Browsing Tag

dreams

Daily Bible Verse and Devotion – Hebrews 6:19

Hebrews 6:19

We have this hope as an anchor for our lives, safe and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain. – Hebrews 6:19 (Holman)

What keeps you steady when things get tough? Where do you turn when life isn’t going like you planned? What keeps you going when you feel like you can’t make it anymore?

That thing that keeps you going when all else seems lost is hope. Hope keeps us going when we feel we can’t make it anymore. Hope keeps us moving forward towards our dreams and calling when we don’t feel like it.

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Hope is what keeps us steady. The good news is that as Christians, our hope is in Jesus. If our hope is in Jesus, we know that it can’t be shaken. So no matter how tough what you’re facing might seem, you can take comfort in the fact that your hope is secure. Jesus has your back.

Daily Bible Verse and Devotion – Titus 2:7

Teen Devotion

Always set an example for others by doing good actions. Teach with integrity and dignity.  – Titus 2:7 (ISV)

Have you ever noticed how easy it is to be lazy? It’s so much fun to sit around, watch tons of Netflix and Snapchat all summer break. However, living your life for only fun and what feels good won’t put you on a path for lasting happiness or success.

One of the best decisions you can make is to daily live your life striving to do your best. Daily try to push yourself to do better. It could be learning something new, reading a book, or helping someone out. When you make doing your best in everything your goal, the other things will follow.

Whatever your dream may be, striving to be an example and the best version of yourself each day will help you get there. Choose today to set laziness aside and you’ll find that you can accomplish something truly great for God.

Daily Bible Verse and Devotion – Ephesians 3:20

Daily Bible Verse and Devotion on Ephesians 3:20 for teens and youth

Now to Him who is able to do above and beyond all that we ask or think according to the power that works in us – Ephesians 3:20 (Holman)

Can you remember a time when your grandma asked you what you wanted for your birthday? Secretly, you really wanted a new phone, but you knew that was very expensive and there was no way you’d get it. So instead of telling her what you really wanted, you said you wanted a new hat or a shirt or something that cost less. Sometimes there’s a gap between what you ask for and what you think.

When it comes to presents, we ask for a shirt or a hat, but we want a new phone. We don’t want to offend the person asking us what we want, or maybe we know they can’t afford it, so we ask for something less than what we think we actually want.

It’s easy to fall into this trap with God too. Maybe you want to see some things changed in your life or to pray for really big things, but we treat God like we do with our grandma. We’re afraid to ask him and pray for big things. Today’s verse says that God wants to do more than we ask or think in our lives. So don’t be afraid to step out and see God move in big ways in your life.

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Daily Bible Verse and Devotion – 1 Timothy 4:12

Teen Devotion and BIble Verse on Leading

“Do not let anyone look down on you because you are young, but be an example for the believers in your speech, your conduct, your love, faith, and purity.” – (1 Timothy 4:12 GNT)

I remember the summer after youth camp that I found this Bible verse. It was life-changing for me. I began to see that as a young person, God wanted to use me. I got the revelation that I didn’t have to wait until I was an adult, I could start making a difference in the world right now.

Perhaps you feel like you are too young or don’t know enough to make a difference for God. However, that is not the case. What you know is enough. You are not too young to be used in a big way by God.

Challenge yourself to be a leader this new year. Decide that you’re not going to just sit back and let life happen to you, but that you’re going to stand up and make a difference in the lives of those around you. Choose to be an example of God’s love to the people around you.

If you’d like to read more about leading as a teenager, check out the devotions below!

Daily Bible Verse – August 21

 

Teen Devotion and Bible Verse on Choices

“Today I have given you the choice between life and death, between blessings and curses. Now I call on heaven and earth to witness the choice you make. Oh, that you would choose life, so that you and your descendants might live!
 – Deut 30:19

It’s easy to not think that much about the choices you make every day. You might not think that choosing to skip practicing your instrument or skip reading your Bible matters that much. The truth is the choices you make each day matter a lot. They set the direction and the course for your life.

This Bible verse challenges you to choose godly things and choose life. If you want to experience the best in life, you need to daily choose to follow after God. Following after God isn’t always the easiest choice, but it’s a choice that doesn’t bring heartbreak or regret.

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Choose today to make God first in your decisions. Choose to develop godly habits and do the things that God would have you to do. Decide today that you’re going to do what this verse says and choose life!

Daily Bible Verse and Devotion – Psalm 37:4

BIble Verse on Desires of Your Heart

Take delight in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. Psalm 37:4 (NIV)

This verse has often been misunderstood. Many have thought that if they delight themselves in the Lord, every desire they’ve ever had would come to pass. However, this is not what this verse is saying. This is saying that when you delight yourself in the Lord, the things you desire begin to change. God begins to give you new desires.

The great news about getting desires from God is that you know those desires already are something He desires for you. If He gave the desire, He also wills for you to pursue it.

Just like anything, you need to test your desires to see if they are of God. The only way to know what God’s will of something is, is by seeing if it agrees with what the Bible already says on the subject. You might have a desire to go steal something, but you can see in the Bible that it says, “Thou shalt not steal…”. This makes this obvious that it’s not God’s will. However, if a desire is something that lines up with the Bible and the desire came as a result of truly delighting yourself in the Lord, you can trust that it’s a desire from Him. If the more you continue to delight yourself in God and the desire gets stronger, you can begin stepping out in confidence and head in that direction because you know that desire is from God.

Read: 3 Practical Steps to Help You Accomplish Your Dreams

How To Discover Your God-Given Purpose In Life

Teen God-Given Purpose In Life

Have you ever been lost? I remember a time when I got lost on a missions trip with my youth group. Two of my friends and I got into a taxi. Our missionary tried to give our taxi driver the address where we were going, but the taxi driver didn’t want to listen. He insisted he would just follow the taxi in front of him that had the rest of our group. The taxi got going, but as we got to a busy intersection, our taxi driver began following the wrong taxi. He drove us all over town and followed the wrong taxi to a house.

When he stopped, he tried to tell us to get out. We didn’t speak the same language and we kept trying to tell him that we didn’t want to get out, that he had followed the wrong taxi. He just stared at us and looked confused. We kept trying to think of ideas to tell him to take us back to the train station where we had been picked up from. Finally, we all began making train noises, we honked and made choo-choo sounds until at last, he understood.

He took us back to the train station and we waited there until the rest of our youth group came back to find us.

Sometimes the idea of discovering God’s purpose for your life can make you feel lost, just like I was lost on my missions trip. You might feel like you don’t know where to go and you’re afraid to make the wrong turn or follow the wrong taxi. However, following God’s plan for your life doesn’t have to be difficult or confusing. God wants to show you your purpose.

Discovering Purpose Takes Time Alone With God

Proverbs 20:27 – The spirit of a man is the lamp of the lord searching all the inner depths of his heart

God wants to reveal things to you about your future. However, God isn’t going to show you those things using Snapchat, Musical.ly, Instagram or any other social media platform, but wouldn’t it be nice if he did? God reveals things to you in your spirit. And it’s not complicated: to hear God you’ve got to get quiet and listen. That’s hard sometimes, social media is way more fun than reading your Bible and prayer. However, God wants to talk to you and reveal things to you. You’ve just got to get quiet to listen to your spirit.

The key to discovering your divine destiny and purpose is simple: Realize God wants to speak to you about your future.

When you have that truth solidly in your heart it will make the process of discovery easier. God wants to show you His plans for your life. He wants to help you make good decisions about your future. God speaks those truths to your spirit. So if you’re quiet and willing to listen, God will show you the next step to take.

For I know the plans I have for you,” says the LORD. “They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope. – Jeremiah 29:11 (NLT)

God has plans for you. And he wants to show them to you. All you have to do is spend some time seeking God. If you started dating someone, you’d want to spend time with them to get to know them better. You’d want to know all their hobbies, their dislikes, likes, hopes, and dreams. Developing a relationship with God is no different. It’s all about spending time getting to know God. As you spend time in the Bible and in prayer you’ll get to know the things God likes and His hopes and dreams for you.

Read/Watch: How to Have an Awesome Quiet Time


More than anything, God wants to help you make the right decisions – so involve Him in the decision-making process. Choose to spend time getting to know Him and letting Him speak to your spirit about your future.

Read: How To Make Better Decisions


Purpose Isn’t Identity

We put a lot of weight on what we do for a career, so much that it often becomes our identity. You’ll see adults that introduce themselves by saying something like, “I’m Lydia and I’m a doctor”. In society, a lot of weight is placed on your career.  It’s important to remember that our purpose or career is not our identity. Our identity is found in Jesus. We need to find out what Jesus says about us in the Bible. We need to let who we are in Christ become our identity.

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What you do for God is never as important as for you to discover your identity in Christ. Your career isn’t your identity. Jesus is your identity.

Dear friend, I pray that you may prosper in every way and be in good health physically just as you are spiritually. – 3 John 1:2 (Holman)

God wants you to prosper in every area of your life. He’s more concerned with you knowing who you are in Christ than He is about what you end up doing as a career. So take some time in the discovery process to focus on the things God says about you. Realize that God wants you to prosper in every way.

Read: What Christians Have In Common With Spiderman


It Takes Time To Learn Your Giftings

Have you ever discovered a new game? I remember when I was a kid my grandma taught me a new card game. The first few times I played, I wasn’t very good. It took me some time to learn the rules and discover strategies that would help me win. Once I had played the game a few times, I began to win. The more I played, the more I learned and the better I got.

The same is true with our giftings. We don’t always know what we’re gifted at right away. You’ve got to learn and discover the things you’re good at. You might try out for band and realize you hate music. You might go out for volleyball to discover you’re not athletic. That’s ok. Part of discovering what you’re good at requires learning what you’re not good at. Keep at it, keep trying to learn and discover your giftings.

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You might realize that you really like helping with the children’s ministry at your church, but you hate working with the media team. That’s ok. You’re in the process of discovery. You’re learning more and more all the time about what your giftings are. Get involved at your local church. Begin to serve and you’ll start to see the things you’re good at and the things you’re not that good at. It’s all part of the learning process. The more you learn the better you’ll get!


Discovering purpose takes some effort. It requires spending time with God, and learning about yourself and your giftings. The good news is that God wants to show you your purpose. If you choose to spend time with Him and listen, He’ll speak to your spirit and show you the next steps to take.

If you’re a youth leader, you can download discussion questions to go with this devotion in our youth leader resource area.

4 Truths About Habits

Teen Devotion About HabitsAs a teenager, you might not really think about your habits much. But, you probably have tons of habits. You might have a habit of getting up in the morning a certain way. Or a habit of eating something a certain way.

I have this crazy habit of eating Nutter Butter cookies. I take two cookies, open each cookie sandwich up, and scrape out the peanut butter. I then re-stack the cookie using only two of the four cookies and all of the peanut butter filling. This makes a mountain of a cookie with lots of good peanut butter filling. Its so good!

Sometimes, habits can be weird, like how I eat Nutter Butter cookies. Other habits are boring and some habits are good and others are bad. Regardless of how habits are characterized, let’s look at a few things that habits have in common.

Truth One – Habits are Hard to Break.

Habits can be really hard to break, especially if you’ve been doing them for a long time. Maybe you have a habit of cracking your knuckles and it drives your mom crazy. So you try really hard to quit, but it seems like you always forget and crack them anyway. Habits are tough to break. Over time, they’ve become a part of who you are and it makes it much harder to break them when you find a bad one.

A bad habit never disappears miraculously. It’s an undo-it-yourself project.  – Abigail Van Buren

Have you ever had a habit that was really hard to break?

To break a habit, it takes a lot of hard work, but if you decide to do it and are determined, you can break any habit. Also, don’t discount God’s help in breaking a habit. Ask God for wisdom and he’ll show you creative ways you can break your habit.

The more bad habits you kick when you’re young, the freer and more fun you’ll have as you get older. Don’t waste any time, start working on those bad habits today!

Truth Two – Habits are hard work

Good habits don’t just appear in your life. As awesome as that would be, habits don’t just show up in your life. You’ve got to choose to work on the habits you’d like to have.

If you want to be more generous, you’ve got to spend time working on generosity. If you want to be more patient, you’ve got to practice patience in your life. A good way to do this, is to find some verses in the Bible that deal with the habit you’d like to see in your life. Read the verses and say the verses out loud daily, and put a copy of the verse in your locker at school or mirror at home. Getting God’s word into your heart is a good way to develop good habits.

Another practical thing you can do is to find some resources to develop the habit in your life. Perhaps your library has a book on your habit, or you can spend some time searching online to find tips to develop the habit. You can gain a lot of insight by simply looking for resources designed to help you develop good habits.

Regardless of how you develop the new habit, you need to realize that good habits aren’t going to just show up in your life. Just like an athlete has to practice hard to become good at their sport, you’ve got to spend time practicing and developing good habits in your life. Good habits don’t happen by chance, rather they’re developed through hard work and discipline.

Truth Three – Habits  determine your destination.

Just because you want to get a certain level of success in life doesn’t mean that it will happen. Just desiring something will never get you to where you want to go. Your destination in life is determined each day by the habits you keep.

Habit is a cable; we weave a thread each day, and at last we cannot break it. -Horace Mann

You’ve got to put in work to get to where you want to go in life. High achievement doesn’t happen automatically. You’ve got to put some time in to developing habits that will help you reach the destination you desire in life.

If you want to do well in sports there are certain habits you must develop to get you there. If you never show up for practice and don’t eat right, you’ll never achieve as much as those who do. To be good at something, you’ve got to develop the habits you need for success.

This is why its so important to develop good habits while you’re young. As you get older, habits become harder to break. It also becomes harder to reach your destination. Choose to develop habits that will help you reach your goals.

Habits help you reach your dreams.

If you have a dream of becoming a musician, then begin to develop good habits of practicing music. If you want to be a writer, begin writing a little bit every night before you go to bed. Whatever it is that you dream of doing, the habits you work on now matter. They will take you toward your dreams or away from them.

People ruin their lives with the foolish things they do, and then they blame theLord for it.  – Proverbs 19:3 (ERV)

Habits are really important. So choose today to make good habits in your life. Choose to not let life just pass you by, but rather put in the effort to develop good habits today.

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Similar Youth Devotions

If you’d like to discuss this devotion with your youth group, we’ve got a PDF handout of discussion questions ready for you. Click below to add to cart.

Daily Bible Verse and Devotion – Colossians 1:16

Daily Bible Verse and Devotion - Col 1:16 Teens Dreams Destiny PurposeThrough him God created everything in the heavenly realms and on earth. He made the things we can see and the things we can’t see–such as thrones, kingdoms, rulers, and authorities in the unseen world. Everything was created through him and for him – Colossians 1:16

As a student, it’s easy begin to wonder what your calling is in life. You can begin to wonder what is next for you or how will God bring to pass the dreams that are in your heart.

These are all great questions and things to consider. However, it’s always good to check our motives when we’re praying and asking God our destiny. Many times we fall into the trap of asking God to bless our dreams and what we want to do, instead of asking God to show us what He would have us to do.

God created us. He knows us and loves us, He knows what will make us fulfilled and happy. In light of this, we should focus on building a thriving relationship with Jesus. As we spend time with Jesus we should ask Him what He wants us to do and what He created us for. Doing this will bring you lasting and true happiness.

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What Canoes Teach Us About Hope

Teen Devotion and Youth Group Lesson on Hope

When you’ve got a great talent or ability people will often ask you when you realized you were able to do your talent. I discovered my “talent”, or lack there of at the age of ten. I was at a summer camp with some friends and during a free time at the camp, a friend and I decided to take a canoe out on the lake. It was fun, we paddled and talked and had a great time. When we were about in the middle of the lake, we heard the camp’s bell. The bell was telling us that our free time was over and we needed to go to the next scheduled activity. 

My friend and I began trying to turn our canoe around. We realized in a few minutes that we weren’t able to turn the canoe around. We tried and tried and tried, but no matter how hard we tried we weren’t able to turn our canoe around. And in that moment, I realized how bad I was at steering a canoe.

In canoeing and in life there’s often times where we need to turn it around or we need to course correct. Sometimes we might see something coming up ahead and realize that we need to change our course. Or perhaps, we see a dream, goal or vision that God has for our lives but we don’t know how to get there.

How Do We Get There?

So how do we do it? How do we get from where we are now to where we want to be? How do we stay motivated and keep moving toward our goal even when our goal seems too far away and we begin to wonder if we can ever get there?

Hope is what keeps us focused and moving toward our God given dreams and goals. Hope is what motivates us when things get tough and we want to give up. In the Bible, the disciples faced a situation where they wanted to give up hope.

but we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel. And what is more, it is the third day since all this took place. – Luke 24:21 (NIV)

In this passage, the disciples were sharing their feelings and said they had hoped. They had given up on hope since Jesus had died. They were feeling really discouraged and didn’t know what to do next.

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How do you turn a bad situation around?

One of the most important things to do when you’re in a tough situation is to not give up on hope. Hope is very important to accomplishing your dreams and goals, so let’s look at a few reasons why.

Hope = Direction.

If you lose your hope, you lose all direction in life. If you were in a canoe and you dropped your paddle, you’d be in trouble. Without the paddle, you’d have nothing to steer you. Hope is the same for us in life. Without hope, we have nothing steering and driving us toward our goals and dreams in life. If we give up our hope, we give up our direction.

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Hope = Anchor.

When you’re boating an anchor is important. Without it, you could run aground or drift off course. An anchor helps keep you in place. In life, it’s no different. We need something secure and something to help hold us steady. A secure anchor for our lives is Jesus.

We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure. It enters the inner sanctuary behind the curtain – Hebrews 6:19 (NIV)

Many times in life our emotions, feelings and circumstances can try to drift us off course. We have to realize that if we lose hope, we lose our anchor.

Guard Your Hope.

When you’re canoeing it can make sense to take a dry bag with you. A dry bag is a safe place to put keys, books, maybe even food that you don’t want to get wet. Once this bag is sealed, it keeps important items from getting wet. Our hope is important. It’s something that needs to be guarded and kept safe. If we’re going to accomplish the dreams that God has put in our lives, we need to be sure to guard our hope.

What you put your hope IN matters.

If you were to try to hope in a canoe and paddle on carpet, you wouldn’t get very far. It would be hard work and really tough. However, if you were to put that same canoe into water and begin to paddle, it would be a lot easier. Why? What you put your canoe in matters. In life, it’s no different. What you put your hope in matters. You can put your hope in your friends, or in money, or lots of other things. Just be sure that what you put your hope in is solid. That it’s something that can see you through. In life, putting your hope in Jesus is a good choice. Jesus will never leave you or let you down. What you put your hope in matters.
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Hope can be resurrected.

Your situation isn’t too far gone for God. Your hope can be resurrected.

In their fright the women bowed down with their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? – Luke 24:5

These women went back to the tomb where Jesus had been buried. They were looking back at what had been. The angel asked them why were you looking for the living among the dead. The angel was telling them that even though their hope (Jesus) was once dead, it had now been resurrected. They didn’t have to keep looking for it in the place of death. In the same way, our hope can be resurrected, if we put it in Jesus.

Hope is important as it is the motivation for you to reach your God given dreams. Always remember that your situation isn’t too hopeless for a resurrection. Your dream isn’t too far off for Jesus to help bring it to pass in your life. If you choose to keep hope alive, your situation is never too hopeless. If you trust in God and lean on Him as the source of your hope, you’ll never be disappointed and never be without true hope.

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If you’re a youth leader and would like discussion questions or a lesson outline and powerpoint, you can download them below.