Be Still and Know Daily Bible Devotion

Proverbs 27:25-27

After the hay is harvested and the new crop appears and the mountain grasses are gathered in, your sheep will provide wool for clothing, and your goats will provide the price of a field. And you will have enough goats’ milk for yourself, your family and your servant girls. These verses give us a delightful insight into a rural way of life which has a rhythm that those of us who live in towns and cities can total...

Proverbs 27:21

Fire tests the purity of silver and gold, but a person is tested by being praised. I wonder how you respond when someone praises you. Perhaps you are praised for your excellent work, your sporting skills, your kindness or your reliability. The writer of Proverbs makes the interesting observation that such praise is as critical a test of a person as fire testing precious metals. Praise will expose the kind of perso...

Proverbs 27:15-16

A quarrelsome wife is as annoying as constant dripping on a rainy day. Stopping her complaints is like trying to stop the wind or trying to hold something with greased hands. I’m not going to defend the pure sexism of this proverb. There’s absolutely no need for it. Anyone can be quarrelsome, whatever their gender! The writer is convinced that the quarrelsome person is very hard to stop. He makes it sound as if ...

Proverbs 27:14

A loud and cheerful greeting early in the morning will be taken as a curse! This might sound a bit harsh, but if you’ve ever lived with someone who is irrepressibly loud and cheerful, you probably know what the writer of this proverb is getting at! In life, it’s not so much what you say as how, when, where and why you say it. The writer is talking about people who are insensitive, and, let’s be honest, we all know ...

Proverbs 27:12

A prudent person foresees danger and takes precautions. The simpleton goes blindly on and suffers the consequences. Prudence isn’t a word that we hear much these days, but it’s a wonderful word. The prudent person not only discerns the right thing to do, but does it. They make good plans and anticipate the problems that might occur. Our society is very safety-conscious, and that is obviously a good thing, although ...

Proverbs 27:9-10

The heartfelt counsel of a friend is as sweet as perfume and incense. Never abandon a friend—either yours or your father’s. The writer Samuel Johnson once wrote: “Life has no pleasure higher or nobler than that of friendship.” I am sure we could all speak movingly of our friends. They are the people with whom we can laugh and cry, and be completely ourselves. It isn’t surprising that the writer of Proverbs had mu...

1 John 5:21

Dear children, keep away from anything that might take God’s place in your hearts. Every day, we are all bombarded with influences. Family, friends, television, internet, advertising, books, social media and radio are all trying to claim our attention and suggest different ways in which we should be thinking. Much of the time, we don’t even notice it’s happening, but we cannot stop the process. Most of those influen...

1 John 5:14-15

We are confident that God hears us whenever we ask for anything that pleases him. And since we know he hears us when we make our requests, we also know that he will give us what we ask for. Prayer is of absolutely crucial importance to our lives. It has been wisely said that you and I are as strong as our prayer lives and no stronger. Every part of our lives depends upon prayer, so it is really important that we ...

1 John 5:11-12

This is what God has testified: He has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have God’s Son does not have life. Sooner or later, everyone is bound to ask what life is all about. Freddie Mercury, the lead singer of Queen, one of the most successful rock groups of all time, asked the question in one of his last songs: “Does anyone know what we are living f...

1 John 5:4-5

For every child of God defeats this evil world, and we achieve this victory through our faith. And who can win this battle against the world? Only those who believe that Jesus is the Son of God. We need to be clear that whenever John talks about the world in this passage, he is talking about the world without God. When humankind rejects God, the world is a terrible place full of sin, death and destruction. We are al...

1 John 4:11-12

Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other. No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love is brought to full expression in us. You cannot see the wind, but you can easily see the effects that it has. Equally, you cannot see electricity, but we have no doubt that it exists because of all that it does. No one has ever seen God, but we know that ...