Daily Devotional

In this way, every generation will have a living faith in the laws of life
and will never forget the faithful ways of God. – Psalm 78:7 (TPT)

I always thought that I would live for God when I was older. I figured I’d lean on the faith of my parents and then I’d really go all-in for God when I got to be an adult. However, as I went to some youth camps and began to learn more about the Bible, I realized that I shouldn’t wait. I could develop a relationship with God and a faith walk of my own.

Today’s Bible verse talks about how every generation has to have a living faith. God doesn’t want to have a dull, boring lifeless relationship with you. Instead, He wants you to have a living faith. That means God wants to speak to you. God wants to show you things to come and things about your future. He wants to talk to you, help you know how to deal with the mean girl who rides your school bus. God desires to give you the wisdom to know how to talk to your friend who has parents that are going through a divorce. God wants to have a living relationship with you.

He doesn’t want to do this when you get to be an adult. Rather God can speak to you now. He can lead and guide you right now. So don’t wait. Don’t follow after God when you get older, choose to go deep now.

“But blessed are those who trust in the LORD and have made the LORD their hope and confidence. – Jeremiah 17:7 (NLT)

Confidence is a strange thing, isn’t it? Sometimes you have days when you really feel confident, and then there are days when you feel so incompetent and insecure. When talking about confidence, it’s easy to think that if you are dating the right person, or friends with the right people, or wear the right things then you’ll be confident. Or perhaps you think if you make the right team, get the right part in the play then you’ll be really confident.

The thing is that when confidence is built upon people, circumstances, or things, that confidence can be easily shaken. Confidence built on anything other than God, will cause you to be shaken when difficulty comes.

The best way to have lasting confidence is to build your confidence in God. God says in today’s verse that we are blessed when we trust in the Lord and when we make Him our hope and confidence.

Confidence that is lasting and secure finds it’s foundation in God. When God and what the Bible says about you becomes your confidence, then you’ll be able to face anything that comes your way.

Today, choose to build confidence in God. When you do, you’ll have a confidence that will last.

So let’s not get tired of doing what is good. At just the right time we will reap a harvest of blessing if we don’t give up. – Galatians 6:9 (NLT)

It’s really easy to get discouraged. Maybe you’ve been believing God for something and you haven’t seen results yet. Perhaps you’ve been doing the right thing for a long time and no one has noticed or acted like they cared.

In these situations, it’s really easy to want to be discouraged or quit. However, today’s Bible verse tells us to not get tired of doing good. How do you keep yourself from being discouraged? Many times it helps to remind yourself of the good things God has done for you. You can remember the times He’s brought you out or has been faithful. Sometimes the reward for doing the right thing doesn’t always show up when you think it should or when you expect it.

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The good news is that God always rewards faithfulness. If you stick with it and don’t give up, you’ll be rewarded. So challenge yourself to stick with it. Don’t give up when it gets hard or you feel like no one notices. If you stick with it, God will see that you are rewarded.

Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who hurt you. – Luke 6:28 (NLT)

Don’t you hate it when people pick on you? Or maybe not even you, but you see all the hate in the world. You see kids being bullied for the dumbest things, and see people in the world being unkind and hate all around. And it can make you really feel disillusioned about people and the future.

Here’s the thing. You can’t change other people. People are going to do bad, ugly, and horrible things. And this has been happening since the beginning of time. Just think about Abel who was killed at the beginning of Genesis, simply because his brother got jealous of him.

Realizing that you can’t change someone else can make it all seem pretty helpless. However, we’re not left helpless or without power. In the Bible, we’re challenged to do something different. When people curse you, you’re to bless them. When someone hurts you, you are to pray for them.

How crazy is that? That’s not usually my first response, praying for someone when they treat me badly. Yet that’s what the Bible encourages us to do. The Bible doesn’t promise that people will always treat us well. It doesn’t tell us those horrible things will stop in the fallen world we live in. What it does do is to tell us to pray for those people and bless them.

Prayer can do what we can’t do. And when we pray for and bless those who do bad things to us, we’re helping ourselves and them too. Instead of allowing people to hurt us, we’re forgiving and asking God to help them! Wow. What would our world look like if we spent time each day praying for those people around us doing bad things?

“God blesses you when people mock you and persecute you and lie about you and say all sorts of evil things against you because you are my followers. – Matthew 5:11 (NLT)

Have you ever been mocked for your faith? I remember a time when I had a job and my boss just hated Christians. He did everything in his power to make life hard for me. I worked at a restaurant, and he would try to knock trays of food and drinks out of my arms, all because he didn’t like me and what I stood for as a Christian.

Instead of retaliating, like I wanted to, I felt like God was leading me to ignore the bad treatment and to just keep a good attitude in the situation. So each day I showed up to work and I did my best to act like my boss’s actions didn’t bother me. I always treated him fairly and with respect.

After a year or so of working there, my boss’s attitude toward me began to change. He was never really over the top nice to me, but once he told me that I was the first Christian who hadn’t let him down or flaked out on him. He never came to know Jesus, but he respected me and with time treated me better.

Just like me, you’re going to face situations where people aren’t going to treat you right due to your faith. When that happens, ask God for wisdom. The person who is mistreating you might have a lot of hurt from other Christians that is causing them to act the way they do. If you ask Him, God will give you wisdom and show you how you should respond.