Looking for today's Disciplines Devotion? Click here to read it.

About Disciplines

The Upper Room Disciplines provides an opportunity to look more deeply at scripture by offering a week of devotions by a single author on a particular theme.

Read More

Latest Disciplines Devotions

Living into Lent - March 5, 2017

March 5, 2017

Today’s psalm calls us to confess our wrongdoings to God lest these unconfessed wrongdoings eat us up from the inside out. The psalmist says when he failed to confess, he experienced...

Read More

Living into Lent - March 4, 2017

March 4, 2017

At the end of Jesus’ forty-day fast in the wilderness, he is starving. So not surprisingly, the devil’s first temptation invites Jesus to turn stones into bread—not only for food but...

Read More

Living into Lent - March 3, 2017

March 3, 2017

Jesus begins his ministry with a forty-day fast in the wilderness, paralleling the Israelites’ forty years in the wilderness after their rescue from slavery in Egypt. They faced many trials in...

Read More

Living into Lent - March 2, 2017

March 2, 2017

Understanding today’s passage depends on remembering our single humanity. Adam and Eve, standing in for us all, chose not just sin but death itself. Our problem ever since is not that...

Read More

Living into Lent - March 1, 2017

March 1, 2017

Psalm 51 has been the psalm for the first day of Lent, Ash Wednesday, since the church’s beginnings. It is a prayer of deep repentance, when we find ourselves able to...

Read More

Living into Lent - February 28, 2017

February 28, 2017

Adam and Eve do not passively listen to the snake’s temptation. It is clear from Eve’s response to him that she has been thinking about this all along. The snake says,...

Read More

Living into Lent - February 27, 2017

February 27, 2017

This week we enter Lent, a time of preparation in the early church for those being baptized at Easter. On Easter those being baptized learn that though caught in the death...

Read More

Mountaintop Experiences - February 26, 2017

February 26, 2017

Today we celebrate the event of the Transfiguration—an event of central importance in Jesus’ life, as well as the lives of his three intimate companions. The event looks backward and forward,...

Read More

Mountaintop Experiences - February 25, 2017

February 25, 2017

Biblical prophets are less interested in predicting the future as in declaring the word of God. Elijah, who engaged in dialogue with Jesus and Moses on the Mount of Transfiguration, embodies...

Read More

Mountaintop Experiences - February 24, 2017

February 24, 2017

The reading from Second Peter anticipates the story of the Transfiguration that we will celebrate this coming Sunday. Peter alludes to that event by quoting God’s statement concerning Jesus, “This is...

Read More