#jesus

Your fiancé is pregnant, and you are not the father. One can only imagine the painful emotions one feels upon hearing that news. But this pregnancy was different. It took an angel and a vision to explain the unexplainable!

Mary was the first person to receive Jesus on his terms. Many people want Jesus to come and meet their needs, fix their problems, and heal their hurts. Their expectations are centered around what Jesus can do for them. Mary was different. Check out her response to the angel Gabriel, who told her she would have a child.

Light and darkness are not opposing forces. Dark is simply the absence of light. When light enters, darkness is dispelled. There was a time when we lived in spiritual darkness. That’s all we knew. It was natural and normal. Then we met the Light of the world. He dispelled the spiritual darkness that saturated our hearts. Jesus “called [us] out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Peter 2:9-10). Paul says we are “children of the light, children of the day” (1 Thessalonians 5:4-5). Jesus says it this way.

To introduce this devotional, I wanted to show all the different decisions that make life complex. There are multiple choices for everything from washers and dryers to tires for your car. Since you may not be in the market for a washer or dryer, and your tires are just fine, I decided to see how many brands of jeans there are. I found a site that provided the complete list of jean brands listed in alphabetical order. I stopped counting at one hundred brands. I was only at “C”! I didn’t have it in me to count jean brands starting with “D” all the way to “Z.”

Most of us are afraid of the dark—the absence of light. That’s where chaos, fear, disillusionment, and anxiety reside. It’s the place where the unknown lives. What is waiting for us…hiding from us…in the darkness? It paralyzes. We can’t move forward in the darkness. But here is the good news—the believers’ light is always shining.

“Be a light!” That’s what Beth Ann Schaeber said to her boys every day. Before she dropped them off at a friend’s house or their sporting event or when they walked out the door to go to school, “Be a light!” was the last thing they heard. They responded, “Shine bright!” Beth Ann knew that she was sending her kids into a dark world. She knew that they had been called out of darkness into God’s marvelous light to reflect the light of Jesus. The apostle Paul gave us the same challenge.

There is a great story involving Jesus and his disciples that reminds us that even great men and women of God have times of doubt, especially when the storms kick up. Here’s the story from Matthew’s account of Jesus walking on the water and Peter giving it a try.

So, what does God do with our sin? I don’t mean to be flippant with that question. I know that my sin separated me from God, and Jesus paid the penalty for my sin on the cross. He took on God’s wrath for sin and satisfied the Father by his amazing work.

Repentance is a word that doesn’t get a lot of positive press these days. We would like to blame it on the times we live in, but honestly, people have had trouble with repentance since Genesis 3. Today, let’s consider why repentance gets such bad press.