Tag Archives: Spiritual Renewal

Devotional, Series

GOD BEGINNINGS, Part 10: Rivers in the Wasteland

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Read Isaiah 43:19–21

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
Even when I walk through the darkest valley, I will not be afraid, for you are close beside me. Your rod and your staff protect and comfort me.” (Psalm 23:4 NLT)

A clear river winds through a volcanic wasteland beneath a scarred mountain. Elk drink from the water as birds fly overhead and fresh vegetation emerges among ash, fallen trees, and mineral-rich soil.
Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “Rivers in the Wasteland” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

I have loved volcanoes since I was a boy. I had a book about them that I returned to repeatedly, studying the pictures and learning about the devastation—and transformation—they could produce. Two volcanoes especially captured my imagination: Mount Vesuvius and Mount St. Helens.

Vesuvius possessed the mystery of the ancient world. Its eruption in 79 CE buried entire communities beneath ash and volcanic debris, capturing human fear and imagination for nearly two millennia. As a boy, I was fascinated by the pictures and by the story of a thriving world suddenly entombed beneath the earth.

Mount St. Helens felt different because its eruption was not ancient history. It happened in 1980, during my lifetime. The blast leveled forests, displaced wildlife, and left hundreds of square miles looking barren. The photographs showed a landscape so thoroughly devastated that it seemed impossible for life ever to flourish there again.

Perhaps that was what fascinated me most. Volcanoes reveal both the terrifying power of destruction and creation’s astonishing capacity for renewal.

There is nothing romantic about the devastation they cause. Landscapes disappear. Habitats collapse. Lives are lost. What once sustained life becomes difficult to recognize.

Yet devastation is not the only thing volcanoes produce. As volcanic material weathers over time, it releases minerals into the earth. What initially buried the landscape can eventually contribute to remarkably fertile soil. New plants take root. Animals return. Entire ecosystems begin developing across ground that once appeared incapable of sustaining anything.

The landscape does not return unchanged. The forest growing around Mount St. Helens is not the same forest that stood there before the eruption. New life does not erase the devastation or restore everything that was lost. It emerges from altered ground.

Volcanoes remind us of a truth embedded within creation: destruction may radically change the landscape without gaining the authority to determine its final future.

The people receiving the words of Isaiah 43 understood what it meant for their world to erupt. Jerusalem had fallen. The Temple had been destroyed. Many had been carried into exile in Babylon. Their political, religious, and communal lives had been torn apart. They were not enduring a temporary inconvenience. They were living amid the collapse of the world they had known.

Into that devastation, a later prophetic voice continuing in Isaiah’s tradition announces that God is making a road through the wilderness and creating rivers in the wasteland.

God does not deny that the wasteland exists. Scripture does not tell the exiles to rename devastation as blessing, pretend that displacement did not wound them, or become grateful for everything they had suffered. Babylonian exile was not good merely because God could bring life from it. Faith does not require us to call destruction holy before we are permitted to hope.

Instead, Isaiah announces that devastation does not exhaust God’s creative possibilities.

Psalm 23 offers a similar promise: “Even when I walk through the darkest valley…” The familiar language of the King James Version calls it “the valley of the shadow of death.” Either way, the psalm does not promise that faithful people will never enter death-shadowed terrain. It promises that we do not enter it alone.

The crucial word is through.

God’s presence does not always remove the valley or immediately return us to where we were before entering it. Sometimes the only faithful path leads directly through terrain we would rather avoid. Yet Isaiah adds something astonishing to that promise. God not only accompanies the people through the wasteland; God brings water into it.

God creates the conditions through which life can emerge in the very place that appeared incapable of sustaining it.

Isaiah says that even the wild animals will honor God because God provides water in the wilderness. On the surface, this is a beautiful picture of creation receiving God’s provision. Within prophetic language, however, wild animals often carried an additional meaning. Jackals, ostriches, and other wilderness creatures were associated with abandoned ruins. Their presence indicated that human settlements had collapsed and cultivated places had reverted to wilderness.

They were signs that civilization had left and desolation had taken over.

Isaiah reverses the image. The wild animals no longer testify only to abandonment. They become witnesses to renewal. The creatures most closely associated with the wasteland are among the first to recognize that water is flowing there.

There may even be some prophetic irony in that. God asks the people, “Do you not see it?” Meanwhile, the wild animals are already drinking.

Creation recognizes God’s provision while human beings are still deciding whether it counts.

Perhaps that is because we frequently expect renewal to look like restoration to a former condition. We want the same forest, the same structures, the same communities, the same bodies, the same relationships, or the same versions of ourselves we knew before everything erupted. We pray for new life while quietly defining it as the recovery of the old one.

But God does not promise the exiles a replica of their past. By the time the first exiles returned, nearly fifty years had passed since Jerusalem’s destruction—and about sixty since the first major deportation. Many returnees had been born in Babylon and knew Judah only through inherited stories. Meanwhile, Judah had not remained empty. Those who survived there had cultivated the land, raised families, and formed lives of their own. The return brought competing claims about land, belonging, and authority—not an uncomplicated homecoming. There was no road back to the world as it had been. God would have to make a new one.

The Church must hear this when looking at struggling congregations, neglected neighborhoods, wounded communities, and people whose lives no longer fit familiar expectations. Institutions often survey altered ground, calculate what has been lost, and conclude that nothing valuable can grow there. Resources are withdrawn. Communities are abandoned. People are treated as liabilities because they cannot reproduce what existed before.

God sees differently.

God sees the minerals hidden within the ash. God sees water beneath the wasteland. God sees ecosystems that do not yet resemble anything we recognize. And those dismissed as wild, unwanted, unrespectable, or out of place may be the first to drink from the river and recognize that God has not abandoned the terrain.

The same is true within us. Some experiences alter us permanently. We may never become the person we were before the eruption, and healing does not require us to do so. God’s new creation is not confined to reconstructing an earlier version of our lives. Grace can nourish something genuinely new—something shaped by what we have survived without being defined solely by it.

The ash remains part of the ground, but it does not prevent the ground from becoming fertile.

God leads us through the valley. God remains with us in the wasteland. Then, sometimes slowly and beyond the timetable we would choose, living water begins to flow through the devastation.

The wasteland is real.

But it does not get the final word.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
God does not always restore the former landscape; sometimes God creates a new ecosystem within it.

PRAYER
Life-giving God, remain with us when the landscape of our lives is altered beyond recognition. Lead us through death-shadowed valleys, help us perceive the rivers you are creating, and give us courage to welcome life even when it does not resemble what came before. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).

Devotional, Series

GOD BEGINNINGS, Part 9: Can You See It?

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Read Isaiah 43:18–19

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“And the one sitting on the throne said, ‘Look, I am making everything new!’ And then he said to me, ‘Write this down, for what I tell you is trustworthy and true.’” (Revelation 21:5 NLT)

Two groundhogs emerge from their burrow at dawn in a Pennsylvania landscape. Bare trees and lingering frost surround them, while tiny green shoots and warm sunlight quietly reveal that spring has already begun.
Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “Can You See It?” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

During the last couple of years I lived in Pennsylvania, I knew spring had arrived when the groundhogs began appearing. First, I would see Mama and Papa Groundhog venturing out again. Then, later in the spring, their pups would emerge and begin exploring the world around them.

And no—they never appeared on Groundhog Day.

They followed no human calendar and waited for no ceremonial announcement. By the time I saw them, the changing season was already underway. Life had been stirring beneath the ground before any groundhog—or pastor—appeared above it.

That is the tension within God’s question through Isaiah: “I have already begun! Do you not see it?” God is not merely promising that something new will happen eventually. God declares that the new thing is already emerging, even while the wilderness still looks like a wilderness.

These words were not written by the eighth-century prophet Isaiah himself. They come from a later prophetic voice continuing in Isaiah’s tradition, speaking to the people of Judah during the Babylonian exile. Jerusalem had fallen, the Temple had been destroyed, and the people were living far from home under foreign rule. They needed more than a comforting memory of what God had once done; they needed to recognize what God was beginning to do among them now.

The exiles knew what God had done before. Their ancestors had been enslaved in Egypt, trapped between Pharaoh’s army and the sea, with no visible road to freedom. Then God divided the waters and made a way where no way appeared possible. The Exodus became the defining testimony of Israel’s deliverance—a sacred memory passed from one generation to the next.

Yet Isaiah declares, “But forget all that—it is nothing compared to what I am going to do.” God is not commanding the people to erase their history or diminish what God had done. In fact, the verses immediately preceding this passage deliberately invoke the Exodus. The past still testifies to God’s faithful character.

The warning concerns what happens when sacred memory becomes a boundary around what God may do next.

Before, God made a road through the sea. Now, God promises a road through the wilderness. Before, God divided the waters. Now, God promises to bring water into a wasteland. The landscape changes. The method changes. God’s faithfulness remains.

The people knew how to recognize the God who made a road through the sea. The question was whether they could recognize that same God making a road through unfamiliar terrain.

God declares, “I have already begun! Do you not see it?”

That question suggests something unsettling: God’s new work may already be emerging while God’s people remain unable—or unwilling—to perceive it. They may be staring toward the sea, waiting for familiar waters to divide, while life is already breaking through somewhere else.

This does not mean that everything new comes from God. Newness alone is not evidence of holiness. Not every innovation is faithful, every disruption is deliverance, or every promise of change is life-giving. Institutions can adopt new language, introduce new programs, and advertise new visions without confronting injustice, relinquishing control, or changing anything substantive.

God’s new work must be discerned according to God’s revealed character. Does it produce the fruit of the Spirit? Does it cultivate love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control? Does it tell the truth, practice mercy, pursue justice, extend hospitality, loosen bonds, and restore life?

Discernment protects us from two equal dangers: worshiping novelty simply because it is new and rejecting God’s work simply because it is unfamiliar.

The second danger can be particularly difficult for churches and institutions to recognize. We may pray passionately for renewal while quietly prescribing what renewal must look like. It must use our familiar language, preserve our established structures, affirm our existing authority, and resemble a previous season when God’s presence seemed especially clear.

A testimony can become a template. A former movement can become a monument. Nostalgia can disguise itself as faithfulness.

Then, when new life begins emerging through unfamiliar people, overlooked communities, or places we had dismissed as barren, we may resist the very renewal for which we prayed. We may conclude that God is absent because God is not working through the people, practices, and patterns we expected.

The same temptation exists within us personally. We can become attached to the way God once met us, the work through which we once served, what once gave our lives meaning, or the person we once believed we had to be. Those memories may remain sacred, but they do not have to dictate our future. Honoring who we have been does not require us to remain there.

Sometimes the new thing God is revealing is not an opportunity appearing outside us, but a truer life already emerging within us. It may begin quietly—small enough to overlook, unfamiliar enough to mistrust, and alive before anyone else recognizes or approves it.

The past testifies that God makes ways where none appear possible. Faith trusts that God is not restricted to making the same way twice. Honestly, I praise Jesus for that!

Friends, the new thing may already be emerging.

Can you see it?

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
God’s faithfulness does not require God to repeat the past.

PRAYER
Faithful God, free us from confusing familiarity with faithfulness. Teach us to honor what you have done without restricting what you may do next. Give us wisdom to discern your character, courage to recognize your new work, and faith to follow the road you are creating. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).

Devotional

God Was Already Here

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Read Genesis 28:10–22

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“A certain woman named Lydia, a worshiper of God, was listening to us; she was from the city of Thyatira and a dealer in purple cloth. The Lord opened her heart to listen eagerly to what was said by Paul.” (Acts 16:14 NRSVue)

A winding yellow brick road stretches through a peaceful countryside at sunrise, leading toward distant hills beneath a glowing sky. A weathered stone rests beside the road, subtly recalling Jacob's pillow, while the warm morning light suggests both new beginnings and the quiet realization that holy ground has been present all along.
Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “God Was Already Here” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

I’ve always had a soft spot for The Wizard of Oz. It remains one of my favorite films, and I’ve watched it many times over the course of my life. As a child, it captured my imagination. The Wicked Witch of the West terrified me, yet I couldn’t look away. Like many children, I saw the story as a simple battle between good and evil.

As I’ve grown older, however, I’ve come to appreciate that the story is far more nuanced than I first realized. The Wicked Witch is certainly the villain, but she isn’t simply wicked for wickedness’s sake. Dorothy’s unexpected arrival sets tragedy in motion. A house falls from the sky, her sister is killed, and the shoes she believes belong to her are suddenly worn by someone else. None of that excuses her choices, but it reminds me that stories—and people—are often more complicated than they first appear.

Still, the moment that has stayed with me most isn’t the Witch or even the Wizard. It’s the ending. Dorothy has finally defeated the Witch. The Wizard’s promises have fallen apart. The journey seems over, yet the one thing she still longs for—home—remains just out of reach. Then Glinda gently reveals what Dorothy never imagined: the means to return home had been with her almost the entire journey. The slippers hadn’t changed. Dorothy had. What she needed was not something new, but new eyes to recognize what had been there all along.

As I write this, I am sitting at my desk on the first day of a new season of ministry. The months leading here were filled with spiritual renewal, prayer, healing, waiting, and rediscovering joy. Looking back, I realize that while I thought I was preparing for whatever came next, God was quietly preparing me to recognize work that had already begun.

That realization brings me to Jacob.

Fleeing uncertainty, Jacob stops for the night with nothing more than a stone for a pillow. While he sleeps, he dreams of a ladder stretching between heaven and earth, with angels ascending and descending upon it. When he awakens, he doesn’t declare that God has suddenly arrived. Instead, he says, “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.”

The ground had not become holy overnight.

Jacob had simply awakened to a holiness that had always been there.

The same pattern appears again in the book of Acts. When Paul meets Lydia by the river, Scripture tells us that the Lord had already opened her heart. Paul did not manufacture faith. He did not bring God’s presence into Lydia’s life. He became a witness to the work God had already begun.

How often do we make the same mistake?

We begin a new job and wonder what we will accomplish.

We move into a new neighborhood and wonder how we will make a difference.

We join a new church and ask what ministry we will build.

Yet Scripture gently redirects our attention. Before we ever arrive, God is already there. Before we ever speak, the Holy Spirit is already moving. Before we ever begin serving, grace has already gone ahead of us.

We are not the authors of God’s work. We are witnesses to it.

That truth is both humbling and liberating. It reminds us that the success of God’s Kingdom does not rest on our shoulders. Our calling is not to create God’s presence, but to recognize it. Not to initiate grace, but to participate in it. Not to bring Christ into the world, but to join Christ where the Holy One is already at work.

Wherever you find yourself today—a new season, a new challenge, a new relationship, or simply another ordinary day—perhaps the most faithful prayer is not, “God, come here.”

Perhaps it is:

“Open my eyes.”

You may discover, like Jacob, that the ground beneath your feet is holier than you ever imagined.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
Faith begins not by bringing God somewhere new, but by recognizing the Holy One who has been there all along.

PRAYER
Holy One, thank You for always going before us. Open our eyes to recognize Your presence in the people we meet, the places we enter, and the ordinary moments we too easily overlook. Give us humble hearts to join the work You have already begun, trusting that Your grace is always one step ahead of our own. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).

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From the Archives: SEVEN LOADED LETTERS, Part 6: The Church that Played Dead

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Read Revelation 3:1–6

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“These people say they are mine. They honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.” (Isaiah 29:13 NLT)

The Book of Revelation opens not not with beasts or bowls, but with a voice—a call that echoes through time and space to a Church both ancient and present. These seven letters, delivered to communities scattered across Asia Minor, are more than historical artifacts. They are loaded with truth, urgency, and love. They speak to us, challenge us, and strip away illusions. In every age, Christ’s words to the Church still ask us to listen—and respond.

Image: AI-generated using OpenAI’s DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “The Church That Played Dead” at Life-Giving Water Devotion

Part 6: The Church That Played Dead. They had a name for being alive. People looked at them and saw success. Momentum. Activity. A solid reputation. And yet, Jesus—who sees beyond appearances—spoke a truth that silenced the room: “You are dead.”

Sardis wasn’t being persecuted. They weren’t being tested. They weren’t in crisis. That might have been the problem. They were comfortable, confident, and coasting on yesterday’s faith. The form remained. But the fire had gone out.

This wasn’t a church that failed to perform—it was a church that learned how to perform too well. And that’s what makes Sardis feel so familiar today.

We see it in churches built like brands—polished, televised, franchised. Places where celebrity pastors replace shepherds, and worship feels more like spectacle than surrender. We see it in the rise of prosperity preaching, partisan pulpits, and marketing strategies baptized as mission. These churches are full. Loud. Impressive. But Jesus isn’t impressed. He never was.

But it’s not just in megachurches.

We see it in denominational dashboards, where vitality gets reduced to numbers: attendance, professions of faith, giving units, mission hours logged. Boxes get checked. Goals get met. Reports get filed. But hearts remain unchanged.

Jesus was never about numbers. He was about relationships.

His movement went from one, to three, to twelve, to thousands, and back again to twelve, then three at the cross. His mission wasn’t built on crowd retention—it was built on deep, costly, unshakable love.

Not image. Not metrics. But faithfulness.

When Jesus says to Sardis, “Wake up. Strengthen what remains and is about to die,” it’s not a rejection—it’s a rescue.

He doesn’t say it’s too late. He says there’s still something left. But it won’t survive on autopilot. It won’t be saved by better branding or busier programming. It has to return to the source. To Him.

“These people say they are mine. They honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.” (Isaiah 29:13 NLT)

And then there’s this, from Jesus himself:

“You are like whitewashed tombs—beautiful on the outside, but filled with dead bones and all sorts of impurity.” (Matthew 23:27 NLT)

This is the danger of playing dead: you forget you’re supposed to be alive.

But resurrection is still on offer.

Jesus says, “If you do not wake up, I will come like a thief.” The language is sharp because the stakes are real. A church can do all the “right” things, and still lose the thread. Still fall asleep at the altar. Still drift into a coma of respectability.

But not everyone in Sardis gave up.

“Yet you have a few people… who have not soiled their clothes. They will walk with me, dressed in white, for they are worthy.” (Revelation 3:4 NLT)

To those few, Jesus doesn’t say, “Start a rebellion.” He says, “Hold on.”

Stay awake. Stay faithful. Stay close.

This isn’t about recapturing success. It’s about reclaiming life. The Church doesn’t need to prove it’s alive. It needs to return to the One who is.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
You can’t build resurrection on reputation. Only Jesus gives life that lasts.

PRAYER
Wake us up, Lord. Strip away the illusions we’ve built. Forgive us for confusing noise with life, numbers with faithfulness, and performance with presence. Strengthen what remains. Help us return to you—not for appearances, but for love. Amen.

Christian Liturgical Season, Devotional

Altar Audit, part 1: The Altar of Architecture

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Read Daniel 4:28–37

ALSO IN SCRIPTURE
“All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field.” (Isaiah 40:6 NLT)

Altars reveal what we worship. Some are obvious—raised platforms of stone and flame. Others are quieter, constructed in systems, reputations, loyalties, and assumptions. Lent is a season of holy examination. It calls us to look closely at what we have built, what we defend, and what we trust. In this series, we will conduct an audit—not of budgets or buildings, but of allegiances. Lent strips away every false altar until only Christ remains.

A modern concrete altar sits cracked down the center in a civic plaza beneath an overcast sky, distant skyline blurred behind it. The words “Altar Audit,” “The Altar of Architecture,” and “Life-Giving Water Devotions” are overlaid in white.
Image: AI-generated using DALL·E and customized by the author. Used with the devotional “Altar Audit, Part 1: The Altar of Architecture” at Life-Giving Water Devotions.

Part 1: The Altar of Architecture. Nebuchadnezzar stood on the roof of his royal palace and admired what he had built. Babylon stretched before him—brick, tower, wall, gate, garden. An empire carved into skyline and stone. And he said aloud what empire always whispers in its heart: “Look what I built. Look how great I am.”

Architecture is not just buildings. It is visibility. Permanence. Proof. It is what we construct to convince ourselves—and others—that we are secure.

Babylon was magnificent. No one disputed that. But Daniel tells us the problem was not beauty. The problem was boast. The problem was the subtle shift from gratitude to ownership. From stewardship to supremacy. From gift to mine.

Before the words left his mouth, judgment fell. Not because God resents success, but because pride forgets the Most High. Nebuchadnezzar was stripped—not first of his throne, but of his illusion. He lost his sanity. He lost his cultivated humanity. The king who built monuments ended up grazing like cattle.

Grass.

Isaiah echoes the same truth: “All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field.” Grass grows. Grass flourishes. Grass withers.

Empire builds architecture.
God reminds us we are grass.

Ash Wednesday marks our foreheads with dust and says what Daniel 4 dramatizes: You are not invincible. You are not ultimate. You are not the architect of eternity.

Empire is not just Babylon. It is any system—civil or sacred—that begins to believe its own press.

Nations build towers of strength and assume divine favor. Churches build campuses, platforms, brands, and assume divine endorsement. Institutions construct reputations and confuse growth with righteousness.

Architecture becomes an altar when we begin to worship what we built.

The Church is not immune to Babylonian thinking. We too can stand on the roof and say, “Look at our numbers. Look at our influence. Look at our reach. Look at our impact.” We can assume that scale equals blessing and visibility equals faithfulness. We can protect the structure more fiercely than we protect the Spirit.

But Lent asks a harder question: What happens when the architecture cracks?

Ashes are the great equalizer. Dust levels kings and laborers alike. Empires and denominations return to the ground. Grass does not negotiate its mortality.

Yet Daniel 4 does not end in destruction. It ends in recognition. Nebuchadnezzar lifts his eyes—not to his buildings, but to heaven. And when he does, his sanity returns. His kingdom is restored, but his perspective is altered. He finally confesses that the Most High reigns.

That confession is the pivot. In the wilderness, Jesus is shown all the kingdoms of the world. Architecture on a global scale. Power without the cross. Glory without surrender. The temptation was not merely political—it was architectural. Build something grand. Rule something visible. Take the shortcut.

Jesus refuses. Where Nebuchadnezzar grasped and lost his mind, Christ relinquished and remained fully human. Where empire builds upward, Christ kneels. Where kings boast, Christ empties.

Architecture promises permanence.
Christ promises resurrection.

This Ash Wednesday, the Altar Audit begins by asking: What have we built to feel secure? What structures do we defend more fiercely than love? Where have we confused visibility with faithfulness?

The question is not whether we build. We all build. Families. Careers. Congregations. Ministries. Influence. The question is whether what we build has quietly become what we worship.

Empire says, “Look what we made.”
Lent whispers, “You are dust.”

And in that whisper is mercy. Because when the architecture falls away—when pride dissolves and illusion cracks—what remains is not ruin. What remains is Christ.

Christ, who refused the kingdoms.
Christ, who did not boast.
Christ, who chose the cross over the skyline.
Christ, who does not wither like grass.

Lent strips away every false altar until only Christ remains.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY
If what I have built were taken away, would Christ still be enough?

PRAYER
Most High God, we confess how easily we admire what we have constructed. We measure success by scale and faithfulness by visibility. Mark us again with the truth of dust. Strip away pride that blinds us. Guard us from confusing architecture with allegiance. Teach us to lift our eyes from what we have built to who You are. When our towers tremble, let Christ remain. Amen.

Devotion written by Rev. Todd R. Lattig with the assistance of ChatGPT (OpenAI).