Download our newest release in the App Store next week. For our Android users, Read is coming later this summer. If you happen to have automatic updates disabled on your device, you can come back to this page and tap here to update manually.

Dwell Adds Bible Reading Experience

Just want the Cliffs Notes version of this post? Tap here to see what’s new!

When we launched Dwell in 2018, our goal was to create an audio-first Bible app that would help modern-day disciples reclaim the ancient practice of hearing Scripture. We were convinced that having the words of God spoken over you could be a life-giving practice that could deepen your faith. We still are. And for the last four years, our small team has been dedicated to creating the most beautiful listening experience for the most important book in history.

Of course, there’s no way we could have done this without the support of our unbelievable subscribers (all 100,000 of you!). Each of you have made Dwell a reality and we cannot thank you enough for believing in us and financially supporting the ongoing development of the app. And today, as we announce a brand new chapter in Dwell’s history, we want you to know that audio always will be in Dwell’s DNA; it always will feature as a core component of what we do around here.

And yet who can deny the power of the printed word? As you know, movable type is the technological innovation that sparked our information age and the modern world. Martin Luther and the reformers knew the power of text and the written word and that is why they worked so ardently to produce printed Bibles for Christian communities throughout Europe. They knew that there was no tangible gift greater than the gift of possessing a copy of God’s word.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that at least once a week we hear from a subscriber who wishes that they could read the Bible in Dwell. They say things like, “You have the best Scripture listening experience. Why not complement it with an amazing reading experience?” Over the years, we’ve learned that when your subscribers speak, it’s wise to listen. So for all of you who’ve been asking, be on the lookout next week for a notification about the release.

Today, we wanted to give you a sneak peek of what you’ll find when you open up Dwell next week. For a long time, we’ve known that Dwell needed Scripture text inside the app. That was the rationale for our release of Read Along last summer. And as wonderful as the read along experience is, there’s something equally wonderful about reading the Bible at your own pace. The challenge for our team over the last 18 months has been how to authentically integrate a reading experience into an audio Bible app. The last thing we’ve wanted to do in our pursuit to create a text-only experience of Scripture is compromise our own identity as an audio-centric Bible app. Here’s how we’ve tried to thread the needle:

Listen and Read share equal billing

When you open up the Player in Dwell, you’ll notice that Read has replaced Read Along in the top toggle. We’ve made this change because of how important we believe Read will be to the future of Dwell (We haven’t gotten rid of Read Along, just changed the way you access it. More on that soon.).

Every Piece of Content in Dwell is Now Readable

One of the real distinctives about our new read experience has to be that every piece of Bible content you tap on in the app can now be read. That means every Bible chapter of course, but it also means every playlist, every plan, every story, even your own user-generated playlists can now be read inside the app.

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How to now access Read Along

Access to Read Along now takes the form of a “speech bubble” icon and is located just to the right of the fast-forward icon for quick and easy access. The placement is similar to how you currently access Apple Music’s lyrics feature.

And while we’re on the topic of Read Along, check out these other notable improvements you’ve been asking for. 👇🏼

You can now customize your Read Along screen choosing to display the default dynamic background or a clean black background. Also, you can adjust the size of your Read Along text.

All of Your Favorite Bible Versions Available to Read

All of the Bible versions you enjoy listening to are available for reading. That’s the ESV, NIV, NKJV, KJV, NLT, The Message, CSB, NRSV, and more. You can quickly access Bible versions using the Bible version picker on the Read screen.

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Quick Access to the Books of the Bible within Read

The Read screen also offers a Scripture picker which gives you quick access to the books of the Bible and their corresponding chapters.

Also, we’ve included the same Scripture picker on the Listen screen! No more having to navigate away from the player to listen something new from the Bible!

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Customize Your Bible Reading Screen

We’ve given you some options for tailoring your read experience. Choose between Dark and Light themes.

Pick from five excellent font types including Dyslexie, an award winning typeface specially designed for people with dyslexia. You can also adjust the font size for easy reading and increase vertical line spacing for more or fewer words on the screen.

Our Advanced Settings lets you nix clutter by hiding verse numbers and chapter headings, as well as turning on and off Red Letter for the words of Jesus.

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We hope that gives you a good sense of what’s coming next week. We’re so excited to get this release in your hands and get your feedback on it. Please reach out with any questions or suggestions! Thanks again for supporting Dwell and we look forward to continuing to serve you.

List of New Features:

• Read the Bible using Dwell. Includes every chapter, playlist, plan, or story
• A new Home screen that showcases featured content, the Dwell Daily, and quick access to your next day’s listening or reading plan
• Improvements to Me screen including quick access to your listening metrics. The Me screen is now your handy way to easily access all of your favorited Bible content in Dwell, as well as your downloads and group content
• Improved navigation. Quick access to the Books of the Bible Picker on the Listen and Read player
• New way to access Read Along feature in the player
• Customize your Read Along experience now by adjusting background type and text size, plus access nearly all of the Listen player controls without having to leave Read Along mode
• Easily jump back to something you read or listened to earlier from right within the player

We are thrilled to announce that Dwell has acquired NeuBible: the beautiful, thoughtfully-designed Bible-reading app for iOS.

What’s the backstory?

All of us at Dwell have long admired NeuBible’s emphasis on aesthetic excellence, and when we set out to begin building our app’s Pure Read experience, we reached out to the NeuBible founders to glean wisdom from them. Our conversations quickly uncovered the similarities in each organization’s values. Like Dwell, NeuBible valued beauty, and was passionate about creating sacred ‘digital’ spaces that could help those living in our modern world meaningfully connect with God. During our conversations we also learned that NeuBible was in the midst of transition, and in need of finding a partner to whom they could pass the baton, someone who would carry forward their values and their mission for building and perpetuating beautiful, thoughtfully-designed Bible experiences. Dwell fit the role like a glove.

What does this mean for NeuBible customers? 

First off, welcome to the Dwell family! For a good chunk of this year, you won’t see any changes inside the NeuBible app. This isn’t a bad thing! As it stands, NeuBible is both a delightful and soulful tool for reading the Scriptures.

All of us at Dwell are continuing to consider the ways in which Dwell and NeuBible can and ought to live together. Also, Aaron Martin, one of NeuBible’s co-founders, has generously made himself available to the Dwell team to help us imagine and explore the possibilities between the two apps. As things progress, we’ll be in touch.

What does this mean for Dwell customers?

NeuBible is now a part of the Dwell family, which we’re all thrilled about! There are no integrations currently in place between the two apps. This is largely because we’re still in the long process of unfolding how both apps will work in conjunction with one another in the future. Stay tuned!

Onward!

Jon and I set out 5 years ago to help recover the ancient practice of hearing Scripture with our ears, so that God’s Word might be formed deep within our hearts. We’re still passionately committed to that vision, and yet, over the last 18 months, we’ve sensed a need to broaden that vision. Things are certainly expanding over here, and it’s all quite exhilarating! But at its core, Dwell is about helping you create space to be with God. Being with Him, after all, is how we become like Him, which we think is the goal of the Christian life. All in all, we look forward to sharing the next chapter of Dwell’s story with you soon.

In countless ways, our ambitions in life often outpace our preparation.

We want to run a marathon, but give ourselves a week to train. We want to cook a holiday feast for friends and family, yet attempt to shop and set the menu the day of the event. And even in our spiritual lives, we often run into the same challenges, perhaps nowhere more frequently than in our attempts to the read the Bible.

If we desire a life shaped and animated by the words of Scripture, we must root ourselves in consistent practices of devotion that are born out of steady faithfulness, not a flare of passion for Christ that burns out as quickly as it arrives.

With our new collection of daily Bible plans, Dwell makes daily time in Scripture simple, straight-forward, and sustainable.

Dwell Daily

This 365-day plan is exclusive to Dwell, and is inspired by the listening habits of the Dwell community, featuring the most popular and well-loved stories and passages on the Dwell app. With Dwell Daily, you will spend equal amounts of time in all corners of Scripture, rotating between the Old Testament, Psalms and Proverbs, the New Testament, and the Gospels. Plus, at no more than a few minutes in length, this is a daily Bible habit that anyone can cultivate!

Listen now in the Dwell app.

Daily Listens

For most of Christian history, Scripture was first and foremost a communal resource, shaping the prayers and imaginations of the family of God as they worshipped together. As such, many Christian traditions continue to emphasize this practice and encourage their members, even when scattered throughout the week, to read the Bible together, following a shared plan of daily passages (commonly called a lectionary).

Now on Dwell you can easily listen to the assigned daily passages from five Christian traditions – Anglican, Catholic, Episcopal, Orthodox, and Protestant – inviting members of these traditions to integrate Dwell into their communal practice of faith, and allowing Christians from other traditions to explore and learn from other parts of the family of faith.

Explore the Daily Listens collection now.

We’ve partnered with the team at Wolfbane Books to build an exclusive plan around their recent release, The Story of God With Us. This plan traces the foundational reality at the heart of the biblical story: God’s desire and determination to be with His people. 

We recently sat down with Kenneth and Shay, co-authors of this beautiful new book, asking them to take us behind the scenes of the writing process, exploring the importance of visual art and storytelling in our growth into Christ’s likeness.

Enjoy this in-depth interview, and make sure to pick up a copy of the book and subscribe to the plan in the Dwell app!

Tell us a bit about yourselves: your passion for Scripture, family faith formation, and the spark behind this new book, The Story of God With Us.

(Kenneth) My name is Kenneth Padgett and I’ve been enthralled with God’s Word from the moment I started following Jesus two decades ago. This wonderment of the Word has compelled me to complete a graduate degree in biblical studies, and I’m currently in the thick of post-graduate doctoral work in biblical narrative and theology. I serve as the Scholar-In-Residence at my local church. But before my academic work and church service, I am first a husband and father. My main disciple-making efforts are spent trying to lovingly form my family into flourishing followers of Jesus. These efforts were the main inspiration for writing The Story of God with Us. I needed a resource that would allow my children to experience the sweep of the story of Scripture, while tracing a theological thread from Eden to New Creation. What better place to start than surveying the wonderful reality that God desires to dwell with us, and we with him, always and forever, world without end!

(Shay) My name is Shay Gregorie – I started to follow Jesus when I was in high school. At that time I had some college age youth leaders who really cultivated a love for Scripture in me. I was also fortunate to have a dad who always revered and studied God’s word. Now I’m a dad of eight kids (four boys and four girls) and always looking for resources to help shape their hearts and minds.

That being said, there were SO many different sparks that set this project in motion. One of the most memorable moments was during seminary when one of my professors played a recording of Psalm 136 (in Hebrew) set to music by a group of Jewish singers. That Psalm tells the story of the Old Testament with the repeated refrain, “For His steadfast love endures forever”. It was really captivating and kept you eager to hear how God’s steadfast love was going to be manifested in each scene from Scripture. But as the song progressed and the story rose toward a crescendo, a crescendo never came. The tune and the refrain ended up smoldering out with fading instrumentals. I was so let down. But that’s the way the narrative reads if you only have the Old Testament. At that moment I wanted to hear the crescendo explode with the story of Jesus the King, the Spirit coming, and New Creation! So when Kenneth started talking about writing this story, I remembered the shape of Psalm 136. It was the beauty of that psalm set to music that prompted the shape of The Story of God with Us.

Why do you think we as humans are so captivated by a good story? How is this story approach especially helpful when inviting children to enter into the world of the Bible?

In the beginning God spoke. He is the master story-teller of the cosmos. We were created by a God who speaks, and we bear his image by imitating him. But God does not communicate by giving us excel spreadsheets or grocery lists. Rather, he’s weaving history into an epic drama that puts his glory on display and calls all people to participate in his life-and-light-giving-Story!

If you think about it, we are wired for story. Every human intuitively knows that we are creatures created for story. We constantly tell them, read them, hear them, and watch them. Stories seem to have a unique formational power that can reach into the darkest depths of our being and turn the lights on. How wonderful is it that God has chosen to reveal himself in a grand Story!

We believe deeply that children have a heightened capacity to be formed by story-telling. Like us adults they are wired to know God through his Story, but unlike most of us their wiring is fresh and super-conductive. This makes childhood an excellent time to get to know God through the biblical story.

Our prayer is that The Story of God with Us will be just one of many more resources to come that can help form families through the great unified story of the Bible!

In your book, you tell the grand story of Scripture through the lens of mountains. What do mountain tops have to do with God’s nearness and desire to be with us?

I would argue that even the topography in the Bible tells a story! Let’s do a quick survey of some major moments in the Bible that coincide with God dwelling with his people.

The whole story really kicks off in a mountaintop garden where God dwells with the first couple, Adam and Eve. Did you know that Eden was a mountaintop garden? Consider briefly that rivers flow out of the garden. Which direction do rivers flow? Down. The Prophet Ezekiel (28:13-14) notes Eden’s mountaintop location, saying,

“You were in Eden, the garden of God…You were on the holy mountain of God…”

But Eden isn’t just the dwelling place of Adam and Eve; we see that God is also present, talking and walking in the midst of the garden in Genesis 2-3. In Genesis 4-9 we see humanity descending eastward, away from the life-giving presence of God and into a chaotic realm of increasing death. Eventually a single family is preserved through God’s global judgment, and they wind up on a mountaintop. Noah and his family replay the Eden narrative on Ararat, a mountaintop vineyard where humans fail again. This leads to all humanity coming together to build the Tower of Babel, a man-made rival mountain that was designed to put mankind in the heavens, the realm of God (Genesis 11). Babel represents the height of human rebellion.

The next place where the people of God are gathered to dwell in the presence of God is just after the great exodus from Egypt. In Exodus 19 the Israelites meet God at Mount Sinai. On this mountain God constitutes his people and promises to dwell in their midst. He has them build the tabernacle, a special tent that is designed in the likeness of Sinai. The tabernacle functions as a mobile mountain of God that rests in the center of the Israelite camp. The last scene in the book of Exodus is God filling the tabernacle with his presence. Eventually, this tent becomes a permanent building called the temple. Just like the tabernacle in Exodus 40, God’s presence fills the Temple in 1 Kings 8. The temple rests on Mount Zion; the beloved mountain often referred to in many of the Psalms. Consider Psalm 132:13, “For the Lord has chosen Zion; he has desired it for his dwelling place.”

Eden, Ararat, Sinai, and Zion are the peaks that tower over the landscape of the Old Testament narrative; a narrative that tells us of a God who desires to dwell in the midst of his people.

Only five pages into the New Testament Jesus is standing on a mountain in Galilee reconstituting his people. There he stood as Immanuel, “God with us.” At the end of Matthew the disciples are gathered on what is perhaps this same mountain listening to the resurrected Jesus proclaim that he will always be with them. John’s final vision in the book of Revelation is that of the Holy City descending to earth onto a very high mountain. As he watches, a loud voice proclaims, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.” (Revelation 21:1-10).

What is the significance of visual art and the many ways it captures the hearts and imaginations of children and adults alike?

We were made for story, but story can be communicated in numerous ways. We are all visual learners. Our eyes “hear” the heavens “declare” the glory of God when we gaze upon their majesty and beauty. God has given the eye a unique ability to produce immediate wonderment, and we should never neglect this gift in storytelling. In The Story of God with Us the two modes of storytelling (hearing and seeing) work together to induce wonder and form a child’s imagination.

Dwell is thrilled to offer a companion Bible listening plan to The Story of God With Us. Do you have any tips or suggestions on ways people can most helpfully explore this plan and dive deeper into the themes introduced in your book?

We’re very excited about this listening plan! The Story of God with Us is a book that is meant to be read many times over. As the story begins to stick in your heart, our prayer is that it will give you place markers for understanding the entire story of the Bible. If you are listening to the plan with your family, it might be good to revisit the corresponding scenes from the book, even leaving it open while you listen. While you don’t need the book to enjoy the playlist, we did intentionally design the playlist to be a scene by scene companion.

Dwell has been such a huge blessing in our own households, and we’re so grateful for this opportunity to provide this playlist. May it bless you and your family!

About the Authors

Kenneth Padgett is a co-founder of Wolfbane Books and co-author of The Story of God with Us. He is a PhD candidate in Biblical Studies at Trinity College, Bristol (UK) and serves in his local church as the Scholar-In-Residence. He also holds a Master’s degree in Old Testament from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (Where he met Shay). He and his wife, Rebecca, live in the South Carolina lowcountry with their two young daughters.

Shay Gregorie is a co-founder of Wolfbane Books and co-author of The Story of God with Us. He is an ordained pastor in the Anglican Church of North America and currently serves on the pastoral team in his local church. He holds a Master of Divinity degree from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (where he met Kenneth). He is a native of Mount Pleasant, South Carolina where he lives with his wife, Catherine, and their eight children. 

Join us each week of Advent as we share bonus content from friends of Dwell, each reflecting upon their own Advent journey and life with God in and through Scripture.

Week 4: Rich Villodas

Rich Villodas is the Brooklyn-born lead pastor of New Life Fellowship, a large multiracial church with more than seventy-five countries represented in Elmhurst, Queens. Rich holds a Master of Divinity from Alliance Theological Seminary. He enjoys reading widely, preaching and writing on contemplative spirituality, justice-related matters, and the art of preaching. He’s been married to Rosie since 2006 and they have two beautiful children, Karis and Nathan. His first book, The Deeply Formed Life, is now available wherever books are sold.

Visit him online at richvillodas.com.

The Presence of God in a Season of Presents

How Do We Practice the Presence of God in Advent?

The Importance of Praying Scripture

Bonus Audio Content:

Titanic and the Deeply Formed Life

Transcript: First of all, Titanic came out in 1997. And what was I doing in 1997? Well, I was an 18-year-old worker at the movie theater in Manhattan, what was called Sony Theaters at the time. And so I cannot tell you how many times I watched Titanic, as you know, I was supposed to working, but I would sneak into the back of the theater and watch and all that. And I watched it numerous times, but I would say a few years ago, as I watched it again, as it came on, like on TNT or something like that, as it does every other hour, again I was struck by the contrast, essentially, that it sets out to sail (the Titanic) and hits an iceberg. And what you see in the movie from that point on is this terrifying contrast, where on the upper decks of the ship, there is celebration and opulence and all the rest, and then the water started rushing in into the lower decks of the ship, and you start seeing all kinds of chaos and pain. And sooner or later, you know, as though as the movie progresses, the issues of the lower deck begin to rise until the entire Titanic is capsized.

And as I thought about it one day and watched it, I thought, Oh, this is this is really a core metaphor of life, and the spiritual life in particular, where there’s so much happening on the lower decks of our lives that we often don’t pay attention to, and sooner or later, if we don’t pay attention to what’s happening on the lower deck, we’re going to capsize and so ironically, the logo of our church is an iceberg, so it’s all coming together here. But yeah, Titanic, I think, is a wonderful metaphor, because it’s about the ways that the lower decks of our lives often rise to capsize us if we’re not paying attention.

Can we Hope for Depth in an Age of Social Media and Superficiality?

Transcript: I do think there is hope, but I think the hope is contingent upon our ability to live in reality as it relates to technology.

You know, I think Dr. King said in one of his speeches, it might have been one of his sermons, that we have allowed our technology to outrun our theology, and that we’re not so good at weighing the price of technological progress. And I think to the degree that we are able to face the ways that technology, not just the gift, but the ways that it malforms us, I think, to the degree that we do that we can appropriately boundary it and see what it is and the gift that it brings, but not live in this illusion that we’re not being formed in some negative ways. So I think on one level, I think there’s great hope, but that hope is contingent upon our ability to live in reality.

But to your point, absolutely. I mean, so much of technology is based on this curated sense of self, this false self, really, that I’m trying to project out into the world. And I think so much of what we see with technology is it reveals all the ways that we don’t feel loved, and the ways that we’re trying to grasp that love.

There’s one quote from Aristotle, where he says that when people don’t feel loved, they seek to be admired. And I think that’s what we see a lot (with the) social media landscape, where people often don’t feel this deep abiding sense of love really coming from the heart of God. As a result, I have to figure out ways where I can earn admiration, which interestingly enough, I know we’re in the Advent season, but when you look at Jesus when he gets baptized, he gets baptized and the voice of the Father comes down, “This is my son in whom I’m well pleased,” and then he’s sent into the wilderness and the first thing that’s really tested is whether he believes in that word of affirmation. And the evil one says, “If you are the Son of God, turn this bread into stone. If you are the Son of God, jump from the temple and angels will catch you. If you are the Son of God, bow and I’ll give you all the powers, the kingdoms of the world.” In other words, do you truly believe in this message of your belovedness, or are you going to seek to figure out various ways to obtain it? And I think that is the struggle of social media. Am I living from the center of God’s love? Or am I working really hard to try to achieve something that truly is already mine?

Silence and our Experience of God

Transcript: What silence does is, in some ways, it reveals to us all the ways that we have become subjected to stimulation, and a need for greater and more experience. And so I remember a quote from Brennan Manning some years ago, where he said, “Do I worship God, or do I worship my experience of God?” And we have to be very clear about how we respond to that, because it’s very clear that many of us are worshiping our experience, and how do you know you’re worshiping your experience? Well, when the experience, especially the good experience is gone, am I still showing up? And I think that’s at the core of Christian spirituality, am I really pursuing God or what I can get from God?

Join us each week of Advent as we share bonus content from friends of Dwell, each reflecting upon their own Advent journey and life with God in and through Scripture.

Week 3: Marlena Graves

Marlena is a writer, deep thinker, and speaker who is passionate about the eternal implications of our life in God. She is a lover of beauty – especially the beauty of her family, others, and creation. Marlena is a justice seeker—trying to overcome evil with good. In addition, she seeks answers to these types of questions: What does abundant life look like (John 10:10)? If God is good and we are his deeply beloved children and safe in his kingdom, how then should we live? Marlena deeply believes that spiritual formation and justice should never be separated. She is most concerned with those who profess to follow Jesus but speak and behave so unlike him. She includes herself in the mix and therefore seeks to bridge the gap between what Christians profess to believe and how they live. She speaks regularly to congregations, university campuses, and to retreatants about the implications of following Jesus. Marlena loves to laugh and be around others and then recover in silence and solitude! 

Visit her online at marlenagraves.com.

Seeing Light in the Darkness

Finding Joy in Stillness and Silence

Scripture as Reorientation to Reality

Bonus Audio Content:

The Way Up is Down

Transcript: As I read the Gospels, I compared and contrasted the life of Jesus with the way that the American church in particular presents itself to itself and to the world, primarily the evangelical church, because that’s where I’m most familiar, but I would say, I could see this in the three branches of Christianity. A lot of the times we present ourselves as seeking celebrity, how many people attend your church as being the most important thing, and a lot of what I would say is (it) mirrors the American culture, the American dream, like health and wealth, and the church seems to reflect our American culture. Of course, I’m not speaking for every church or every Christian, but what’s being communicated to the public. And I just never have seen that in the life of Jesus.

When his brothers (or maybe cousins depending what stream you come from in Christianity) said to him, no one who wants to make something of themselves stays in secret. Why don’t you go to the festival and make a name for yourself. And in Matthew 4, when Satan tempted Jesus to jump from the high pinnacle of the temple, do something magnificent, Henry Nouwen talks about this, do something magnificent, make a name for yourself. Jesus was never like that, he told the devil to flee from him and those temptations.

I think we have believed that fame is what makes us important: fame, wealth and power.

And Jesus, he totally, just absolutely dismissed those. He did not seek to be the most powerful religious figure. He was not born in a palace. He almost shunned anything that distracted from the message, repent for the kingdom of God is near. He’s near. Jesus is near. And so I just wonder, what’s the big contrast?

I think of Philippians 2. Jesus gave up everything, his power, and if you want to say fame, but his control of all things to become a human being. He divested himself of glory, so that he could say, “Not my will, but yours be done.” And I think that’s the way up is down. And the Bible talks over and over about how God will uplift the meek and the humble, but the arrogant, and the people that put their trust in riches or fame, he will not look to. And I don’t mean that God will ignore these people, but what I mean is the Lord is close to the brokenhearted and the humble, the people at the bottom of the societal hierarchy are the people that God is drawn to and spends time with.

The Poverty of Jesus as a Path to Joy

Transcript: When I think of poverty, I’m thinking about several things: poverty of spirit, but also maybe it could be material poverty. But if we impoverish ourselves of everything in us that’s not of Christ, we make room for God to be in our lives, God bearers like Mary. If our life is too full of godless things, and godless postures and godless obsessions and orientations, there’s no room for God in our life.

We kind of chase after things that we know, but we keep falling for it, that don’t fill us. I love the Sermon on the Mount: the pure in heart will see God. Rich Mullins has a song where he said that too. And I heard this story by Fr. Henry Reardon in Chicago. He was driving somewhere, like a long journey, and his windshield wipers stop working in the winter and so he had to drive with his family and then wipe off by hand the windshield wipers because they kept getting mud from the snow and he couldn’t see. In the Bible, Matthew 6:22, another one of my favorites, Jesus says, “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eye is good, your whole body is good.” And so, when we fill ourselves and our lives with that which is not of Christ, that which is not good, true, and beautiful—the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life, like the Bible says—when we dwell on things that are not of God, we get full of it.

Having Eyes to See

Transcript: Whatever you spend your time on, whatever you focus on, you’ll become like that. I think it’s in Habakkuk, it says we become like the things we love. And our time, how we spend our time kind of tells us what we love, where our treasure is, Jesus said. So I see it as like, where does joy come from? I think when we are purified and cleansed of our sins, and again, I just say that which is not of Christ, that which leads to death, when we’re cleansed of those things we can see better, like Jesus talks about in Matthew 6:22. And I think it can give us joy, because we see that those things don’t satisfy, we see that as we practice the life of Christ in our lives, how it manifests itself in our lives, that we see that goodness.

This morning, I was driving back (I’m in a Ph. D. program), I was driving back from school. I had taught a class at the university, and last year at this time, I would call my mom and she would call me (“How did class go?”), and my mom just died on June 27 of 2021, and I was really sad. Like, I really missed my mom, I did this, like, a couple weeks ago, I was gonna call my mom, like, I can’t call my mom, I can talk to my dad, but I can’t call my mom. And then I saw a little butterfly a couple of times. The monarch butterfly, I saw it flying up by a light, when I was stopping at the light, then I was traveling down the highway. I’m like, “Some monarch butterflies are out.” And I was just thinking about all things being made new and that I’ll see my mom someday, that there’s pain right now, but I took joy in a little monarch butterfly, it was the grace of God to me today. And I think having eyes to see brings joy. Because if we just see the world from the world’s perspective, we’re gonna see everything we don’t have, or everything that’s wrong, we’re not going to be able to see the good and true and beautiful that is bursting all over, but we have to have eyes to see it.