7 January 2026 - convinced

Today's Readings
(Audio) 

Beloved, if God so loved us,
we also must love one another.

God demonstrated his love for us when "sent his Son as expiation for our sins". In doing so he set us free from those sins, which were always, though in different ways, failures of love. The extreme measures he took to accomplish this make him eminently lovable, as a bridegroom that spared no effort to save his bride. 

No one has ever seen God.
Yet, if we love one another, God remains in us,
and his love is brought to perfection in us.

God is invisible. He is not like a creature where our good behavior may help them and our bad behavior may harm them. Thus, he expects us to demonstrate our love for him by the way that we love one another. This is a valid demonstration because in doing show we show love for what he himself loves. Also, when we do so, it means we allow God to have his way within us, since it is with his own love that we ourselves are called to love. The origin and means of our ability to love is from God. He himself guides us as we seek to love him, showing us how to love others for his sake.

This is how we know that we remain in him and he in us,
that he has given us of his Spirit.

The evidence of the Spirit at work within us takes the shape of lives lived with faith, hope, and charity, grounded in the basic fact "that the Father sent his Son as savior of the world". The Holy Spirit is the origin of our faith, since he reveals to us what flesh and blood cannot. He is the guarantee of our hope, since we possess him as God's love poured out, and the first installment of our eternal inheritance. He is the one who leads us to love, making us bear all the fruits of the Spirit in our lives. 

We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us.
God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in him.

When we agree with the Holy Spirit and acknowledge the truth, especially the truth about Jesus as Lord and Son of God, we grow in faith. When he convinces us of God's love for us we grow in hope. This is like the psalmists invitation to taste and see (see Psalm 34:8). The more we taste, the more we desire. Knowing the truth and desiring the truth tends toward living for the truth, which means cooperating with the charity God has placed in our hearts, letting it flow out to the world.

In this is love brought to perfection among us,
that we have confidence on the day of judgment
because as he is, so are we in this world.

It is interesting to note that confidence about the day of judgment is not an automatic and unshakable belief that Christians acquire at the moment of conversion. It is something in which we grow as we grow in faith, hope, and love. Then we see that things are working as intended, and it becomes increasingly unlikely, though not guaranteed, that we are free from self-deception. We are not promised an absolute certainty of our salvation. But we can have a moral certainty about whether or not our hearts are alive in charity. This isn't an abstract moral calculus so much as a conviction of the reality of our relationship with God and the transformation he is accomplishing within us. It will in fact look different for each individual. Some may perform highly visible acts of great love. The love to which others are called may be more hidden. Some will struggle in an obvious public way with sin. But even this does not necessary mean they are disqualified or that they are not undergoing transformation. Only God knows our hearts. Hence, only he can give us confidence about their condition. And we can only possess that confidence by growing in relationship with him.

There is no fear in love,
but perfect love drives out fear
because fear has to do with punishment,
and so one who fears is not yet perfect in love.

Fear of punishment is a valid motivation. It is reliably accessible even when we are not experiencing the consolation of God's presence. It is helpful to remember that hell is real and that people may in fact go there apart from the grace of God. This means that even if we don't feel sufficient love for others to help them receive the Gospel we may still be concerned enough for them to do so without the aid of those feelings. But the more we grow in love the less we will have to fall back on such fail-safes. We won't be motivated by our desire to avoid suffering, or because we want to feel certain consolations, or because we want to receive certain gifts from God himself. More and more we will desire the giver rather than his gifts. And the more we realize his goodness, the more convinced we are of his love, the more we will desire him for others as well.

But at once he spoke with them,
“Take courage, it is I, do not be afraid!”
He got into the boat with them and the wind died down.

What begins as a storm of conflicting and unreliable motivations gradually gives way to the peace of being rooted in that which is alone unshakable, where alone we can true rest: God himself.

 

Shane And Shane - Psalm 34 (Taste And See)

  

6 January 2026 - God is love

Today's Readings
(Audio)

Beloved, let us love one another,
because love is of God;
everyone who loves is begotten by God and knows God.

When we truly love one another we do so by first opening ourselves to the source of love, God himself. Love on this level cannot come from ourselves, but is only possible if we are in filial relationship with him. Nor can we claim to be truly in relationship with him if we don't love, since placing barriers on his love isn't just acting against something to which he assigns special priority and importance. It is rather placing a barrier on himself and his own presence within us. If we truly love him, we let him in. And if we truly let him in, if we become truly vulnerable before his love, we won't resist when he begins to flow out through us to others.

In this way the love of God was revealed to us:
God sent his only-begotten Son into the world
so that we might have life through him.

Our conceptions of love are often too limited and sentimental. Even when they tend toward the good of the other they often do so in a nearsighted way that can only produce temporary effects. But God's love is such that it lifts us up above the limits of our mortal existence into his eternity. It is also true that what we are willing to do for the sake of love is often constrained and compromised. Therefore we cannot measure the true nature of love based on our past experience or any human precedent. Even the best earthly loves fall short. Only in God do we see a love that refused to limit itself or be compromised. He went to the utmost extreme limits for the sake of his beloved. Only in him, then, do we see the full measure of love. He held nothing back for himself but gave everything he had for our salvation. He died in order to share his very life with us.

In this is love:
not that we have loved God, but that he loved us
and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.

John is not merely saying that we must get in line with God by imitating his love. Nor is he saying that we must perfect love in ourselves if we are to communicate with him, as though it were a language we could study, or a skill we could master. Love is not something that we can truly have apart from he who is himself love living within us. That is why the fact that he loved us first always has to have priority in our definition of love. Only his love was able to break the chains of our sins that kept us living in a state of perpetual compromise where our love was only ever expressed in fits and starts.

When Jesus saw the vast crowd, his heart was moved with pity for them,
for they were like sheep without a shepherd;
and he began to teach them many things.

Jesus saw a people compromised by sin, unable to be all that God intended them to be, and his heart was moved with compassion. Therefore he gave the gift, not just of bread, but of the bread of life, his own Body and Blood, in order to defeat sin, and strengthen us with his very self to make us able to love as he first loved us. Even in the symbolic act of the multiplication of the loaves we see that his love draws others up together with himself into the dynamics of love, both the crowds that contribute the loaves and fish, and the disciples who help distribute them. His Eucharistic feast does even more to draw us into a communion of love, love that is not a mere idea or sentiment, but one which changes first us, and then the world.

Saint Meinrad Schola - Of The Father's Love Begotten

 

5 January 2026 - greater is he

Today's Readings
(Audio) 

We receive from him whatever we ask,
because we keep his commandments and do what pleases him.

When we live according to the commandments our lives are well ordered. We recognize that the one who has given us the commandments is good and has done so that we may flourish. Therefore we have confidence to know that our Father desires to give us good things. We also have wisdom that comes from living in the light that causes us to know what good things we request. The law tells us we ought not chase after excesses of power, pride, or sensual pleasure. It tells us that we should pursue love of God and love of neighbor above all. When our goal is to do what pleases God we rise above motives of selfishness and fear that cause us to not receive what we ask "because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions" (see James 4:3). We don't earn answered prayers by accumulating commandment points. While it is true that willful sin can be a hindrance to prayer, answered prayer is always a gift. But normal Christian progress should mean that we grow in confidence about the Father's desire to give us this gift as we come to realize more and more that all that he does is designed to make us thrive.

Those who keep his commandments remain in him, and he in them,
and the way we know that he remains in us
is from the Spirit whom he gave us.

We keep his commandments and thus remain in him. Yet the way that we can be sure that we keep his commandments is not by keeping a meticulous checklist to ensure our fidelity. Rather, it is through relationship with his Spirit who guides us and empowers us that we know that we remain in him. The commandments are not a project for us to complete through effort and gritted teeth. It is instead the Spirit who teaches what we ought to do and also him who gives us the strength to do it. The possibilities for failure when we try it alone are endless, including despair and self-deception. But the Spirit guides us like a personal trainer who has seen every possibility of failure and every hidden secret of success. He knows us better than we know ourselves and is thus able to help us to avoid self-sabotage and to keep us motivated to reach our goal.

Beloved, do not trust every spirit
but test the spirits to see whether they belong to God,
because many false prophets have gone out into the world.

There are, however, other spirits who promise much, but who would sabotage are efforts. These spirits try to masquerade as the Holy Spirit in their efforts to make us believe their bad advice and destructive ideas. Since we have seen how necessary the Holy Spirit is for doing life together with God  we need to be sure that we can remain in contact with the Spirit in spite of imposters. We need to remain grounded in the truth when we are surrounded by a thousand lies.

This is how you can know the Spirit of God:
every spirit that acknowledges Jesus Christ come in the flesh
belongs to God,
and every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus
does not belong to God.

In one way John is simply saying that the Spirit will never contradict the basic core doctrines of the faith. But he is also saying more. He shows us a way to interrogate spirits to determine, not what they say superficially, but their ultimate motivation. Do the ideas they espouse lead to acknowledging Jesus, or not? This is similar to what Paul meant when he wrote to the Corinthians, saying "no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except in the Holy Spirit" (see First Corinthians 12:3). We can thus perform a mental exercise where we imagine whether or not the personification of things we have been discerning would be willing to make this claim, or whether they have other, less noble priorities. This by no means discounts other, more charismatic interpretations of the verse, but is intended for anyone who has yet to find those helpful.

You belong to God, children, and you have conquered them,
for the one who is in you
is greater than the one who is in the world.

The reason we need not be afraid of the spirit of the antichrist, that was in the world at the time of John, and is perhaps even more prominent in our own, is not because of who we are in ourselves. It is rather because the one who is within us is greater than any opposition we could face, physical or spiritual. When we rely on his presence within us there is no force that can take us from his hands and nothing that can prevent us from remaining, from abiding in him.

Peter Furler - Greater Is He

 

4 January 2026 - magi sighting

Today's Readings
(Audio) 

“Where is the newborn king of the Jews?
We saw his star at its rising
and have come to do him homage.”

Though the Jews had been once been exiled to Babylon, the presence of Daniel and other faithful Jews may have planted seeds that would one day yield the conversion of the Gentiles. Among the first fruits of that harvest seem to be these magi from the east, who may have known of Jewish prophecies from historical memory of the time of the exile. It is hard to imagine that many people in Persia were interested into the obscure statements their captives may have made in past generations. But it seems that there must have been at least a few that were so moved at the time that they were motivated to keep that memory alive. Generations later, the magi were so motivated by those memories that they undertook a long and difficult journey to see the prophecies fulfilled. We might easily imagine that most Persians descendants had no interest in ancient Jewish prophecy, even offended at the thought that they should consider it. But the magi saw something worth pursuing in the future leader of Israel that the star predicted. But while they were willing to entirely order their lives by what the star had revealed to them Herod had the opposite response. He saw the birth of a new king as a potential threat, particularly since the prophecy said, "Edom will be dispossessed" (see Numbers 24:17) and he was an Edomite. He chose to cling to what he thought he possessed. This was in stark contrast to the magi who emptied out their treasures when at the feet of the newborn king.

“Go and search diligently for the child.
When you have found him, bring me word, 
that I too may go and do him homage.”

There are usually two options when one receives a revelation from God. It can be seen as a great blessing, worthy of hope, and of pursuit. Or it can be seen as a hassle, not worth pursuing, or possibly even worth resisting depending on the threat it poses to the status quo. Such revelations often run so counter to our expectations that our merely human ways of thinking put us at risk of rejecting them. We may easily imagine that a new king might be important. But what if we go to him and find a poor child with no appearance of royalty? Could we still empty our treasures at his feet in that situation, as the magi did? God works in ways that may at first seem futile, too under-powered to make a difference in a world in which everything is decided by power. But he does this intentionally to frustrate our temptation to believe that worldly power is absolute. 

And behold, the star that they had seen at its rising preceded them, 
until it came and stopped over the place where the child was.

The prophecy about the messiah's place of birth was, apparently, largely public knowledge. But that didn't mean that he would easily be found by the disinterested or by his enemies. The magi followed a star, but their sincerity opened them to divine guidance. The star revealed more to them than to others. It provided more than a general ballpark location for the child. It all but gave them turn by turn directions to his doorstep. Was this in fact the work of an angel, perhaps the same one who would warn them in a dream not to return to Herod? We cannot say. But it was not the work of an ordinary star. 

And having been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, 
they departed for their country by another way.

We all come to Jesus still at least partly complicit in the systems of violence and injustice in the world. We frequently find ourselves helping the Herodian figures around us, wittingly or unwittingly. But once we encounter Jesus and begin to reorient our lives around him we receive the guidance we need to extricate ourselves from such systems. We are led out of the kingdom of darkness, toward a kingdom of light. We become free to disobey figures like Herod when they try to make us compromise our values. We should therefore reflect and ask ourselves, how are we different for having encountered the king, in our lives generally, and this Christmas specifically? How willing willing are we to allow the Lord to go against our expectations and change our plans? How willing are we to take a stand when necessary, in order to follow his guidance? Would we defy kings for his sake? Or would the threat of their power cause our courage to collapse? Most likely this won't be a real world scenario that we face. But it still a good thought experiment. We definitely will encounter people who are indifferent or even possibly hostile to Jesus in the course of our lives. We need to resolve to stand up for him, when he calls us to do so. Whether the fear we need to conquer is actually fear of retribution or just fear of embarrassment, if we resolve now to face it head on and follow Jesus no matter what, we may hope to be ready to actually do so when the time comes.

Rise up in splendor, Jerusalem!  Your light has come,
the glory of the Lord shines upon you.

 

Rend Collective - We Three Kings (We're Not Lost)

 

3 January 2026 - see what love

Today's Readings
(Audio) 

Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.

Jesus was the Lamb whose sacrificial self-offering on the cross made it possible for us to be set free from sin. This offering fulfilled all of the ancient precedents and types that pointed toward it. The blood of bulls and goats could not truly take away sin, but only the blood of the divine Lamb (see Hebrews 10:4). The power of this precious blood was efficacious in the lives of believers first through baptism. Although Jesus himself did not baptize, he did so through his Body, the Church, and thus it was true that he was "the one who will baptize with the Holy Spirit". It was in this baptism followers were born from above, of the Father, made into daughters and sons of God. 

See what love the Father has bestowed on us
that we may be called the children of God.
Yet so we are.

The fullness of the reality of our baptismal transformation is not automatic. We are made children of God, after which point we need to act like his children. And because of the power of his Spirit we can indeed do so. If we continue to live as children of the world or of the devil after our baptism that identity can still dominate us. We need not only to enter into communion with Jesus through baptism. We need to remain in him, by learning from him how to live our lives, to make ourselves pure as he is pure. We can't claim to remain in him if we are still knowingly and willingly giving ourselves over the serious sin. It is in this sense that "no one who sins has seen him or known him".

Beloved, we are God’s children now;
what we shall be has not yet been revealed.

We have warned ourselves against the possibility of backsliding and choosing less for ourselves than our baptismal birthright. But our motivation should not only be to avoid less but also to progress toward more, since there is always more. We need, not only fear of failing, but also hope for the things that await us, the "what we shall be" that "has not yet been revealed", what "no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined" (see First Corinthians 2:9). We know that it is more "than all that we ask or think" (see Ephesians 3:20). It is this hope this draws us on toward the goal. The more it does, the more clearly we see God, as Jesus promised the pure of heart (see Matthew 5:8). The more clearly we see him the more we desire him, in a feed forward mechanism, until at last "we shall see him as he is" and our hearts finally come to rest in the fulfillment of their deepest desire.

 

Matt Maher - Behold The Lamb Of God

 

2 January 2026 - you have the anointing

Today's Readings
(Audio) 

Whoever denies that Jesus is the Christ.
Whoever denies the Father and the Son, this is the antichrist.

Since such an individual was opposed to the fact that Jesus was this Christ he was fitting called an antichrist. Jesus was the one who received the fullness of God's anointing and could thus share that anointing with others. He was the Word at the beginning whose words were the beginning of transforming others into new creations in himself. Jesus was the nonnegotiable starting point. Rejecting him was to ultimately cut oneself off from, not just that specific truth, but the source of all truth. It was not possible to intentionally dispute and willfully disbelieve the role of Jesus while still maintaining a relationship with the Father. It was only through the Son that one had access to the Father.

Anyone who denies the Son does not have the Father,
but whoever confesses the Son has the Father as well.

Why would anyone want to deny the Son? Well, perhaps because the reality of the Son was less convenient than that of the Father. There was so much messy real life history caught up in his identity. The idea of the Father was a harder one to falsify. But the truth of the story of Jesus, as we know, had many opponents. Among those who might have accepted the outlines of that story were many who refused to accept it because they didn't like his teachings or felt threatened by his moral demands. The Father could be imagined as nonthreatening abstract philosophical principle. Of course, doing so involved discounting much of the Old Testament as well. But among people who thought of themselves as innovators in the arena of truth this was not a deal-breaker. But, although they thrived on novelty, novelty was the greatest weakness of their doctrines.

Let what you heard from the beginning remain in you.
If what you heard from the beginning remains in you,
then you will remain in the Son and in the Father.

Many other lesser men would have responded in a different and inferior way to the challenges of the heretics. They would have simply said what was not true and then explained again from the beginning what was true according to them. But, although John pointed out the deficiencies in false doctrine, he did not articulate a positive argument. Rather he deferred to a truth his readers already received. In doing so he recognized that it was not chiefly he who could persuade others. It was God, working through the anointing of his Holy Spirit.

As for you,
the anointing that you received from him remains in you,
so that you do not need anyone to teach you.

The way his listeners received the truth about Jesus was not finally through clever arguments. It was through illumination by God. They did not accept the truth that Jesus was the Christ in the way that they accepted other truths. As with Peter, "flesh and blood" did not reveal it, but rather the Father (see Matthew 16:17). These were a different class of truths. They were not merely facts or arguments to be considered. They were revelation from God that one could either accept, ignore, or reject. It was important for John's readers to remember this. If they forgot, they would be at risk of being deceived any time they couldn't win an argument. But no matter how well a heretic argued, no matter how plausible or desirable was their doctrine, it did not present itself to heart of another with the same gravity and authority of the reveled Word of God. One was human cleverness. The other was revelation. Thus the hearers of John, even though they be simple and untrained, could look within themselves and realize the falsity of the claims being made by the antichrists. They were who they were because of the Word they learned and the anointing that they received. When in doubt, they could fall back on those as fail-safes.

And now, children, remain in him,
so that when he appears we may have confidence
and not be put to shame by him at his coming.

Not succumbing to the lies of the antichrists was more important than merely being correct. It was necessary to remain in relationship with Jesus himself. The stakes were higher than any specific argument. It was his presence within them that had changed their lives in the beginning. And it was their presence in him that was at work drawing them home. Thus it was this presence that John argued should be defended above all else.

 

Skillet - Jesus, Jesus (Holy And Anointed One)

 

1 January 2026 - God chose the weak

 

Today's Readings
(Audio)

The shepherds went in haste to Bethlehem and found Mary and Joseph,  
and the infant lying in the manger.

How unusual were the choices of to whom the angels communicated the good news about the birth of the messiah. In the first place, the parents themselves were by no means obvious candidates, though they were in fact qualified by their connection to the Davidic line. Nevertheless, their lives had no appearance indicative of this royal lineage. They were apparently poor and unknown in the wider world. After them, the first people who were told were shepherds, also likely without wealth or influence. It was not the great men of the age who were sent to witness the birth of the savior. But it did make a certain kind of sense. It brought to mind the fact that David himself had been called from watching the flock of his father Jesse in order to become king. This was fitting since the Lord called David to "be shepherd of my people" (see Second Samuel 5:2). The prophets had long critiques subsequent kings and leaders for the failure to act as shepherds, serving themselves rather than the sheep. God promised that he himself would shepherd his people (see Ezekiel 34:15), and would also send shepherds after his own heart (see Jeremiah 3:15). And in Jesus these promises were finally in the process of being fulfilled. Thus it was appropriate for his birth to be witnessed, not first by great men or worldly kings, but by other shepherds. We know they were not chosen because their testimony would make the story any more persuasive. Imagine trying to describe this birth to one unfamiliar with the story. Their vision of angels would be just as quickly discounted as Mary or Joseph insisting on the supernatural way the birth came about. This, is not, probably how most of us would have written the story. It seemed that God was intentionally handicapping the ease with which he could raise this child to the throne of David. Yet there was a reason that an obscure birth was appropriate. God was beginning the work of casting down the mighty from their thrones and lifting up the lowly. A great reversal was taking place, after which, power could no longer be separated from service or from love. The very fact of the shepherds as first witnesses bore witness to this truth.

All who heard it were amazed  
by what had been told them by the shepherds.

God had and would continue to choose unlikely individuals to proclaim the good news to the world. He choose the weak in the world to shame the strong, and those who count for nothing to bring to nothing those highly accounted by the world (see First Corinthians 1:26-28).  Among the first of these were the shepherds who were so transformed by their experience that people must have been able to tell that something unusual had happened. This change that the visit of the angels begun in them was apparently sufficiently distant from who they were previously that people who heard them speak of it couldn't help but be "amazed". So it was probably not them or their words so much as the transformation God himself accomplished in them that spoke for itself. We may hope this is true for us as well, so that we, who are by no means trained professionals, nor practiced in the art of persuasion, can still make known the amazing things the Lord has done.

And Mary kept all these things,  
reflecting on them in her heart.

Even to Mary the full meaning of the circumstances of her life were not immediately obvious to her. She knew that God was with her in the circumstances of her life, but also knew that he didn't always provide an explanation for why certain things happened as they did. We may imagine that even for her it would have been comforting to have more definite knowledge of what these events meant and of the future that was beginning to take shape for her son. Rather than resenting the unknown she remained open. Rather than ignoring the unknown, she remained present to it until its meaning eventually became evident. As an aside, it is interesting to note that this statement that she reflected on these things was meant to indicate how Luke himself came to learn about them.

Then the shepherds returned,  
glorifying and praising God  
for all they had heard and seen,  
just as it had been told to them.  

The shepherds, apparently, returned to their flocks, and to business as usual, the daily grind. But they were not the same after as they were before. Even the transitory involvement in the life of Jesus, an involvement the value of which was difficult to quantify, was something that they would treasure from that point on. In many ways God has accomplished more in our own lives through Jesus than he did in those of the shepherds. But are we moved to give him glory of praise as the shepherds did? If not, it may be that we need to learn from Mary how to keep all that the Lord did for us, reflecting on it, until we realize how great a treasure it is.

Matt Maher - Hope For Everyone