In 2 Corinthians 2, Paul is unsettled over Titus and the church at Corinth even while ministry is going well. When plans, health, work, or politics don’t go how we expected, we too find ourselves shaken. But, no matter how uncertain we feel, there is a source of certainty we can turn to: our God.
Decades later, an aged Apostle John still cannot finish a sentence about Jesus without being overwhelmed with excitement. The Gospel has not become ordinary for him, but has it for us?
When every headline seems to confirm that the world is bending farther from truth, outrage and hopelessness can feel more natural than faithful witness. Philippians 2:12–16 places Christians in the midst of a crooked generation and calls them to shine without murmuring or retreating. How can a believer hold forth the word of life when darkness seems to dominate?
You said you would do it forever—and you meant it. Then the job vanished, and suddenly an honest promise looked like a lie. In 2 Corinthians 1, Paul’s critics pressed the same charge over travel plans that fell through: if his word couldn’t be trusted, why trust anything he said about the Gospel? When circumstances overturn the best intentions, where does trust rest?
We tend to equate complex with superior. But that can deceive us into missing the truth.
It is easy to look at a life that way and decide you are not ready to speak for God—too inexperienced, too uncertain, too likely to say it wrong. Jeremiah 1 opens with a prophet making exactly that case — and God’s answer to him.
Any given day we take in thousands of ads, texts, and broadcasts, and we start to wonder if we’re even listening to the right voice. James 1:19–26 says be quick to hear, slow to speak, and doers of the word—not hearers only. Someone around you is already listening to yours.
We easily draw safe boundaries around God’s grace, welcoming those who seem familiar while overlooking those who feel foreign or difficult. Yet the distant wise men of Matthew 2 and the rejoicing Gentiles of Acts 13 confront those boundaries: Jesus came to reach the world. Who might God be placing beyond our comfort, yet within the reach of his good news?
Most of us would rather keep our doubts quiet than be caught not having it all figured out—especially around people who assume we do. Nicodemus, one of the most respected religious teachers of his day, came to Jesus under cover of night with exactly that tension, and in John 3 Jesus meets him there, in the dark, unfinished.
God had just routed the mightiest army of the ancient world on Hezekiah’s behalf, then healed him from a terminal illness—and somehow, facing the next threat, Hezekiah forgot both and went looking for an ally he could hold onto. Isaiah 39 traces how that forgetfulness works in a believing heart, and why it’s the sneakiest danger of all.