The Journey
Spiritual maturity is the journey, not a destination. “She’s on my side!” Billy shouts. Susie says, “Daddy, how much longer till we get there?” She is trying to not dignify her brother’s words. “She’s touching me!” Billy shouts again. “You’re so immature!” Susie responds instinctively. She lets out a deep sigh, and then says, “Mom, can we stop? I need to go to the bathroom. You know daddy, he’ll never stop until we need to stop for gas.” Seeing his opening, Billy fires the dig at his sister next to him in the seat of their family minivan: “Smells like you’re the one with gas to me.” “Oh, why don’t you just grow up?” Susie can’t help but respond. “Oooh, and you think you miss mature?” Billy knows he’s under her skin and is not about to let up. “You two had better stop right now.” Dad has finally had enough. “You don’t want to make me have to pull over and deal with this?” At this point, mom has steadfastly tried to ignore the predictable tacky banter, but has had enough. As she looks up from her book, she asks, “Anybody want to play the license plate game?” This is the part of the family trip they don’t show on all of those mini-van commercials. You know, the commercials where the destinations are fantastic, the children are happy and never bratty, dads are never cranky, the moms have perfectly styled hair, and no one ever needs to stop to go to the bathroom. At the end of the commercial, they are looking at the stars out of the back of their minivan, smiling happily. Of course, they don’t have to deal with mosquitoes or sweat. If we are honest, most of us get frustrated with the long trip before we get to our destinations. This also makes it hard for us in our Christian walk. We get impatient with our progress – or lack of it – as we seek to grow in Christ. We look for shortcuts and quick fixes. We’ll grab the latest list of things to do or pick up the newest self-help best seller in an attempt to get there more quickly. Spiritual maturity, however, is the journey and not a destination. There are no shortcuts. We know it’s not a list of things to achieve or shortcuts to take, but a long trip to become like Jesus (Philippians 3:7-11; Philippians 2:5-11). Part of being spiritually mature is admitting we haven’t arrived yet, but a journey to continue (Philippians 3:12-16). To help us get on the journey, we have the example of those who are alive with Christ-like character (Philippians 3:17-19). Our trip to become like Jesus can get a little rough when folks get cranky and we all get a little too impatient with ourselves and each other, but the destination is surely worth effort (Philippians 3:20-21). So let’s remember our destination, and let’s not give up on ourselves and those traveling with us! How do you stay encouraged to stick with the journey and keep trying to become more and more like Jesus? What do you read, where do you turn, what helps encourage you and help you restore your spiritual passion and remain on the journey to be like Jesus? I’d love to hear from you on my blog: http://blogs.heartlight.org/phil/?p=252 About the author: Phil Ware has authored 11 years of daily devotionals, including VerseoftheDay.com, read by 500,000 people a day. He works with churches in transition with Interim Ministry Partners and for the past 21+ years, he has been editor and president of HEARTLIGHT Magazine, author of VerseoftheDay.com, God’s Holy Fire (on the Holy Spirit), and aYearwithJesus.com. Phil has also authored four books, daily devotionals on each of the four gospels.
Work-Family Spillover
Can we keep the bad stuff in our day from leaking out? Researchers call it “work-family spillover.” My wife and I call it “kick-the-dog syndrome.” It is the problem some of us have with letting stress at work poison the most important relationships in our lives. Police officers, customer-service workers, air-traffic controllers, teachers, practically all of us who serve the public: we occasionally get barked at by unhappy people. The customer bought a product that doesn’t work. The person who answers the phone catches grief for something about which she knows nothing. Hurt, angry, or grieving people vent raw emotions on some innocent soul. Years ago my wife and I heard somebody tell about a fellow who got chewed out at work. When he came home that evening, he turned away from his wife’s welcome kiss to gripe about a tricycle in the driveway. She in turn went to a happy child and chewed him out for failing to put his toys away. So the five-year-old boy went to put his bike away – and kicked the family dog on his way. When I come home grumpy and out of sorts, my wife doesn’t get in my face about it. She just asks, “Are we going to have to buy a dog?” Point taken! The domino effect of toxic emotions is very real. The good-faith effort to put customers first leads companies to train employees to take verbal abuse without firing back. Those companies seldom go the next step to teach those people what to do to keep from internalizing the attacks they suffer. So they get home at the end of a workday irritable, defensive, and unavailable to their families. Some people are able to deflect these blows easier than others. They don’t take them personally. They take deep breaths. They drink herbal tea. They exercise hard at day’s end and sweat out their tensions. They let a coworker, friend, or mate in on what has happened and drain some stress simply by talking about it. They pray for God to give them the power to be present for the people who love them – and to keep them from dumping their stress on those people. Maybe one or more of these coping strategies will help the next time you face the problem. The point in raising the topic of work-family spillover is less to tell you how to avoid it than to remind you and me not to put others in that difficult spot. I’ve found it is easier to ask for God’s help to avoid venting my anger on the fellow at the counter or a lady on the phone than to try to make amends later. As far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. (Romans 12:18) About the author: Rubel Shelly preached for decades and served as a professor of medical ethics, Bible, and philosophy at multiple universities. He was a former president of Rochester College and Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Lipscomb University. He was the author of more than 30 books and hundreds of inspirational articles. His commitment to a non-sectarian presentation of the gospel touched countless lives.
Daily Prayer for March 4
Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Hebrews 12:1–2, NIV Lord, our God and Father, we thank you for letting us walk in the way of Jesus Christ, for helping us on the way to the Cross. Come what may, we belong to the Savior, and we are your children. We want to be joyful and full of faith, full of hope, full of patience, for your mercy leads us on. In all we experience how often we can say, “Thanks be to God. He has helped us here, he has helped there, he helps every day in spite of all the evil in the world. Praise and thanks and honor be to him forever!” Amen. Recent articles on Plough Pets in Heaven David Mills Aquinas may be dead right, but anyone who offers systematic theology to someone who has just lost a pet needs to learn a thing or two about love. Read now A Season of Unveiling Joy Marie Clarkson and Norann Voll Norann Voll and Joy Marie Clarkson discuss how they are observing Lent and a book of Lenten and Easter devotions that you shouldn’t miss. Read now It’s Time to Play David Demaree If debating politics with strangers feels exhausting, there is a better, enjoyable alternative. Read now Light Your Lamp and Read Saint Columban An ancient Irish saint exhorts us to sell our vices and buy life. Read now Painting the Neighborhood John Whitehead Allan Rohan Crite, a contemporary of the Harlem Renaissance, forged his own artistic path in Boston. He has left us a celebration of community. Read now
Today’s Verse – Isaiah 55:8-9
“My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” —Isaiah 55:8-9 Thoughts on Today’s Verse… No matter how hard we try to perceive the awesomeness of God, he is still God, and we are not. We must forever remember that the original, and still primary, sin was seeking to become equal to God. We are to know God, and we should seek to know about God, but we can never fully know everything about him or become equal with him. Trying to become equal to God and losing our sense of reverence and awe for God are at the heart of all sin. While we should seek to put on God’s righteous character, gracious compassion, and faithful lovingkindness, in humility, we recognize that we cannot begin to approach his majesty, righteousness, wisdom, or holiness on our own. When we have done our best to describe and praise our glorious God, what Job said centuries ago is true: “And these are but the outer fringe of his works; how faint the whisper we hear of him! Who then can understand the thunder of his power?” (Job 26:14) However, by God’s grace, the promise remains that one day we will be like him and see him as he is (1 John 3:1-3) and will know him fully even as we are fully known (1 Corinthians 13:11-12). We wait in eager expectation of that day! My Prayer… Tender Shepherd, thank you for your patience with me. I cannot fully understand or appreciate your holy, transcendent character and glorious nature. Thank you for sending Jesus so I can know you better and trust you to know me more than I know myself. I look forward to seeing you face-to-face when Jesus comes to bring me home to you. Until that day, please know I love you. In the name of Jesus, I humbly offer my thanks and praise. Amen. All scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House.
03 Mar 2026
We have needs and we desire many things. The Lord knows. We are also fortunate because He knows what is good for us. Let us be grateful and trust Him to give us direction. An attitude of gratitude will cause us to find favour with God and man. Hebrews 13:5-6.
Delight
Why in the world would someone do this? No longer will they call you Deserted, or name your land Desolate. But you will be called Hephzibah [“My Delight is in Her”], and your land Beulah [“Married”]; for the LORD will take delight in you, and your land will be married. As a young man marries a young woman, so will your Builder marry you; as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God rejoice over you (Isaiah 62:4-5 TNIV). Years ago a 21-year-old woman in Shanghai has made news for deciding that her best chance to win back her ex-boyfriend is to be someone else. Or at least to look like someone else. The young woman has made the decision to have multiple plastic surgeries designed to make her look like actress Jessica Alba. It seems that throughout their year and a half relationship, her boyfriend has been obsessed with the actress. He hung pictures of Alba all over the apartment the two shared and talked about her constantly. He even bought his girlfriend a blonde wig to wear, though she says he never came out and told her that he wanted her to look more like Alba. Well, no. Because that would be creepy. The young woman actually showed quite a lot of sense when she broke up with the guy over his obsession. Now, though, she says she misses him and wants him back. “My friends … suggested I do plastic surgery to look like her,” she told reporters at a Plastic Surgery Hospital in Shanghai. The hospital has agreed to do the multiple surgeries that will be necessary without charge, “to showcase their surgery skills.” In fairness, the director of the hospital has encouraged the young woman to think seriously about the procedure, but she seems to think there’s something empowering in it. “As a member of the younger generation in this country,” she says, “I have a choice to decide what I want in life.” That’s true, I suppose. It’s just sad that what she thinks she wants is to be someone else. I’m pretty sure she’s not alone, though. Our society is full of messages telling us that who we are isn’t good enough. We’re supposed to lose weight, get fitter, have better skin and hair and whiter teeth. We have to look younger, for goodness’ sake. We’re supposed to be wealthier so people will think we’re successful, or at least dress and drive and travel and play and live like we are. Our sex lives are supposed to be more exciting, and there’s even a pill for that. We’re supposed to be better educated, our houses are supposed to be cleaner, our clothes are supposed to be nicer, our children are supposed to be more precocious. Name something about yourself or your life, and there’s probably someone somewhere who will sell you something “guaranteed” to make it better. Or a fantasy to make you forget that it isn’t better. Advertising depends on it. Political campaigns stand or fall on it. The credit industry relies on it. Retailers cash in on it. Drugs and alcohol and pornography thrive on it. To quote singer/songwriter Steve Earle: “It’s called snake oil, y’all; it’s been around for a long, long time.” But among all those messages telling you that you aren’t good enough, telling you all the ways you need to be different, it’s easy to miss the one telling you that you’re loved, valued, appreciated, and accepted. Right now. Today. Just as you are. Sometimes the church, intentionally or otherwise, communicates a picture of God as vengeful, judgmental, and stern. That’s the danger in trying to take seriously God’s holiness, and the high purpose to which he calls his people. It can almost sound, sometimes, as if we’re just proclaiming another way in which people aren’t good enough – that they need spiritual plastic surgery in order for God to love them. But look again. Listen again. The Bible is full of passages like the one in Isaiah that affirms God’s “delight” in the people that he made, and his determination to live in happiness with them “as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride.” Don’t read that as some kind of mushy, vapid, puffy romance-novel love. God knows full well what it will take to have that kind of relationship with human beings. He knows that we aren’t movie-star material, spiritually speaking. He knows our sin, and has always known the price forgiveness and grace would demand. And he paid that price on a cross in the Middle East, two thousand years ago. Paid it for everyone who lived before, and everyone who will ever live since. And in paying it, he spoke one message, clearly and plainly: you and I matter to him. We don’t have to be different to earn his love. He values and appreciates us as we are, spiritual warts and blemishes and all. He delights in us, rejoices over us, and chooses to live with us and call us his. Pass that message on to the children in your life who feel that they don’t measure up. Pass it on the friend battling a weight problem, or your colleague at work who’s struggling with alcoholism. Pass it on to the friend who can’t find the self-esteem in her to get out of an abusive relationship, and to the neighbor who can’t find a job, and to the sibling who’s going through a divorce, and to the single parent who can’t quite imagine another day of raising a child alone. Pass it on to the person stuck in a dead-end job at a business you frequent, and pass it on to a friend’s son who can’t seem to pass his GED. And pass it on to that brother or sister you sit near at church, struggling over and over with the same sin. But if you pass it on, make sure you reinforce it with your actions. Because telling them
The Button Box
How will we be remembered? Depth not length, is important. Not how long you take to talk but how much you say. Not how flowery and eloquent you sound but how sincerely and succinctly you speak … that’s what is important … that’s what is remembered. Two memorable minutes can be more effective than two marathon hours. (Chuck Swindoll in The Quest for Character) There were three constants in Grandma’s house when I was a child. I could always count on Grandpa sitting at the kitchen table with a portable radio, earplug in place, as he listened to the Detroit Tigers baseball games. There were the puffy and sweet homemade sugar cookies filled with a moist raisin center. And then there was the button box … an old cardboard box filled to the brim with every kind of button imaginable. I remember seeing my Grandma cutting all the buttons off an old work shirt one afternoon. I asked her why she bothered since she already had so many in her box. Her eyes opened wide in disbelief and she said, “You never know if you might need just this size button.” She then held up her most recently orphaned button. After that, I never questioned Grandma about her practical ways. She was just too nice. Anyway, my brother and I had our own uses for that old box of buttons. Time and again, we’d visit and make our way to Grandma’s small store of toys. This meager selection consisted of a partially rusted blue truck similar to the Tonka’s of today; a box of Lincoln Logs (which I still can’t master well enough to build a suitable log cabin); and several thick books filled with cherished stories about King Midas, The Water Babies, and a lonely little girl visiting a farm. After we’d played out our imaginations, we’d begin to slowly meander around the house with something more dreadful than trouble on our minds … boredom! I guess it was just instinctive, but Grandma always could tell the right moment to pull out the button box. She would call us out to the kitchen where Grandpa still sat, earplug in place; and we would start stringing buttons. What fun we had making all kinds of different designs and sometimes fighting over a particularly unusual button. I can’t remember ever going to my Grandparents’ house without spending time stringing and re-stringing buttons. It seemed a shame to spill them all out once our string was full, but then again Grandma would remind us that the buttons weren’t going anywhere and would be waiting for us the next time around. Over fifteen years have passed since Grandma died, but every day I have a reminder of the simple joys of childhood inspired by this loving and creative lady. On my kitchen counter, in a glass jar, lovingly sits the same buttons waiting for some child to get bored and start stringing. The memory of the righteous is blessed.Proverbs 10:7) About the author: Michele Howe is a book reviewer and writer with a women’s lifestyle column, “Embracing Life’s Curves” with Syndicated Writers of America. Michelle’s books include: Going It Alone: Meeting the Challenges of Being a Single Mom, Prayers for Homeschool Moms, Prayers for New and Expecting Moms, Prayers of Comfort and Strength, and Prayers to Nourish a Woman’s Heart. Check out her books online!
Don’t Trust a Shadow
Why do we chase after what is not substance? There are companies devoted to creating and maintaining “image.” Actors, athletes, politicians, executives of major corporations – it is not unusual for them to have someone in charge of their public persona, their image, their reputation. At one level, I understand the task of such companies or persons. Given the fact that celebrities are marketable in terms of their names, it is not absurd to think that somebody needs to be monitoring what is being said or put on the Internet. Just think, for example, of the image-name value of Tiger Woods. There is another sense, however, in which image and reputation are quite secondary. One could even say they are unimportant. Since we are just one week past Presidents’ Day, I will let Abraham Lincoln make the point here. “Character is like a tree and reputation its shadow,” Lincoln is reported to have said. “The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.” The man who is almost always selected by both scholars and ordinary folk as the best president in America’s history knew whereof he spoke. He might have spoken with a tinge of melancholy in his voice. It likely came from deep thought about the turmoil his role in history forced him to suffer. Called a “buffoon” by people from his own political party, Lincoln was hardly thought to be the man for the job as the Union was about to be severed. Then, as the Civil War raged, politicians, newspapers, and conversations in village squares indicted him for his ineffective leadership and bumbling prosecution of a war. His tall, gangly frame and big ears led to caricatures and comparisons to an ape. The early signs were not favorable to the greatness we ascribe to him now. Lincoln lived through the horrible time of the Civil War with personal integrity intact. He wept for the fallen – Rebels as well as Yankees. He was determined to uphold the human dignity of all – blacks as well as whites. He planned to restore the Union with healing grace rather than hateful revenge. Some scholars cite his second inaugural address as his greatest speech: With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan – to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations. Lincoln believed it was the tree that was to be trusted, not the shadow. That it was real character that mattered, not others’ opinions. He was right. Just ask anybody who has trusted image over character. God’s wisdom says it this way: Whoever walks in integrity walks securely, but whoever takes crooked paths will be found out. (Proverbs 10:9 NIV) About the author: Rubel Shelly preached for decades and served as a professor of medical ethics, Bible, and philosophy at multiple universities. He was a former president of Rochester College and Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Lipscomb University. He was the author of more than 30 books and hundreds of inspirational articles. His commitment to a non-sectarian presentation of the gospel touched countless lives.
Today’s Verse – Job 23:10-11
He knows the way that I take; when he has tested me, I will come forth as gold. My feet have closely followed his steps; I have kept to his way without turning aside. —Job 23:10-11 Thoughts on Today’s Verse… How we long for Job’s words in this verse to be our true confession. We are not yet gold, but long to be. We are not yet fully following the LORDs steps, but are trying to follow faithfully. We have tried not to turn aside from God’s ways, but we sometimes falter. Thank God for his grace until our intentions and desires are fulfilled in our genuine discipleship. Until that day, we pursue Jesus as we seek to reflect his character and compassion, trusting in the Holy Spirit to do the work of transformation (2 Corinthians 3:18) so that the following may be true of us as it was in Jesus: He knows the way that I take; when he has tested me, I will come forth as gold. My feet have closely followed his steps; I have kept to his way without turning aside. My Prayer… Magnificent Creator and Sustainer of the Universe, I confess my sin and my inadequacies in following your paths completely. Forgive me as I commit my life to serve you in holiness and joy. Thank you for your grace, which covers my sin and perfects in me the character of Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit. In the name of my Savior, Jesus, I pray. Amen. All scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION. © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House.
02 Mar 2026
A posture of gratitude is important. An attitude of praise and thankfulness is key as we go about our day. We may be experiencing difficulties, but let us remember to praise the Lord no matter what we are experiencing. Psalm 145:1-7.