What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ – Phil 3:8 (NIV)

As a teenager, you probably love the idea of being in charge. If you’re like most teens, you’re excited for the day when you’re an adult and you get to call all the shots in your life.

Even if you don’t get to call all the shots in your day-to-day life, in your relationship with God, you are in charge.

Today’s Truth: You are the only person who determines how well you know Jesus.

Your relationship with God isn’t based on your parent’s faith or relationship with God. Rather, you’ve got to choose to have a deep and meaningful relationship with Him.

And you’re in charge of that! You get to choose how well you know Jesus. The good news is that nothing is stopping you from getting to know Him more.

So don’t wait until you’re older. Instead, choose to follow Jesus today. Get into God’s word and learn how much He loves you and desires a relationship with you.

Who can hide in secret places
    so that I cannot see them?”
declares the Lord.
    “Do not I fill heaven and earth?”
declares the Lord. – Jeremiah 23:24 (NIV)

God is always there. There’s no place too far away from Him. There is No place where you can go that He doesn’t care and see you. God loves you, cares about you, and wants to help you through whatever it is that you face.

Right now, it might feel like you’re going through the most difficult thing you’ve ever faced. It might cause you to wonder if God is really there, or if He cares. The truth is, He’s there. He sees your pain, He sees you and loves you. He wants to sit with you in the middle of your storm.

That’s the God we serve. He’s not a God who is far away from us and hoping that one day we figure it all out on our own. No, He’s right there, ready to lead the way, show us what to do, give us wisdom on how to make our situation better and comfort us in the midst of whatever we go through.

Today’s Truth: No matter where you are, God is right there.

So today, encourage yourself that God sees you where you are. He loves you and wants nothing more than to be your help through to the other side.

We’d like to give a big thanks to Lucas Beron for creating the image for today’s devotion. If you like his designs, you can see more of his work by following him at @yosigonmd. He’s also written several devotions for us in the past: How to Live Fear-Free During Coronavirus and Daily Bible Verse and Devotion – Psalm 4:8.

Have you ever known someone who tried to make salvation a really difficult thing? Maybe they thought they had to be really good to get saved, so they worked really hard for salvation. Perhaps you know someone who doesn’t even realize that heaven and hell are real, so the idea of salvation doesn’t make much sense to them either.

Here’s the thing, the Bible tells us that it’s faith in Jesus that saves us. When we believe in Him, believe that He was raised from the dead, and His life was the payment in full for our sin, and speak it out, that’s when we’re saved.

If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. – Romans 10:9 (NIV)

Salvation isn’t difficult to obtain, but it can feel difficult because it’s so easy. It’s easier to not think about eternity and never make a decision for Jesus. It’s easier to try to do lots of good work to earn your salvation.

The Bible shows us, however, that we can’t do enough good to earn heaven. We needed Jesus. And that’s why Jesus came to the earth. To help us in our weaknesses. He did what we couldn’t do.

Today’s Truth: Jesus Did What We Couldn’t Do – He Made us Right With God.

So today, first make sure that you have made a personal decision to follow Jesus. Next, believe that His sacrifice on the cross was sufficient payment for your sin. Then determine to make sure that the people you come into contact with know that too. There are people all around you that might not know that Jesus paid the price so they don’t have to spend eternity separated from Him.

This summer, we’ve been going through some scriptures that show us our need for Jesus. It’s easy in our world to think that as long as we’re pretty good, there’s nothing to worry about. However, that’s not what the Bible teaches us. We see in today’s verse that the wages or payment for sin is death.

Death is what we deserve as sinners. However, I’m so thankful that God doesn’t give me what I deserve or what I’ve earned. Instead, He extends His grace and His mercy. God chose to give us eternal life.

For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord. – Romans 6:23 (NLT)

We don’t deserve it, but God saw fit to give us eternal life in Jesus. That’s good news. The gospel isn’t about following rules or doing enough. It’s about how we could never do enough, and instead, we need to fall at the feet of Jesus and accept His love and mercy. It’s through Jesus only that we find eternal life.

Today’s Truth: The Gospel isn’t about following rules, it’s about falling at the feet of Jesus and accepting His love and mercy.

No other religion can offer what Jesus can. Only Jesus can make you truly free and allow you to experience eternal life in Him.

So today, spend some time thinking about this verse. Take a moment to thank God for not giving you what you deserved (death) but instead extending mercy to you, and giving you eternal life in Jesus.

Have you ever met someone that said they were a good person? Maybe they try to do good things, and would probably say they’re a good person. But will that be enough? Will that person spend eternity in heaven? And the answer is no. No matter how hard you or they try, there isn’t enough good that you can do to earn God’s love or salvation.

We all have sinned. Even the best of us.

since all have sinned and continually fall short of the glory of God, – Romans 3:23 (AMP)

The good news about all this is that God knew this about us. He knew we’d continually mess up. That we’d never be able to do enough good on our own. And that’s why He planned from the beginning of the world a solution.

Today’s Truth: God loved you enough to do whatever it took to bring you back to Him.

The solution would be something that cost Him everything. And yet, it was worth it to God. Because He loved you and me. He had such a passion to bring us back into right standing with Him that He was ready to pay whatever the cost.

Knowing this helps you see your value. You can begin to realize that even if you’ve missed it and messed up, to God, you’re worth everything. He loves you and gave all He had to help you out of your sin!

We’ve got another summer scripture for you today. Yesterday, we looked at how Adam’s sin brought the curse and death on the world. That’s the bad news.

And there’s even more bad news. Because of Adam’s sin, death spread to each of Adam’s descendants. That means that you and I are sinners.

When Adam sinned, sin entered the world. Adam’s sin brought death, so death spread to everyone, for everyone sinned. – Romans 5:12 (NLT)

Realizing that you’re a sinner is an important step in your relationship with God. Not that you spend all day beating yourself up for the ways you fall short, that’s not the point at all. Instead, the point is coming to the realization that you need help to obtain God’s righteousness.

Today’s Truth: You Need Help to Obtain God’s Righteousness

That means that being a good person isn’t enough. As hard as you try to be good, it’s never enough. You need another solution. A better way. And that’s what God himself provided. God in His love cared so much about you, His creation that He made a solution for your sin. What you couldn’t do in your own strength, you didn’t need to do. God Himself was coming to make a way for you to be righteous. Keep on with us, we’ll learn more about that in the upcoming days.

Hopefully, your summer break from your studies has been going well. It’s nice to have a break and have a change of pace from all that studying. While we might break from school work, we shouldn’t take a break this summer from the study of God’s word. So with that in mind, let’s take a look at today’s Bible Verse, or verses, actually!

¹⁷ To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’

“Cursed is the ground because of you;
    through painful toil you will eat food from it
    all the days of your life.
¹⁸ It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
    and you will eat the plants of the field.
¹⁹ By the sweat of your brow
    you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
    since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
    and to dust you will return.” – Genesis 3:17-19

So those are a lot of verses, but here’s the thing, we need them all to realize an important truth. Do you see what God is saying here? He’s saying the world is no longer as He created it, originally. He tells us that the ground is cursed, that thorns and thistles will now come out of the ground, and that one day, each and every one of us will die.

That isn’t really encouraging, is it? But don’t worry, just like any good movie, this isn’t the end. As we’ll read in a few days, God had a plan for man and for the world. That plan gives us hope. But until we get to those verses, let’s take a few moments to think about this, and how what we see in today’s verses can help us share the gospel with others.

Today’s Truth: Bad things aren’t God’s Fault

See sometimes we might have friends who see wars and see some of the terrible things that people do in the world. And they might ask you, how could a loving God allow those things to happen? And as a result, they choose to not put their faith in God. But here’s the thing. God isn’t responsible for the bad things that happen in our world. That’s a result of Adam’s sin. Because of His sin, the world is cursed, it’s not the good place that God originally created.

That’s why we see sickness, death, suffering, and many of the bad things in the world. It’s because our world is fallen and broken. It’s because there’s a real devil out there wanting to steal, kill, and destroy. (John 10:10)

So don’t be afraid to stand up for the truth with your friends. Let them know that the bad stuff that happens isn’t God’s fault, the world simply isn’t the same good place our loving father God originally created.

Over the next week and a half, as a start to your summer break, we’re going to look at some verses that show us our need for a savior and why Jesus came to earth.

So let’s take the next week and look at these scriptures, and if we don’t already know them, then commit them to memory and build our faith together!

God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day. – Genesis 1:31 (NIV)

Have you ever thought about the fact that when God created the world, everything He created was good? And yes, it’s not still that way (we’ll see why in tomorrow’s verse). But we see in today’s verse that God created the world. Everything we see from the sky to animals is a part of His creation. And it’s so complex and wonderful. The way God created our sky to protect us, the variety in the animals, all of it is simply amazing.

God’s creation is miraculous. Take some time today to look outside and see the amazing things that God created.

Today’s Challenge: See the Miracle of Creation each day.

There’s no way that the complexity, the variety, and the things we see in nature are created without God. Yes, the world isn’t the way God created it because of sin, more to come on that tomorrow, but overall, the world screams there is a creator and that He creates good things for us to enjoy.

It’s getting to be summertime, and we thought it might be fun to do a series over the next week and a half on some scriptures that are pretty foundational to our faith and our salvation. These scriptures outline our need for a savior, Jesus, and why sin is such a big problem without Jesus.

If you haven’t already, consider challenging yourself to memorize these scriptures. Memorizing them really does help you. That way, if you forget your Bible at home one day, or if you’re jogging at track practice, you can think about and recall some scripture to feed your faith.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. – Genesis 1:1 (NIV)

One of the first things you have to settle in your walk with God is that God is the creator. Why is that important? Because as creator, there is no higher power than God. That means that He has the right to call the shots in our world because He was the one who created it.

Today’s Challenge: Look to God as the Creator

Seeing God as your creator is foundational to your faith. If you believe that He created, then it makes sense why He has the right to judge sin. It makes sense why He loved us so much that He wanted to send a savior to the world to redeem us from that sin.

So if you haven’t thought about it much before, determine to begin to see God as the creator of our earth today. Realize that if He created, then He has authority and that instead of using that authority to make you as His creation feel bad for messing up, He decided to love you and extend His mercy to humankind all throughout history.