Max Lucado Daily: GRACE REWIRES YOUR HEART - April 3, 2026
Grace. The bank gives us a grace period. The seedy politician falls from grace. Musicians speak of a grace note. We use the word for hospitals, baby girls, kings and pre-meal prayers. We talk as though we know what grace means.
You turn the page of your Bible and look at the words. You might as well be gazing at a cemetery. Lifeless, stony, nothing moves you. But you don’t dare close the book, no sirree. You dare not miss a deed for fear that God will erase your name.
If that’s your feeling, grace can speak to you. God’s grace has a drenching about it. It comes after you. It re-wires you. From insecure to God-secure. From regret riddled to better-because-of-it. From afraid to die to ready to fly. As Paul said in Galatians 2:20 (NKJV), “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” You might call it a heart transplant.
Grace: More Than We Deserve, Greater Than We Imagine
Psalm 23
A David Psalm
1–3 23 God, my shepherd!
I don’t need a thing.
You have bedded me down in lush meadows,
you find me quiet pools to drink from.
True to your word,
you let me catch my breath
and send me in the right direction.
4 Even when the way goes through
Death Valley,
I’m not afraid
when you walk at my side.
Your trusty shepherd’s crook
makes me feel secure.
5 You serve me a six-course dinner
right in front of my enemies.
You revive my drooping head;
my cup brims with blessing.
6 Your beauty and love chase after me
every day of my life.
I’m back home in the house of God
for the rest of my life.
Our Daily Bread reading and devotion
Friday, April 03, 2026
by Alyson Kieda
TODAY'S SCRIPTURE
1 John 4:7-12
God Is Love
7–10 My beloved friends, let us continue to love each other since love comes from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and experiences a relationship with God. The person who refuses to love doesn’t know the first thing about God, because God is love—so you can’t know him if you don’t love. This is how God showed his love for us: God sent his only Son into the world so we might live through him. This is the kind of love we are talking about—not that we once upon a time loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to clear away our sins and the damage they’ve done to our relationship with God.
11–12 My dear, dear friends, if God loved us like this, we certainly ought to love each other. No one has seen God, ever. But if we love one another, God dwells deeply within us, and his love becomes complete in us—perfect love!
Today's Insights
John, “the disciple whom Jesus loved” (John 13:23), wrote much about how God loves us. In his gospel, he says that “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son” to save us from our sins (3:16). In one of John’s letters, he uses similar language: “This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. . . . He loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:9-10). Similarly, Paul accentuated that God demonstrated His great love for us by sending Christ to die for us “while we were still sinners” (Romans 5:8). Because of Jesus’ atoning sacrifice for our sins, which we remember on Good Friday, “we can rejoice in our wonderful new relationship with God because our Lord Jesus Christ has made us friends of God” (v. 11 nlt). K.T. Sim
Visit go.odb.org/040326 to learn about Jesus and His atoning sacrifice.
Why Good Friday
This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 1 John 4:10
What’s so good about Good Friday? Why isn’t the day called Bad or Sad Friday? After all, it’s meant to be a day of sorrowful reflection, not a day of celebration. Sometimes, this day takes other names, such as Holy Friday. In Germany, it’s called Karfreitag, or Sorrowful Friday. So where did we get the tradition of calling it “Good”? Some believe it may have originated from the older tradition of calling it “God’s Friday.”
No matter the origin of the name, it’s still appropriate to call the Friday on which Jesus died “good.” Out of Christ’s sacrificial love, He died for our sins. That’s why Good Friday is good. And the great news is that three days later He rose from the grave in victory.
New Testament scholar D.A. Carson wrote, “It was not nails that held Jesus to that wretched cross; it was his unqualified resolution, out of love for his Father, to do his Father’s will—and it was his love for sinners like me.” We read in 1 John 4: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (v. 10).
The good news of Good Friday is that God loves us and wants to have a relationship with us! Because of that love, we’re called to love others (vv. 7, 11). When we do, we show our love for Him.
Reflect & Pray
What does Good Friday mean to you? How can you honor Jesus on this day?
Dear God, thank You for loving me! Please help me to tell others about You.
My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers
Friday, April 03, 2026
If You’d Only Known
If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace—but now it is hidden from your eyes. — Luke 19:42
Jesus entered into Jerusalem in triumph, but a strange god was there: the pride of Pharisaism. The Pharisees were religious and proper, but Jesus saw straight through them: “You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean” (Matthew 23:27).
What is it that blinds me in my day? Do I have a strange god—not a disgusting monster, but a mindset that rules and dominates me? More than once, the Lord has brought me face-to-face with this strange god, but instead of yielding to the Lord, I scraped through. Now I am still in the strange god’s possession, still blind to the thing that would bring me peace.
“If you, even you, had only known …” These words imply culpability; God holds us responsible for what we do not see. It is appalling that we can be in the place where the Spirit of God should be ruling us and still be increasing our condemnation in his sight.
“Now it is hidden from your eyes.” God goes directly to the heart, and the tears of Jesus follow. The terrible sadness of the might-have-been! God never reopens doors that have been closed. He opens other doors, but he reminds us that there are doors we’ve shut that need never have been shut.
Never be afraid when God brings back the past. Let memory have its way. It is a minister of God, with its rebuke and sorrow. God will turn the might-have-been into something wonderful in the future.
Judges 19-21; Luke 7:31-50
WISDOM FROM OSWALD
It is perilously possible to make our conceptions of God like molten lead poured into a specially designed mould, and when it is cold and hard we fling it at the heads of the religious people who don’t agree with us.
Disciples Indeed
A Word with You, by Ron Hutchcraft
Friday, April 03, 2026
WHEN GOOD FRIDAY GETS PERSONAL - #10235
Twenty-three marks on the wall of his four-by-four prison cell told the story. It had just been three weeks since the soldiers captured him - the number one name on the Most Wanted List - at a local bar and they hauled him into this cell. The charges were robbery, treason, and murder. Day 23 was going to be just another day there, or so he thought until he heard the growing sounds of that angry mob outside the window above him. He managed to grab the bars on the window and pull himself up high enough to hear what the crowd was screaming. It was a combination of shock and fear that swept over him when he heard they were shouting his name! "Give us Ba-rabbas! Give us Ba-rabbas!"
Then the chant gradually began to change. Now they were shouting with this bloodthirsty anger, "Cru-ci-fy him! Cru-ci-fy him!" Barabbas slumped to the floor. He couldn't believe it. He'd been their hero, but now they were calling for his execution by the most brutal means of execution ever devised - death on a cross. Within minutes, five soldiers were dragging him, kicking and screaming down the corridor, up the stone steps, and to another door. They flung the door open, pushed him through it, and slammed the door behind him.
It took a little while for him to realize where he was. He was out on the cobblestone street of Jerusalem. He was free! Before reality could fully dawn on Barabbas, the door behind him opened again. He literally had to roll out of the way to keep from being trampled by this angry crowd pushing their way through with a bare-backed, bleeding man in the middle of them. As Barabbas plastered himself against the wall of that narrow street, he could see that man's back had been so brutally beaten it was like one gaping wound, exposing tissue and bone everywhere. Barabbas' first instinct was to run while he could, but he didn't. He followed that crowd all the way up to that skull-shaped hill just outside the city, where from a distance, he heard the hammer and the spikes that the heartless executioners of Rome were driving into that man's hands and feet.
It turned dark as night in the middle of the day and the skies opened up with a deluge of rain. Curious spectators just began to drift away. Finally, Barabbas felt safe enough to walk slowly to the top of Skull Hill, with his head covered. It was as if there was a magnet pulling him toward the man hanging on that middle cross between two other dying criminals. Barabbas had heard the man say from that cross, "Father, forgive them." He'd heard many things at crucifixions. He'd heard cursing, and screaming, and threatening, but never "forgive."
He now could recognize the face that was beaten almost beyond recognition. It was Jesus - the man who had done no wrong, whose only crime was to love those that no one else cared about. And in that moment Barabbas found himself looking up into the eyes of that man on the middle cross and saying aloud, "Jesus, you don't deserve to be there, I do. But because You're dying there, I don't have to die." I could walk up to the cross where Jesus died and say that, and so could you.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You on this Good Friday about "When Good Friday Gets Personal."
I don't know if Barabbas ever really made it to the cross, but I do know that getting to that cross to have your sins forgiven is your only hope of heaven. Our word for today from the Word of God is in Galatians 2:20, and it simply says, "The Son of God...loved me and gave Himself for me."
If you've never been to Jesus' cross and said those words, "For me. You're dying for me," this could be your personal Jesus-day. When you tell Him you are His, when every wrong thing you've ever done will be erased from God's book, because the blood shed on that cross was shed to pay for it. And when you trade hell for heaven this very day, would you tell Him, "Jesus, you're dying for what I've done. And today I am yours."
And then, would you make a trip to our website? It's ANewStory.com. I want to help you today be sure you've crossed over from death to life.
Good Friday - Jesus died for your sin today so you don't have to.
