Gospel-Changed Hearts

Article

Our 2024 Advent Devotional

“What is Advent? It’s the season when we look back to Christ’s first coming, as a baby born in Bethlehem, and look forward to his second coming when he will return to renew and redeem every part of fallen creation. The Advent season gives us a time to reflect upon the promises of God and to anticipate the fulfillment of those promises in Christ. Advent season is a time for remembering and rejoicing! This year, Advent season is from December 1 – 24, and we’d like to send you an email each day of the season with an Advent devotional from Gospel in Life.

By Gospel in Life
Article

Understanding God’s Grace in My Brokenness

I will never forget my birthday, May 8, 2001. Nor will I forget my husband, Daniel’s birthday, May 9, 2001. I have often joked that my husband gives me money on my birthday and I return it on his birthday. But this birthday was to change the trajectory of our lives.

By Mary Zunitch
Article

From Gangs to Serving Jesus

My run-ins with the police continued, and one night I found myself handcuffed after assaulting a rival gang member with a baseball bat. Sitting in the back of the police car, I realized I was about to enter the criminal justice system, and I prayed and promised God that if He rescued me from that situation, I would change my ways. The officers ended up letting me go home free that night. God had answered my prayer, but I did not keep my vow.

By CJ Francis
Article

Christ Saved Me at My Lowest

One day my brother and I got into a bad fist fight, which resulted in me getting sent to Florida to live with my mom. My brother had found my mom! Apparently she was doing better. I lived with her for a few weeks, but it was obvious that my mother was still using drugs. My uncle lived one city over and came to our apartment. He told me, “Angel, either you come live with me or you stay here and your life spirals down the hole it’s been going down until you end up like your mom.”

By Angel Francis
Article

God’s Gospel Instead of My Gospel

If I felt like I was a sinner, it’s because I was a sinner. If it felt like all the things I was resting my hope in for my own righteousness were disintegrating under my feet, it’s because by His grace, they were disintegrating. “He inflicts wounds that heal,” I remember Tim Keller saying, and God was most definitely breaking my dependence on my own self-righteousness, so He could demonstrate His own righteousness as the justification for my life and salvation.

By Rozz Morehead-Strebe
Article

A Journey through Lent (Devotional)

We invite you to sign up to receive our daily devotionals during the season of Lent—February 14 – March 28. Each day there is scripture and a meditation to help you reflect on the hope and glory provided through Christ’s death and resurrection.

By Gospel in Life
Article

Testimony of a Changed Heart

It all started as a way to support my then girlfriend, now wife. In the same way I’d talk through her work struggles to support her career, or reluctantly shop with her and provide my valuable fashion advice, I agreed to go to church to support her desire to reignite her faith. I wasn’t a believer, but she grew up a Christian. After a hiatus from church in college, she wanted to return, so we began spending our Sunday mornings at a church in the Mission neighborhood of San Francisco..

By Brett Doran
Article

How I Discovered the True “Need Meeter” of My Soul

I reached a point where I did not know how to live as a Christian anymore. I became suicidal, thinking my only two options for my future were death or to come out as a lesbian atheist. The former option was birthed out of a summation of the church’s language around this conversation. Sinners were welcome, certainly, but only the heterosexual kind. I did not know how to become more Christian in order to be heterosexual. So, to appease the church crowd, I thought the Christ-following answer was to kill the gay out of me.

By Laurie Krieg
Article

My Life is in His Hands

Suddenly, I felt him grip my arm and yank me off the path, crying out, “Attention: serpent!” Look out, a snake! As he pulled me back, he lunged himself forward, and in one swift stomp, Sidiki crushed the snake’s head under his heel. Snakes in this region are deadly poisonous, and the nearest hospital was many miles away. So, on my first night in his village, Sidiki saved me from certain death.

By Ben Salvatore
Article

What Was Once Dead Is Now Filled with Life

How do we move from becoming anxious about what we see and read to being able to have peace as we build a habit of turning to God with prayers and petitions based on what is going on? And how do we keep from letting our minds go down an endless spiral of negative information and instead choose to dwell on restorative things?

By Gospel in Life
Article

Tim Keller Discusses Writing His New Book on Forgiveness (Video)

I have to see that I have a need for forgiveness because I am a sinner. Now, that’s sort of negative. That’s humility. That helps toward forgiving other people when you realize “I’m a sinner too”. But that’s the bad news. The good news is the cost of forgiveness. What God went through, what Jesus went through in order to get you that forgiveness and to forgive you freely. And that fills you with grateful joy, and there’s a need for both the humility and the joy.

By Susan Nacorda-Stang
Article

Building Healthy Media Habits

How do we move from becoming anxious about what we see and read to being able to have peace as we build a habit of turning to God with prayers and petitions based on what is going on? And how do we keep from letting our minds go down an endless spiral of negative information and instead choose to dwell on restorative things?

By Hilary Chiu
Article

The Autumn of the Church’s Influence on Culture

Christians in every society must use their wisdom in how to apply the Bible carefully, allowing others to come to different conclusions and use different approaches—all of which are based on biblical inspiration, but none of which comes with absolute biblical warrant. How freeing is it for the church that we can agree on the moral imperatives, but have a healthy (and even heated!) debate over the application of those morals in culture?

By Michael Keller
Article

Walk with Purpose

An autoimmune disease that had been lying dormant surfaced early this year with life-changing force. Overnight my world completely shifted.

By Nelli Kim
Article

Friendship, Community and Compassion Leads Others to Christ

Even though I turned her down, she befriended me, and over the next few months, she and her friends became my friends. I was attracted to the way they loved one another and me, and was often amazed by their generosity and care. I eventually accepted one of their many invitations to come to church because I grew to trust them and love their community. About a year later, in large part thanks to their persistence, I became a follower of Jesus.

By Susan Nacorda-Stang
Article

Looking to Jesus When Your World Upends

An autoimmune disease that had been lying dormant surfaced early this year with life-changing force. Overnight my world completely shifted.

By Angela Adour
Article

New Life From the Tragedy of 9/11

As I rode the subway home, I was lost in thought. I recalled the moment on 9/11 when Brian and I had said goodbye to each other at the fort, when I realized that my relationship with God was practically nonexistent. But here I was, going to the church for help, and those ladies had cared. As I pieced everything together, something shifted inside of me. I felt hope.

By Christina Stanton
Article

Rediscovering the Message of the Prodigal God

I realized I had made an idol out of being a pastor and when it was taken from me, I reacted like a small child with his toy taken away. I began to converse with God daily and digest his Word again daily and pray and sing and fast. And the prison I had willingly put myself in slowly melted away.

By Casey O Pater
Article

Love and Comfort Out of Tragedy

There’s a clear line of demarcation in each of our lives: the pre- versus the post- September 11th reality – and there’s nothing we can do to change this. What a strange and overwhelming feeling of powerlessness this realization brings, and yet, having been forced to confront it, our lives go on, in some ways as before and in other ways indelibly altered.

By Nancy Barter
Article

How Christ Redeemed My Son and Me Through His Addiction

I can’t say when he first used marijuana but I’d guess it was freshman year of high school and by junior year he was smoking weed on a regular basis. Concerned, I turned to friends who would talk about their own kids who were partying too much, reassuring me that it wasn’t unusual, that we were in this together. I turned to the school therapist who did not seem fazed at all by my son’s weed use.

By Rebecca Silver

This Month's Featured Book

Deepen Your Daily Time with God

Are you looking for a way to deepen your daily walk with God? Go Forward in Love: A Year of Daily Readings from Timothy Keller is a new 365-day devotional, compiled from excerpts of Dr. Keller’s wide range of books.

Donate now and get the book