Featured Devotionals

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ODJ: roots

My friend noticed that his maple tree was shedding leaves prematurely. The tree doctor told him his tree was suffering from a girdling root. It had taken 30 years, but the offending root had encircled the tree and was now slowly choking it. If my friend didn’t dig down and hack the root off, the tree would die.
The Pharisees had allowed the root of pride and jealousy to smother their love f

ODJ: hope

Today was a day of gladness; tonight has been difficult. A seemingly small event had unleashed a torrent of emotion in me. The day before, my husband and I had received difficult news. Being stirred with faith, during the daylight hours I had grabbed on to the inexplicable determination and joy God placed in my heart—even in that difficult place. As the day turned into evening, though,

ODJ: a choice

One evening my family and I were watching an episode of a TV show called Brain Games. It had a segment in which they tested the ability of people to make choices. One group went to an ice cream parlour that featured 50 to 60 different flavours of the delicious dessert. The other group went to a shop that had only three flavours. The group who had to choose from many flavours experienced m

ODJ: first half, second half

Ready for a Bible quiz? Which king attained national influence at age 16; was a genius in military deployment and national security; invented new military weapons; had true vision for commercial and business development; and possessed the Midas touch in husbandry and agriculture?
Who was he? King Uzziah—whose name means “The Lord my strength”. The chronicler tells us the secret of the k

ODJ: crashing down

We got really good,” Raleigh Becket bragged. He and his brother piloted a “Jaeger”, a huge battle robot that fought massive, dinosaur-like creatures named Kaiju as depicted in the movie Pacific Rim. In their arrogance, the brothers defied orders and went on a reckless mission battling a huge Kaiju alone. The massive beast destroyed their Jaeger, causing it to come crashing down in d

ODJ: God of the living

The Sadducees were more interested in politics than religion—accepting only the Pentateuch (the five books of Moses) as their Scripture. Being materialists in their thinking, they didn’t believe in angels, nor in the resurrection (Luke 20:27; Acts 23:8).
The Sadducees gave Jesus a hypothetical situation (Luke 20:28-32) involving levirate marriage—where the surviving brother of

ODJ: not bored

The picture in my news magazine showed a Moscow circus bear that was shuffling across a tightrope in preparation for its next performance. More interesting was the woman sitting in the background, slumped over, with her head resting on one hand, as if she had seen this act before. She couldn’t have looked more bored.
She reminded me of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Nature”, in

ODJ: clinging to hope

During the summer of 2011 Dave Mull spent nearly 4 hours adrift and alone in the rolling waves of Lake Michigan, America, clinging only to the handles of a cool box. The boat Dave had been fishing in had suddenly capsized and sank 5 miles offshore, forcing him and his three companions into the deep, troubled waters. Before Dave became separated from the others, he selflessly surrendered his life j

ODJ: a friend

When my younger sister was 4 years old, a global dictator (who we’ll call Frank) was constantly in the nightly news and the contents of his angry speeches splattered across newspaper headlines. He was violent—spewing hatred and fear. My sister obviously had little political understanding, but she picked up on our national anxiety and understood that most people believed this dictator to be a d