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July 2, 1505. A young law student named Martin Luther is walking back to university through the German countryside when the sky turns black.

A bolt of lightning slams into the ground right next to him. Terrified, certain he is about to die and face a holy God he cannot satisfy, he cries out. Saint Anne, help me! I will become a monk!

He lives. And he keeps the vow.

Luther became a monk, and he was a good one. He fasted until his body gave out. He confessed his sins for hours. He once said that if anyone could have earned heaven by being a monk, it would have been him. But none of it brought him peace.

Then came the night in the tower. Luther was studying Romans, and he came to chapter 1, verse 17.

"The just shall live by faith." Romans 1:17.

The fear that had crushed him for years finally lifted. And the man who had hated God now loved Him with everything he had.

That discovery, one sinner finding grace in one verse, became the hammer that would crack a thousand years of religious darkness wide open.

If you have spent years trying to earn what God is holding out as a gift, hear the verse that set Luther free. The just shall live by faith. Not by your performance. By faith in the One who kept the record for you.

Keep looking up,
Pastor Rodney

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Just before midnight in 1709, the Wesley family's rectory in Epworth caught fire.

Samuel Wesley counted his children in the freezing yard and came up one short. Five-year-old John was still upstairs, trapped above the flames. There was no time for a ladder. One neighbor climbed onto the shoulders of another, reached the window, and pulled the boy out just as the roof caved in.

His mother Susanna gathered her son and refused to call it luck. She named him with a phrase straight from the Bible. A brand plucked from the burning.

"Is this not a brand plucked from the fire?" Zechariah 3:2.

That little boy grew up to ride a quarter of a million miles on horseback, preach more than forty thousand sermons, and help ignite a revival that crossed an ocean. He was John Wesley.

You may have your own brush with the fire. An accident that nearly happened. An illness that turned. Look again. Psalm 138:8 says the Lord will perfect that which concerns me. The God who spared you did not do it by accident. You are still here because He is not finished with you yet.

Keep looking up,
Pastor Rodney

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The greatest preacher of the 1800s wept in the dark, and he never hid it.

On a single night in 1856, a false cry of fire sent a packed London crowd into a deadly stampede while 22-year-old Charles Spurgeon stood helpless on the platform. Seven people died. The memory haunted him for the rest of his life.

The Prince of Preachers, the man who drew six thousand listeners every Sunday, spent his years battling a depression he could not always explain. He refused to fake a holy smile. He spoke openly of dungeons beneath the castle of Despair, and he admitted he had been in them.

So he learned to do what the psalmist did. He talked back to his own heart.

"Why are you cast down, O my soul? Hope in God, for I shall yet praise Him." Psalm 42:11.

He did not wait to feel hope before he spoke it. He spoke it until it came.

If you carry a sadness you cannot explain, hear this. Your heavy feelings are not proof of a failing faith. Nothing was wrong with Spurgeon's faith. Nothing is wrong with yours.

Keep looking up,
Pastor Rodney

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Benjamin Franklin came to the meeting with his mind already made up. He would not put one coin in the collection. Then the preacher began to speak. By the end, even the gold was gone, and the most famous skeptic in America walked home with empty pockets and a head full of wonder.

The preacher was George Whitefield, and in the year 1740 he was turning the American colonies upside down. Only twenty-five years old. English. Barely off the boat. But God had given him a voice like nothing anyone had heard. Franklin paced off the distance one day and figured thirty thousand people could hear that voice at one time.

Whitefield preached in open fields, on courthouse steps, from the back of a wagon, two and three and four times a day until his shirt was soaked through and his voice gave out. From Georgia all the way up to Maine. To rich and poor, free and enslaved, churchgoer and scoffer. And when he came to Jonathan Edwards's church in Northampton, Edwards wept through the whole sermon, and Edwards's wife Sarah noticed the secret. He aims more at affecting the heart, she said.

In this five-minute Take 5 devotional, Pastor Rodney Coe shares the story of George Whitefield (1714-1770), the open-air evangelist of the First Great Awakening, and what one young Englishman's voice can still teach us about Romans 10:17 today.

Scripture: Romans 10:17

📖 Read or listen on the blog: https://rodneycoe.com/george-whitefield-preaching-benjamin-franklin/

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Heaven is closer than you think. Lift up your day.

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A brilliant young Englishwoman sat at her desk one day, packing nearly fifty pieces of jewelry into a box to give away, and called it the happiest packing of her life.

This is the story of Frances Ridley Havergal (1836-1879), who wrote the hymn Take My Life and Let It Be and then proved she meant every word, shipping a fortune in jewelry to the mission field with pure joy.

Born in England in 1836, the youngest child of a country pastor who nicknamed her Little Quicksilver. She was reading at three, mastered Hebrew and Greek, and tucked away the whole New Testament, the Psalms, and Isaiah in her memory. Her health was always frail, so she gave God everything while she still could. She once said she never spent so much as a sixpence without the quiet sense that the money was His.

One sleepless night, too full of joy to sleep, she sat up and wrote the hymn that would outlive her by more than a hundred years. Line by line she handed God everything she had. Her hands and her feet. Her voice and her lips. Her silver and her gold. Her will. Her heart. And then she did the unthinkable. She actually meant it.

In this five-minute Take 5 devotional, Pastor Rodney Coe shares the story of Frances Havergal and what one box of jewelry can teach us about real consecration. God is not after a slice of you. He is after all of you.

Scripture: Romans 12:1

📖 Read or listen on the blog: https://rodneycoe.com/frances-ridley-havergal-take-my-life/

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Heaven is closer than you think. Lift up your day.

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A robbed man picks up his pen, and what he writes will still be preaching three hundred years later.

On a dark road outside Chester, thieves took every coin in Matthew Henry's pockets and disappeared into the woods. He walked home shaken, cold, and empty-handed. Most men would have filled their diary that night with anger.

Matthew Henry filled his with thanks. Thankful he had never been robbed before. Thankful they took his purse and not his life. Thankful that what they took was not much. Thankful he was the one robbed, and not the one robbing.

How does a man write words like that on the worst night of his week? In this five-minute Take 5 devotional, Pastor Rodney Coe shares the story of Matthew Henry (1662-1714), the Welsh-born pastor and biblical commentator whose words still feed pulpits and kitchen tables today, and what one robbed diary page can teach us about giving thanks in everything.

Scripture: 1 Thessalonians 5:18 | Job 1:21

📖 Read or listen on the blog: https://rodneycoe.com/matthew-henry-robbed-and-thankful/

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Heaven is closer than you think. Lift up your day.

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A preacher with a weak voice. A bored New England town. Twenty minutes of monotone reading. And heaven came down anyway.

On a warm Wednesday in July of 1741, Jonathan Edwards stepped into the pulpit at Enfield, Connecticut. He never looked up from his page. He read his sermon, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, in a flat monotone. Twenty minutes later, grown men were gripping the pews to keep from sliding to the floor.

Here is what most people miss. Edwards did not rise to that morning cold. For years he had worn grooves in the floor of his study. He had fasted. He had wept over his people before he ever read them a single line. The fire in that meetinghouse was lit long before, in a quiet room, on a man's knees.

In this five-minute Take 5 devotional, Pastor Rodney Coe walks through the story of Jonathan Edwards and the Enfield revival of July 1741, and what it tells us about the kind of prayer heaven still answers.

Scripture: Psalm 85:6 | Acts 1:14 | Deuteronomy 32:35

📖 Read or listen on the blog: https://rodneycoe.com/jonathan-edwards-sermon-enfield-revival/

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Heaven is closer than you think. Lift up your day.

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