The Word for Everyday Disciples with Dave DeSelm

Today’s episode is different. In June of 2025, Dave was diagnosed with stage IV esophageal cancer. And so, after five years of weekly teaching, this will be the final new episode of The Word for Everyday Disciples. Rather than a sermon, what you’ll hear today is a conversation—an honest and thoughtful interview Dave recently recorded with a longtime friend and former colleague, Clinton Faupel. Cli...

There is a popular holiday movie based on an award-winning children’s book called “The Polar Express.” In the story, a young boy is unable to hear the bells at Christmas. The reason? The disappointment of life had dimmed his belief and wonder. It was only after a magical encounter that he was able to believe again. Now, I know that story is about Santa Claus, but there are some striking parallels...

In our last episode, we talked about the mystery of unanswered prayer. There are times when God, in His sovereignty and love, chooses to say “No” to our requests. However, the Bible also tells us that our Father loves to say “Yes” to His children. So, why is it that so often we pray and pray, and nothing seems to happen? Where’s the problem? All too often, the problem is with us. We’re the ones wh...

Have you ever begged God for something that mattered more than anything — and He didn’t come through the way you hoped? That very thing happened to the great King David.  After years of conquest, Israel was now unified and at peace. But, Israel was still worshiping Yahweh at a tent—the Tabernacle that had made the trek through the wilderness with God’s people.  Nestled in his cedar-lined palace, D...

When we look at the life of Jesus, we see that prayer wasn’t a responsibility to be pushed into for Him; it was a relationship to be pulled into. It was in prayer where He found rest, strength, and direction, and where He experienced the Father’s love most deeply. In Matthew 6:5-8, Jesus offers some straightforward advice on how to pray like He did.  1.     Pray systematically – carve out time. De...

It has often been said that prayer is the greatest force in the universe. And yet, it remains a largely untapped resource for so many Christians. Why is that? There are a lot of reasons why we don’t pray, but I think they can be summarized under two headings:   We don’t know how it works. It feels very unnatural to talk to someone I can’t actually see and whose voice I’ve never literally heard.   ...

As we come to the end of our journey through the book of Joshua, our hero is now elderly—over 100 years old. He realizes his time of leading his people will soon be over. So, he calls the people together and gives a remarkable farewell speech.  He begins by reminding them of the covenant God had made with their ancestors. He invited each of them to enter into that covenant, to choose to be loyal t...

They were ready to fight. They thought they knew the truth. They were wrong. Joshua 22 shows how fast things can go wrong when we rush to judgment.  As the Israelites were making their way northward toward Canaan, some of the tribes found the land east of the Jordan to be quite attractive. They asked to settle there, and permission was granted for the tribes of Reuben, Gad, and half of the tribe o...

After twelve chapters of action, miracles, and conquest, our journey through the book of Joshua enters a long stretch of mind-numbingly boring descriptions of towns and boundaries. What in the world could the division of the land into tribal territories have to do with us today? In trying to answer that, I began to ask myself some questions: Why did God assign certain people to live in certain pla...

When the going gets tough—and the battles don’t end as quickly as we hoped—it’s easy to grow weary and discouraged. That’s where Israel found themselves in Joshua 11. Victory didn’t come in a single day or even a single campaign. It took years of relentless struggle. After conquering the land in central and southern Canaan, Joshua turned his focus to the north. There, he was confronted by a huge c...

Today, we’re going to be considering one of the most remarkable occurrences in all the Bible.  It happened on a day when an ordinary man asked an extraordinary God for a miracle of the highest order. He asked for the sun to stand still. And it did! In Joshua 10, Joshua and his troops marched all night to come to the aid of their allies, the Gibeonites. A coalition of five kings had marched against...

If there’s one lesson to learn from today’s message, it’s this: As freely as God’s blessing is given to those who obey, it can be removed from those who disobey. After Israel’s miraculous victory at Jericho, the next strategic target for Joshua’s conquest of the land was the city of Ai. Its small size should have made it an easy win. Instead, Israel was defeated, leaving Joshua and his people angr...

The story about how the walls of Jericho came “a-tumblin’ down” is a favorite. But it’s also the target of a great deal of skepticism. Today, we’re going to look briefly at three of the most frequently asked questions related to the battle of Jericho, and then we’ll seek to apply the events of that day to our day. 1.   Is Jericho a real historical site? Yes! In fact, Jericho is known as the oldest...

You would think that after miraculously parting the torrent of the flooded Jordan River, bringing fear to their enemies, God would have said to Joshua, “Now, go! Strike hard and fast while you have the momentum!” But He didn’t. God brought everything to a screeching halt when He gave Joshua this command: Circumcise all the men and boys. This seemed to make no sense. Not only did it go against mili...

She wasn’t anyone’s first pick for a hero, but God had other ideas. She showed a courageous faith that changed her life—and history—forever. Her name was Rahab, a disreputable woman from the pagan Canaanite city of Jericho. The word the Bible uses to describe her is zonah: prostitute, harlot. There’s no way to sanitize it. Yet Rahab had come to a point of faith in Israel’s God, Yahweh. She had hea...

As we open the book of Joshua, our hero is standing at the edge of the Promised Land, the destiny they have been hoping for.  He is entering the third “leg” of his journey of faith. For the first 40 years of Joshua’s life, he was a slave. Born into bondage, as his fellow Hebrews had been for 400 years. He knew no other life. Then came the glorious day when God sent the great deliverer, Moses. Josh...

We’ve been talking about how to build a big connection to Jesus because the stronger the connection, the better the fruit, and the greater the joy. In this message, I want to look at a practice we don’t often think about in terms of spiritual rhythms, and that’s the practice of celebration—marking moments with joy and gratitude.  God understood the power of joyful celebration. God dotted the calen...

In this series, we’ve been exploring ways to build a strong connection with Jesus. In John 15, He calls it “abiding” in Him. What we’ve discovered is that the stronger the connection, the better the fruit and the greater the joy.  We’ve talked about the importance of rest and nutrition in producing good fruit in our lives. Today, we are looking at the necessity of breathing, and the way we do that...

In John 15, Jesus tells us that if we hope to have lives of fruitfulness and joy, we must abide in Him. We must remain intimately connected with Him at the soul level. The stronger the connection, the better the fruit and the greater the joy.  In this series, we’re exploring ways to build a strong connection with Jesus. The analogy of a grapevine helps us identify some of those practices. Today, w...

In John 15, Jesus uses the analogy of a vineyard to describe the life of a disciple. Jesus is the vine, and we are the branches. Like branches grafted into a grapevine, so it is with our relationship with Christ: the stronger the connection, the more the fruit, and the greater the joy.  Put another way: Fruitfulness is the result of abiding, and that leads to joy.  To abide is to remain intimately...

With the powerful hold idols have over us, is there any hope that we might dethrone these counterfeit gods?  The answer is, “Yes!” …IF we take to heart this foundational truth.   Idols cannot simply be removed – they have to be replaced. How do we do that?  If we hope to deal with our idols, what we need is not merely a vague belief in God but a profound encounter with God. Jacob had such an encou...

You’ve probably heard the saying “Money talks.” What would money say to you if it wanted to be your idol? And what might God say in contrast? 1.     Money says: “Look at how much more others have than you.”  This counterfeit god uses envy to enslave us, driving us to want more. Proverbs 14:30 says, “A heart at peace gives life to the body, but envy rots the bones.” God says: “Be content with and g...

An idol is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your attention and affection more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give. Idols can take on many forms: money, success, power, popularity, or physical attractiveness.  But idols can also take on human form.  When you look to a person for the kind of deep affirmation and acceptance that only God can pr...

Most of us believe nothing could be better than seeing our dreams come true. In that pursuit of happiness, it never enters our minds that getting our heart’s desires could, in fact, be the worst thing that ever happened to us. Good things can go bad. Why does getting your heart’s desire so often lead to disaster? It’s because our hearts are idol factories. We can take a good thing, indeed a gift f...

The Old Testament prophet Ezekiel wrote, “These men have set up idols in their hearts.” (Ex. 14:3) I would suggest that those words written thousands of years ago could easily apply to us. Though we may not bow to idols of stone or wood, the issue of idolatry is no less real now than it was in Ezekiel’s day.  As we begin this series, we’re going to consider some fundamental questions:  What is ido...