Solid Joys Daily Devotional

We should emphasize that God loves and forgives for his own glory because the Bible does, and because it makes clear that God loves us with the greatest love.

God forgave us when we first believed in Christ. Then, from that broken, joyful, grateful, hopeful experience of being forgiven, we offer forgiveness to others.

Christians are included in the Davidic covenant. What David received, we will also receive in Christ Jesus.

Don’t let your ignorance of the micro reasons for suffering cause you to overlook the massive help God tells us in his word of his macro purposes for us.

Irresistable grace does not mean grace cannot be resisted. It means that when God chooses, he can and will overcome that resistance.

There is no hope for God’s people unless he causes them to return from their leaping into sin and unbelief.

Feeling rotten about your sin is not the same as repenting from it. But it can lead there.

The same God who feeds billions of birds every hour around the world will take care of you.

We get the help; God gets the glory. That arrangement keeps us humble and happy, and keeps him supreme and glorious.

Times of suffering and deliverance are both God’s stages of care for you. He has not left you or forsaken you.

Jesus will take care of you when you take care of others. That’s why there were leftovers after Jesus fed the multitudes.

Jesus provides an ever-present, ever-living witness to the removal of the Father’s wrath from us.

When Jesus says, “I will grant him to sit with me on my throne,” he promises us a share in the rule of all things.

Jesus anchored the happiness of suffering saints in the reward of heaven. And he anchored the happiness of successful saints in the same.

If we don’t call to mind what God has said about himself and about us, we will languish. Never forget that our God is the God of the impossible.

Every little thing you do that is good is seen and valued and rewarded by the Lord. And he will pay you back for it.

Yield to the sovereignty of God in all the details of life, and rest in his infallible promises to show himself mighty on your behalf.

Receive Christ, welcome Christ, embrace Christ — not just as your fire insurance policy, but as your eagerly awaited Treasure and Friend and Lord.

Be patient and loving as despairing people wake up from their dark night and regret their hasty words.

What act could be more one-sidedly free and non-negotiated than one person raising another from the dead? This is the meaning of grace.

Our emotions are governed in large measure by what we consider — what we dwell on with our minds.

When the command of God comes with the creating, converting power of the Holy Spirit, it gives life. And we believe and rejoice and obey.

Freedom from greed comes from the deeply satisfying faith in God’s future grace.

If God exists, then he is the measure of all things, and what he thinks about all things is the measure of what we should think.

When God judges believers in the end, he will forgive us all our sins and grant us life everlasting.

God is not the God of some grace. He is the God of all grace — including the infinite, inexhaustible stores of future grace that we need to endure to the end.

Christ promises to work for us, and to be for us so much that, when our missionary life is over, we will not be able to say we’ve sacrificed anything.

God gives both the sustaining grace we need in times of trouble, and the suffering which makes us depend on his grace.

This is God’s will for you and this is why Christ died: that you would draw near to God.

Satan is helpless to do the one thing he wants to do most: damn us. Christ bore our damnation.

Does your faith make you eager to forsake sin and make progress in holiness? That’s the kind of faith God requires.

The strength of your faith does not uproot trees. God does. The object of your faith is more important than the quantity of your faith.

If you are a Christian, death is no longer a punishment for sin. Your sin has been put away by the death of Christ. Christ took the punishment.

Be thankful for the past grace from the last year, and be confident in the future grace for the new year.

The lifetime of this year passes before our eyes, and we face the inevitable question: Did we live it well?

When God works in our hearts by the blood of Christ, we feel and think and act in ways more pleasing to him.

Flee from the wrath of God, tremble with joy that you are saved, and rescue others along the way.

Study the glory of God. Treasure it in all things and above all things. Then study your soul. Know why you treasure glories that are not God’s glory.

God did not create humans in his image to be aimless, like lifeless leaves blown around in the backyard of life. He created us to be purposeful.

Christ’s death was judgment on him because he bore our sins (not his own), and it was mercy toward us who trust him.

Jesus offers you a clear purpose for living, hope that your failures will be forgiven, and help in your fight against sin.

Jesus appeared in the world for two reasons: to help us stop sinning, and to satisfy God’s anger when we do sin.

Look to Jesus this Christmas. Receive the reconciliation that he purchased. Don’t put the gift on the shelf unopened.

The whole Bible is written that you might be awakened to the wonder that Jesus Christ is the Son of God who came into the world.

Jesus’s birth was not a coming into being of a new person, but a coming into the world of an infinitely old person.

If you want to give a gift to God this Christmas, walk off the assembly line of sin and don’t go back. Take up your place, instead, in the picket line of love.

Forgiven, we are indestructible. Satan’s plan was to condemn God’s followers in God’s own courtroom. But now, in Christ, there is no condemnation.

Distrust God’s mercy, and all is lost. But conquer here, and nothing can harm you for a million ages.

God put our sins on his Son and judged them there, so that he could put them out of his mind, and deal with us mercifully and remain just.

God delights to show his power through apparent defeat. He sometimes retreats in order to win strategic victories.