We didn’t ask to show up where we showed up; God designated it anyway, whether that place felt like a gift or a darkness we never would have chosen. Jeremiah 29 puts God’s people in that same kind of place: Babylon, with the Lord saying He caused them to be carried there. What do you do when the place you’re in was never your idea?
Most of us know what it feels like to wonder whether God has just lost interest—whether we’ve messed up too much, waited too long, or ended up too far gone for him to still be working. The prophet Isaiah delivered God’s word to people who felt exactly that way, and what he told them in passages like Isaiah 7 and 9 raises a question worth sitting with: does “God with us” still hold when everything around you says otherwise?
When corruption seems everywhere, it is tempting to imagine that the world just needs a few good people willing to play Batman and set things right. But Psalm 14:3–4 says everyone has turned aside, forcing a harder question: What happens when the same sin we fight in others begins corrupting our own good intentions?
Most of us know our own dirt isn’t the curated kind—and suspect it may be too much to clean up. In Matthew 9, Jesus walks past everyone with the polished-for-consumption sob story and stops at a tax collector’s booth, a man whose sin was public knowledge, and says simply, “Follow me.”
Can we choose our own adventure wisdom? The Bible says “no” for a very important reason.
We have a lot of things we think are signs of the “blessed life”? Proverbs has a clear answer that challenges our assumptions.
God’s discipline isn’t a topic we like talking about or facing in any way. It feels intimidating and leaves us wondering if God is angry at us. But Proverbs gives us a different story.
We can say things like “In God We Trust,” but what do we mean? Do we really trust?
God’s way doesn’t always look the most successful in the moment, but it is the path to true success.
When it feels dark, we need the well trod paths of God’s Word to strengthen us so we don’t lose hope.