Featured Devotionals

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ODJ: heaven scent

Bugs love it and humans hate it. It’s the pungent odour of the Rafflesia flower, a plant that can weigh more than 15 pounds and measure more than 3 feet across! This botanical beast smells like decaying flesh or rotting meat, an odour that carrion beetles and flies adore. Although this bloom attracts insects, it repels people. Its stench is so foul that people have nicknamed it the “corpse flo

ODJ: the good life

On the occasion of billionaire Ted Turner’s 75th birthday last year, a news channel’s profile opened with these poignant words: “What will matter most about Ted Turner’s life story when they roll the final credits? That he started the first 24 hour news network? Built a fortune once worth $10 billion? Was Time magazine’s Man of the Year? Received a star on Hollywood’s Walk of

ODJ: ministry without borders

I’ve been serving an inner-city church in an African- American neighbourhood of a large American city. It’s not common for Korean pastors to serve in this type of cross-cultural context, and so I’ve been asked more than once what brought me to the church. My answer? “God!” I never planned on serving here, but it has become clear that it was indeed God who called me.
I think Philip t

ODJ: life and love

Life can be difficult. At times, burdens, disappointments and uncertainties can seem too difficult to bear. Poet Annie Johnson Flint poignantly captured the struggles of life in her poem “One Day at a Time”:
One day at a time with its failures and fears,
With its hurts and mistakes, with it weakness and tears,
With its portion of pain and its burden of

ODJ: bad religion

In his landmark books Soul Searching and Souls in Transition, sociologist Christian Smith surveyed American young adults and found that most held to what he called “Therapeutic Moralistic Deism”. They’re deists because they believe God doesn’t interfere in our lives unless we need His help to solve a problem. They’re moralistic because they believe God wants us to be good and ki

ODJ: apathetic

In December 2011 an article was published that analysed a group of Americans called the “spiritually apathetic”. Their attitude could be summed up as: “So what?” The article presented the following sad statistics:
• 44 percent spent no time seeking “eternal wisdom”.
• 19 percent said, “It’s useless to search for meaning”.
• 28 percent said, “It’s not a

ODJ: run

I was 7 years old when I was first exposed to pornography. Some kids had found it, and I naively agreed when they offered to show it to me. In today’s digital world, the stakes are much higher. More than a frozen picture in time, the power of video erodes what little innocence remains in our world.
Over the years I’ve heard about porn in various forms—phone porn addictions, texted photo

ODJ: heart condition

Every morning I take an aspirin. Heart disease runs in my family, and my doctor says it’s good for the health of my ticker.
The particular brand of aspirin I take has the shape of a heart embedded on one side of each little yellow pill. At first I thought it was just cute. But now, nearly every time I see it, I’m reminded that taking this simple medicine is helping my heart.
Just as

ODJ: dog whisperer

My young nieces recently introduced me to a favourite TV show of theirs: The Dog Whisperer. In the series, an animal behaviourist named Cesar Millan gives advice to pet owners who have unruly dogs. We soon became hooked on the show.
It didn’t take too many episodes to recognise, however, that whatever the problem—a dog endlessly chasing its tail, barking all day or getting aggres