July 9 Paul was sold out for the Gospel. He asks the Corinthians if he was not worthy of their financial support. In fact, he spends twenty-four verses covering reasons that he has given up so much in order to win the lost. But he never put anyone on the spot, begging for their financial…
May 10 Up to this point, God has added to the number of those in the church. Three thousand here. Five thousand there. But in today’s reading, we see that God removes two people: Ananias and his wife Sapphira. Following on the heels of everyone sharing everything in Acts 4, Joseph/Barnabus sold some property and…
April 30 If you have been around church for very long, you’ve probably heard about “The Widow’s Mite.” It’s the story we see at the beginning of Luke 21. As Jesus and His disciples watched, rich people dropped large sums of money into the Temple treasury. This treasury was located in the Court of Women,…
April 27 We see two efforts to trap Jesus in today’s Bible reading in Luke 20. In the first, the scribes and chief priests sent spies to ask Jesus if the people should pay taxes to Caesar. Their hope, of course, was to trip him up before the Roman authorities, and have them do their…
February 15 Matthew 13:11–15 refers to Isaiah’s prophecy that the Messiah will speak in parables. So what is a parable? The Greek word behind “parable” means “to throw alongside.” As Jesus went about ministering, He often drew word pictures from what He and His disciples encountered. The parables were designed to reveal secrets of the…
February 6 In Matthew 6, Jesus provides a stark contrast between the attitudes of the Jewish leaders and His own. He speaks of giving, praying, and fasting on one hand, then possessions and anxiety about provisions on the other. But, if we boil down the entire chapter, we immediately see the division: self-centeredness and God-centeredness. In…
