Podcast
Daily Readings by Wild at Heart
Hosted by John Eldredge · EN
Daily Readings are a daily excerpt from books and teachings from John and Stasi Eldredge and Morgan Snyder.
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Soul Care
2d ago00:03:59Tap to summarizeWe’re going to want our souls strong and ready for the days ahead, filled with God, not fried and empty. So we must practice soul care.I’m not suggesting you go on a witch hunt for every neglected place in your soul. There’s way too much loss in there to take on all at once. Many people are afraid to feel any of it, fearing that if they start crying, they’ll never stop. It isn’t true, but let’s be kind; let’s approach this realistically. Pick one thing you would call a loss or disappointment that you feel you’ve had to put aside because there wasn’t time or space to deal with it when it happened.Has a movie or song brought you to tears recently (perhaps there’s a song that always brings a few tears?). Play it again, and pay attention — why? What is this awakening in you? Put some words to it. The neglected losses are in there; give them a voice.Then what? Allow your soul to feel. Don’t tell it what to feel; it knows what to do. Just give it permission. It might be anger at first, or it might be sadness, loneliness, why bother? You might find yourself shouting some profanities — that’s okay. Your losses matter. Don’t edit yourself into silence.Anger is a pretty common first reaction to unattended loss. Let it out. Grab a kitchen spatula and start whacking the pillows on your couch, all the while naming why you are so angry over this loss.What you’re doing through this practice is becoming present to your own soul, to places that were left behind.The next step is to invite Jesus in. Invite his love, his comfort, his presence into this specific loss, for his presence brings mercy and healing. I find it important to ask, “What do you have to say about this, God? What are you saying to me about my losses?” His comforting words of interpretation, or promise, are part of the healing.Sometimes what I need is a walk to my little stream. I just need to sit, and sitting by water really helps. Beauty heals; beauty contains within it the promise of restoration.In the past, when I became aware of something in my soul needing his touch, mercy, or deep healing, I would bring it to Jesus in prayer and ask him to do so. The results were mixed. Sometimes it seemed to work, sometimes not. During my road trip to Montana, Jesus began to show me something quite helpful — we can’t stand at a distance from our own soul and ask Christ to “go in there and deal with it.” This isn’t hostage negotiation; we don’t hide a block away and hope God takes care of business. This is your own soul we’re talking about; the door opens from the inside. “I stand at the door and knock,” Jesus explained. “If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in” (Revelation 3:20). We open the door to our soul from the inside. This is the purpose of naming the loss, feeling it, allowing ourselves to return to the place in our own being that we walked away from. We must enter these places ourselves — the memory, the emotion, whatever it is we are aware of. We inhabit our own soul again. Jesus insists on it. Once there, we open the door from the inside, inviting Christ in, which he is always so eager to do. Want more? Order your copy of Get Your Life Back today
Transcribe →Sideshows
3d ago00:01:15Tap to summarizeIt seems that much of what Christians believe they are called to these days is a cluster of activities that include regular church attendance, Bible study, prayer, giving, concern for justice, and attending the annual men or women’s retreat. Now — what is all that activity for? What are those things supposed to do to us, or in us? If it’s not restoring the whole man, it may not be in line with what God is doing. Because that’s clearly what he’s up to. Back to Jesus’ argument with the Pharisees. He says,“These peoples’ heart has become callused. They hardly hear with their ears. They have closed their eyes. Otherwise, they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them.”Do you hear the offer? Do you see what he is so upset about? They have completely missed the point of what God is up to, what he is after in a person’s life: to heal him as a human being. This is so essential to your view of the Gospel and your own approach to Christianity. Really — it will shape your convictions about everything else. Want more? Order your copy of Free to Live today
Transcribe →Our Lives Are Stories
4d ago00:02:02Tap to summarizeIf you want to get to know someone, you need to know their story. Their life is a story. It, too, has a past and a future. It, too, unfolds in a series of scenes over the course of time. Why is Grandfather so silent? Why does he drink too much? Well, let me tell you. There was a terrible battle in World War II, in the South Pacific, on an island called Okinawa. Tens of thousands of American men died or were wounded there; some of them were your grandfather's best friends. He was there, too, and saw things he has never been able to forget."But in order to make you understand," explained novelist Virginia Woolf, "to give you my life, I must tell you a story."I expect all of us, at one time or another, in an attempt to understand our lives or discover what we ought to do, have gone to someone else with our stories. This is not merely the province of psychotherapists and priests, but of any good friend. "Tell me what happened. Tell me your story, and I'll try to help you make some sense of it."We humans share these lingering questions: "Who am I really? Why am I here? Where will I find life? What does God want of me?" The answers to these questions seem to come only when we know the rest of the story.As Neo said in The Matrix Reloaded, "I just wish I knew what I am supposed to do." If life is a story, what is the plot? What is your role to play? It would be good to know that, wouldn't it? What is this all about? Want more? Order your copy of Epic today
Transcribe →On the Side of Good
5d ago00:02:15Tap to summarizeWe are now in the late stages of the long and vicious war against the human heart. I know — it sounds overly dramatic. I almost didn't use the term "war" at all, for fear of being dismissed at this point as one more in the group of "Chicken Littles," Christians who run around trying to get everybody worked up over some imaginary fear in order to advance their political or economic or theological cause. But I am not hawking fear at all; I am speaking honestly about the nature of what is unfolding around us ... against us. And until we call the situation what it is, we will not know what to do about it. In fact, this is where many people feel abandoned or betrayed by God. They thought that becoming a Christian would somehow end their troubles, or at least reduce them considerably. No one ever told them they were being moved to the front lines, and they seem genuinely shocked at the fact that they've been shot at.Hello? That's what happens in war — you get shot at. Have you forgotten? We were born into a world at war. This scene we're living in is no sitcom; it's bloody battle. Haven't you noticed with what deadly accuracy the wound was given? Those blows you've taken — they were not random accidents at all. They hit dead center.On and on it goes. The wound is too well aimed and far too consistent to be accidental. It was an attempt to take you out; to cripple or destroy your strength and get you out of the action. Do you know why there's been such an assault? The Enemy fears you. You are dangerous big-time. If you ever really got your heart back, lived from it with courage, you would be a huge problem to him. You would do a lot of damage ... on the side of good. Remember how valiant and effective God has been in the history of the world? You are a stem of that victorious stalk. Want more? Order your copy of Wild at Heart today
Transcribe →If Deadness Is Next to Godliness
6d ago00:01:20Tap to summarizeIf the way to avoid the murderous rage and deceptive allures of desire is to kill it, if deadness is next to godliness, then Jesus had to be the deadest person ever. But he is called the living God. "It is a dreadful thing," the writer of Hebrews says, "to fall into the hands of the living God ... For our 'God is a consuming fire'" (10:31; 12:29). And what is this consuming fire? His jealous love (Deut. 4:24). God is a deeply, profoundly passionate person. Zeal consumes him. It is the secret of his life, the writer of Hebrews says. The "joy set before him" enabled Jesus to endure the agony of the Cross (Heb. 12:2). In other words, his profound desire for something greater sustained him at the moment of his deepest trial. We cannot hope to live like him without a similar depth of passion. Many people find that the dilemma of desire is too much to live with, and so they abandon, they disown their desire. This is certainly true of a majority of Christians at present. Somehow we believe that we can get on without it. We are mistaken.Want more? Order your copy of The Journey of Desire today
Transcribe →What Role Are You Playing?
1w ago00:01:30Tap to summarizeWe come into the world with a longing to be known and a deep-seated fear that we aren't what we should be. We are set up for a crisis of identity.And then, says Frederick Buechner, the world goes to work: Starting with the rather too pretty young woman and the charming but rather unstable young man, who together know no more about being parents than they do the far side of the moon, the world sets in to making us what the world would like us to be, and because we have to survive after all, we try to make ourselves into something that we hope the world will like better than it apparently did the selves we originally were. That is the story of all our lives, needless to say, and in the process of living out that story, the original, shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us hardly end up living out of it at all. Instead, we live out all the other selves which we are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world's weather. (Telling Secrets) Think about the part you find yourself playing, the self you put on like a costume. Who cast you in this role? Most of us are living out a script that someone else has written for us. We've not been invited to live from our heart, to be who we truly are, so we put on these false selves hoping to offer something more acceptable to the world, something functional. We learn our roles starting very young and we learn them well.Want more? Order your copy of The Sacred Romance today
Transcribe →Grace
1w ago00:02:17Tap to summarizeThe human soul is a place of profound mysteries. God is a person of infinite creativity. He can do this any way he wants. Sometimes he goes straight for the wound or the brokenness. Having had that healed, we find it far easier to resist the enemy and renounce our sins. Sometimes it requires binding the enemy first, simply so we can think clearly enough to do the repenting and find the healing we need. This is an outline to the process whereby we become holy in his name. Jesus will guide you. Ask him to guide you.Do not be surprised or discouraged if you find that it takes more than one round of prayer. It didn’t take you a day to get into this mess. Sometimes you’ll have to pray again in a month, and then again in six months. Listen carefully: This doesn’t mean that “it didn’t work.” Quite often Christ comes back in our lives for a deeper work of healing. Even if you’re only eighteen, the sun has gone down a lot of times in your life; there’s a lot of past there. But if you’re fifty-eight, there’s a whole lot more past to your story. So be gracious, be patient; it doesn’t mean you’re blowing it if Christ brings it up again. It simply means it’s time for another round, and so you go back again through this exact process of repentance and deliverance and healing.The beauty is that as you become more whole, you can become holier. And as you become holier, you can become more whole. Trying to choose one without the other I think has really brought people a great deal of distress, brought them to the conviction that no real change takes place in this life. It’s not true. It’s just that discipline is not enough. As my wife Stasi was saying just the other day, “You can’t repent your way out of brokenness.” It simply doesn’t work. We repent our sins; the brokenness must be healed. Furthermore, this isn’t simply about the sweet love of Jesus. You have an enemy, strongholds are real, and you must break those agreements and banish the enemy.Want more? Order your copy of Free to Live today.
Transcribe →A Prayer for Mental Resilience
1w ago00:06:26Tap to summarizeMental resilience begins when we decide to take hold of our thought life. Navy SEAL training includes teaching the recruits positive self-talk. Apparently we say something like three hundred to one thousand words to ourselves every minute. You know from experience that a whole bunch of it is negative. Mental resilience is built by intentionally, consciously saying positive things — which for the believer would be all the beautiful truths of Scripture. God is with me. I am secure. Christ lives within me. I have the strength that prevails. Positive self-talk helps calm fears aroused by the amygdala, that part of the brain that governs anxiety.In recent days I’ve found myself driving along reciting out loud the opening lines from the Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus ...”So simple, but so very helpful. This is what I believe; this is what I believe.Reading and memorizing scripture builds mental resilience because it is a living, breathing text in which you encounter God, and through which you get perspective on the world. How good would it be for your mental health to be reminded each day that Jesus is Lord of all, “running the universe, everything from galaxies to governments, no name and no power exempt from his rule” (Ephesians 1:20–21 The message). Try reading Isaiah 40 for five days in a row and watch what it does for your soul. Join me in this prayer:Begin with three deep breaths.Search me, God, and know my heart ... know my anxious thoughts (Psalm 139:23).I come to you, Jesus, for peace of mind. I give my mind to you. I set my mind on you. Capture my every thought. I surrender all the news. All worry and speculation. I surrender everything grabbing my attention.I give you my thoughts, Jesus. All of my mental life: my focus and attention, my memory and recall, my understanding and imagination. I dedicate the life of my mind to you, Lord Jesus, and you alone.The mind governed by God’s Spirit is life and peace (Romans 8:6). Holy Spirit, Spirit of God, come and fill my mind. Come and fill my thoughts. Fill my mind with life and peace.Repeat that ...Holy Spirit, Spirit of God, come and fill my mind. Come and fill my thoughts. Fill my mind with life and peace.For we have the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16). I pray to be one mind with you, Jesus. One thought, one imagination, one mental life. I receive the mind of Christ. I receive the mind of Christ.Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, right and pure, lovely and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise (Philippians 4:8). Think about something beautiful, some thing that reminds you of the goodness of God. A place you love. A sweet memory. Something in nature. Something that makes you smile.Now stay with that today. Want more? Order your copy of Resilient today
Transcribe →To Harden Our Hearts
1w ago00:01:45Tap to summarizeWhat makes the Day of Judgment so unnerving is that all our posing and all our charades will be pulled back, all secrets will be made known, and our Lord will "expose the motives of men's hearts" (1 Cor. 4:5, emphasis added).This is the point of the famous Sermon on the Mount. Jesus first says we haven't a hope of heaven unless our righteousness "surpasses that of the Pharisees" (Matt. 5:20). How can that be? They were fastidious rule keepers, pillars of the church, model citizens. Yes, Jesus says, and most of it was hypocrisy. The Pharisees prayed to impress men with their spirituality. They gave to impress men with their generosity. Their actions looked good, but their motives were not. Their hearts, as the saying goes, weren't in the right place. A person's character is determined by his motives, and motive is always a matter of the heart. This is what Scripture means when it says that man looks at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart. God doesn't judge us by our looks or our intelligence; he judges us by our hearts.It makes sense, then, that Scripture also locates our conscience in our hearts. Paul says that even those who do not know God's law "show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness" (Rom. 2:15), such as when your child looks guilty for having told a lie. This is why it is so dangerous to harden our hearts by silencing our consciences, and why the offer of forgiveness is such good news, to have our "hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience" (Heb.10:22 NRSV). Oh, the joy of living from right motives, from a clean heart. I doubt that those who want to dismiss the heart want to dismiss our consciences, set aside the importance of character.Want more? Order your copy of Waking the Dead today
Transcribe →Neglecting Our Soul
1w ago00:02:52Tap to summarizeIt’s human nature to want our problems to simply go away. Be honest now — how many of us have heard a troubling tick, tick, tick or thump, thump, thump coming from the general direction of our car’s engine or transmission and not done a thing about it, hoping it would just go away? We do this with our health all the time — that painful little hitch, the lump, the troubling indigestion, those few extra pounds cry for our attention, but we let it pass for months or even years, hoping it will magically sort itself out.How much more our souls. In this busy, mad, distracted world, it’s just too easy (and far more efficient) to send your soul to the back of the bus. Low priority. Maybe later. But you, my reader, have read this far, and I'm so proud of you! You’re making the hard choices that will bear fruit for years and years to come.So ... next step. Let’s talk about neglected places in your soul.I’m beginning the conversation with neglected loss, disappointment, and grief not because these are the main issues in any person’s life, but because these are the things we tend to run from. Of course we do. We run from pain, run back to our normal lives, try to pretend we aren’t bereaved, bereft, whatever the loss may be. Problem is, we are running from huge tracts of our own soul, leaving them behind, and then we can’t find more of God because we are looking with so little of our own soul.It takes more of you to find more of God.We often can’t find the more of God we long for, because we are looking with so little of ourselves. Too much of us has been left behind. Just as the assault on our attention keeps pushing us into the shallows, so that we no longer hear deep calling unto deep, the pace of life rushes us past significant moments of disappointment and loss, and in doing so continues the “shallowfication” of our souls. We are like eroded stream banks, a little more shaved off every year. Or like the lonesome hero in “Desperado,” who was losing all his “highs and lows” as his feelings simply went away.So this is a good place to push back. We may have neglected our soul’s need for beauty. We may have neglected our soul’s need for play. But I have reason to believe that unattended loss is a good place to start if you would recover and heal the vessel God wants to fill, if you would open up room in your life for him to meet you there. Want more? Order your copy of Get Your Life Back today
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