Joe Barnett

Forget not all his benefits.           —Psalm 103:2 Turn pouting into praise by focusing on what you have, instead of fixating on what you don’t have. Psalm 103 hands you twenty-two verses of what’s already in your bucket. Verse two says, “Praise the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all […]

You should want praise from God and not from humans.      —Romans 2:29 Are you sensitive to what others think of you? Aren’t we all? Dr. Raj Raghunathan, a professor at the University of Texas, teaches a course about happiness. At the beginning of the semester, he asks his students to tell him what

Because you say so, I will let down the nets.       —Luke 5:5 Jesus, the carpenter, told Simon, the fisherman: “Put out into deep water, and let down the nets for a catch” (Lk 5:4). There were two things off base with this charge: 1) Nighttime was the right time to fish; it

Grace be with you.  —2 Timothy 4:22 I get misty-eyed reading 2 Timothy, Paul’s last letter. He was terribly lonely. “Everyone in the province of Asia has deserted me,” he wrote (1:15). “At my first defense, no one stood with me . . . all forsook me” (4:16). “Only Luke is with me” (4:11). He

To Timothy, my dear son. 2 Timothy 1:2 Today my scheduled daily Bible reading put me in the pages of 2 Timothy. When I visit here, it’s always with a sense of sadness, because it was Paul’s last letter. His writings have been transformative in my life; so when he signs off and lays aside

On his law he meditates day and night.                           —Psalm 1:2 I got a belly laugh out of a publicist’s defense of a politician whose knowledge of Scripture was dubious. “He knows his Bible,” he said. “He’s read it all the way through.

Do not lie. Do not deceive one another.                  —Leviticus 19:11 Ken Stegall, an admired preacher friend, wrote about a man who had a small grocery store in Sheridan, Arkansas in the 1940s. A customer told him she needed a large chicken. He reached into the ice bin,

In his hand is the life of every creature. —Job 12:10 Hummingbirds are fascinating creatures. They weigh less than one ounce; consume one-half of their weight in sugar daily; have a heart rate of more than 1,200 beats per minute; take 250 breaths per minute. Then there’s this fact that I’m struggling to wrap my

Trust in the Lord with all your heart.                   —Proverbs 3:5 Habakkuk was frustrated. “How long, O Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen?” (Hb 1:2). The prophet gives voice to our disappointment with God’s silence. It’s hard to harmonize our heartache with

Great is his love toward us.       —Psalm 117:2 Here’s a bit of trivia for you. The shortest chapter in the Bible is separated by only one chapter from the longest. The longest chapter is Psalm 119, which has 176 verses; 2,426 words. The shortest chapter is Psalm 117, which has only two