Morning Encouragement

Running on Empty: Day 21 Final  “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give  them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of  water welling up to eternal life.” — John 4:13-14 (NIV)  Good morning, and welcome to the last day of this journey together.  Twenty-one days ago, we started with a tank on empty. Not a metaphor we had to  reach for. A description most of us recognized the moment we read it, because we had  been living inside it. The exhaustion was real. The distance between what we knew  about God and what we felt on any given morning was real. The world was loud and the  faith was thin and the prayers were whispered because that was all we had left. We  named it honestly because that was the only place to begin. 

Running on Empty | Day 20  “Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice!” — Philippians 4:4 (NIV)  Good morning. There is a word that gets used so casually in Christian circles that we  can almost stop hearing it, and yet when we look at where Paul wrote it and what  surrounded him when he did, it turns out to be one of the most radical sentences in all  of Scripture. 

Running on Empty: Finding God’s Strength When the World Has Taken Yours | Day 19 “Praise the Lord, my soul; all my inmost being, praise his holy name. Praise the Lord,  my soul, and forget not all his benefits.” — Psalm 103:1-2 (NIV)  Good morning. There is a posture this series has been quietly building toward, and  today we name it plainly: gratitude. Not as a feeling to manufacture before the coffee is  ready, and not as a spiritual performance layered on top of everything already weighing on us. Gratitude as a way of seeing, a discipline that does not change what is in the  room but changes what we notice first when we walk into it. 

Running on Empty | Day 18  “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To  act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.” — Micah 6:8 (NIV)  Good morning. If you have ever wished God would just hand you a short, clear answer  instead of a thousand scattered instructions, this morning’s verse is about as close as  Scripture gets to doing exactly that. 

Running on Empty | Day 17  “Have nothing to do with godless myths and old wives’ tales; rather, train yourself to be  godly. For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things,  holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.” — 1 Timothy 4:7-8 (NIV)  Good morning. If you have made it this far into this series, something in you has been fighting to stay connected to what matters, and that is worth acknowledging before  anything else.  

Running on Empty | Day 16  "Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be  discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go." — Joshua 1:9  (NIV)  We are glad you are here this morning, and we are glad you did not stay down.  

  HANDS, FEET, AND TRUST  Running on Empty | Day 15  "Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but  now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and  trembling, for it is God who works in You to will and to act in order to fulfill His good  purpose." — Philippians 2:12-13 (NIV)  Good morning. There is a question waiting at the start of most days, often before our  feet hit the floor: how much of today is up to us, and how much is up to God?   It is one of the oldest tensions in the life of faith, and it wears us out from both  directions. On one side sits the believer who has decided that trusting God means doing nothing, sitting on our hands and waiting for heaven to move while the work God placed  in front of us goes undone. On the other sits the believer who has decided everything  depends on us, who plans and strains as though God were a distant spectat...

Running on Empty | Day 14  "In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought  to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans." — Romans  8:26 (NIV)  Good morning. If the week has worn the words down to almost nothing, you are in  exactly the right place for what this morning has to offer.   The Groan the Words Could Not Carry  This week we walked through heavy ground together. Fear behind the wheel while  wisdom looked on. Hollow philosophies absorbed so gradually we stopped noticing  what they had displaced. The two in the morning loneliness that has nothing to do with  who else is in the house. The exhaustion of measuring ourselves against everyone  around us and never arriving anywhere that felt like enough. The hard seasons that turn  out to be not punishment but refinement, the fire burning away everything that was  never meant to survive. And the b...

Running on Empty | Day 13  Jesus replied, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in  the kingdom of God.” — Luke 9:62 (NIV)  Good morning. Whatever this day is already asking of you, we are glad you stopped  here first.  There is a kind of weariness that has nothing to do with what is happening today and  everything to do with what happened years ago, or last week, or even ten minutes  before we sat down to read this. We carry a conversation that ended badly. We carry a  decision we cannot undo. We carry the version of ourselves we used to be, or the  people we used to have around us, or the season of life that felt easier than this one  does now, and somewhere along the way that backward glance stopped being an  occasional visit to memory and became where we actually live. We are trying to plow  today’s field with our necks turned the wrong direction, and we wonder why the line  keeps going ...

Running on Empty | Series: Day 12  “In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer  grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith,  of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire, may result in  praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.” — 1 Peter 1:6-7 (NIV)  Good morning. If this season has worn you down to nothing, you are exactly where this  morning needs you to be.   Here is something worth saying plainly before anything else. The tank does not always  run empty because we have been suffering well, carrying a hard season the way  Scripture asks. Often it runs empty because we have spent every drop of energy trying  to solve what was never ours to solve, fix what only God could fix, manage timing and  outcomes that were never under our control to begin with. The exhaustion is not always  proof th...

Running on Empty | Series: Day 11  “Each one should test their own actions. Then they can take pride in themselves alone,  without comparing themselves to someone else, for each one should carry their own  load.” — Galatians 6:4-5 (NIV)  Good morning. Before you measure this morning against anyone else’s, slow down right  here. There is no scoreboard in this place, only you and the God who already knows  exactly where you stand with Him.   There is a kind of tiredness that does not come from the work itself. It comes from the  running tally we keep without ever deciding to start one. We notice who reads farther in  the Word than we did this week. We notice whose children seem to be turning out better,  whose marriage looks easier, whose ministry looks busier and more fruitful, whose  suffering looks heavier or lighter than ours, and somehow that comparison matters to us  too. Social media compounds this in ways we rarely n...