Zondervan Inspire

dinner

The Wall Street Journal reported that less than one in three kids eats an evening meal with both parents. While you might feel tempted to think that the family dinner exists as an old-fashioned institution like sock hops and soda shops, consider this: the same Journal article cited statistics from the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse that teens from families that almost never eat dinner together are seventy-two percent more likely than an average teenager to use illegal drugs, cigarettes, and alcohol.

From Words Kids Need to Hear: To Help Them Be Who God Made Them to Be

by David Staal

Any comments or testimonies today?

change

When you boil life down to the nubbies, the name of the game is change. Those who flex with the times refuse to be rigid, resist the mold and reject the rut—ah, those are the souls distinctively used by God. To them, change is a challenge, a fresh breeze that flows through the room of routine and blows away the stale air of sameness.

Stimulating and invigorating as change may be—it is never easy. Before you get all jazzed about some quick and easy change you plan to carry out, better read that sentence again. Changes are especially tough when it comes to certain habits that haunt and harm us. That kind of change is excruciating—but it isn't impossible. Change—real change—takes place slowly. In first gear, not overdrive (see Romans 12:1-21).

From New Men's Devotional Bible

Devotion by
Charles Swindoll

Any comments or testimonies today?

conversation

Here, I believe, is the fundamental clue to understanding conversation with God. When we raise our concerns to God, we stand by him and look with him toward people and problems that we care about mutually. When we turn our eyes toward him, we say out loud our love and appreciation, just as we look toward our oldest and dearest friends and tell them how we care for them, though they already know it. We confess to God what we are and what we have done, which he knows all about. We express our faith in him. We thank him for who he is and what he has done for us. None of this is news to him, but all of this draws us together.

From Personal God: Can You Really Know the One Who Made the Universe?

by Tim Stafford

Any comments or testimonies today?

trust

Faith is essentially the practice of trust. And our routine failure to properly trust an infinitely wise God reveals something of our own perversity. We all desire to control our circumstances, and faith is a surrendering of that control. So we naturally tend to rebel against faith. But God graciously counteracts this tendency by nurturing us. Like a good parent, he consistently demonstrates his love. And we, like kids, must trust him on this basis.

From Gum, Geckos, and God: A Family's Adventure in Space, Time, and Faith

by James S. Spiegel

Any comments or testimonies today?

joy

In his final prayer (see John 17:1-26), Jesus prayed that his disciples would experience the full measure of his joy—now. He prayed for us to have his joy in the middle of rush-hour traffic, screaming kids, and a darkening world. He doesn't want us to wait for heaven to be full of joy. Jesus' joy has a divine purpose; to reveal him. He desires to fill us with overflowing joy, to proclaim his victory to the world over life's worse conditions—even in the face of hurricanes, plagues, terrorism, and nuclear disaster.

From New Women's Devotional Bible

Any comments or testimonies today?

trinity

The Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God in three persons—is often considered to be mysterious at best, self-contradicting at worst. Everyone would acknowledge that the idea of a triune God—three in one—is the most difficult of all Christian doctrines, which is why so many neglect it or even write it off.

But this is tragic. As Saint Caesarius of Arles said in the sixth century, "The faith of all Christians rests on the Trinity." While the Trinity transcends the bounds of human understanding, this doctrine is at the heart of Christian spirituality, and in the life of faith we experience its truth at every turn.

From The Faith: What Christians Believe, Why They Believe It, and
Why It Matters

by Charles Colson and Harold Fickett

Any comments or testimonies today?

others

There are some things we view as our rights that really aren't. We have the right to speak our minds, but does that mean we always should really say whatever is on our minds? Do we have the right to hurt people with our words just because they're true? As Christians we are to lay down our self-interest and consider others more important than ourselves (see Philippians 2:3-4). This is so different from our culture and what we usually feel in our hearts. But if we're to follow the example Jesus set for us, sacrifice for others can't be dismissed.

From Be the Change: Your Guide to Freeing Slaves and Changing the World

by Zach Hunter
Read Zach's latest book Generation Change,
now available.

Any comments or testimonies today?

hunger

We human beings have an innate longing to know God, our Creator. We crave this the way abandoned children yearn to know their fathers. The hunger for relationship goes deep.

If Jesus is right and God really does welcome our addressing him as "Father," we have come upon a most stunning fact: we can relate to God as members of the family. The door is open to the most profoundly personal relationship—that of a child to a parent.

From Personal God: Can You Really Know the One Who Made the Universe?

by Tim Stafford

Any comments or testimonies today?

listen

A child frequently needs for a parent to set aside the temptation to instruct or give advice in favor of simply sharing in the moment at hand: a moment that offers a reason to cheer, to laugh, to cry—and always to listen. Your child will see these reactions as tangible expressions that she can count on you to understand the circumstances she is dealing with. Sometimes the words kids really need to hear are those they say to a parent willing to listen.

From Words Kids Need to Hear: To Help Them Be Who God Made Them to Be

by David Staal

Any comments or testimonies today?

irony

Voltaire is reported to have said that within a hundred years of his day the Bible would be a forgotten book. In a strange twist of irony, within a century of his death, one of his homes in France would belong to the Geneva Bible Society and serve as the place where Bibles were printed and distributed. But at least Voltaire, Sartre, and Nietzsche were honest and consistent in their views. They admitted the ridiculousness of life, the pointlessness of everything in an atheistic world.

Contemporary atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, however, are so blind to the conceit of their own minds that they try to present this view of life as some sort of triumphal liberation. Sartre, as atheistic intellectual elites know but are embarrassed to acknowledge, denounced atheism on his deathbed as philosophically unlivable. A few years ago, in a debate between atheism and Christianity, Antony Flew described a Christian philosopher's experience of knowing Christ as "grotesque." But Flew has now vacated the atheistic camp, no longer able to honestly justify its metaphysical moorings (see Psalm 14:1-3).

From The End of Reason:
A Response to the
New Atheists

by Ravi Zacharias

Any comments or testimonies today?