Grace grows where faith leans. That is the simple thread running through Habakkuk 2:4 and Romans 1:16-17. The righteous live by faith. Paul says the good news about Jesus is God’s power to rescue anyone who believes, and in that gospel the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith. Bob Hoekstra draws the line clearly. Pride stands on self. Faith leans into the Lord. Grace flows where we stop carrying ourselves and begin trusting Jesus to carry us.

Jesus met fearful disciples on the first day of the week. Doors were locked. Hearts were tense. He came and stood among them with peace, then He said it again, peace. Simpson draws our eyes to that repeated blessing. There is the great settling of being reconciled to God through Jesus. Then there is the steadying quiet of His own peace flowing within us for the work He entrusts to us.

Oswald Chambers reminds us that there are things we simply cannot do. We cannot save ourselves. We cannot sanctify ourselves. We cannot purify what is unclean or make straight what has been bent by sin. That is the finished work of God through Jesus. The question he presses is simple. Do we live from what God has already accomplished, or do we keep trying to manufacture what only grace can give?

Grace sets the table. Today’s reading from Miles Stanford reminds us that the Father has placed us in His Beloved Son, and from that secure place He means for our hearts to finally rest. We are not inching our way into favor. We are carried there by grace and welcomed as family.

When I wrote, “Have you ever loved so hard you began to disappear?” while presenting my YouTube video on Janis Joplin’s Piece of My Heart, I was giving words to a particular kind of ache. Not the holy surrender that blossoms in Christ, but the approval-seeking love that drains the soul. The song captures it perfectly. Take another little piece of my heart now, baby. Give a little more. Maybe then I will be enough.

There’s a raw honesty in Janis Joplin’s voice that few singers have ever matched. When she pleads, “Didn’t I make you feel like you were the only man?” it isn’t a performance—it’s confession. Every line of Piece of My Heart throbs with the pain of someone who has given everything to be loved, only to find herself emptier than before.

Every generation writes its songs of longing. In the early seventies, Dream On echoed through the air like a lament for meaning itself. Beneath its soaring vocals and driving rhythm lies a confession humanity cannot silence: time is moving, and we do not know why.

Some of Jesus’ words land on us with quick excitement, yet fade when life grows hot. Witness Lee points to the rocky places in our hearts, those hidden pockets of self-protection and private agendas that keep the seed from sending roots down. The sun is not the villain. The same heat that matures a rooted life scorches a shallow one. The difference is depth.

We belong to Jesus as His Body, not as isolated strivers trying to make spiritual things work. T. Austin-Sparks reminds us that the members of a body do not invent their own assignments. The Head directs, the life supplies, and the members express. That is how prayer bears fruit and how service carries weight, not by intensity, but by union.

We are all building something. Ray Stedman reminds us that the foundation is already set in Jesus, and the materials we choose flow from the life we are depending on. Some choices echo the Spirit, like gold, silver, and precious stones. Other choices follow the mood of the age, like wood, hay, and stubble. The day of evaluation is not about whether we belong to the Lord. It is about what of our life together with Him will endure when His holy gaze tests it. Thank you, Pastor Stedman, for pointing us back to the joy of a life that truly counts.

Isaiah paints a tender and steady picture of Jesus. The Servant listens to the Father each morning, then speaks timely words that lift the weary. He does not shrink back when shame and cruelty press in. He sets His face like flint and keeps walking. Bob Hoekstra’s reflection stirred this fresh look at how trust in the Father bears real fruit in real pressure.

God’s Word declares that not one of the Lord’s good promises failed for Israel, everything came to pass, Joshua 21:45. A. B. Simpson invites us to look at our own story through that same lens of promise and fulfillment. The destination is not anxious striving but a settled trust in the Faithful One.

We chase big assignments for God, then the Lord offers something simple. Come. Chambers holds up this invitation from Jesus and shows how our pride would rather perform than present ourselves. We would rather argue than arrive. We would rather carry our loads than collapse into His arms.

Suffering does not make us valuable to God, it reveals the life of Jesus that is already ours. Today’s Abide Above selection gathers wise voices who remind us that those most free for service are often those who have passed through deep waters. The point is not to chase hardship or to romanticize pain. The point is to see that our Father wastes nothing. In union with Jesus, hardship becomes a classroom where His life is expressed and His goodness is learned from the inside out.

Some days the heart can feel like a footpath beside a crowded road. There is traffic in the mind, appointments in the will, and swirling thoughts in the emotions. In today’s reading, Witness Lee points to Jesus’ parable of the sower and helps us see why good seed can land yet never enter. The wayside soil is hard from constant traffic. The seed sits on the surface. Birds sweep in and it is gone. Jesus says this is what happens when the word of the kingdom is heard but not truly understood. The heart is too packed for the seed to sink in.

We share one loaf, so we belong to one body. That is how Paul paints our life together in Jesus in 1 Corinthians 10. Today’s reading from T. Austin-Sparks draws us into that simple picture. Prayer is not a form to recite, it is a table where the risen Jesus nourishes His people by the Holy Spirit. We come tired, we rise renewed. Not because we prayed well, but because He gives Himself.

Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 3 draw our eyes away from personalities and methods, and back to Jesus who gives the increase. He reminds us that every believer is a servant, and every role matters. Some plant, some water, yet only God makes anything grow. That truth is freeing. It takes the weight of outcomes off our shoulders and places it where it belongs, on the faithful Lord who works within His people.

Jesus did not live from independent power. He trusted the Father, step by step, and the Father kept Him. Isaiah sings of the Servant formed from the womb, preserved by God in the day of salvation. John lets us overhear the Son saying that He does nothing from Himself, but only what He sees the Father doing. This is not cold doctrine. It is the warm center of how a true human life was lived in perfect reliance on God.

Misunderstanding stings. Unfair words can land like gravel in the heart, and it is tempting to defend, explain, and press our case. Today’s reflection, drawn from A. B. Simpson’s Days of Heaven Upon Earth, points us to Jesus who stood silent under false accusation, Isaiah 53:7, and to David who yielded the moment to God when Shimei cursed him, 2 Samuel 16. These scenes are not about passivity. They are about trusting the Father who sees, weighs, and vindicates in His time.

Chambers brings us back to the core, not a pile of missteps, but the root of sin itself, independence from God. He reminds us that Jesus did not only carry a bag of our individual wrongs. At the cross, the Father made His sinless Son to be sin, so that in Him we become the righteousness of God. That is not cold doctrine. That is the living doorway into union with God through Jesus.