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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Answer His Call
May 2700:02:11Tap to summarizeLife has a way of wearing on a person. Under the weight of losses, pressures, failures, and endless demands, something in our souls begins to wither. Passions dry up. The zeal of a beginning turns into a despairing end. A stone falls heavily down, crushing our will, and in those very places where Jesus once gave birth to vibrant hope, we yield to the grave. Our hearts retreat with a “no more” as death gets ahold of us. But the cemetery is not where we are meant to live. I had the privilege of visiting Israel a few years ago. It was an incredible experience to go to places I had read of and wondered at for so long. One day, I was awed to be standing outside of Lazarus’s tomb. While there, the pastor leading our little group asked us to inquire of God if there were places within us that we had closed in a grave. I knew the answer for me was yes. I was tired. I was hurting. Betrayal from a friend had left me wanting to shrink back from all people. My passion for life had dimmed. My zeal to tell others of the wonders of Jesus had faded. I realized a part of my heart had become buried. And then I felt His call. Jesus’ call to us is the same as His call to Lazarus as He stood before his grave in John 11: “Come out!” he commanded. “Come alive!” We are not meant to live in a tomb. Our callings are needed in the world; they are not to be buried under the burden of others’ demands or judgments. Pain comes, but it does not get to seal our graves. So I ask you, where is death for you? What song has died on your lips at the critics’ continual shaming of your voice? Jesus commands you loudly and firmly to “come out.” And He says it with tears. He is fierce in His instruction and in His intercession for you. He has life for you. Life. Ask Jesus where the tomb holds you and then answer His call. Want more? Order your copy of Defiant Joy today.
Transcribe →Practice All You Have Learned
May 2600:02:45Tap to summarizeDear friends, I hope you see clearly that more of God is our greatest need, our greatest joy, our only rescue. This isn’t optional. He’s the source of the strength and resiliency we need for this hour, the Life that allows us to enjoy everything else in life.So the very simple question is this: What will you do, on a daily and weekly basis, to find God and receive more of him?There are many traditional practices: prayer, fasting, the sacraments. But there are good books on those things. There are also monastic practices like simple work. The summer I lost my dear friend, I built a log rail fence. Long hours of simple, manual labor was exactly what my soul needed. God knew that, brought it to me just in time. He will bring the things you need across your path in the time you need them too. Your soul will let you know when it’s not doing well, when it needs attention, and often what it needs. So let me leave you for now with a piece of advice and a blessing. The advice comes from St. Paul, who lovingly and tenderly offered this to his dear sons and daughters in the faith:Keep putting into practice all you learned and received from me—everything you heard from me and saw me doing. Then the God of peace will be with you. (Philippians 4:9 NLT)I love the kindness of this encouragement. Keep putting into practice. It’s not about perfection; it’s not about being amazing. God is nowhere in the pressure to be amazing. He’s waiting in the simple dailies. Just keep putting into practice the things that heal your soul and bring you more of Jesus. Then the God of peace will be with you. You’ll no longer be sipping God from teaspoons; you’ll learn to drink deeply from the tangible, nourishing, life-giving presence of the eternal God-Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—the fountain of living waters. Which is my blessing:May the Son of God, who is already formed in you, grow in you, so that for you he will become immeasurable, and that in you he will become laughter, exultation, the fullness of joy which no one can take from you. —Isaac of StellaWant more? Order your copy of Get Your Life Back today.
Transcribe →Beauty and Affliction
May 2500:02:31Tap to summarizeSimone Weil was absolutely right—beauty and affliction are the only two things that can pierce our hearts. Because this is so true, we must have a measure of beauty in our lives proportionate to our affliction. No, more. Much more. Is this not God’s prescription for us? Just take a look around. The sights and sounds, the aromas and sensations—the world is overflowing with beauty. God seems to be rather enamored with it. Gloriously wasteful. Apparently, he feels that there ought to be plenty of it in our lives. I am at a loss to say what I want to say regarding beauty. Somehow, that is as it ought to be. Our experience of beauty transcends our ability to speak about it, for its magic lies beyond the power of words.I want to speak of beauty’s healing power, of how it comforts and soothes, yet also how it stirs us, how it moves and inspires. All that sounds ridiculous. You know your own experiences of beauty. Let me call upon them then. Think of your favorite music, or tapestry, or landscape. “We have had a couple of inspiring sunsets this week.” A dear friend sent this in an e-mail: “It was as if the seams of our atmosphere split for a bit of heaven to plunge into the sea. I stood and applauded ... simultaneously I wanted to kneel and weep.” Yes—that’s it. All I want to do is validate those irreplaceable moments, lift any obstacle you may have to filling your life with greater and greater amounts of beauty.We need not fear indulging here. The experience of beauty is unique to all the other pleasures in this: there is no possessive quality to it. Just because you love the landscape doesn’t mean you have to acquire the real estate. Simply to behold the flower is enough; there is nothing in me that wants to consume it. Beauty is the closest thing we have to fullness without possessing on this side of eternity. It heralds the Great Restoration. Perhaps that is why it is so healing—beauty is pure gift. It helps us in our letting go. Want more? Order your copy of The Journey of Desire today.
Transcribe →Beauty Is Not A Number
May 2400:01:16Tap to summarizeGod says our latter glory will exceed our former. To our great loss, in our society we no longer value the wisdom and expertise that comes through living well through many years. Silver hair and wrinkles are earned.I have learned that being beautiful, feeling lovely, and enjoying who we uniquely are has absolutely nothing to do with our weight, our age, or the shape of our bodies. Take that in a moment and try it on for size. Let the possibility of that being true settle into your spirit for a moment before you quickly dismiss the idea. Beauty is not about the hair, the clothes, the marital status, the bank account, or the number on the scale. Being beautiful is a quality of spirit recognized primarily in a woman whose soul is at rest because she believes her God when he calls her lovely. She is no longer striving to reach the world’s unattainable standards of beauty and acceptance but instead is receiving the inheritance that is hers as an image bearer of the living God. She is embracing who God has made her to be.Want more? Order your copy of Becoming Myself today.
Transcribe →Following Him into the Unknown
May 2300:01:23Tap to summarizeEither we wake to tackle our “to do” list, get things done, guided by our morals and whatever clarity we may at the moment have (both rather lacking to the need, I might add); or we wake in the midst of a dangerous Story, as God’s intimate ally, following him into the unknown.If you’re not pursuing a dangerous quest with your life, well, then, you don’t need a Guide. If you haven’t found yourself in the midst of a ferocious war, then you won’t need a seasoned Captain. If you’ve settled in your mind to live as though this is a fairly neutral world and you are simply trying to live your life as best you can, then you can probably get by with the Christianity of tips and techniques. Maybe. I’ll give you about a fifty-fifty chance. But if you intend to live in the Story that God is telling, and if you want the life he offers, then you are going to need more than a handful of principles, however noble they may be. There are too many twists and turns in the road ahead, too many ambushes waiting only God knows where, too much at stake. You cannot possibly prepare yourself for every situation. Narrow is the way, said Jesus. How shall we be sure to find it? We need God intimately, and we need him desperately.“You have made known to me the path of life,” David said (Psalms 16:11). Yes—that’s it. In all the ins and outs of this thing we call living, there is one narrow path to life, and we need help finding it.Want more? Order your copy of Waking the Deadtoday.
Transcribe →Wholehearted
May 2200:01:42Tap to summarize“‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death ‘or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.’ He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” (Revelation 21:4–5)No more tears. No more pain. No more death. No longer any reason to mourn. At the renewal of all things, our hearts are going to be free from grief. The joy of this will far surpass our physical relief. Think of it—if God would offer today to remove from you just one of your greatest sources of internal pain, what would you ask him to remove?And once it were gone, what would your joy be like?Oh my goodness—I would be a happy maniac, dancing in my underwear like David before the ark, running about the neighborhood like Scrooge on Christmas morning, leaping housetop to housetop like the fiddler on the roof. And if all your brokenness were finally and completely healed, and all your sin removed from you as far as the east is from the west—what will you no longer face? What will you finally be? How about your loved ones—what will they no longer wrestle with? What do they finally get to be?We shall, finally and fully, be wholehearted—a wish so deep in my soul I can hardly speak it.Want more? Order your copy of All Things New today.
Transcribe →The Message of the Arrows
May 2100:01:45Tap to summarizeAt some point we all face the same decision—what will we do with the Arrows we’ve known? Maybe a better way to say it is, what have they tempted us to do? However they come to us, whether through a loss we experience as abandonment or some deep violation we feel as abuse, their message is always the same: Kill your heart. Divorce it, neglect it, run from it, or indulge it with some anesthetic (our various addictions). Think of how you’ve handled the affliction that has pierced your own heart. How did the Arrows come to you? Where did they land? Are they still there? What have you done as a result? To say we all face a decision when we’re pierced by an Arrow is misleading. It makes the process sound so rational, as though we have the option of coolly assessing the situation and choosing a logical response. Life isn’t like that—the heart cannot be managed in a detached sort of way (certainly not when we are young, when some of the most defining Arrows strike). It feels more like an ambush, and our response is at a gut level. We may never put words to it. Our deepest convictions are formed without conscious effort, but the effect is a shift deep in our soul. Commitments form never to be in that position again, never to know that sort of pain again. The result is an approach to life that we often call our personality. If you’ll listen carefully to your life, you may begin to see how it has been shaped by the unique Arrows you’ve known and the particular convictions you’ve embraced as a result. The Arrows also taint and partially direct even our spiritual life. Want more? Order your copy of The Sacred Romance today.
Transcribe →Nothing is Lost
May 2000:03:06Tap to summarizeLet me take you back now to the last cup of tea, Luke’s parting, and the ending of our family’s childhood era. It was the Saturday of his high school graduation. We had been through two others before and knew the ritual well. I believe in rituals; they are the last signposts left in a culture of impermanence. But as we sat in the bleachers, unable to stop the unfolding ceremony, watching Luke slowly approach the stage in cap and gown, I was on the brink of sobbing shamelessly. How is this not just loss? my heart cried to God. Tell me—how is everything not just loss? At that moment everything felt like loss. Jesus replied immediately, Oh, John—nothing is lost. Some of you may have experienced in a sermon or during personal Bible study, perhaps in a time of prayer or in a counselor’s office, the ability of Jesus to communicate an entire concept in a single moment. You have a revelation. The Creator of our mind and soul can give to us a sweeping understanding as if by transfusion. If I put into words the revelation given in that moment in the forty-second row at an ordinary high school commencement, Jesus showed me something like this: When the kingdom comes, my dear, heartbroken friend, nothing that was precious to you in this life will be lost. No memory, no event, none of your story or theirs, nothing is lost. How could it be lost? It is all held safe in the heart of the infinite God, who encompasses all things. Held safe outside of time in the treasuries of the kingdom, which transcends yet honors all time. This will all be given back to you at the Restoration, just as surely as your sons will come back to you. Nothing is lost. The effect was nearly instantaneous. I went from a desolate parent saying good-bye—not just to our last child but to an entire era—to a beloved son who had just been given a sneak preview into the Christmas morning that will come upon all the earth. I underwent a complete emotional transformation. All time had stopped in the moment before that moment; now I was completely fine. My body relaxed back into the chair like a man who had just set forth on a Caribbean cruise. I wanted to shout out, “You can carry on—I’m good now." Nothing is lost. If you will just let go of your anger and cynicism for a moment, just allow it to be true for a moment, well then—your heart is going to take a pretty deep breath. Want more? Order your copy of All Things New today
Transcribe →A Sage Draws Us to God
May 1900:04:04Tap to summarizeWe live now in a culture of expertise, so completely second nature to us that we don’t give it a second thought. Cutting-edge advances in science and technology—ever sharpening, ever thrusting forward—are now available to anyone with an Internet connection. If our doctor gives us grave news, we naturally get a second and third opinion from specialists. Businesses regularly hire consultants—experts—to help them get the edge over their competitors, and churches have jumped on the bandwagon as well. It’s become one of our shared assumptions, this reach to “find the expert,” and I wonder if it’s part of the reason we do not under- stand or recognize a true sage. In business circles experts are sometimes even called sages.They are worlds apart.A sage differs from an expert the way a lover differs from an engineer. To begin with, expertise quite often has nothing to do with walking with God, may in fact lead us farther from him. For the expertise of the specialist gives us the settled assurance that he has matters under control, and that we will also, as soon as we put our trust in him. That is why we love him. “The reason your church is not growing is because you’re not marketing yourselves properly to your intended customers.” On a human level, that might be true, might produce some results. But wouldn’t it be better to inquire of God why the church is not growing? The psychology of expertise comes indistinguishably close to the psychology of the Tower of Babel. “We have matters under our control now. Expertise has given us power over our destinies.” And we know how God feels about that.Now of course, there is nothing wrong with expertise—per se. I’d be the first one to find the best heart surgeon in the country should my son need heart surgery. And yet, why is it that we seem to have so few sages in our midst, that most of us have witnessed the sage only in stories like those I’ve recounted? Is it that they don’t exist, or might it be that our near-worship of expertise has pushed the sage to the sidelines? And what are we to make of the passage that tells us, “Everything that does not come from faith is sin” (Rom. 14:23 NIV)? Whatever, whenever, wherever we place our hopes and confidence in something other than God, that is sin. Given mankind’s inexplicable reluctance to rely on God, and nearly limitless ability to rely on anything else, can you see how the culture of expertise actually plays right into our godlessness, despite all our protestations to the contrary?The sage, on the other hand, communes with God—an existence entirely different from and utterly superior to the life of the expert. Whatever counsel he offers, he draws you to God, not to self-reliance. Oh, yes, the sage has wisdom, gleaned from years of experience, and that wisdom is one of his great offerings. But he has learned not to lean upon his wisdom, knowing that often God is asking things of us that seem counterintuitive, and thus his wisdom (and expertise) are fully submitted to his God. Humility might be one of the great dividing lines between the expert and the sage, for the sage doesn’t think he is one. “Do you see a man wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him” (Prov. 26:12 NIV). Thus we might not know we have a sage at the table, for he will remain silent while the “experts” prattle on and on.The experts impress. The sage draws us to God. He offers a gift of presence, the richness of a soul that has lived long with God. Want more? Order your copy of Fathered by God today.
Transcribe →The Biggest African Lion I’ve Ever Seen
May 1800:02:13Tap to summarizeOur local zoo had for years one of the biggest African lions I’ve ever seen. A huge male, nearly five hundred pounds, with a wonderful mane and absolutely enormous paws. Panthera leo. The King of the Beasts. Sure, he was caged, but I’m telling you the bars offered small comfort when you stood within six feet of something that in any other situation saw you as an easy lunch. Honestly, I felt I ought to shepherd my boys past him at a safe distance, as if he could pounce on us if he really wanted to. Yet he was my favorite, and whenever the others would wander on to the monkey house or the tigers, I’d double back just for a few more minutes in the presence of someone so powerful and noble and deadly. Perhaps it was fear mingled with admiration; perhaps it was simply that my heart broke for the big old cat. This wonderful, terrible creature should have been out roaming the savanna, ruling his pride, striking fear into the heart of every wildebeest, bringing down zebras and gazelles whenever the urge seized him. Instead, he spent every hour of every day and every night of every year alone, in a cage smaller than your bedroom, his food served to him through a little metal door. Sometimes late at night, after the city had gone to sleep, I would hear his roar come down from the hills. It sounded not so much fierce, but rather mournful. During all of my visits, he never looked me in the eye. I desperately wanted him to, wanted for his sake the chance to stare me down, would have loved it if he took a swipe at me. But he just lay there, weary with that deep weariness that comes from boredom, taking shallow breaths, rolling now and then from side to side. For after years of living in a cage, a lion no longer even believes it is a lion ... and a man no longer believes he is a man. Want more? Order your copy of Wild at Heart today.
Transcribe →