Hey Pops, Teach me to be satisfied every morning. I’ve grown too used to putting off satisfaction for another day when some lofty goal is reached. I’ll be satisfied when I’m skinnier. I’ll be satisfied when I have x amount of money in my savings. I’ll be satisfied when my house is clean. There are a million reasons to put off satisfaction and happiness. It never takes long to sink into a rhythm of dissatisfaction with life. Why? Because I’ve grown used to my spiritual and emotional joy being contingent on temporal, and quite frankly, fleeting things.

No one signs up for anything because they want to be persecuted. And yet, one of the first lessons Jesus teaches us in the Bible, is that we will be persecuted for righteousness’ sake. And not only that, but we will be blessed because we are persecuted in Jesus’ name. But that’s not the reason people give their hearts and lives to Jesus. Usually, they want something else: forgiveness of sin, relationship with God, to be saved from eternal suffering, to go to heaven. The list could go on and on. But people don’t tend to give a confession of faith because they know it’s a guarantee for oppression.

This verse is probably one of my top 5 favorite verses, and very often, it’s a prayer in my heart. Lord, help me to be pure in heart so that I might see you better. Many times, when we talk about purity and the Bible, we think sexual purity. Preserving our bodies from sexual sin and saving them for our spouse. But when we’re talking about purity here, we’re talking about moral purity rather than ceremonial or physical purity. Instead of an obedient or honorable heart, we’re more so talking about an undivided heart. A heart so focused and unadulterated that it clarifies our vision.

Imagine: You’re a little kid and you’re tossing a baseball in the house– something you’ve been told many times not to do. The more you toss the ball, the more you get lost in your make-believe game. Suddenly, you’re not in the living room anymore. In your mind, you’re under the lights of a stadium, pitching in the World Series. You wind up for the pitch at the bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, and everyone’s eyes are on you. You throw and– Crash.

If you follow Jesus, you’ve been there. There comes a moment in time where every believer gives their life to Christ. Not only asking for Him to forgive their sins, but also to be Lord over them. To some, those two things may seem interconnected, but sometimes they’re not. Some people casually approach Christ, asking to be found without sin and wanting to be saved, but that doesn’t mean they submit their lives and become meek before Him.

If you haven’t noticed by now, when Jesus teaches the Beatitudes in Matthew 5, He unveils them in such a way that they build upon one another. Blessed are the poor in spirit. That applies to any believer in God, where at the point of salvation, they realize they are so spiritually bankrupt that they could never save themselves. Thus, they are in need of Jesus to save them and pay that debt. Blessed are those who mourn. In other words, blessed are those who see their sin and realize how that sin has grieved God, and grieve over it themselves. They deeply understand just how badly their sin has separated them from the presence of God and find themselves in sorrow over how they’ve wronged God, and yet they find comfort from the Lord in that those sins are forgiven. And blessed are the meek?

Blessed are those who mourn… It might seem sort of contradictory. How can it be possible to mourn and yet be blessed? If we’re mourning, it would mean we lost something, right? And losing something or someone to the point of grief can’t be something Jesus wants for us, let alone something He blesses us with. Yes, when Jesus says blessed are those who mourn, He means real and harrowing heartache. The word He uses in the Greek is “pentheó” which means a deep, personal grief over a death or a hope that dies. It is a grief so severe that it takes possession of the person and cannot be hidden.

At the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, He gives a lesson on a mountainside. There is a great crowd of people around Him, and they are all attentive to what this Messiah has to say. For the Jews, they believed that Jesus was here to free them from Roman occupation and rule, restoring them to political power and peace, and reigning over them victoriously whilst pouring out spiritual and material blessings over His chosen people the Jews. But in Matthew 5, the beginning of what has more popularly become known as the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus sets a very different tone than what the Jewish people assumed of a Messiah for generations. Instead, Jesus lays out more of a foundation to discipleship; what daily life looks like for someone who belongs to the Kingdom of Heaven, and how His followers should ethically live.

Can you stop in the middle of a task and change gears? I know that’s something I struggle with. If my husband calls from the other room, I usually say I need a couple minutes, or ask him to let me finish this one thing first. I don’t do well leaving something undone, or almost done. My tunnel vision makes it hard for me to walk away from loose ends. So when I read the above verses, part of me wonders whether I’d be able to drop my nets and my boat in order to follow someone indefinitely. But when I think on it, this is something that isn’t out of the ordinary when it comes to scripture.

When we’re little kids, temptation looks innocent. Maybe it’s the late afternoon, dinner is in the oven and the table is set, but your mind just can’t get off of that jar of cookies on the counter. You try to resist temptation, thinking of how your mother would tell you no, but then you think to yourself that just one won’t ruin your appetite. Maybe you can just sneak one and no one will ever know. So you reach your hand in and grab it, but then think to yourself that you’ll probably want more– because just one won’t be enough when you could have three– and you swipe two more. Maybe you get away with it. Maybe your mom doesn’t find out.

John the Baptist: a guy who was simple in a lot of ways and yet had a big job. Scripture describes him as a man who “wore a garment of camel’s hair and a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey.” (Matthew 3:4) To us, it might sound a little crazy and alternative between the clothes, the diet, and the wilderness lifestyle, but in a lot of ways, John the Baptist was a real-time example of God’s provision over a man that walked by faith and in his calling. Seriously. This guy lived out in the wilderness– not a desert, but not in a comfortable town either– and lived off of what God gave him. He didn’t worry or strive or beg his followers to provide for him. Scripture doesn’t say that he led a revival, baptized people, and then shook down the crowds of people for a paycheck afterwards. John lived and breathed his ministry: to prepare the way for Jesus’ coming and calling the world to repentance ahead of Christ’s ministry. It wasn’t a side hustle or a mere passion project. It was his whole life.

When the radio crackled out its first broadcast on Christmas Eve in 1906, listeners tuned in to the voice of Reginald Fessenden reading Luke 2– the birth of Christ– before he picked up his violin and played “O Holy Night.” Yes, that’s right. The first song played on the radio, after years of exclusively morse code, was a hymn depicting the birth of Jesus. The song was written in French as a poem originally by Placide Cappeau in 1843 and set to music by Adolphe Charles Adams for a Christmas Eve mass in 1847. Although the church accepted and loved the hymn at first, it was eventually banned after leadership found out that Adolphe was Jewish and Placide walked away from his faith. Eventually, about a decade later, the hymn would fall into the hands of an American minister, John Sullivan Dwight, who would change some of the lyrics to be the ones we know today.

Picture this: The world seems to hold its breath and is eerily still. The wind whips through cold, damp trenches as the minutes tick into the wee hours of the morning. The year is 1914 and you are a soldier in the army holding down the western front against the Germans in World War I. The war began earlier that year at the beginning of the summer, and has been relentless ever since. If you were crazy enough to poke your head out of the trench to look across No Man’s Land, the bodies laying out in the cold would be staggering– a fresh dusting of snow being their only burial shroud. You miss your family, your hometown, and your own warm bed. It almost seems like a lifetime away as you sit at the bottom of this trench, the soil packed hard and unforgiving. You count the days since you’ve been here when it occurs to you; it’s Christmas Eve.

Today, we begin with a laugh: Sam was scrolling through Twitter a few nights ago and started to chuckle. When I asked him what was so funny, he told me that someone asked via tweet, “Who is Harold Angel?” Of course, this person would be confusing Mr. Harold Angel with the opening line of the same Christmas hymn called, “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.” The lyrics were originally written by Charles Wesley as a poem and later put to music by George Whitfield in 1753, when the original first line– Hark, how the welkin (heaven) rings– was revised to what we know and love today. What strikes most historians about this hymn is the lyrics; not only are they theologically sound, but they are beautifully put. In three stanzas, this song presents the Gospel in a meaningful and succinct way, which is probably why it has stood the test of time– almost 300 years to be exact.

If you’ve been with me since the beginning of this little devotional site, you’ll know that every year, for five years, I’ve tackled the Christmas story in the weeks after Thanksgiving leading up to the big day. This year, I pondered how I could make my Christmas devotions different from what I’ve done in the past. So what is something about the Christmas season that can immediately put a person in the seasonal spirit? For me, before we put up the tree or bake the cookies, before we wrap the presents or decorate the house, we all do one thing: turn on Christmas music. To me, Christmas carols can instantly get me into the Christmas spirit, bring all my childhood memories to the forefront of my mind, and help me remember that our Savior, Jesus, came to be with us in the flesh.

Reverence. It’s a big word, and one not to be used lightly. It is a deep respect and awe for something or someone. Lately, I’ve been asking myself: do I have reverence for the Lord in my every day life? I think between social media blurbs, quick and snappy sermon titles, and TikTok devotions, the American church has lost what was once its highest priority: to revere and regard the Lord with deep love and trembling.