How often do you lie awake at night thinking about someone who has wronged you? How often do you know you need forgiveness from another person, but you’re scared to ask for it? How often do you wonder if God can forgive what you’ve done? Giving and asking for forgiveness can be some of the most difficult things we ever do, but if we are going to thrive in our personal relationships—especially in marriage—we have to learn how to do both. What is a two-way street in marriage, however, is a one-way street when it comes to our relationship with God. God, who never sins and is perfect in every conceivable way, never needs our forgiveness; but we need his forgiveness for our rebellion against him.

Many of the Psalms speak to this very need. Take Psalm 85 for example. This Psalm begins with a reflection on God’s forgiveness and restoration of his people. “LORD, you were favorable to your land; you restored the fortunes of Jacob. You forgave the iniquity of your people; you covered all their sin. You withdrew all your wrath; you turned from your anger” (Ps. 85:1–3). Based on instances of God’s forgiveness in the past, the psalmist then pleads for that same forgiveness and restoration in his day: “Restore us again, O God of our salvation… Show us your steadfast love, O LORD, and grant us your salvation” (4, 7). You and I are in the same position as the psalmist. We look back through the pages of Scripture and we see God’s mercy and patience with his wayward people. And we, like this psalmist, ask God to pour out the same forgiveness and restoration in our days and in our lives. But sometimes we still have a nagging question in the back of our minds, “Can God really forgive me?”

But Psalm 85 doesn’t leave us wondering about how God will respond to our pleas for forgiveness. “Let me hear what God the LORD will speak, for he will speak peace to his people, his saints… Surely his salvation is near to those who fear him…” (8–9). Looking back on Psalm 85 from this side of the cross, we now know why God’s people can have this confidence in his forgiveness. Jesus died on the cross and endured the punishment that you and I deserved. He paid the debt that we owed! He washes us clean from our sins and forgives us over and over again! The cross shows us the depths of God’s love and the heights of his mercy. We can be confident in God’s forgiveness, not because we deserve it (we don’t and we never will!) but because in the act of giving his Son as the sacrifice for our sins, he showed just how great his love is for us. So if you ever wonder, “Can God forgive me?” just remember that he has already given his Son to die for you. And chances are, someone you know needs to hear that God can forgive them of their sins and free them from the guilt they live in. So this week, tell them about our forgiving and gracious God.

In the colder months of the winter, we all appreciate a good fire. I love sitting by a fire on a cold night and feeling its warmth; there’s just something so peaceful about it. In the cold temperatures, we long for the warmth of a fire. If you sit by a fire long enough, your body absorbs its warmth. Eventually you get warmed up and you can leave the fire for a little bit and still feel warm from the time you spent in front of the fire. Then eventually you feel the cold coming in again and you feel the need to go back to the source of the warmth once more. But just looking at the light of the fire does not warm your body. In order to get warm you have to be in close proximity for a sustained period of time. If someone just walked by the fire without even stopping and thought that would be enough to keep him warm, we’d call him crazy. 

But all too often, that is what we try to do with God. Sometimes we act as if we can just walk by God briefly on a Sunday morning and stay warm all week from that one brief encounter. We live busy lives, crammed to the max, but we squeeze in a little ‘God-time’ once a week and wrongly expect that we can run off of that for the other 167 hours in the week. Brothers and sisters, the reality is that we must stay near God. You know that life is hard. All week you’ll be facing difficulties and decisions and temptations and just walking by the fire once per week is not enough. We need more time daily in God’s presence in order to keep the spark of faith alive inside of us. Hear the words of Asaph:

So this week, I just want to exhort you to stay near God. Spend time in his presence each and every day by reading his word and by praying. Get close to his throne every single day and let your soul be warmed so that you live each day with his strength, not yours. In the presence of the Lord there is peace, there is hope, there is true life. Each day the world tries to throw water on the fires of your devotion. So each day, draw close to God and refuse to let anything else pull you away from him. He is honored—and we are safe—when we are with him.

Have you ever eaten honeycomb? A friend of mine brought some to school once and shared it with our class. It’s considered a delicacy in many cultures, and although some prefer not to eat the beeswax, it is edible too, along with the honey. The honeycomb has a very unique texture and of course it’s dripping with the sweet flavor of honey. In Psalm 19, David compared the joys of knowing God’s words to the drippings of the honeycomb. He said, “The rules of the LORD are true, and righteous altogether. More to be desired are they than gold, even much fine gold; sweeter also than honey and drippings of the honeycomb” (Psalm 19:9b-11).

David was a man who loved God’s word. He not only read it and contemplated it but he also loved applying God’s word to the way he lived. To follow in David’s footsteps, we first need to spend time in God’s word. That is what our 2025 Bible reading plan is designed to do—give us some external accountability and guidance to help us have consistent time in God’s word each day. And if you’ve been following our Bible Reading plan that we began in January, congratulations! This week we will reach a milestone. We will finish Revelation, the last book of the New Testament. (Because there are more days in the year than chapters in the New Testament, we will spend the last few months of the year rereading select New Testament books while we finish reading the entire Old Testament in one year’s time.)

But if we want to follow in David’s example and delight in God’s word, then we need to go beyond just reading it. When we read God’s word prayerfully and meditate on it throughout the day, sharing it with others and trying to apply it to our own lives, then God opens up our hearts to delight in his law. “I long for your salvation, O LORD, and your law is my delight” (Ps. 119:174). Ask God to open your heart to his word, not only to receive it, but to love it and to live it. By the power of his Spirit inside us, God writes his law on our hearts. Through the strength and comfort of the Spirit, we can learn to follow God with a full heart and with joyful obedience. This is the essence of relationship with God. And it all starts with reading and delighting in God’s word. God has given you his word. He invites you to open it, read it, delight in it, and ultimately to delight in God himself.

Who Will Follow Jesus?

There are many people who are fans of Jesus, but who will actually follow him? Jesus does not call on us to merely agree with his teachings: he calls us to live out his teachings in our lives. For those of us who were born into and raised in Christian circles, there is a grave danger that we content ourselves with merely hearing and agreeing with Jesus’ teachings without doing them. Do you remember the words of Jesus at the end of the Sermon on the Mount? He said, “Everyone who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it” (Matthew 7:24-27). Fans hear his words and will even praise the wisdom and brilliance of his teaching, but disciples–true followers–hear and do his teachings. The call of Christ is a call to action. It is a call to leave the world behind and follow our Lord in life, through death, and to life beyond. So, who will follow Jesus? Will you? The words of one hymn ask it this way: 

(“Who Will Follow Jesus?” Words by E.E. Hewitt, Music by William J. Kirkpatrick)

We do not live in a silent universe. By God’s grace, our world is filled with music and laughter and speech. We take these things for granted, but they are some of God’s greatest gifts to us. And yet, while music and laughter and speech are wonderful, they are not the most important reason I say that we do not live in a silent universe. Far more important is the fact that God himself has spoken to us.

Throughout the Old Testament, we see that God is a God who speaks. He creates the world simply by speaking it into existence. “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light” (Gen. 1:3). After creating Adam and Eve, he spoke to them before they spoke to him: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply…’” (Gen. 1:27-28). Language itself and our ability to speak is a gift from God and a reflection of that fact that God is a communicative God. He created mankind in order to give of himself to us, to communicate himself to someone outside himself. By his very nature, God is a giving God, a communicating God. He delights in revealing himself to us so that we can know him.

Throughout the Old Testament, God at times communicated directly with his creatures, although he usually communicated with his people through prophets, men specially commissioned by God to speak on his behalf without in any way lessening the authority or truthfulness of the message and without overriding the creativity and personality of the messenger. And the culmination of that recurring theme of God speaking is seen in the arrival of the Son of God himself, who is God and comes and speaks the very words the Father gave him to speak. “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son…” (Heb. 1:1-2). The God who spoke the universe into existence, who spoke to Abram in the land of Chaldea, and who spoke to Moses on Mt. Sinai has spoken to us through his Son. It is God’s greatest self-revelation. The revelation through Jesus explains and clarifies all previous revelation, and is the subject matter of all successive revelation through the apostles and New Testament prophets. 

Because we do not live in a silent universe, but one in which God has spoken, you and I are confronted with one very important decision: will we listen to God or will we refuse to hear his voice? There is no neutral option. We either welcome his voice, or spurn it. The universe is not silent. God has spoken. Will you listen to him?