Free Reading Plans and Devotionals related to Matthew 15:1

Just as a physically unhealthy heart can destroy your body, an emotionally and spiritually unhealthy heart can destroy you and your relationships. For the next five days, let Andy Stanley help you look within yourself for four common enemies of the heart — guilt, anger, greed, and jealousy — and teach you how to remove them.

Your heart is that place deep inside where you live, laugh, cry, and experience things. And when your heart is sick or broken, it robs you of life. Yet God promises to heal your heart and set you free from the brokenness that holds you back. So join Berni Dymet and open God’s Word to discover the peace and strength that comes from living with a whole, undivided heart.

Throughout the New Testament, Jesus shows compassion toward unlikely “sinners” who expressed great faith. Whether tax collectors, Roman centurions, or Samaritan women, Jesus repeatedly shows that he came to rescue people burdened with shame. During this plan, Bible teacher and author Kat Armstrong illustrates how these stories strengthen our understanding of God’s empathy and knowledge of how all types of people express beautiful faith in Jesus.

Matthew writes to God’s people and walks them on a journey that will take them from where they are to be Disciple Makers. This is 16 of 27 devotional plans walking us through the book of Matthew.  This portion talks about faith, and in many different ways. Watch how faith gets challenged, stretched, refined and exposed – then ask whether our faith matches theirs!

Relying on ourselves sounds good. After all, if we just get a little more organized, a little more patient, a little more spiritual, our lives will be better…. Right? In this week’s devotional, Christine Hoover reminds us why relying on ourselves leads us to bow to the false kings of anxiety, control, and self-indulgence. Only when we bring our whole hearts to the true King will we find true satisfaction.

YOU are brilliant- uniquely formed and divinely woven together with the ability to light up this world through goodness and kindness, bravery and resilience. Your shimmer is multi-faceted and potential uncontainable. Created with purpose, you were destined to shine. Over the next seven days, explore who God created you to be and awaken to a life defined by radical love, bold faith, and unstoppable hope.

We all have emotions that compete for control of our lives. And those emotions can get us in trouble when we let them be the boss of us. In this 7-day reading plan, Andy Stanley shares a scriptural “how-to” about saying no to destructive emotions. We need to monitor our hearts—not just our behavior—to prevent emotions like guilt, envy, fear, and anger from bossing us around.

For years Christians have asked, "What would Jesus do?" But what if we asked a better, more illuminating question: "What Made Jesus Mad?" Jesus didn't cringe at the sinners; rather, he cringed at the religious phonies, arrogant judges, and hypocrites. What if, by coming to understand God’s holy anger, we come to know a savior we never knew before? Take the first step in this 10 day plan.

Favor is simply God's supernatural provision that enables us to live beyond our natural abilities. It is available to everyone, and it comes by grace. Learn how to pursue God's favor over the next 21 days, and ready yourself for an outpouring of favor that will accelerate your kingdom assignment!

My favorite way to focus on the “red stuff” in the New Testament—the words of Jesus—is to ask “the Oprah question.” Near the back of every O Magazine, and near the end of the popular talk show she once hosted, Oprah asks her celebrity guests this brilliant question: “What’s one thing you know for sure?” As a lifelong journalist, I’ve interviewed hundreds of people over the years, and I think the Oprah Question is the best single interview question I’ve ever heard. So I co-opted her question, morphing it into this: “Based on this Scripture passage alone, what’s one thing I know for sure about Jesus?” As a random exercise in asking the Oprah Question, let’s read through one chapter from Matthew’s Gospel that’s loaded with red stuff—chapter 15—quickly determining what we know for sure about Jesus as we scan through the things he said and did. We’ll sometimes read the same passage but answer the question differently. (Taken from the book The Jesus-Centered Life by Rick Lawrence, a companion to the Jesus-Centered Bible—jesuscenteredbible.com.)