Walk in Wisdom
To receive these lessons by email, fill out THIS FORM and select "Daily Devotional" from the options.
These daily devotionals are written to help you remain rooted and grounded in God's Word each day. We have one devotional for each weekday, and one for the weekend.
-
Latest Devotional
Love is Jealous, Love is Kind
Numbers 5:29-31
“This is the law in case of jealousy, when a wife, though under her husband’s authority, goes astray and defiles herself, or when the spirit of jealousy comes over a man and he is jealous of his wife. Then he shall set the woman before the LORD, and the priest shall carry out for her all this law. The man shall be freefrom iniquity, but the woman shall bear her iniquity.”We can’t even begin to formulate a coherent argument for why a perfect God would accept a spirit of jealousy in a husband as a good thing until we ponder what God explicitly meant in Exodus 20, at the very outset of the Ten Commandments, when He said, “I the LORD your God am a jealous God.”
Friend, if we walk away from Numbers 5 today without a deep delight in that whisper from Heaven over our betrothed heart, “I am jealous for you,” if we misunderstand that the context for jealousy is sacred matrimony, which serves time and time again as a biblical analogy for our special bond with the LORD, then not only will we continue to wade through the shallow end of our own earthly relationships but we’ll never go deeper in our matrimony to the Almighty either.
Consider the thought that God’s love for you isn’t methodical but something He feels? Likewise, His faithfulness isn’t just an effect of His moral perfection but something He chooses? When the LORD commands, “You shall have no other gods before me … for I the LORD your God am a jealous God,” He isn’t being hotheaded. He isn’t like the spouse who slashes car tires or breaks windows or burns letters. Yes, we can sin out of jealousy; but jealousy itself is not sin. Rather, it’s the expression of the deepest bond of intimacy. How so? Because only the jealous lover can say to his beloved, “You are my only one.”
In writing all that, I’m suddenly convicted by the thought that my God has poured out an unbridled declaration of faithfulness to me from the beginning of time in the words, “I am jealous for you,” and I don’t believe I’ve ever repeated that expression of love back to Him. So that’s the resolution for today: to declare my love to God in those words, and then to demonstrate it.
-
Get Your Hard Hat Ready
-
Blue Collar Cloth
-
Sabbath Psalm (Revision of Fanny Crosby’s hymn ‘All the Way My Savior Leads Me’)
-
Beyond the Blue
-
A Most Sacred Order
-
Awaiting the Dawn
-
Tribal Standards
-
Count Me In
-
Hallelujah!
-
Servant Status
-
Enduring Love
-
Don’t Light the Fuse!
-
The Last Word
-
Don’t Wait . . . Sing Now!
-
God Knows Best
-
Gunning for Bear
-
Parental Endowment
-
Steadfast, Immovable
-
Paying Penance?
-
Stone-Blind
-
Going the Extra Mile
-
A Priceless Pearl
-
Revenge Denied
-
Trying Your Patience
-
By Faith, Not by Sight
-
Begging Your Pardon
-
Lift That Weight!
-
Keep Swinging
-
The Heavens Declare
-
Let’s Go Fishing!
-
Parking Space #23
-
Measureless Grace
-
No Man Left Behind
-
Completing the Puzzle
-
Skeletons in the Closet
-
Deposits and Investments
-
Piercing the Darkness
-
You’re on Candid Camera!
-
Dry Bones
-
Without Love
-
Father Knows Best
-
Putting on the Dog
-
The Dreaded Word: Practice!
-
Walking in the Spirit
-
Down Memory Lane
-
The Stops of a Good Man
-
Truly Good News
-
The Good Shepherd
-
People of the Word
-
Imitating Christ
-
The One Left Standing
-
Invisibly Involved
-
“Not Guilty!”
-
But You, O Lord . . .
-
God Uses Broken Things
-
Then Comes the Good Part!
-
Go to God
-
Light Up the Runway!
-
Faith is . . .
-
I Believe I Will
-
Under Evaluation
-
Minority Rule
-
Sabbath Psalm (Adapted from Albert B. Simpson’s hymn, ‘Yesterday, Today, Forever’)
-
The Melody of Raindrops
-
Inverse Psychology
-
Right Between the Eyes
-
Bon Appetit
-
Our Word
-
Sabbath Psalm (Revision of Jane C. Bonar’s hymn, ‘Fade, Fade, Each Earthly Joy’)
-
Dirt in the Divine
-
Open Your Eyes!
-
Gray Hair and Long Branches
-
A Matter of Trust
-
A Begrudging Virtue
-
Sabbath Psalm (Revision of William T. Sleeper’s hymn, ‘Jesus, I Come’)
-
The Least of These
-
Remedial Purity
-
Mad Goat Disease
-
Joyful Sorrow…And Other Paradoxes
-
Seeing Double
-
Sabbath Psalm (Revision of John M. Neale’s hymn ‘Art Thou Weary?’)
-
Cleaning House
-
The Buck Stops With You
-
The Seminal Covenant
-
Word from our Land-LORD
-
Stop the Spread
-
Sabbath Psalm (From Lidie Edmunds hymn, ‘My Faith Has Found a Resting Place’)
-
A Less-Than-Perfect Conception
-
Altars and Alterations
-
The City Center
-
Hold Your Peace
-
Fight the Tide
-
Sabbath Psalm (Revised from Dora Greenwell’s hymn, ‘My Savior’)
-
Hearts Ablaze
-
The Glory in the Commandment
-
New Dawn
-
The Big Six
-
The Hermeneutic of Hindsight
-
Sabbath Psalm (A revision of Horatius Bonar’s hymn ‘Here, O My Lord, I See You Face to Face’)