. Then the preacher began to speak. By the end, even the gold was gone, and the most famous skeptic in America walked home with empty pockets and a head full of wonder. The preacher was George Whitefield, and in the year 1740 he was turning the American colonies upside d...

Send us Fan Mail A brilliant young Englishwoman sat at her desk one day, packing nearly fifty pieces of jewelry into a box to give away, and called it the happiest packing of her life. This is the story of Frances Ridley Havergal (1836-1879), who wrote the hymn Take My Life and Let It Be and then proved she meant every word, shipping a fortune in jewelry to the mission field with pure joy. Born in...

Send us Fan Mail A robbed man picks up his pen, and what he writes will still be preaching three hundred years later. On a dark road outside Chester, thieves took every coin in Matthew Henry's pockets and disappeared into the woods. He walked home shaken, cold, and empty-handed. Most men would have filled their diary that night with anger. Matthew Henry filled his with thanks. Thankful he had...

Send us Fan Mail A preacher with a weak voice. A bored New England town. Twenty minutes of monotone reading. And heaven came down anyway. On a warm Wednesday in July of 1741, Jonathan Edwards stepped into the pulpit at Enfield, Connecticut. He never looked up from his page. He read his sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God , in a flat monotone. Twenty minutes later, grown men were gripping...

Send us Fan Mail When Fanny Crosby was six weeks old, a traveling doctor treated her infected eyes with a hot poultice and left her blind for life. He packed up and left town, and no one ever saw him again. She would never see a sunrise or her mother's face. She would never see a single word she would one day write. And she would write more than eight thousand hymns the church is still singin...

Send us Fan Mail A preacher rode alone through the mountains of Wales, and his heart was cold. His name was Christmas Evans. Born on Christmas Day, 1766, into deep poverty. Orphaned at nine. At seventeen he still could not read a single word. After he met Christ, he taught himself his letters and began to preach. One night his old friends beat him in the dark and he lost an eye for the rest of his...

Send us Fan Mail In the winter of 1863, soldiers waded into half-frozen creeks to be baptized, too full of new faith to wait for spring, and many of them knew they might not live to see it. This is the story of the Great Revival that swept the Civil War camps on both sides, where Bibles were so scarce a single one served a whole regiment, and around 150,000 men came to Christ in the middle of the...

Send us Fan Mail They told her there was no place for a Black missionary to Africa. She called it the greatest disappointment of her life. Mary McLeod Bethune was born in 1875 on a South Carolina cotton field, the fifteenth of seventeen children of former slaves. She trained for years to become a missionary. When the door slammed, she opened a school in Daytona Beach with a dollar and fifty cents,...

Send us Fan Mail C.S. Lewis was a brilliant Oxford atheist, certain that Christianity was a myth and determined to keep God at arm's length. This is the story of how the evidence, a midnight conversation with J.R.R. Tolkien, and a quiet ride to the zoo in his brother's motorcycle sidecar brought the most reluctant convert in England to his knees. And it leads to the most personal questio...

Send us Fan Mail The fastest man in Scotland was about to throw away the race of his life. The 1924 Olympics were in Paris, and Eric Liddell was the favorite to win the 100 meters. Then the schedule came out. The heats fell on a Sunday. And Eric Liddell, who believed the Lord's Day belonged to the Lord, quietly announced that he would not run. The newspapers called him a fool. Some of his own...

Send us Fan Mail She weighed just fifty pounds when they carried her onto the ship. Lottie Moon, four feet three inches tall and fluent in five languages, had given away all her food and money to starving families during a famine in China. She had spent nearly forty years pouring out her life on the far side of the world, and now her own body could not go on. The younger missionaries put her on a...

Send us Fan Mail The Atlantic had turned black. Wind tore through the rigging, waves crashed clean over the deck, and a sailor who had spent years mocking the very idea of God was clinging to a rope and certain he would not live to see morning. His name was John Newton. He was the captain of a slave ship, and by his own confession one of the most brutal men sailing those waters. The vessel was bre...

Send us Fan Mail He started out as a thief. By sixteen, George Müller had stolen from his own father, run out on hotel bills, and landed in a German jail. By the time he died, he had cared for more than ten thousand orphans and handled over a million pounds, and he never once asked a single human being for a penny of it. Same man. One changed heart in between. Müller was born in Prussia in 1805. H...

Send us Fan Mail A Sunday school teacher named Edward Kimball stood on the sidewalk outside a Boston shoe store, working up the nerve to go in. He nearly turned and walked away. Then he pushed the door open and went looking for a clerk named Dwight Moody. That awkward conversation in a stockroom led D.L. Moody to Christ. He became the greatest evangelist of his century. The ripples never stopped,...

Send us Fan Mail They summoned him for treason. He told them he had already been summoned by a higher Judge. Samuel Rutherford was a country pastor banished to a cold northern city, where exile turned him into one of the most beloved letter-writers in church history. This is the story of the book they burned, the pulpit they took, and the deathbed words that have comforted believers for more than...

Send us Fan Mail A man stands at the railing of a ship in the middle of the Atlantic late at night. A few weeks ago he had four daughters, Annie, Margaret, Bessie, and little Tanetta who was only two. Now the captain has come to find him with the words no father should ever have to hear. "Sir, this is the place. We are passing over the spot where your daughters went down." This is the st...

Send us Fan Mail Noon on a Wednesday in 1857, in a third-floor room above an old church in lower Manhattan, a forty-eight-year-old man sat down by himself to pray. For thirty minutes, nobody came. Then footsteps on the stairs. Then five more men. Within a year, ten thousand New Yorkers were praying every day, and close to a million Americans came to faith in eighteen months. This is the story of J...

Send us Fan Mail The true story of missionary Amy Carmichael and the childhood prayer God answered with 'no' (Isaiah 55:8). A little girl in Ireland once begged God for blue eyes and woke up disappointed. She had no idea He was preparing her for a rescue that would not make sense for another forty years. This is the story of Amy Carmichael, the missionary who slipped past temple gates in...

Send us Fan Mail The true story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the pastor who left safety in America to resist Hitler in Nazi Germany (Hebrews 11:6). In 1939, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was safe in New York City. His American friends had arranged a teaching post at Union Theological Seminary specifically to keep him out of Hitler's reach. He lasted 26 days. Then he boarded the last passenger ship crossing...

Send us Fan Mail The true story of William Seymour, the overlooked preacher behind the Azusa Street Revival (Acts 10:34). In 1906, William J. Seymour arrived in Los Angeles with one good eye, a borrowed pulpit, and a message that got him locked out of the first church he preached in. He found a small group of seekers, a borrowed room, and his knees. What happened next ignited the Azusa Street Revi...

Send us Fan Mail The true story of missionary Gladys Aylward, the rejected housemaid who led nearly 100 children to safety across China (Isaiah 6:8). In 1932, a London parlor maid named Gladys Aylward was rejected by the China Inland Mission as too plain, too ordinary, and not intelligent enough to learn Chinese. So she saved every penny she earned, bought a one-way train ticket, and traveled alon...

Send us Fan Mail The true story of Blaise Pascal's 'Night of Fire', the encounter with God he sewed into his coat. On the night of November 23rd, 1654, the most brilliant scientific mind in Europe had a two-hour encounter with the living God that broke him wide open. Blaise Pascal was thirty-one years old. By twelve, he'd worked out Euclid's first thirty-two propositions o...

Send us Fan Mail The true story of Peter Marshall, the Scottish immigrant who became Chaplain of the U.S. Senate (2 Samuel 7:8). How does a working-class kid from Coatbridge, Scotland, with no college degree, no connections, and no money, end up praying over the U.S. Senate and pastoring the church where Abraham Lincoln once sat in the pews? This is the true story of Peter Marshall, one of the gre...

Send us Fan Mail The true story of missionary John Paton and the night angels guarded his mission house (Psalm 91). What do you do when the cannibals are coming and you've already buried your wife and son? In 1858, John Paton sailed to the New Hebrides, a chain of Pacific islands where the previous missionaries had been killed and eaten within minutes of landing. He buried his wife and infant...

Send us Fan Mail The true story of Shamgar and John Wooden's father, two overlooked heroes who beat the odds (Judges 3:31). The Bible mentions Shamgar exactly one time. One verse. Judges 3:31. He grabbed a farmer's ox goad, basically a long sharpened stick, and killed six hundred Philistines with it. And then he just goes back to farming. Centuries later, in a farmhouse in Centerton, Ind...