Morning Encouragement

Standing Firm in Shifting Sands: The Gospel in a Transformed Culture Series Introduction “Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.’” (John 20:21, ESV) Good morning, friends! Easter Sunday has come and the greatest announcement in human history has been declared once again: the tomb is empty, death is defeated, and Jesus Christ is alive. But now the sun rises on a new morning, and we step back into a world that did not change overnight. Today we begin a journey together, one that starts at the empty tomb and walks straight into the middle of our complicated, shifting, challenging culture.

The Road to the Cross: A Lenten Journey of Surrender and Hope | Day 44 | Easter Sunday “He is not here; he has risen, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay.” — Matthew 28:6 (NIV) He is risen! He is risen indeed! Hallelujah! Good morning, beloved in Christ, and the most blessed of all mornings: Easter Sunday! We have arrived. Over Forty days ago we began this journey together on Ash Wednesday, marked by dust and mortality, reminded that we are fragile creatures in desperate need of a Savior. We walked through honesty and surrender, through community and prayer, through the shadow of the cross and the weight of Holy Week. We stood at the foot of the cross on Good Friday. We sat in the silence of Holy Saturday. And now, before the sun has fully risen on this first day of the week, the stone has been rolled away, the tomb is empty, and the angel is speaking words that split history in two: He is not here. 

The Road to the Cross: A Lenten Journey of Surrender and Hope | Day 43 | Holy Saturday “The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him, to the one who seeks him; it is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.” — Lamentations 3:25–26 (NIV) Good morning, beloved in Christ, and blessed Holy Saturday. Yesterday we stood at the foot of the cross and heard seven words fall from the lips of Jesus before He bowed His head and gave up His spirit. Today there are no words. The tomb is sealed. The stone is in place. The disciples are scattered, hiding behind locked doors, undone by grief and fear and the collapse of every hope they had built their lives around. The religious leaders are satisfied. The soldiers are at their posts. And the world does not yet know that the silence of this day is not the silence of defeat. It is the silence of something that has never happened before in the history of creation, quietly, invisibly preparing to happen for the first time.

The Road to the Cross: A Lenten Journey of Surrender and Hope | Day 42 | Good Friday “When he had received the drink, Jesus said, “It is finished.” With that, he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.” — John 19:30 (NIV) Good morning, beloved in Christ, and blessed Good Friday. We have arrived. The road that began on Ash Wednesday, the road of surrender and self-examination, of community and prayer, of drawing ever closer to this moment, has brought us here: to the foot of the cross. There is no devotion that can do justice to this day. There are no words adequate to the weight of what Jesus bore on our behalf in the hours between His arrest and His death. But we come anyway, with humble and grateful hearts, to stand at Calvary and listen to the last words that fell from the lips of the Son of God before He gave up His spirit. Seven statements. Each one a window into the heart of a love that has no equal.

The Road to the Cross: A Lenten Journey of Surrender and Hope | Day 41 | Maundy Thursday “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.” — John 13:1b (NIV) Good morning, beloved in Christ, and blessed Holy Thursday, also known as Maundy Thursday! We have arrived at the most intimate night of Holy Week. The crowds are gone. The debates in the temple courts are finished. The religious leaders are finalizing their plans. And Jesus gathers His twelve in an upper room in Jerusalem for the last meal they will share before the cross. What happens in that room over the course of the evening is so dense with love and meaning that it fills four entire chapters of the Gospel of John. Tonight Jesus washes feet, breaks bread, pours wine, gives a new commandment, prays for His disciples and for everyone who will ever believe through their testimony, and walks out into the darkness of Gethsemane. Every act of this night flows from a single source, named in the last words of th...

The Road to the Cross: A Lenten Journey of Surrender and Hope | Day 40 | Holy Wednesday “This is what the Sovereign Lord, the Holy One of Israel, says: “In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength, but you would have none of it.”” — Isaiah 30:15 (NIV) Good morning, beloved in Christ, and blessed Holy Wednesday! We have reached the still point of Holy Week. Palm Sunday brought the crowd and the Hosannas. Holy Monday brought the overturned tables and the healing of the blind and the lame. Holy Tuesday brought the debates in the temple courts, the greatest commandment, the widow and her two coins. And now, on what many have called Silent Wednesday, the Gospels record no public ministry, no confrontation, no teaching to the crowds. Jesus, as best as scholars can determine, spent this day withdrawn with His disciples in Bethany, the home of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, resting in the quiet before the storm that was coming.

The Road to the Cross: A Lenten Journey of Surrender and Hope | Day 39 | Holy Tuesday “Jesus replied: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” — Matthew 22:37–40 (NIV) Good morning, beloved in Christ, and blessed Holy Tuesday! If yesterday was a day of action, today is a day of words. Jesus is in the temple courts from morning, and the religious establishment comes at Him in waves, each group sending their sharpest minds with their most carefully crafted questions, hoping to trap Him in His words, to discredit Him before the crowds, to find the theological pressure point that will finally silence Him. The Pharisees ask about paying taxes to Caesar. The Sadducees ask about the resurrection. The teachers of the law ask about the greatest commandment. One by one, Jesus answe...

 The Road to the Cross: A Lenten Journey of Surrender and Hope | Day 38 | Holy Monday “It is written,” he said to them, “My house will be called a house of prayer, but you are making it a den of robbers.” — Matthew 21:13 (NIV) Good morning, beloved in Christ, and blessed Holy Monday! Yesterday the city rang with Hosannas. Today Jesus returns to the temple, and what He finds there moves Him to an act that startles everyone who witnesses it and has puzzled comfortable Christianity ever since. He overturns the tables of the money changers. He drives out those who are buying and selling. He clears the court of the Gentiles, the one space in the entire temple complex where people from every nation were permitted to come and pray, of the noise and commerce that had crowded out its sacred purpose. This is not the gentle Jesus of popular imagination. This is the Son of God, burning with a love so fierce for His Father’s house that He cannot leave it as He found it.

The Road to the Cross: A Lenten Journey of Surrender and Hope | Day 37 | Palm Sunday “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” — Matthew 21:9 (NIV) Good morning, beloved in Christ, and blessed Palm Sunday! Today the road to the cross reaches Jerusalem. After weeks of walking this Lenten journey together, of examining our hearts, surrendering our wills, leaning into community, and drawing ever closer to what Jesus was walking toward, we arrive at the city gates alongside the crowd. The palms are being cut. Cloaks are being spread on the road. And a King is coming, not on a warhorse with an army at His back, but on a borrowed donkey, fulfilling a promise five hundred years in the making. Hosanna. Save us now. The King has come.

The Road to the Cross: A Lenten Journey of Surrender and Hope | Day 36 “Rejoice greatly, Daughter Zion! Shout, Daughter Jerusalem! See, your king comes to you, righteous and victorious, lowly and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.” — Zechariah 9:9 (NIV) Good morning, beloved in Christ! Holy Week is nearly upon us. The season of preparation that began on Ash Wednesday, the six weeks of honest self-examination, surrender, community, and drawing near to the cross, now gives way to the holiest and most sacred days of the entire Christian year. Holy Week is not simply a calendar event. It is an invitation to walk, step by step, through the final days of Jesus’ earthly life, to stand where He stood, to feel the weight of what He carried, and to arrive at Easter Sunday not as tourists who skipped the journey but as pilgrims who walked every mile of it.

The Road to the Cross: A Lenten Journey of Surrender and Hope | Day 35 “Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.” — Psalm 27:14 (NIV) Good morning, beloved in Christ! We are standing in the final hours of an extraordinary season. The weeks of Lent that have brought us to this place have done their work: they have pressed us toward honesty, toward surrender, toward community, toward the cross. And now, with Holy Week drawing within reach, there is one more posture this journey asks of us before we cross into the holiest days of the year. It is the posture of waiting with open hands.

The Road to the Cross: A Lenten Journey of Surrender and Hope | Day 34 “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” — 2 Corinthians 5:21 (NIV) Good morning, beloved in Christ! As Holy Week draws within reach, it is worth pausing before we enter it to ask a question that is easy to assume we already know the answer to: what exactly did Jesus accomplish at Calvary? We have heard the words so many times, forgiveness, salvation, redemption, atonement, that they can begin to lose their edges. They become familiar furniture in the room of our faith rather than the load-bearing walls that hold everything else up. Today, as we stand at the threshold of the holiest week of the Christian year, we want to look again at what Jesus did at Calvary with fresh eyes and grateful hearts. The problem Jesus came to solve is one that runs through every human heart. Isaiah 53:6 (NIV) names it with striking simplicity: “We all, like sheep, have gone...

The Road to the Cross: A Lenten Journey of Surrender and Hope | Day 33 “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest.” — Psalm 22:1–2 (NIV) Good morning, beloved in Christ! There are seasons in the life of faith that no one fully warns us about before we enter them. Seasons when we pray and receive only quiet in return. Seasons when we search the Scriptures and the words lie flat on the page. Seasons when we have done nothing we know of to create the distance, and yet God feels impossibly far away. These seasons are real, they are common, and they are not a sign that faith has failed. They are, in fact, one of the most ancient and well-documented experiences in the entire biblical record.

The Road to the Cross: A Lenten Journey of Surrender and Hope | Day 32 “Blessed is the one whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the one whose sin the Lord does not count against them and in whose spirit is no deceit.” — Psalm 32:1–2 (NIV) Good morning, beloved in Christ! As we walk through the final days before Holy Week, the Gospel accounts press us closer and closer to a truth that is both sobering and, for those who receive it rightly, extraordinarily liberating: every person who followed Jesus failed Him. Not one of them stood firm without wavering. The disciples slept when He asked them to watch. Peter denied Him three times before the rooster crowed. And Judas, who had walked with Jesus for three years, handed Him over for thirty pieces of silver. These were not strangers. These were His own. And their failures, set against the backdrop of His unfailing love, tell us something essential about the kind of Savior we have.

The Road to the Cross: A Lenten Journey of Surrender and Hope | Day 31 “Then he returned to his disciples and found them sleeping. “Couldn’t you men keep watch with me for one hour?” he asked Peter.” — Matthew 26:40 (NIV) Good morning, beloved in Christ! There is a moment in the Gospel accounts of Gethsemane that has the power to stop us cold if we let it land. Jesus, in the most anguished hours of His earthly life, had asked His closest friends for one thing: to stay awake and watch with Him. And when He returned from prayer, He found them sleeping. Not once. Three times. That image, of Jesus standing over the sleeping disciples on the night He was betrayed, is one of the most quietly convicting pictures in all of Scripture. And if we are honest, most of us recognize ourselves in those sleeping men.

The Road to the Cross: A Lenten Journey of Surrender and Hope | Day 30 “Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” — Mark 8:34 (NIV) Good morning, beloved in Christ! There is a version of the Christian life that gets preached with great enthusiasm but bears very little resemblance to what Jesus actually promised. It is the version that emphasizes blessing, comfort, answered prayers, and the favor of God without spending much time on what Jesus said clearly and repeatedly to everyone who wanted to follow Him: that the path leads through a cross before it leads to a crown. Today, as we continue drawing closer to Holy Week, we want to look honestly and hopefully at the cost of following Jesus, because the cost, when we understand it rightly, is also one of the most beautiful things about the faith. Mark 8:34–36 (NIV) records Jesus turning to the crowd, not just to His inne...

The Road to the Cross: A Lenten Journey of Surrender and Hope | Day 29 “Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.” — Luke 22:42 (NIV) Good morning, dear friends in Christ! Of all the words ever spoken in prayer, few have the depth and the weight of the seven words Jesus prayed in the garden of Gethsemane: “Not my will, but yours be done.” They are simple words. They are also the most costly words ever uttered by human lips. And they are the words that, when we make them truly our own, have the power to transform everything about how we live and how we follow.

The Road to the Cross: A Lenten Journey of Surrender and Hope | Day 28 “As the time approached for him to be taken up to heaven, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem.” — Luke 9:51 (NIV) Good morning, beloved in Christ! Something shifts in the air as we move deeper into this Lenten season. The weeks behind us have taken us through honest self-examination, through the rhythms of daily Christian living, and through the beauty of the community God has given us for the journey. Now, together, we turn our faces toward Jerusalem. The shadow of the cross falls longer across the road. And we discover, perhaps with some surprise, that Jesus walked this road not reluctantly, not with dread, but with a settled and resolute love that nothing could turn aside.

The Road to the Cross: A Lenten Journey of Surrender and Hope | Day 27 “Again, truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.” — Matthew 18:19–20 (NIV) Good morning, beloved community of faith! What a gift it is to begin this day knowing that we are never alone in our prayers, that the same God who hears our private cries in the quiet hours also gathers with us when we lift our voices together. As we close out this week of walking together, it is fitting that we turn our attention to one of the most powerful and most underused gifts God has given to His community: the gift of praying alongside one another.

The Road to the Cross: A Lenten Journey of Surrender and Hope | Day 26 “Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, brawling and slander, along with every form of malice. Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you.” — Ephesians 4:31–32 (NIV) Rise and shine, beloved in Christ! A new morning brings with it a new opportunity to receive God’s grace and, perhaps even more challengingly, to extend that same grace to someone who has wounded us. Of all the things God calls us to do together as a community of faith, forgiveness may be the most demanding. It is also, when we allow Christ to work it through us, one of the most powerfully transforming.