Max Lucado Daily: GODLY WEAPONS - September 30, 2026
When we go out in God’s name, Satan makes a dash for the nearest exit. We have weapons he cannot match. What are our weapons? 2 Corinthians 10:4: Prayer, worship, and Scripture. Prayer invites God, praise dethrones Satan, Scripture discloses truth. And Satan hates the truth.Bible study guide
Flee sexual immorality. Let no evil come from your mouth. Make sure the demons of hell know that you are on God’s side, not theirs. People of unbreakable courage know what Elijah knew. “The Lord God of Israel lives, before whom I stand” (1 Kings 17:1 NKJV).
Victims? Not on your life. Victors? You can count on it!
Unbreakable Courage
Proverbs 21
God Examines Our Motives
1 21 Good leadership is a channel of water controlled by God;
he directs it to whatever ends he chooses.
2 We justify our actions by appearances;
God examines our motives.
3 Clean living before God and justice with our neighbors
mean far more to God than religious performance.
4 Arrogance and pride—distinguishing marks in the wicked—
are just plain sin.
5 Careful planning puts you ahead in the long run;
hurry and scurry puts you further behind.
6 Make it to the top by lying and cheating;
get paid with smoke and a promotion—to death!
7 The wicked get buried alive by their loot
because they refuse to use it to help others.
8 Mixed motives twist life into tangles;
pure motives take you straight down the road.
Do Your Best, Prepare for the Worst
9 Better to live alone in a tumbledown shack
than share a mansion with a nagging spouse.
10 Wicked souls love to make trouble;
they feel nothing for friends and neighbors.
11 Simpletons only learn the hard way,
but the wise learn by listening.
12 A God-loyal person will see right through the wicked
and undo the evil they’ve planned.
13 If you stop your ears to the cries of the poor,
your cries will go unheard, unanswered.
14 A quietly given gift soothes an irritable person;
a heartfelt present cools a hot temper.
15 Good people celebrate when justice triumphs,
but for the workers of evil it’s a bad day.
16 Whoever wanders off the straight and narrow
ends up in a congregation of ghosts.
17 You’re addicted to thrills? What an empty life!
The pursuit of pleasure is never satisfied.
18 What a bad person plots against the good, boomerangs;
the plotter gets it in the end.
19 Better to live in a tent in the wild
than with a cross and petulant spouse.
20 Valuables are safe in a wise person’s home;
fools put it all out for yard sales.
21 Whoever goes hunting for what is right and kind
finds life itself—glorious life!
22 One sage entered a whole city of armed soldiers—
their trusted defenses fell to pieces!
23 Watch your words and hold your tongue;
you’ll save yourself a lot of grief.
24 You know their names—Brash, Impudent, Blasphemer—
intemperate hotheads, every one.
25 Lazy people finally die of hunger
because they won’t get up and go to work.
26 Sinners are always wanting what they don’t have;
the God-loyal are always giving what they do have.
27 Religious performance by the wicked stinks;
it’s even worse when they use it to get ahead.
28 A lying witness is unconvincing;
a person who speaks truth is respected.
29 Unscrupulous people fake it a lot;
honest people are sure of their steps.
30 Nothing clever, nothing conceived, nothing contrived,
can get the better of God.
31 Do your best, prepare for the worst—
then trust God to bring victory.
Our Daily Bread reading and devotion
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
by Marvin Williams
TODAY'S SCRIPTURE
Colossians 2:6-15
From the Shadows to the Substance
6–7 My counsel for you is simple and straightforward: Just go ahead with what you’ve been given. You received Christ Jesus, the Master; now live him. You’re deeply rooted in him. You’re well constructed upon him. You know your way around the faith. Now do what you’ve been taught. School’s out; quit studying the subject and start living it! And let your living spill over into thanksgiving.
8–10 Watch out for people who try to dazzle you with big words and intellectual double-talk. They want to drag you off into endless arguments that never amount to anything. They spread their ideas through the empty traditions of human beings and the empty superstitions of spirit beings. But that’s not the way of Christ. Everything of God gets expressed in him, so you can see and hear him clearly. You don’t need a telescope, a microscope, or a horoscope to realize the fullness of Christ, and the emptiness of the universe without him. When you come to him, that fullness comes together for you, too. His power extends over everything.
11–15 Entering into this fullness is not something you figure out or achieve. It’s not a matter of being circumcised or keeping a long list of laws. No, you’re already in—insiders—not through some secretive initiation rite but rather through what Christ has already gone through for you, destroying the power of sin. If it’s an initiation ritual you’re after, you’ve already been through it by submitting to baptism. Going under the water was a burial of your old life; coming up out of it was a resurrection, God raising you from the dead as he did Christ. When you were stuck in your old sin-dead life, you were incapable of responding to God. God brought you alive—right along with Christ! Think of it! All sins forgiven, the slate wiped clean, that old arrest warrant canceled and nailed to Christ’s cross. He stripped all the spiritual tyrants in the universe of their sham authority at the Cross and marched them naked through the streets.
Today's Insights
Paul wrote, “[God] has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation—if you continue in your faith . . . and do not move from the hope held out in the gospel” (1:22-23). The apostle is combatting false teaching here—probably Gnosticism. Among its claims were that Christ didn’t have a physical body. This isn’t a biblical teaching, as it denies the crucifixion and resurrection. Paul warned, “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy” (2:8). As he said, “You were dead in your sins” but now “God made you alive with Christ” (v. 13). When we accept Jesus’ sacrifice as payment for our sin, we become free from sin’s burden.
For further study, read: Teach Us to Pray
Not Ritual but Christ
Hollow and deceptive philosophy . . . depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ. Colossians 2:8
In Santa Fe, New Mexico, thousands gather each year to burn Zozobra—a fifty-foot towering effigy stuffed with their worries, bills, and regrets. They shout, “Burn him!” as they hope the flames will devour their anxieties and troubles and reset their lives. The ritual reflects a deep human longing to be cleansed of fear, shame, and failure. It’s dramatic. But it’s also powerless. Fire can destroy paper but not guilt. It can consume ashes but not shame.
The apostle Paul wrote, “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ” (Colossians 2:8). He reminded his readers that they shouldn’t trade Jesus for empty substitutes, and he explains why: Christ is the visible “image of the invisible God” (1:15), is supreme over creation (1:16), fully God in human flesh (2:9), and victorious over “every power and authority” (v. 10). Because of His death and resurrection, we’re “rooted and built up in him” (v. 7), and fully alive and forgiven by Him (v. 13). Human rituals and cultural ceremonies can mesmerize a crowd, but only Jesus can cancel sin’s debt and break its grip forever.
Instead of yielding our burdens to rituals and traditions, let’s surrender them to Christ. He alone frees us from captivity and fills us with hope.
Reflect & Pray
How can human rituals be dangerous substitutes for Christ? In what ways does He offer us freedom from them?
Dear Jesus, only You can truly set me free.
My Utmost for His Highest, by Oswald Chambers
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
The Commission of the Call
I rejoice in what I am suffering for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions. — Colossians 1:24
The call of God is utterly unique. We think we are answering God’s call when we devote ourselves to spiritual service, but once we get into a right relationship with him, we see how wrong we’ve been. When God calls, he calls us to something we’ve never dreamed of before. In one radiant, flashing moment, we see what he wants us to do—to “fill up” in our flesh “what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions”—and we are riveted with a terrific pain.
The call of God has nothing to do with personal holiness. It’s about being made broken bread and poured-out wine. If we are ever going to be made into wine, we will have to be crushed; you cannot drink whole grapes. But God can never crush those who resist the fingers he uses to do it. Those fingers may belong to someone we dislike, or to some set of circumstances to which we said we would never submit. We think, “If only God would use his own fingers to crush me, and do it in some special, heavenly way!” We have to learn that we cannot choose the scene or the means of our martyrdom.
I wonder what kind of fingers God has been using to squeeze you. Have you been hard as a marble and escaped? If God had persisted in squeezing you while you were still unripe, the wine would have been remarkably bitter. If you wish to be a person whom God can easily crush, you must allow his presence to govern every element of your natural life and to break those elements in his service.
We have to be rightly related to God before we can be broken in his hands. Keep right with him, let him do with you as he likes, and you will find that he is producing the kind of bread and wine that will benefit his other children.
Isaiah 9-10; Ephesians 3
WISDOM FROM OSWALD
The truth is we have nothing to fear and nothing to overcome because He is all in all and we are more than conquerors through Him. The recognition of this truth is not flattering to the worker’s sense of heroics, but it is amazingly glorifying to the work of Christ.
Approved Unto God, 4 R
A Word with You, by Ron Hutchcraft
Wednesday, September 30, 2026
The Eternity Gap - #10363
Scripture: Romans 7:15
You can read about the Grand Canyon. You can see pictures of the Grand Canyon. But you can't begin to comprehend how grand a canyon it is until you're standing right there at the edge of it, trying to drink in how massive it really is. The moods, the colors, the vastness—it was really something impressive for our whole family the first time we went there together. You stand on the South Rim and you look at the North Rim in the distance…the far distance, realizing you can only look. It averages at least ten miles across! There's no way to get across that canyon. There’s no bridge that will take you to the other side.
I'm Ron Hutchcraft and I want to have A Word With You today about "The Eternity Gap."
You stand looking at something you'd like to experience, but there's no bridge to get you there—just a very grand canyon between you and what you're looking at. It's a feeling all of us are much too familiar with; looking at where we are, then looking at the kind of person we need to be and realizing there's a grand canyon in between.
Sometimes it's getting married, or having children, or going through one of life's deep valleys that makes us see our dark side; that makes us realize the great gap between the person I am and the person I want to be, the person I need to be, the person the people around me need for me to be. We don't want to be selfish, but selfishness seems so natural and so hard to change. We don't want to be enslaved by this habit, or hurting people with our angry words, or by constantly succumbing to negativity, even depression. We see our worst come out, and it's often hurting most the people we love the most. We want to be different, but listen, it's a long way to the other side. I know what I want to be, what people who count on me need for me to be, but my dark side wins too often.
This is not a new struggle. One of the writers of the Bible actually talked about it in Romans 7, where we find our word for today from the Word of God. He says, "I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do, I do not do, but what I hate, I do." That sounds all too familiar, doesn't it? "I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.” He says, “For what I do is the evil I do not want to do...who will rescue me?" This man has stumbled on the way that we can bridge the gap between the person we are and the person we need to be—a rescuer. He’s crying out for a rescuer. He answers the question "who will rescue me?" this way: "Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!"
All our efforts to improve ourselves seem to fall short. And according to Romans 3:23 in the Bible, our best falls way short of getting to a perfect God. We have only one hope of crossing the grand canyon that we've never been able to cross, and that is literally being carried across in the arms of Jesus Christ. He can rescue you from your dark side because He died to pay the death penalty for all your sins, and then He rose from the dead to prove that He has beaten everything that has beaten us.
The arms of Heaven’s Rescuer are, in fact, open to you this very day. But He won’t grab you. No, you have to grab Him. Has there ever been a moment when you’ve come to the end of yourself and placed all your hopes and all your trust in Jesus Christ and in Him alone? If not, this would be a great day for you to finally take that first step of faith and to tell Him, “Jesus, I am Yours. I'm putting all my faith in You to have my sins forgiven and to go to heaven someday, to have a relationship with my God."
This could be the beginning of a new story for you. In fact, that's the name of our website - ANewStory.com. And I want to urge you to go there today, and I think you will find there some things from God's Word that will help you be sure you belong to Jesus Christ.
He stands ready to do for you what you have never been able to do for yourself if you’ll just walk into His waiting arms.
