The greatest athletes, philosophers, artists, and business owners of the world all of one major thing in common: they learned the rules of excellence, they obeyed them, and they became masters. If you want to become successful in your life, if you want your relationships to flourish, all we have to do is learn the rules of excellent living and follow them! Fortunately for us, God spells it all out for us in the book of Deuteronomy.

The beginning of January is the perfect time to get rid of old habits and replace them with new ones. The new year is a clean slate. A fresh start. But what do you do when you remember all the times you've tried before and failed? What do you do when your new goal starts to feel a little too ambitious to achieve? You start thinking you can't do it. Better to give up now rather than face the crushing shame of defeat. But with God, there is always a way! Listen to David's message on the 8 Steps of Confidence and Persistence that will help you succeed.

Do you find it hard to see God at work in your life when times are hard? Do you get discouraged or angry when you feel your control slipping? Do you pray but doubt that God will answer you – or that He won’t answer you the way that you want Him to? Are you unsure if God is even trustworthy to handle the hopes and dreams you hold so close to your heart?

You aren’t alone. Literally billions of people have asked the same questions you’re asking, especially one group in particular: The Israelites, God’s chosen people. Unfortunately, their lack of trust in God’s capabilities and intentions lead them down a very dark and painful path. The good news is that it doesn’t have to end that way for you! Listen to David’s message on how you can choose to trust God and experience the blessings of life that He has planned for you.

When God presents you with a task or a dream that seems impossibly out of reach, what do you do? How do you cross that great divide between where you are and where you're called to be? And what do you do when going to church and following God seems boring (especially to your kids)? David Hunzicker digs into the book of Deuteronomy to uncover the answers.

Although it looks very different than in the Bronze Age, idolatry is still very present in the world today. We might not bow down to statues made of wood or stone, but we do yield to the same values that those statues represented: power, money, sex, food, resources… These things are not inherently evil, but when we build our lives around the pursuit of these things instead of pursuing the One who made them in the first place, THAT is idol worship.

There are a lot of strange laws in the world that leave us scratching our heads, and that is true of many of the laws recorded in the Old Testament of the Bible – laws about shaving your head, not eating certain foods, and selling your daughter into slavery. If you find these laws questionable and confusing, you’re not alone!

As Christians, which laws do we need to follow and which ones were “just for them”? To understand this, we must understand the historical context of the culture that the laws were given. Listen as David Young describes how we can find the answers we are looking for directly from the Word of God.

Oh, that our children might learn from us how to love God with all their heart, soul, and might! To ignore this responsibility is to fail our children and to set them up to forfeit God's blessings.To ignore this responsibility is to create spiritually malnourished children who will not be able to withstand the pressures still to come. And you can be sure the pressure will certainly come.

In his book The Great Evangelical Recession, John Dickerson makes a clear case that future generations will face more, not less, external pressure to walk away from the faith. Times are hard for believers now, but we have not yet seen how difficult it will be here in the west.

Are you doing all you can do to prepare your children for the days to come? Are you training your children to love their God? And if you are not a parent or your children are grown, what are you doing to help invest in the next generation as a member of their community?

Am I good enough? Am I worthy of being loved? What do I need to do in order to earn the love I so desire? The bad news is that you are an imperfect person – just like everyone else – and none of us can ever be “good enough.” The Good News is that you can’t do anything to be more loved than you are right now because you are loved without condition by the one who made you. You don’t have to earn love. You only have to accept it.

We live in amazing abundance in the United States, and in such abundance, it can be easy to forget the God who gave us all that we have. Romans Chapter 1 reminds us that ingratitude is the beginning – the “gateway drug” – to all other sins. The solution to this ungratefulness is to proclaim God’s exponential value and worth to ourselves, to our brothers and sisters, and to the world. He is worthy of our worship.

Few things have more power over us than does our memory. But it’s a double-edged sword. Memory can motivate us to achieve great things. Or it can bring about our ruin. Here’s how to use your memory for the glory of God.

Whether we know it or not, we are in the battle of our lives; and, ultimately, it is a bat-tle for our minds. On the one side stands the Lord God, who provides us with the truth we need. On the other side stand the powers of darkness, who endlessly lie to us. The path to victory goes through the Word of God. Victory belongs to the one who learns this.

In Deuteronomy 12, God promises to designate a place of worship (only one) for Israel to come and meet with Him. The appointed place (Shiloh, and then Jerusalem) ultimately served as a signpost to an anointed person (King Jesus). Today, the Holy God meets with sinful man only through the person of Jesus Christ.

Because American perspectives are widely secular and often push the boundaries of profanity, holiness can be a difficult concept for us to grasp. What IS holiness? Holi-ness is the sum total of God’s otherworldly character: His perfections, His morality, His justice, His jealousy, His wrath, His compassion, His timelessness, His glory, and His all-encompassing power and knowledge. God’s holiness is both terrifying and reassuring.

We make objects, places, times, actions, and persons holy when we do two things: separate them from the profane and unite them with God instead. For example, God told the Israelites to eat a kosher diet so that they would constantly be reminded of who they are as a people of God every time they eat a meal.

The crucifixion of Jesus canceled the debt we owed to God for our sins, and the resurrection of Jesus set us free from the bondage of death. God has set us free indeed! But freedom is a difficult gift because we often fail to manage it well. Many see free-dom as a license to live by our feelings and desires—which is actually a form of bondage. God’s freedom releases us from our sinful ways so we can live Christlike lives. Central to Christlike living is showing others the same grace God has shown you. When you hold grudges, practice unforgiveness, remain angry, gossip, harbor resentment, and the like, who is really in bondage?

God often uses that which is physical (and easily understood) to teach spiritual realities. One of the most prominent object lessons in the scriptures is that of leaven (or yeast) working through a batch of dough. In Deuteronomy 16, Israel is reminded that leaven must not be used during the Passover meal, a meal that begins a seven-day fast from leaven throughout all the land. Through this object lesson, God teaches us, his people, to be mindful of all-pervasive influences that work under the surface and behind closed doors – influences that often cause Christians to become rather hypocritical. In this lesson, David Hunzicker discusses four different types of hypocrisy found in the Bible, why they matter, and how to overcome the challenges they present.

Justice is giving to each person that which is rightly theirs—giving them their due. It is a cardinal virtue, and in some ways, the foundation of all other virtues. But oddly, we tend to think about justice only when we experience injustice. God is a just God who expects us to act justly. Our world desperately needs a people who rightly define and model justice. We Christians are meant to be that people.

The world has never been noisier than it is today. Our devices distract us, our commercials lure us, our entertainment beguiles us, and our officials disinform us. We must learn that the only voice that matters is the voice of God. The truth will set you free. Every false map leads to a shipwreck.

Unlike the rest of creation, God created mankind in His image (Genesis 1:26). God placed us [humans] a little lower than heavenly beings and has crowned us with glory and honor (Psalm 8:5). By doing so, God assigned humanity intrinsic value that is to be honored by all, at all times. Human value, your value, is not tied to your usefulness to society, beauty or outward appearance, or performance athletically or intellectually. Your value does not depreciate over time but is tied directly to God’s view of humanity, as the pinnacle of his created order. Do you value human life as God values it?

In most places and in much of human history, women have faced more discrimination and hardship than men, but wherever Christianity has gone, women have been elevated. Because men and women complete each other and share the image of God, we treat women with honor.

The greatest illness in the world is not COVID-19. The greatest disease is being left unwanted, unloved, and uncared for. The first place we are supposed to experience love is in the home from our parents and other family members, but too many children in our country are growing up without anyone to give the unconditional love they were created to have. When families are strong, people tend to flourish. When enough families fail, civilizations collapse.

You were designed to flourish in the community of believers—in the church. But churches are composed of sinful humans, so they can disappoint us, fail us, and hurt us. How can sinful people come together to form a holy community? When Jesus returns, the church will be perfected by Him. But even now, we can become holy if we follow the Scriptures.

You have a relationship with your stuff. As is the case with all relationships, it is either a healthy or unhealthy one. Though we were designed to be in authority over our material possessions, sadly many in our culture, and in the church, have placed themselves under the authority of money and are now enslaved by it (see I Tim. 6:10; Mt. 6:24). Deuteronomy 24 contains a principle, which, if you choose to live by it, will help you stay in right relationship with your possessions and live to reflect the heart of God more fully. The principle: All you have is not all for you. Living by this principle will unlock the generous Spirit inside you so you may do great good for those in need. Yet, living a generous life will not come easily or naturally. Then he [Jesus] said to them, “Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not consist in an abundance of possessions.” (Lk. 12:15).

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From the first page of your Bible, you will begin learning the great truth of the Scriptures: God is before all things and above all things. In sequence and in significance, God is first, and he has no competition. Can you honestly say, then, that God is first in your life? How can you become a “God-first” kind of a person? In Deuteronomy 26, Moses offers instructions that will help you pause and prioritize your life around God and not yourself.