Personal Devotions
Notes from Mark's personal Bible reading and meditation
With a goal to apply one truth from each day's reading to my life that day
Nov 4, 2025, 8:23 AM
Passage Read: 1 Thessalonians 3-4
Meditation Verses: 4:3-8
Thought
Sexual immorality is one of the biggest temptations and problems facing believers. There are others, but this one perhaps more than any other gets spoken against the most. It was common then, it is common now. God saved us to live holy lives, meaning especially lives free from sexual immorality in any and all of its forms, but somehow believers today don't consider many of their immoral ways to be wrong!
Nov 3, 2025, 1:19 PM
Passage Read: 1 Thessalonians 1-2 Meditation Verses: 2:2-6
Thought
Paul is not preaching to make converts, but to announce what God has done and leave the message and the Spirit to do their work. So he feels no compulsion to make his message pleasing to men, but only a compulsion to make his message and his ways pleasing to God. That's also what gives him courage to speak the message even after having been abused in previous cities; opposition doesn't silence him.
Nov 2, 2025, 6:54 AM
Passage Read: Colossians 3-4 Meditation Verses: 4:12-13
Thought
Epaphras is like Paul also a prisoner, according to the letter to Philemon, which should be a companion letter to this one. Yet Epaphras is not silenced or hindered in ministry or in love for his people. In prison, he has more time to pray, and Paul testifies that Epaphras is working hard for them even while in chains!
Nov 1, 2025, 8:44 AM
Passage Read: Colossians 1-2
Meditation Verses: 2:1-3
Thought
Both near the end of Chapter 1 and here Paul makes mention of his sufferings for the churches, including the Colossians, whom he hasn't even met. It is deliberate, as he says clearly here. He wants them to know how much he is struggling for them, so that they would "be encouraged in heart and united in love, so that they would have the full riches of complete understanding, in order that they may know the mystery of God, namely Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge."