Visit www.joniradio.org for more inspiration and encouragement!

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Thank you for listening! Your support of Joni and Friends helps make this show possible. Joni and Friends envisions a world where every person with a disability finds hope, dignity, and their place in the body of Christ. Become part of the global movement today at www.joniandfriends.org.

Find more encouragement on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube.

It would have been nice if God had let us order life like we order a meal. I’ll take good health and a high IQ. I’ll pass on the music skills, but give me a fast metabolism. Would’ve been nice, but it didn’t happen.

When it came to your life on earth, you weren’t given a voice or a vote. But when it comes to life after death, you were. In my book that seems like a good deal, wouldn’t you agree? Have we been given any greater privilege than that of choice?

You’ve made some bad choices in life, haven’t you? You’ve chosen the wrong friends, maybe the wrong career, even the wrong spouse. You look back and say, “If only. If only I could make up for those bad choices.” Well… you can. One good choice for eternity offsets a thousand bad ones on earth. The choice is yours.

Read more He Chose the Nails: What God Did to Win Your Heart

For more inspirational messages please visit Max Lucado.

In March 2024, a US aerospace corporation failed a safety audit conducted by the Federal Aviation Administration. The audit came on the heels of multiple safety incidents, including a flight that experienced a dangerous drop in cabin pressure when a door-plug panel on the jet tore away. A spokesman for the company acknowledged that the failures were due to instructions for employees being difficult to understand and altered too often, resulting in them not faithfully adhering to approved procedures.

Paul told the church at Corinth that they should view him and other leaders as faithful and approved “servants of Christ” (1 Corinthians 4:1). He also declared that he had been “entrusted” (v.2) with being a steward for God. Stewards in Paul’s day were entrusted with overseeing the management and distribution of household resources. Above everything else, a fundamental requirement for those entrusted with responsibilities was faithfulness. Paul labeled himself as a steward who “[worked] hard with [his] own hands” to live out his responsibilities (v. 12)—carefully using what God had given him, especially the wisdom He’d been given and the mysteries of the gospel (v. 2).

As Jesus provides, let’s strive to be faithful stewards, adhering to His approved and flawless standard in our spiritual practices, work duties, and personal relationships.

Amina had come to Christ in a country where Christianity was illegal. She began to share her new faith with her brother, who rejected her appeals. Then he contracted a dangerous lung condition. Alone in a dark hospital room, he gasped for breath. He wasn’t ready to acknowledge Jesus as God’s Son, and he feared speaking the name of Christ aloud. (Someone might hear him!) So he called out, “God of my sister, please help me now!” Suddenly, he could breathe easily, and the room brightened inexplicably. His journey to belief in Jesus began that day.

In Genesis, Abraham’s servant went on a quest to find a wife for his master’s son. First, he prayed to the “God of my master Abraham” (24:12). Why? The servant knew God had told Abraham, “I will make you into a great nation” (12:2). God repeated that promise (15:2-5), and “Abram believed the Lord, and [God] credited it to him as righteousness” (v. 6). The servant could trust “the God of my master Abraham” (24:26, 42) because he’d witnessed the reality of Abraham’s faith.

With our words, we invite others to follow Jesus. More important, however, is the way we live before them. The reality of genuine faith in the one true God speaks volumes.

May the God of Abraham and of Amina use our lives to draw others to Him.

“I lift mine eyes, but dimm’d with grief / No everlasting hills I see,” wrote the Victorian poet Christina Rosetti in her poignant poem “A Better Resurrection.” Rosetti’s poem describes grasping for hope when she feels none, “numb’d too much for hopes or fears.” Yet Rosetti was anchored in a hope deeper than her feelings of despair. Though she could see “no bud nor greenness” pointing to Christ’s resurrection renewing her life, she confessed: “Yet rise it shall” and prayed, “O Jesus, rise in me.”

In 2 Corinthians, the apostle Paul also described experiencing suffering “far beyond [his] ability to endure, so that [he] despaired of life itself” (1:8). But he found that his despair taught him to find his hope only in “God, who raises the dead” (v. 9).

And he learned that as we carry the hope of the gospel in the still imperfect “jars of clay” of our bodies, Christ’s resurrection life and hope shine through, revealing “that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us” (4:7).

This shift happens in Rosetti’s poem too. As she lifted her broken heart up to God, her prayer became only that the broken pieces of her life would be “cast in the fire” to be molded and transformed into an offering “for Him, my King.” Her poem concludes simply: “O Jesus, drink of me.”

Josh Nadeau, author of Heaven Meets Earth, joins me to explore what it looks like to move beyond intellectual faith into something embodied and transformative. Drawing on the Nicene Creed as a 40-day guide, Josh makes the case that goodness, truth, and beauty are the doorways into a faith that actually forms us - shaping our loves, our attention, and how we see the world around us. We talk about why the Western Church has largely lost its sense of wonder, what the ancient spiritual practices do that head knowledge alone never can, and how the ordinary moments of everyday life are already full of divine invitation - if we have eyes to see them.

Josh Nadeau is a writer and illustrator from Canada's West Coast, working to recover ancient ways of seeing God's Reality in a disenchanted age. He believes Beauty is an apologetic; a call to rediscover the holy ordinary of everyday life by participating in God's transcendent work.

He is husband to Aislinn and father to Ransom and Cassian. He holds an undergraduate degree in physics, a master's in theological studies, and a doctorate from the school of hard knocks.

Josh is the founder of Sword and Pencil and Every Day Saints.

Josh's Book: 

Heaven Meets Earth

Josh's Recommendations:

For the Life of the World

Slaughterhouse-Five

Mother Night

Connect with Joshua: [email protected]

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Thank you for listening! Your support of Joni and Friends helps make this show possible. Joni and Friends envisions a world where every person with a disability finds hope, dignity, and their place in the body of Christ. Become part of the global movement today at www.joniandfriends.org.

Find more encouragement on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube.

God has penned a list of our faults.  The list God has made, however, cannot be read.  The words can’t be deciphered.  The mistakes are covered. The sins are hidden. Those at the top are hidden by His hand; those down the list are covered by His blood. Your sins are blotted out by Jesus.

The Bible says, “He has forgiven you all your sins: He has utterly wiped out the written evidence of broken commandments which always hung over our heads, and has completely annulled it by nailing it to the cross” (JB Phillips NT).

He knew the source of those sins was you, and since He couldn’t bear the thought of eternity without you, Jesus Himself chose the nails. The hand is the hand of God. The nail is the nail of God. And as the hands of Jesus opened for the nails, the doors of heaven opened for you!

Read more He Chose the Nails: What God Did to Win Your Heart

For more inspirational messages please visit Max Lucado.

Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot is best known for enduring classics like “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” and “If You Could Read My Mind.” But one of his lesser-known songs is titled “The Minstrel of the Dawn.” (A minstrel is a troubadour, a singer who puts his poetry to music.) Like us, Lightfoot’s troubadour longs to be “more happy than blue.” Although there are always “blue” things to think about or dwell on, the minstrel chooses to focus on the happy things as the new day dawns and then sing about them.

The minstrel of the psalms, David, penned a similar line: “In the morning I will sing of your love” (Psalm 59:16). David had plenty of “blue” things to dwell on—from enemies ready to attack him to fierce men slandering and conspiring against him. “They return at evening,” he sang, “snarling like dogs, and prowl about the city” (v. 14). But he chose, as the new day dawned, to focus not simply on something happy but on Someone good—God—and then sing of God’s love, “my fortress, my refuge in times of trouble” (v. 16) on “whom I can rely” (v. 17).

You may not be a singer-songwriter, but you can still be a minstrel of the dawn. Like David, you can tell God, “I will sing of your strength, in the morning I will sing of your love” (v. 16).