The best gift we can give someone is passion for the Word of God! Whether it’s our own kids, our friends and families, our coworkers, or someone we’re discipling...

Meghan Gross leads us in a brief reflection on the brevity of life, and asks, "What if we daily lived with the recognition that life is short and death is real?  Because if we really know that we are going to die, we’ll change the way we live."

Today’s episode comes courtesy of Meghan Gross, recorded in 2019 when she was a Church Leadership major at LaGrange College and was completing an Internship in Pastoral Leadership at Christ Community Church in Columbus, Georgia.

Last night, I sat down and wrote my wife a letter, and something quite unexpected happened.  I found that in the act of focused thinking about her, I found myself adoring and desiring her more and more!  These focused moments of concentrating on and listing out all of her amazing qualities, her character, her personality – I was falling in love with her all over again!

Several places in the Bible, we are instructed to “put on Christ.”  Have you ever wondered what that actually means?  How do we “put on Christ” in our lives?

There are multiple different modes of prayer, and they can all be employed regularly in our lives to create a more diverse and complete relationship of communication with God.

Confession time: I do a bunch of unreligious stuff in prayer.  Sometimes I speak to God in real, raw, unfiltered ways that I wouldn’t ever be able to speak to another person.  But all these unfiltered, unreligious things I do – with God.  In prayer.

How do we corral all our scattered thoughts during prayer?   I have five suggestions here that can make the reality of distractions in prayer easier to manage:

Oh God...  what if all I do is raise “good” kids?!  Do I want good kids, or do I want faith-filled kids?  Do I want polite kids, or do I want Spirit-led world-changers?  Do I want well-behaved kids, or kids who know and love Jesus with all their hearts and minds?  I know we don’t have to choose – we can have both – but, Lord, in my parenting, have I focused more on behavior and conduct rather than faith and recognizing the fingerprints of God all throughout my kids’ world?

“I don’t know if God is real,” he said.  He was 9 years old.  Such honesty.  Such genuine, pure, honest thought, verbalized.  No pretense.  No past animosity towards the church, no legalism or any of the other things that people wrongly blame God for.  Just pure, honest doubt.  But for a moment, I panicked on the inside.