Posts with the category “daily-devotionals”

As I get older, I am realizing the importance of taking care of my heart.  Each day I exercise by walking one to three miles, depending on the amount of time I have.  This discipline helps me with my ...  Read More

Having been a Christian for many many years, it always does me well to come back to some of the fundamentals of the faith. Pastor Jim often speaks of the basic tenets we know as salvation in Christ al...  Read More

What do people expect of teenagers? Not much, according to Google. Typing in “teenagers and” in the search engine results in suggestions like “teenagers and social media,” “teenagers and depression,” ...  Read More

My wife and I have been doing a lot of puzzles recently. This may or may not seem like a perfectly normal thing to you, but for me it is highly abnormal. I don’t know why but I’ve never liked puzzles....  Read More

Lately I’ve been feeling the call of Yosemite Valley.  If I don’t visit once a year I start going through withdrawals.  One of the most-breathtaking views on the planet, in my opinion, is driving thro...  Read More

I recently found out that Monopoly is the most successful board game ever. When it comes to sales, it finds itself in 3rd place behind Chess and Checkers. Even with that, the game of Monopoly, accordi...  Read More

My heart was moved by the description in Genesis of Jacob’s move to Egypt. Jacob was shocked to learn his son Joseph, who he thought was dead, was, in fact, alive and the most powerful ruler in Egypt ...  Read More

A question pastors often get asked is “When did you receive your call to ministry?” Even though all Christians are called to ministry, I knew what the person was asking.I sensed God calling me to voca...  Read More

My brother says he did not preplan it. At the moment I asked to borrow his golf clubs, he was inspired to extract a bargain from me: the use of his clubs for reading a book he would give me. He did a ...  Read More

I am not a farmer nor a rancher, so anything related to these subjects flies far above my thinking. Yet, the world in which Jesus walked was agricultural and agrarian. He spoke much about seeds, trees...  Read More

Lynette and I enjoy camping.  In fact, as I write this devotional, we are over in El Chorro Campground near Morro Bay.  Any time I am out in nature, my thoughts turn to the God who made all the beauty...  Read More

These days it is not uncommon to hear the Christian walk being touted as nothing but a prosperous one. God is love and wants the best for you so everything will always be ok. If you are really walking...  Read More

Right before Matthew 9:13, Jesus had met Matthew the tax collector. He told him to “Follow Me” and Matthew did. Then Jesus went to his house and had a meal with him and many other tax collectors. When...  Read More

I can’t imagine living in a world without new things.  What if everything stayed the same and never changed?  Or everything just wore out and dilapidated over time without being fixed or replaced? It ...  Read More

What draws you to come into God’s presence? I know for me it depends on the day and what’s going on in my life or the lives of those around me. Sometimes I come into His presence because I need someth...  Read More

Our first home was a quaint cabin-like house in the woods of Felton, California. I loved many things about this house. It sat in the center of the horseshoe-shaped lane called Lazywoods.In the front y...  Read More

When someone hurts or wrongs us, it’s often our instinct to get upset and even return that hurt in some cases. Nowhere is this more evident in my life than when I’m driving. I don’t know what it is ab...  Read More

As I write this, I am on my second stretch of waiting to have a pacemaker put in. Because of COVID, what was a three-month wait has become of five-month wait.While waiting I prayerfully planned a way ...  Read More

Psalm 24:3–4 - “Who may ascend into the hill of the Lord? And who may stand in His holy place? He who has clean hands and a pure heart, who has not lifted up his soul to falsehood and has not sworn de...  Read More

My son was in the Buchanan High School Band. Every summer, the week leading up to the Fourth of July, the Buchanan Band parents would sell fireworks out of a booth at the Walmart parking lot on Herndo...  Read More

I was privileged to be born into a Christian family.  My father was a farmer as was his father and this went back several generations.  His early years as a farmer were much simpler and different than...  Read More

This is one of the best-known and most-quoted verses in the Bible on parenting.  On the surface there is a precious promise here: if we train our children in the ways of the Lord, when they get older ...  Read More

On Monday, April 8, the United States experienced a total solar eclipse, and while for us here in California it wasn’t very exciting, for those in the path of “totality” the sky went dark in the middl...  Read More

Do you remember your first car? It likely wasn’t the fanciest or the fastest, but you might remember it fondly anyway. My first car was, well…different.Our family car when I was growing up was a dull ...  Read More

My wife and I are just about a month away from celebrating our 17th anniversary. Last year for our anniversary we decided to see a concert and purchased tickets for the event. The really good seats we...  Read More

The Palm youth and I recently attended an in-town youth camp at People’s church called Breakaway Remix during Passover Week. During the camp, students got a chance to play games, eat food, serve the c...  Read More

There is so much food for meditation in this event, but I am struck today with one question after reading this: Why did God tell Noah to build the Ark?  God could have built it. After all, He made the...  Read More

My friend Katie was excited about her new job working with a Christian Home Care for Seniors ministry in the Chicago area. As she started to settle into her new position, she found out that her co-wor...  Read More

Jesus had healed blind Bartimaeus. He had gone into Jerusalem in a processional on a donkey, a celebration fitting for a king. He had done His wild cleansing of the temple, knocking things over and dr...  Read More

I am Italian through and through. As such, it has been ingrained in me to greet anyone who crosses my path—on the street, in a store, and especially in the church gathering. It has been four years sin...  Read More

This past Easter season I was blessed by seeing so many ways God’s people joined together to support and encourage one another as a family to provide an opportunity for the community to hear and exper...  Read More

The city of Jerusalem was awakened with the exclamation of Mary Magdalene, “I have seen the Lord.”  The electrifying news came only three days after the demands of the Jewish leaders that Jesus of Naz...  Read More

We just celebrated Easter last week and in the midst of the celebration and joy that we experience in our church services, it can be easy to forget just how dark the world is becoming around us. Howev...  Read More

During my preteen years, I participated in a competition called the National Bible Bee. Imagine a spelling bee with kids and teens reciting Bible verses instead of unheard-of words, and you’ll get the...  Read More

In college, some of my friends nicknamed me “the seeker.”  At the time I wasn’t a Christian, and even though I didn’t realize it I was searching for something missing in my life.  That’s why I joined ...  Read More

Growing up in church, I have had many experiences in and around Holy Week. When I was in grade school, on Palm Sunday our church would have all the kids’ Sunday School classes march into the worship s...  Read More

If you were a comic book character, what would your power be? Notice that I didn’t ask if you were a “superhero”. “Why the distinction,” you might ask. Well, villains have superpowers as well. And hav...  Read More

When I was thirty-five years old something happened that changed my perspective forever about my devotion to God.One morning I felt convicted about giving God my leftovers of time for prayer, worship,...  Read More

I once traveled with another pastor, “sojourned” with him. Our trip took us across the US to a state on the east coast. We attended a church conference there, which turned out to be a blessed experien...  Read More

In the early years of my Christian life, my prayers had a ring of the “too familiar,” even bordering on being monotonous. In His Sermon on the Mount Jesus warned us about using many hollow words and v...  Read More