When your faith feels weak and you're not sure you'll make it through whatever season you're in, the Bible carries a specific and personal promise: God will make you stand. Not because you become stronger or because you find better spiritual disciplines but because He is able to make you stand and He will do it.

If anyone in Jesus’s day was famous among their peers for righteousness, it was the Pharisees. Their whole brand (so to speak) was that they were the ones who did the right things.

Meekness is one of the most misunderstood words in the Bible. It does not mean weakness and instead means power under control, submitted to God. Jesus used this word to describe Himself, which tells us everything about what it actually looks like in a person's life.

Not everything that sounds spiritual is from God. John gives us a direct, practical test in 1 John 4: the Spirit of God will always confess that Jesus Christ — fully God, fully human — has come in the flesh. Any message that falls short of or contradicts that is not from God, no matter how convincing it sounds.

Being called a child of God is not a casual religious phrase. According to 1 John 3, it describes a real relationship — one rooted in God's lavish love, marked by a transformation already underway, and aimed at a final completion when we see Jesus face to face. We are His children now, and that changes how we live today.

In 1 John 2, John reminds us of two things. First, John’s call (from 1 John 1) to live in the light of obedience to God’s commands instead of in the darkness of sin should empower us to not sin.

He doesn’t only dwell in light, although He is described that way too. John says that He Himself is light. He is purity and perfection without limit, flaw, or hidden error. He’s perfect. He is the thing that all of us should be striving for.

This is a comforting thought when we find ourselves suffering or in other ways opposed by the devil. We know that suffering is caused by the sin in the world—not our sin, but the sin in the world.

When we pray “your will be done” as Jesus teaches us to pray, that’s what we’re asking for. We’re asking God to make His will be done on earth instead of any other will, including our own.

In Daniel 2, God gives the king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, a dream in which God reveals that even the greatest Kingdoms on the earth are destined to come to an end.

When Jesus teaches His people to pray (Matthew 6, Luke 11) He begins by introducing God as Father. Jesus is teaching us that we should approach God in a particular way–that He is our Father.