Good Words for Today

The world still chooses Barabbas.

Be quick to repent when you need to repent. Be quick to forgive when you need to forgive. Or else you will drown in a sea of guilt and bitterness.

Our prodigals may run from us, but they can’t run from our prayers. Perhaps we need to say less and pray more.

Miracles happen when we pray. Never doubt that. If God's people pray, he will heal our land. Do it, O Lord!

If all our needs were met, we’d end up forgetting God just like the children of Israel did in the Old Testament. Earthly prosperity tends to be no friend of spiritual growth. And total prosperity generally means total disaster. God intends to bring us again and again to the place where we are crying out to the Lord, begging for his mercy and his grace. That’s not a fun place to be. But it’s where we need to be. Anything that drives us to our knees is good for the soul.

"Jesus knows all about our struggles, He will guide till the day is done; There’s not a friend like the lowly Jesus, No, not one! No, not one!"

"Let not conscience make you linger, Not of fitness fondly dream; All the fitness He requireth Is to feel your need of Him."

We are God’s holy people. Every child of God is a saint. Saint Susan. Saint Sylvia. Saint Butch. Saint Jessie. Saint Sarah. Saint Knox. Saint Zoe. If you know Jesus, you're a saint. Live like it!

Don’t let the world squeeze you into its mold. Don’t go along so you can get along. Don’t lower your standards for a laugh. Don’t trade holiness for popularity.

Sinners have no hope unless saints live like saints. If sinners look at us and can’t tell the difference, how will they ever want what we have, or even believe there is a difference?  

You can be for Jesus, or you can be for the world. But you can’t do both at the same time.

Pray with your eyes open or shut. Pray standing or sitting. Pray out loud or silently. Pray with others or by yourself. Pray with hands folded or arms uplifted. Just pray.

Everyone wants to be a servant until they get treated like one.

When people ask, 'Do you believe in free grace," I ask them, "Is there any other kind?" If it's not free, it's not grace.

"Nothing in history or in the universe cuts us down to size like the cross. All of us have inflated views of ourselves, especially in self-righteousness, until we have visited a place called Calvary. It is there, at the foot of the cross, that we shrink to our true size." John Stott

"Come, every soul by sin oppressed, There’s mercy with the Lord, And he will surely give you rest By trusting in his Word."

In hard times, hold on to the little word "yet." We are forgotten, yet we reign. We are despised, yet blessed. We are reviled, yet defended by God. And the best is yet to come.

Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth after the proud have killed themselves trying to possess it.

God brings down the high and mighty with a great big thud. “Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it” (Psalm 127:1). Still true today.

“The soul that on Jesus doth lean for repose, I will not, I will not, desert to his foes; That soul, though all hell should endeavor to shake, I’ll never, no never, no never forsake.”

You can have Babel with all its power games, its moral degeneration, its paranoia, loneliness, despair, and deceptive pleasure. Or you can have Jesus Christ. Those are the choices of life.

Plan for today: Do my job. Do it well. Trust God with the results.