Proverbs 7 warns against sexual temptation, but one verse in it diagnoses every temptation we face: “Let not your heart turn aside… do not stray.” In this episode, Blake unpacks two words — heart and stray — to show how temptation actually gets its grip: not on a heart marching into sin, but on one that has quietly drifted from being satisfied in God.

Anchored in Proverbs 7:25 and Psalm 107, this teaching devotional traces the pattern of the wandering heart — restless, empty, hunting to fill a void — and the way home: not clenched willpower, but a cry to the Lord who leads wanderers back. It closes with grace for when you fall: no penance to earn, just turn, confess, and let Him satisfy the thirst until the old paths lose their pull.

Follow Before the Lord on Facebook (@BeforeTheLord) and Instagram (@beforethelorddevo). Get devotionals delivered to your inbox at blakescrawford.com/sign-up, or listen anytime at blakescrawford.com/listen. Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and iHeart.

On the road to Jerusalem, Jesus tells His disciples He's about to die — and two of them respond by asking for the best seats in His kingdom. In this episode, Blake looks past the obvious selfishness to what's really underneath: fear. James and John fled the terrifying present into an imagined future, and in doing so missed the chance to be with Jesus in His pain.

Anchored in Mark 10:32-45 and Romans 8:5, this devotional names the three ways we flee a hard reality — denial, control, and future-casting — and what all of them steal: our presence. The cure isn't gritting our teeth; it's a mind anchored in the Father. Whatever you're tempted to run from, the peace you're chasing somewhere else is found right here, with Him, in the present.

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Sometimes we just can't seem to feel close to God — the quiet time goes flat, and everything feels like going through the motions. In this episode, Blake shares three words the Lord pressed on his heart in a season like that: input, output, and throughput — three ways to guard your heart when the distance sets in.

Anchored in Proverbs 4:23, this devotional is a practical, watch-your-heart framework: guard what you let in, what comes out of you, and what runs through your mind. Blake walks through how to spot the drift early and, using a simple four-step process — recognize, confess, ask, act — work each area back toward God. You may not feel close right away, but faithfulness in these three is the road back.

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James says to count it all joy when we face trials. In this episode, Blake hands you a different word for “trial” — disruption — and makes the case that God never wastes one. Life settles into a groove; a disruption breaks it, and often that's exactly where we meet God in a new and deeper way.

Anchored in James 1:2-4, this devotional gets personal. Blake shares the hardest disruption of his life — the death of his sister in 2001 — and the second disruption hidden beneath it: a false belief that good Christians are shielded from real suffering. What God taught him in that season reframes how we meet every interruption that levels us.

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Years ago in counseling, Blake unloaded a grievance he was sure was justified — and his counselor looked right through him: “Blake, you're a lonely man looking for love in all the wrong places.” In this episode, Blake shares why that hard word landed, and what it revealed about the real mark of a wise person.

Anchored in Proverbs 9:8-9, this devotional makes the case that wisdom isn't having it all together — it's being rebukeable and teachable. Blake gets honest about what it takes to receive correction, why some of us end up with no one willing to challenge us, and how a hard word, handled right, becomes one of God's kindest gifts.

Follow Before the Lord on Facebook (@BeforeTheLord) and Instagram (@beforethelorddevo). Get devotionals delivered to your inbox at blakescrawford.com/sign-up, or listen anytime at blakescrawford.com/listen. 

The words that come out of us — especially when emotions run high — say more about our hearts than our vocabulary. In this episode, Blake gets honest about a season when the doubt and fear churning inside him turned even his wife's smallest comment into a fight, and what finally changed it.

Anchored in James 1:26 and Matthew 15:18, this devotional traces our words back to their source: the heart. Rather than white-knuckling the tongue, Blake walks through a guided descent — from the sharp words on the surface, down to the wound underneath, and into surrender — where the old story a wound tells gets rewritten and its grip finally breaks.

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On the night before the cross, in the agony of Gethsemane, Jesus gave His three closest disciples one job: stay awake and pray. Three times He asked; three times they slept. In this episode, Blake looks at why that failure was so tragic — and what it reveals about how the big moments of our lives are really won or lost.

Anchored in Mark 14:38, this devotional takes an unexpected turn through a lesson Blake learned running a landscaping company: a whole lot of little issues become one big issue. The same is true of the soul. Spiritual readiness for the big temptations and trials isn't summoned in the crisis — it's built in the small, ordinary moments of daily dependence on God. You can't draw on a reserve you never built.

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For most of his life, Blake had a hair-trigger — the moment he sensed he might disappoint someone, fight or flight would fire, and he’d swing or bolt before he ever paused. In this episode, he gets honest about the hurtful consequences of plunging ahead, and the slow lesson underneath it: his recklessness wasn’t confidence, it was fear.

Anchored in Proverbs 14:16 and Isaiah 30:15, this devotional reframes godly caution — not as timidity or passivity, but as the wisdom to pause and bring the moment to God before reacting. Blake unpacks the difference between real caution and cowardly avoidance, why we so easily mistake fear for wisdom, and how the small gap of a holy pause turns a reaction into a response.

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We can spend years learning about God and still not know Him. In this episode, Blake gets honest about the season he chased Bible knowledge just so he wouldn’t feel stupid around more mature believers — and the shift that finally brought his time in the Word to life.

Anchored in 1 Corinthians 8:1 — “knowledge puffs up, but love builds up” — this devotional traces the move from head knowledge to heart knowledge: from knowing about God to actually experiencing Him. Drawing on Jeremiah 9 and Ephesians 1, Blake shows why that shift is the Spirit’s work, not ours — and how to come to Scripture longing to meet God rather than just collect facts.

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Jeremiah handed God’s people a picture they couldn’t miss: they had walked away from a spring of living water to dig their own cisterns — cracked pits that couldn’t hold a drop. In this episode, Blake gets honest about the cisterns he spent years digging with his own hands: people-pleasing, pretending, showing off — every one of them a way of trying to find life apart from God.

Drawing on Jeremiah 2:13, this devotional traces the two evils behind a thirsty soul — forsaking God and replacing Him — and the reckoning that comes when you finally see what you’ve been doing. Blake shares what it actually took to stop digging and turn back to the Fountain: a retraining that felt mysterious, even like death at times, but led to something better than results — a deeper connection with the Lord.

Follow Before the Lord on Facebook (@BeforeTheLord) and Instagram (@beforethelorddevo). Get devotionals delivered to your inbox at blakescrawford.com/sign-up, or listen anytime at blakescrawford.com/listen.