The holiday season is a good time to get grateful. Gratitude is powerful and has a significant impact on our health, mood, relationships, and ability to handle hard times — if we let it. Gratitude is also an important part of having a close relationship with God. 

No matter what is going on in our lives, gratitude can help us see God moving, and hold onto the hope that we are cared for. 

Check out our newest Spiritual Playlist to learn how to always be thankful.

We need to come to know God through personal experience. If we don’t make the effort to make our relationship with God personal, we end up becoming “zombie Christians”—people who go through the motions without much heart. As “zombie Christians,” we lack the spiritual power that enables us to faithfully conquer the everyday challenges we face. 

Check out our newest Mini Quiet Time to learn more about how to make your relationship with God personal.

Listen to these powerful verses of the Bible that show us God’s intimate understanding of our hearts.

Scriptures read:

* Psalm 139:1-2 The Passion Translation

* Isaiah 40:27-28 New Living Translation

* Hebrews 4:15-16  - Contemporary English Version

* Romans 8:27 - Contemporary English Version

* Psalm 147:5 - Amplified Bible

* Proverbs 2:6 - Amplified Bible

* Proverbs 9:10 - Contemporary English Version

* Proverbs 14:10 - The Passion Translation

* Job 36:5 - Christian Standard Bible

* Jeremiah 51:15 - The Voice

* 1 Chronicles 28:9 - New English Translation

* Genesis 16:13 - Amplified Bible

* Exodus 2:25 - Amplified Bible

* Psalm 10:17 - The Passion Translation

* Psalm 38:9 - New English Translation

* Isaiah 11:2 - Contemporary English Version

* Isaiah 29:15 - Easy-to-Read Version

* Isaiah 50:4 - New Living Translation

* Isaiah 50:5 - Good News Translation

* Jeremiah 3:15 - Amplified Bible

* Jeremiah 12:3 - Amplified Bible

* Jeremiah 9:24 - Amplified Bible

There are a lot of scriptures about worry and anxiety, but it’s important to understand before diving in that the Bible is not a self-help book. Though it’s good to find scriptures that calm our minds, we are meant to embrace the transformative change of our will, character, and desires that comes from walking with God.

God changes lives, he doesn’t merely improve them.

In today’s Mini Quiet Time, we’ll give you 3 practical tips from the Bible for how you can start trusting God when you feel worried.

In today's episode, we’re going to talk about one of the most necessary yet difficult parts of our spiritual lives: facing and defeating doubt. Doubt leads us to question ourselves, to question why we’re here, and to question whether we’re really loved.

Check out this week's Mini Quiet Time to learn from Jesus how to defeat your own doubts, and come out the other side powerful and confident like he did.

It's hard to feel alone. The Bible tells us that what we all want most is to feel unconditionally loved for who we are, and God wants to give us that love. But this can feel easier said than done — how do we stay open about who we are when it leaves us vulnerable to being hurt, rejected, or misunderstood?

In this week's Mini Quiet Time, we'll look at a story where Jesus had to choose to be vulnerable and what came as a result of his decision.

In the Bible, David was a guy in the Bible who had a real “best friend” relationship with God. So how do we build this kind of friendship with God? David wrote many of the psalms in the Bible. They were often his prayers, and we can learn from them how to build a close friendship with God ourselves.

In today's Mini Quiet Time we'll look at Psalm 13, one of the psalms where David talked to God about some tough things but comes out closer to God as friends.

The book of Psalms is full of the prayers of people trying to take difficult emotions to God. Check out our new Mini Quiet Time, where in Psalm 32, David comes to God to help him deal with the clutter of his heart.

Sometimes people make it hard for us to love them, and it’s very easy to respond in ways that don’t help us or them. The best way to let God teach us to love is to look at how Jesus loved. In today's Mini QT, we're looking at a story of Jesus choosing to love someone a lot of other people had written off: a notorious sinner named Zacchaeus. Though Zacchaeus came with baggage, Jesus’ decision to love anyway completely changed Zacchaeus’ life for the better.

Do you ever feel like you can’t live up to the epic stories of the faithful people in the Bible? 

If you actually read the stories of these people, though, you’ll see God didn’t choose them because they were so strong and capable, but because he was. Through little decisions to have faith and trust God’s process, each of these regular people became the great heroes we see in the Bible. 

Check out this week's Mini Quiet Time to learn from one such a person, Gideon, how to accomplish the impossible with faith in God.