We can spend years listening to truth while our hearts quietly harden, grow shallow, or get tangled in a thousand other things. Even if we show up and check all the boxes, spiritual numbness can still creep in. What we need, again and again, is a heart that’s open, receptive, ready for God’s Word to take root. He doesn’t force His way in. He sows and waits, faithful even in the dry seasons. But the condition of the soil? That’s our part. We must keep it prepared. So what about your heart today? Is it broken and ready, or is there hardness, shallowness, thorns that need to go?

The Strange Plans of God
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As the first church began to explode with growth and unlimited possibility, one of its brightest and best young leaders–a man named Stephen–was brutally murdered for his faith. Who would have thought that something so awful and unfair would have ever been part of God’s plans for the church? And yet God used this event to scatter the church and spread the Gospel to other places. Often in life God’s plan seem so strange, even unkind, yet we must trust His plans and hold to the promise that God knows what He is doing.




