My Devotionals

Joseph’s master took him and put him in prison, the place where the king’s prisoners were confined. But while Joseph was there in the prison, the Lord was with him (Genesis 39:20-21a)

Joseph, the treasured son of Jacob, was sold into slavery by his brothers and eventually wound up in Egypt working for Potiphar, an Egyptian official. And right from the start, Joseph proves to be exceptionally good at his job. Genesis 39:2-3 tells us that “The Lord was with Joseph so that he prospered...the Lord gave him success in everything he did.” 

Seeing this, “Potiphar put [Joseph] in charge of his household, and he entrusted to his care everything he owned” (Genesis 39:4). But after refusing to go to bed with Potiphar’s wife, Joseph is wrongly accused of sexual harassment and thrown in prison. 

In sum, Joseph goes from a state of helplessness as a slave, to a position of power in the palace, back to a place of great weakness as a prisoner. And...

Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him all the more…His brothers said to him, “Do you intend to reign over us? Will you actually rule us?” And they hated him all the more because of his dream and what he had said. (Genesis 37:5, 8)

God has given you a dream for your work. 

Maybe it’s doubling your business so that you can provide more jobs that lead to human flourishing. Maybe it’s writing a book to help others learn from your mistakes. Maybe God has given you a dream for an entirely different career than the one you hold today. 

If you have breath in your lungs, I’m confident that God has given you a dream for your work. 

But I’m also confident that there are many moments when you feel a disconnect between your dream and your present reality—a gap between what God has placed in your heart and what he has placed in your hands. 

Joseph understood the pain of staring into that gap...

For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good….for the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing. (Romans 13:4,6)

Let’s face it: The brand of Christianity isn’t so hot right now. By and large, non-Christians perceive us to be judgmental and unloving, increasingly retreating into subcultural enclaves to sit on Facebook to rage about “the culture” rather than engage it.

Here’s something you can do today to help solve this problem: Celebrate the good in a non-Christian’s work. More than that, tell them that you see God working through them to do good in the world.

That’s what we’ve seen throughout this series on common grace! God gives good gifts of provision and vocational skill to “the righteous and the unrighteous” (see Matthew 5:45). And he works in this world through believers and non-believers alike as we see in Romans 13:1-6.

And so, while we will not agree with...

The Lord is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made. (Psalm 145:9)

I was talking with a friend recently who explained how he felt called by God to quit podcasting because of how much anxiety it was causing him.

Every one of this guy’s friends was telling him that he needed the podcast to grow his business. But he shut down the show anyway. And then, his business exploded.

Reflecting on this series of events, my friend said, “It just goes to show that God rewards doing business his way.”

“Ummmmm, not so fast,” I said.

I went on to lovingly explain to my friend that it may be true that God’s blessing was tied to what he perceived to be an act of faithfulness. But not necessarily. While there are certainly eternal rewards tied to working “as unto the Lord” (see Colossians 3:23-24), temporal rewards are not always connected to our righteousness. To quote my college statistics professor, “Correlation does not imply...

When a farmer plows for planting, does he plow continually? Does he keep on breaking up and working the soil?...His God instructs him and teaches him the right way. (Isaiah 28:24,26)

I was recently asked to speak to a group of pastors about Redeeming Your Time, my book that examines God’s Word and bestselling time management books for wisdom about how we can be maximally productive for God’s glory.

Before I took the stage, a pastor spoke and passionately called the audience to ignore “secular” business books. The essence of the man’s message was that, “The only book you need is the Good Book.”

When it was my turn to speak, I knew I couldn’t bite my tongue. So I addressed the pastor’s comments head on and said, “We might not ‘need’ these ‘secular’ business books per se. But God in his common grace has given great wisdom to Christians and non-Christians alike and we would be foolish not to learn from...

Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you. (Luke 6:27)

Last week, we began exploring how our work should be uncommonly shaped by the reality of common grace: the goodness God shows to “the righteous and the unrighteous,” his friends and his enemies (see Matthew 5:45).

Today, we’ll see that common grace should lead us to be good to our enemies.

Interestingly, that’s the context of Matthew 5:45. Jesus said, “I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you…because [God] makes his sun rise on both evil and good people, and he lets rain fall on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:44-45).

You see it right? Jesus is saying that we should do good to our enemies because of God’s common grace! God is so good that he longs to do good to “the righteous and the unrighteous.” And he’s calling you and me to be the conduits for his blessings.

Now, you may not have anyone at work you’d...

[God] causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. (Matthew 5:45)

When the Apostle Paul said in Ephesians 2:8 that “it is by grace you have been saved,” he was referring to God’s saving grace: the grace that, through Christ, saves human beings from their sins.

Separate from saving grace is the doctrine of God’s common grace: the goodness God shows people regardless of their relationship with or faith in him.

That’s what Jesus was referring to in today’s passage when he said that God “causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good” (Matthew 5:45). Christ was saying that, while God is the source of “every good and perfect gift” (James 1:17), God chooses to give those gifts to “the righteous” and “to ungrateful and evil people” (Luke 6:35).

So, while only Christians are recipients of God’s saving grace, every human being is a constant ...

As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. (John 15:9-11)

In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry stumbles upon an enchanted mirror. Unlike normal mirrors, this one does not show the reflection of the person standing in front of it. Instead, it shows a reflection of “the deepest, most desperate desire” of that person’s heart.

But the object inside the mirror is just a mirage—a tantalizing vision trapped on the other side of the glass. This, of course, drives the mirror’s visitors mad with frustration. 

But you and I both know this is a blessing in disguise. Because even if they were able to get their hands on the object of their affection, unless that object was Christ, it would inevitably disappoint....

Each of you should look not only to your own interests but also to the interests of others. (Philippians 2:4)

When I was researching my next book, I read tons of dense books with “paragraphs” that spanned entire pages—sometimes multiple pages. Every time I approached another mammoth passage, I felt exhausted before I even began reading. It felt like the cognitive equivalent of staring up at Mount Everest before an ascent.

After complaining about my own pain long enough (first-world problems, I know), the Lord reminded me that I’ve written some long paragraphs myself. And if long paragraphs made my work feel arduous, my longwindedness probably makes your reading feel arduous too.

So I went back through the manuscript I was writing and took a machete to the document, chopping every paragraph down to size.

That’s a small example of one reason I think we can all give thanks for the “thorns and thistles” that make our work difficult: Painful work...

Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged. The soldiers twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on his head. They clothed him in a purple robe and went up to him again and again, saying, “Hail, king of the Jews!” And they slapped him in the face. (John 19:1-3)

God never intended for work to be painful and frustrating. According to Genesis 1 and 2, work was God’s first gift to humankind!

But when sin entered the world, the curse broke every part of creation, including the world of work. God told Adam, “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you” (see Genesis 3:17-18).

That backstory makes the Romans’ choice of a “crown of thorns” for Jesus all the more interesting. Knowingly or not, the Romans used a thorn—this symbol of the curse—to crown the One whose resurrection would overturn that curse. It is precisely...