Studies, reading plans and every single day within them, alongside devotionals and articles. Search by title, book of the Bible, passage or topic.
Bible Memory collection
…were buried with him through baptism into death so that, as Christ was raised, we too may live a new life. 1 Peter 1:3 God has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
Bible Memory verse
God has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. It names Christian hope as living, because the one it rests on is alive. Hope that depends on circumstances dies with them. Titus 1:2 1 Corinthians 15:19 Romans 5:5 Praise you, Father of mercies.…
Bible Memory collection
The gospel is news before it is advice. These passages give you the message in its apostolic shape, so you can tell it without drifting into moral improvement. 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 Paul hands on what he received as of first importance: Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, was…
Bible Memory verse
…us, not because of righteous works we had done, but because of his mercy, through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, poured out richly through Jesus Christ, so that justified by grace we would become heirs with the hope of eternal life. The whole gospel movement sits in one…
Chapter study
…and turns it into the deepest statement of union with Christ in the New Testament. This chapter also arrives at the hardest hour of Jesus's earthly life. He knows what the next twenty four hours hold. He knows one of…
Reading plan
…'whom Jesus loved'. Reading it, you can feel that this is not a fresh news report. It is an eyewitness who has had decades to sit with what he saw and has come to understand why it happened. That is why John so often…
Reading plan day
…John 3:16 Thank God for a beginning you did not manufacture. New birth
Chapter study
…of the most important passages in the Bible, and without it much of the New Testament loses its depth. Some chapters can be read quickly without much loss. This is not one of them. Genesis 22 is written slowly, with…
Chapter study
…Leviticus 2 later commands and accepts grain offerings, and the two New Testament passages that comment both speak about the men. The quality argument is a reasonable inference from the extra detail given to Abel's…
Chapter study
…the Messiah? He was writing as a shepherd about his own God, and the New Testament then shows Jesus taking the shepherd role for Himself in John 10:11. Psalm 23 is not a coded prophecy. It is a true description of the…
Reading plan
…grown up around that promise. It arrives through an imperial census, a birth with no room for it, shepherds as the first to hear, and foreigners kneeling before a child. God kept his word exactly, and almost nobody…
Reading plan day
The announcement of Jesus' birth is given first to shepherds, people with little status or reputation in their society, which fits a pattern all through Scripture of good news reaching the overlooked before it reaches…
Reading plan day
…Herod, the powerful ruler close by, is troubled and threatened by the news. Even from birth, Jesus divides people by how they respond to him. Matthew 2:11 Give a gift in worship, not in exchange. Worship
Devotional
Isaiah 43:19 Behold, I will do a new thing. It springs out now. Don’t you know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert. WEB Isaiah 43:19 is spoken in the context of God promising…
Chapter study
Philippians 4 is one of the most quoted chapters in the New Testament, and also one of the most misquoted. 'I can do all things through Christ' has been printed on posters for athletic victories and business success,…
Chapter study
…the text. The psalm describes a way of life and commends it, and the New Testament shows one man who walked it without exception. What the psalm itself does not do is say which of the two it intends, so the study…
Chapter study
…in the first. Then read the five verbs of verse 29 and 30 slowly. Foreknew, predestinated, called, justified, glorified. Notice which tense the last one is in. How does verse 29 define the good that verse 28 promises?…
Devotional
…that we are not consumed, because his compassion doesn’t fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. Jeremiah writes these lines with the smoke of Jerusalem still in his clothes. The temple is gone.…
52 Week Journey
…where nothing was, and it ends with Him saying that He makes all things new. Everything between those two sentences is the story of a God who starts things His people could not start. So week one is not about turning…
52 Week Journey
…not escape from a physical world into a purely spiritual one. It is a new heaven and a new earth, a city coming down, a resurrection body, a wedding supper. The Bible ends where it began, in a garden, except this time…
Dig Deeper
…be hungry, both to abound and to be in need. The clearest guard in the New Testament against reading the psalm as a promise of constant plenty. Paul was hungry sometimes, and never once treated it as evidence that God…
Dig Deeper
…and those called according to His purpose. Romans 8:29 For whom he foreknew, he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. The next verse defines the…
Dig Deeper
…there existed, Acts 16:22 to 24. The believers reading this letter knew what real trouble looked like, and they had watched Paul sing in a prison in their own city. Paul writes from confinement, describing his bonds in…
Biblical concept
…that no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again. Birth is something done to a person, which is the force of the image: nobody arranges their own birth. John 3:8 compares it to wind. You see the effect and…
Biblical concept
…never be destroyed. When Jesus began to preach, he did not introduce a new idea. He announced that something long promised had arrived. The Old Testament already knew that God reigns, that his throne is fixed in the…
Topic study
…have I hope. Hope here is an act of memory: the mercies that are new every morning are remembered before they are felt. The Gospels: hope with a face Luke 2:25 Simeon waits in the temple for the consolation of Israel…
Biblical concept
…It begins with God delivering Israel from Egypt and runs through to the New Testament's use of the same word for deliverance from sin, judgement and death. Ephesians 2:8 to 9 states the terms plainly: by grace you have…
Biblical concept
…in legal settings. history These sources are written down after the New Testament period, so they show a settled attitude rather than proving the exact status of shepherds in the first century. Rabbinic legal traditions…
Biblical concept
…promise in Scripture of a human deliverer, born of a woman, and the New Testament writers read the incarnation as its fulfilment. Isaiah 9:6 Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and his name shall be called…
Biblical concept
2 Corinthians 5:17 says that if anyone is in Christ there is a new creation, and that old things have passed away. The change is described as God's work, not self improvement. Revelation 21 extends the same word to the…
Biblical concept
…a sign or an oath, and each is initiated by God. Jeremiah 31 promises a new covenant with the law written on the heart and sins remembered no more. Luke 22:20 has Jesus name the cup as the new covenant in his blood.…
Topic study
…in the prayer meeting and noise everywhere else. And this is why any renewal of your own soul will begin, not with new techniques, but with a return to speaking honestly with the Father who has been waiting to be spoken…
Biblical concept
…because it is darkness and not light for those unprepared. In the New Testament the same phrase points to the return of Christ. 2 Peter 3:10 says it comes as a thief, and 1 Thessalonians 5:2 says the same, so…
Word and phrase
…believers already possessing it before death. Heaven, and finally the new creation, is where that life is enjoyed without interruption, but the life itself begins at faith. John 5:24 1 John 5:13 Eternal life is only…
Word and phrase
…and James. Habakkuk 2:4 The just shall live by his faith, a verse the New Testament quotes three separate times to explain the gospel. Hebrews 11:1 The clearest biblical definition of faith, as confidence in what is…
Word and phrase
…spoken directly after Israel's worst failure so far, which is why the New Testament writers keep returning to this verse whenever they want to explain God's character toward sinners. In the New Testament, grace becomes…
Biblical concept
…Romans 5:1 draws out the result of justification as peace with God, a new standing, not merely a cancelled record. Justification declares a person righteous, which includes forgiveness but goes further to a positive…
Bible question
…Jesus answered him, “Most certainly, I tell you, unless one is born anew, he can’t see God’s Kingdom.” WEB Jesus explains this himself, so read his words before ours. John 3:3-8 Jesus answered him, “Most certainly, I…
Bible question
…ours. 1 Corinthians 15:1-5 Now I declare to you, brothers, the Good News which I preached to you, which also you received, in which you also stand, by which also you are saved, if you hold firmly the word which I…
Bible question
…for all God's people in Joel 2:28-29. Jesus is not introducing someone new; he is promising a nearer and permanent presence. Counselor translates the Greek paraklētos, which is used of one called alongside to help, and…
Bible question
…food and clothing, we will be content with that. The argument is from birth and death, the two moments no one manages. Food and clothing set a strikingly low bar for contentment, and Paul does not present it as a rule…
Bible question
…and to be at home with the Lord. This is the plainest statement in the New Testament of what happens to the believer at death: absence from the body means presence with the Lord, not unconscious sleep, not annihilation,…
Bible question
…undone. Many people count only actions and never weigh the good they knew to do and avoided. Scripture teaches what sin is largely by showing it happening. Eve and Adam in the garden Genesis 3:1-6 The serpent questioned…
Bible question
…faint, but though our outward man is decaying, yet our inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is for the moment, works for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory; while we…
Bible question
…which means he keeps talking to God about God's apparent absence. No new circumstance is recorded in the psalm. What changes is David, who ends by trusting in God's loving kindness and singing because God has dealt…
Bible question
…the sin that troubles them but its repetition, or the fact that they knew better and did it anyway. Others ask the question because of Mark 3:28-30 and Matthew 12:31-32, where Jesus names a sin that will not be…
Bible question
…powers of the age to come, and then fell away, it is impossible to renew them again to repentance; seeing they crucify the Son of God for themselves again, and put him to open shame. For the land which has drunk the…
Bible question
…Asking whether it can be trusted is the same instinct we apply to news and to history, and Scripture does not ask to be exempted from it. Many people were handed the Bible with an implied threat, that doubting it means…
Bible question
…brother becoming a leader in the movement is part of the evidence the New Testament itself points to. The risen Christ goes to the ones with the most reason to doubt: a denier, a doubter, a brother, and a persecutor. It…
Bible question
…with no food, to a widow with one meal left, and to an apostle who knew both plenty and hunger. The widow at Zarephath 1 Kings 17:14-16 She had a handful of meal and a little oil, and was preparing a last meal for…
Bible question
…stays connected rather than by a branch that strains. 1 Peter 2:2 as newborn babies, long for the pure milk of the Word, that with it you may grow, WEB Long for the word like a newborn longs for milk. Scripture is…
Bible question
…Leviticus 19:18 The command not to avenge or bear a grudge predates the New Testament and roots forgiveness in the law itself. 1 Samuel 24:12 David refuses to harm Saul, leaving judgement between them to the LORD.…
Bible question
…him, and call on him. He roots this in Deuteronomy and Joel, not in a new invention of his own. Acts 16:30-31 and brought them out and said, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” They said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus…
Bible question
…service. Don’t be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what is the good, well-pleasing, and perfect will of God. WEB A renewed mind proves what God's will is.…
Bible question
…directly about this, because the earliest churches faced it too. The New Testament gives specific, checkable marks rather than a vague feeling to go on. The apostle Peter, likely near the end of his life, writing what…
Bible question
…sin; and the sin, when it is full grown, produces death. Conception, birth, growth. Because there are stages, there are earlier points to act, and the earliest is the quietest. Matthew 26:41 Watch and pray, that you…
Bible question
…wrote a psalm asking not only for pardon but for a clean heart and a renewed spirit. The psalm asks God to create and renew, verse 10, which is language for what only God does. He asked for the inside to be changed…
Bible question
…He had to recover, understand and teach a book his generation barely knew. The hand of God was on him, and his reading led to a national return to the covenant (Nehemiah 8). Ezra's order is the model: seek the law, do…
Bible question
…ground. Scripture describes God binding himself, precisely because he knew we would need something to hold in the dark. Trust often looks like obedience before it looks like peace Genesis 22:3 Abraham rose up early in…
Bible question
…rather than curious. That background is the strongest evidence that the New Testament writers were not casually promoting a second god. They were Jews who kept saying there is one God, 1 Corinthians 8:4-6, while also…
The Sunday Study
Verse-by-verse teaching with historical context, and a prayer to close. Nothing else in the email.