Posts tagged Don't Waste Your Quarantine
Meditation | Daily Devotional

What have you been daydreaming about lately? Or, perhaps more to the point, what do you tend to look forward to after a long day of work?

At this time of year, we’re usually about a month into baseball season, which means my honest answer would have to include catching a few innings of a ballgame once the kids are in bed. But even with one fewer thing to distract me, I’ll still admit that it’s an ongoing project to keep God’s Word, His character, and His praise-worthiness at the forefront of my mind and heart.

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Personal Evaluation | Daily Devotional

Search me, O God, and know my heart;

Try me and know my anxious thoughts;

And see if there be any hurtful way in me,

And lead me in the everlasting way.

Psalm 139:23-24, NASB

I highlighted these verses in my Bible back in the college days when it was cute to draw a heart next to every “heart” typed on the pages. Scribbled next to them in the same blue ink are the words “Don’t leave me unchanged.”

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Evangelism | Daily Devotional

One would think that being held in isolation would halt the advance of the gospel. How can we continue to see the gospel spread if we are mostly staying in place?

Paul actually saw the opposite. As Paul writes the letter to the Philippian church, he sits confined in a Roman prison cell. He is not able to go to synagogues and market places as he normally would to preach the good news.

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Bible Study | Daily Devotional

At this stage of the game, the Internet is starting to pop a bit with speculations and predictions about what might change about our lives if (and when!) we emerge from COVID-19 exile. Will online shopping replace many brick-and-mortar stores once and for all? What about movie theaters? Even the future of the handshake is now questionable, depending on which expert is speaking when.

But as the musical geniuses who wrote “Frozen II” so often remind us, some things never change. Plenty of things might make that list in a temporal sense, but isn’t it comforting to know that our God and His Word will never change?

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Worship | Daily Devotional

The good news is that even while we wait, we can experience God’s purpose for our lives. In Psalm 27, David shows us a sense of purpose that coronavirus can't take away. David is a man on a mission, stating something he wants to spend “all the days of his life” doing. He has a clear goal that he is seeking after: to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord.

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Prayer | Daily Devotional

As we consider how to make the best use of our current season, I’ve got a question for you: How is your prayer life right now?

Too many times, our prayer life is stale, lame, and meager because we’re missing the larger context of the world and our Father’s work in it. Amid our responsibilities, routines, and sheer scheduling of life, prayer seems to be the one “activity” we leave for another day. Rather than taking advantage of the direct line we have to the very throne room of God our Father, we try to soldier on through one more day on our own.

The mere fact that on virtually every page of Scripture we can find either someone—including Jesus himself—praying, or believers being invited, urged, and instructed on how and why to pray tells us that prayer is not an optional piece to the Christian life.

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Reading | Daily Devotional

Don’t you wish we could take a peek at which books made the Apostle Paul’s Isolation Reading List? What filled the pages he requested? Poetry? Scripture? Letters? Philosophy? While we can never know for sure because he doesn’t say, we can perceive that those books meant a lot to him; the parchments were valuable at a time when Paul was feeling very alone.

Paul’s ask comes in the middle of a long list of people who have abandoned him.

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Words | Daily Devotional

Paul was acquainted with isolation. Whether he was under military-style house arrest or sitting alone in a public prison, he knew what it is like to be alone. In Acts 28:16, Luke explains one of his situations this way, “When we came into Rome, Paul was allowed to stay by himself, with the soldier who guarded him.” Can you imagine that? Perhaps at this particular moment we can imagine it. We are asked to stay home, even though we do not have soldiers guarding our door.

What did Paul do with his time? One thing we know he did was write incredibly personal and encouraging letters to others, and God used these letters in mighty ways

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Don't Waste Your Quarantine | April 15

Humans need purpose. Quite literally, without it we die. A number of years ago the staff at a nursing home conducted an experiment to answer the question, What would happen if we brought pets into the facility and gave the residents the responsibility to take care of them? What they noticed in the residents was an increase in energy, health, and even overall life expectancy because of a new found sense of purpose.

One of the hardest things about being in quarantine over the past couple weeks can be a feeling of purposelessness.

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