Stillspeaking Daily Devotional

09/04/2026

Today in the , Mary Luti considers accountability in the church.

"The practice of discipline doesn’t condemn the wayward. It acknowledges a need to start over. It doesn’t despair of anyone. It assumes a graced capacity for responding and repair. It doesn’t run out of chances. It assumes that when you’re finally ready, Mercy will be, too."

The practice of discipline doesn’t condemn the wayward. It acknowledges a need to start over. It doesn’t despair of anyone. It assumes that when you’re ready, Mercy will be, too.

09/03/2026

Today, Matt Laney considers the legacy of Paul:

Faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ. – Romans 10:17 (NRSV)

That’s a bold statement for someone who never met Jesus or heard him teach in the flesh.

Paul was not a disciple. In fact, Paul was a fierce opponent of the Jesus movement before he became its foremost promoter in Gentile territory.

However, Paul’s status as a “promoter of the Jesus movement” needs a mountain-sized asterisk.

The Christ he preached grew from a vision he never describes in his letters. The famous scene of Paul blinded by the light comes from Acts, written decades later by Luke.

Think about that. The most influential theologian in Christian history based his understanding of Jesus on a private experience, one he did not submit for peer review by Jesus’s appointed successors for three years. He intentionally avoided them. He said his spiritual experience outranked their human experience, so why bother?

Imagine someone claiming to have received a vision of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King that outranks the lived experience of those in Dr. King’s inner circle. Unlike King, Jesus left behind nothing but students—exactly who Paul dodged.

Because Paul answered only to his experience of Christ, Christ-ianity does the same by viewing Jesus through Paul rather than the other way around.

Yeah, I’m not exactly Paul’s biggest fan. But I’ll give him this: He had chutzpah, which is why you are reading this and why we have a church at all. Whatever my qualms with Paul, I’ll be forever grateful for his legacy: the Church that protects and proclaims the words of Jesus.

Paul got us here. The Gospels point us to Jesus.

: Help me balance my vision of Christ by attending to his words.

08/31/2026

Today's encouragement: What opportunities do you have to support someone who is feeling buried by life? Think especially about hands-on opportunities to be supportive, no matter how small.

: Jesus, when I am buried, take away my shame so I can ask for the help I need to begin again. And give me empathy to help unbury others you put in my path. Amen.

08/29/2026

Today, Mary Luti reflects on :

O God, you are my God; I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water. – Psalm 63:1 (NRSV)

St. Augustine is one of the Church’s greatest theologians. But many Christians think Christianity took a bad turn in him, mostly because he saddled us with original sin, predestination, a pathological sexual ethic, and a rationale for using state violence to compel orthodoxy.

He wasn’t all bad, of course. Nobody is. Some of the doctrines we most dislike weren’t original to him, nor was he alone in teaching them. And he made towering positive contributions to Christian life and faith as well.

But what some Christians find compelling about him is less about theology and more about soul. This brilliant, impassioned, prolific, driven, arrogant, defensive, pastorally wise, Christ-haunted African bishop went public with his private sins, laying bare in his introspective writings the sordid history of a base and irresolute heart.

Driven by ambition, he wrote, he’d repeatedly gone astray, almost deliberately wounding himself and people he loved. He’d desperately desired to surrender to Christ but was so trapped in destructive habits that he couldn’t. And when he prayed for God to change him, he always hedged, “but not yet.”

Loathe him or love him, you might recognize that heart. It’s not all that unlike our own, with their shames, hurtful habits, myopias, moral hedging, ego traps, and inexpressible longings for God.

Maybe we can meet Augustine there, in soul poverty, in the pain of desire, in the howl for grace. And maybe we could warm a little to a man who, after that grace finally fell hard upon him, could pray like this:

: “Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new! You were within me, but I was outside. You were with me, but I was not with you. You called, you shouted, you broke through. You flashed, you shone, you opened my eyes. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath, and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger for more.”

08/24/2026

What if God is a God of no judgment?

God can’t be the God of Love if God isn’t the God of Justice. The love and grace of God have never negated the truth and justice of God.

08/21/2026

Sam Houser calls us to in today's : Liberating Love, loosen whatever binds our spirits. When fear tightens its grip, remind us that our lives were never meant to be lived inside traps of despair or division. Give us the courage to choose compassion over certainty, hope over cynicism, and love that is bold enough to set us—and one another—free. Amen.

Read their full devo, linked in comments.

08/20/2026

Matt Laney writes in today's (excerpted): "I love dogs until they start acting like dogs: the barking, the licking, the bad boundaries, the poor personal hygiene. ... I can view God the same way. I love my spiritualized ideas about God without all the messy godliness."

Link in comments.

08/19/2026

In today's , Quinn G. Caldwell reminds us of the faithful (but hard) work of asking for help:

For though the Lord is high, God regards the lowly; but the haughty God perceives from far away. – Psalm 138:6 (NRSV, adapted)

Just exactly why it’s so hard for so many of us to ask for help is a mystery. From asking what aisle the thing is in, all the way up to going to therapy or joining a twelve-step group, admitting we aren’t masters of the universe, that we could use an assist, is the hardest thing some of us can imagine.

And even though this is self-evidently a terrible way to go through life, God seems to have made it a core principle that she will respect our wishes in this regard.

God will watch, will be aware—the fall of every sparrow, remember? But God will keep God’s distance while you grunt, “It’s not heavy, it’s just awkward.” While you stagger through life with the weight of the world hanging off you like someone insisting they can bring all the groceries from the car in one trip. While you get more and more lost rather than just stopping and asking someone who’s been this way before what you ought to do.

Is this a preservation of our autonomy, our free will? Is it a strategy, like parents letting kids work it out themselves instead of intervening? Something else? I certainly don’t know.

All I know is that God has promised to perceive your foolish haughty self from far away. Until, that is, you just do the hardest thing and ask for help. Then God has promised to be as close to you as your own breathing.

Prayer: Come, God, come. You know exactly what it meant when I said I was fine. Amen.

08/18/2026

When people categorize or qualify you, God objects! Read today's from Kaji Douša:

The Bible gives us a lot of so-called “barren” women. The world looked at them and saw emptiness. But that empty space is exactly where God loves to dwell.

08/11/2026

Today's reflection from Mary Luti:

"Jesus said, “Go, sell everything you have, give to the poor, then follow me.” At this he went away sad, because he had great wealth. Jesus said to his disciples, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.” – Mark 10:21-25, abridged (NIV)

A rich man asks Jesus how to inherit eternal life. He’s sincere, but “inherit” is a telling word. It means getting a share, a portion. He hopes to add another portion to his already disproportionate share of material wealth and moral achievement. He’s so accustomed to accumulating that he can only think of eternal life as an acquisition.

But eternal life is a person, not a portion. And that person loves him and welcomes him to intimacy. With a precondition: he’ll have to make the same first move toward Jesus that God once made toward us in Christ: he must empty himself.

He can’t do it. Jesus names the obstacle. It’s wealth, and not just our attachment to it. Dispossession is indeed an inner attitude, a spiritual posture, but that’s not all it is. To follow Jesus really means living life in the red.

They were all doing just that, but Jesus’s disciples are still shocked by his severity. He doubles down, “It’s easier for a camel…” To save the wealthy, God would have to do the impossible.

We always think someone else is wealthy, not us. Maybe examining that assumption should be our first response to this hard word. But that’s not for me to say. No one can tell you what it means for you in practice to accept Jesus’s invitation to life eternal.

Only you know what it would take to hope not in goodness and its satisfactions, much less in wealth and its acquisition, but only in what God may yet make possible in you by grace.

: I keep going away sad, Jesus. But keep inviting me. Grace may yet push me through the needle’s eye."