July 21-25
[M] 2 Kings 7-8; 2 Chr 21; Matt 6
[T] 2 Kings 9-10; Psalm 49; Matt 7
[W] 2 Chr 22-23; 2 Kings 11; Ps 131; Matt 8
[T] 2 Chr 24; 2 Kings 12; Ps 50; Matt 9
[F] Joel 1-3; Matt 10
Dwell Plan Day 146-150 | CSB | Digital PDF | Printable PDF
Notes from Jon & Chris
Monday
2 Kings 8:11 | Elisha was told by God to tell Hazael that he would be king of Syria. We learn here that God must’ve said more to Elisha than that, sharing with him what this new king would wind up doing to God’s people. And it was a horror show of prophetic clarity. And Elisha breaks down into tears, embarrassing Hazael in the process. So Elisha shares with him why he’s emotionally crushed: God has shown him the terrible cruelty that Hazael will go and do against God’s people. Beware of prophets who aren’t like Elisha. There are “christian” people who delight in anticipating and participating in the apocalyptic prophecies of God. These are the folks who love to threaten people with large signs, gleefully telling sinners about God’s coming judgment. Believe me, they will suffer that judgment themselves first. The true prophets of God have the Spirit of God, and that begins with the fruits of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, etc. Where prophetic announcements happen without those fruits, no matter how accurate they might be (God will judge sexual immorality, abuse, the murder of children, etc.), the posture of how we speak is as important as the position of the truth we know about God’s holiness. Elisha is a prophet anointed with a double portion of the Spirit and here’s the proof of it. Let us all ask for and seek such a blessing.
2 Chronicles 21:7 | Here, we’re told that the Lord was not willing to destroy the house of David because of the covenant He had made. Even though Jehoram walked in the evil ways of the kings of Israel and led Judah astray, God remained faithful to His promise to David. This wasn’t because the kings were righteous, but because God had sworn to bring a lasting light, a descendant who would one day reign in justice and bring salvation to the world. Through all the failures of David’s line, God was faithfully preserving the way for Jesus, the true Son of David, to come and redeem His people.
Matthew 6:9-13 | The Lord’s Prayer is actually a bit difficult to translate. Part of that is the traditional translations that exist today. We have centuries of a particular form and turn of phrase, so changing it or retranslating it is both awkward and intimidating. But the other part of it is the prayer itself: it’s a way of praying that sounds more like David and the Psalms than our modern sensibilities. Of the seven requests, six are in the passive imperative voice. Only the phrase lead us not does not have that grammatical form. The passive part puts it all on God to perform these things, and blunts any impertinence or presumption to the requests. They are not demands and don’t have a demanding tone. The form of the verbs describes real dependence. But they still have an insistent tone of expectation. Since we don’t have the imperative voice in English, the urgency, need, and directness of these requests is blunted. We don’t see or hear the exclamation points for each request in our translation. Somehow, I feel robbed. We’re being instructed on not just what to pray about, but what our attitude and hope should be in our prayers. This is describing a living relationship, of a person imploring and pleading with another person on how they need action. That is how God is inviting us into His presence. Praise Him.
Matthew 6:9 | The way that Jesus teaches us to pray is actually mind blowing, especially in those first words: “Our Father.” In this prayer it’s assumed that more than one person is praying. The requests are all for a plurality of folks asking, and that’s a part of Christ’s instruction to us. It’s supposed to be a community—a whole church praying. Those disciples are supposed to be all praying together, and it’s the first thing we see them doing in Acts, after Jesus has ascended. That’s not to say that we can’t pray personally for ourselves, but even in our private prayer we don’t only ask for stuff for ourselves. We pray for the people we love. There’s a priestly quality to this group prayer in the “our” words, where we’re always to be interceding as a natural part of our identity as a kingdom of priests. Jesus is teaching and modeling that.
But there is a deeper truth here, an even more profound beauty for us. Jesus is saying to His disciples to pray “our Father” and there’s no way He isn’t also a part of that group prayer. Which makes sense, because it’s Jesus’ obedience and sacrifice that makes prayer even possible for us. Otherwise, any approach or conversation with God would be too bold—especially with all of these imperative commands in the grammar! The beauty of grace begins to shine when we see this. Christ is joining us in prayer and is inviting us to join Him. We call God our Father because in our adoption Christ becomes our older brother. And what is our older brother doing right now? What does the Scripture tell us? He’s interceding for us at His Father’s throne. So this prayer depends on the Spirit of sonship to be at work in us. So Christ is saying “Go to God My Father as if I’m shoulder to shoulder with you and knee to knee next to you at the throne of grace.” It’s an invitation and a welcome; it’s an encouragement and a fellowship with Him when we pray. We’re saying “our Father” because Jesus is praying with us and for us, and it’s only in Him that we can have such bold hope. What Christ is teaching here is our living participation in the counsels of eternity. It’s what He’s forging for us and creating for us in His own prayers and obedience to “our Father.” It’s absolutely amazing just these two words in. Praise Him.
Matthew 6:25–34 | Jesus calls us to live free from anxiety, not because life is easy or predictable, but because our Father in heaven knows and cares for us. He gently points to the birds and the lilies as living illustrations of divine provision. They don’t toil, store, or plan, yet they are fed and clothed by the same God who made us. Jesus isn’t calling us to carelessness or passivity, but to childlike trust. The heart of His message is this: you are deeply known and deeply loved by your heavenly Father. And if He tends to flowers and sparrows, how much more will He tend to you?
The pagan world—both in Jesus’ day and in ours—offers no such confidence. The ancient world relied on appeasing angry gods; our modern world relies on anxious striving. Whether it’s financial security, career success, or relentless self-improvement, the secular vision for peace always comes with a price tag: perform, hustle, prove yourself, and maybe you’ll be okay. But Jesus turns this logic upside down. In the kingdom of God, peace comes not from performance, but from the unshakeable love of the Father—a love secured through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Because He gave His life for us, we don’t have to prove our worth. We’re already loved.
If Jesus died for us while we were still sinners (Romans 5:8), then we’ve already entrusted Him with our greatest problem: our sin and separation from God. And if He has handled that, we can trust Him with our daily worries: our jobs, our health, our children, our unknown future. Jesus doesn’t shame us for our anxiety; He invites us to rest in His finished work. We seek first His kingdom not because we’re trying to earn His favor, but because we already have it. The gospel frees us from the tyranny of anxiety by reminding us that our future is secure, our Father is good, and our Savior has already borne the weight of our deepest fears.
Tuesday
2 Kings 10:32 | At first glance, it looks like Israel is simply losing a battle to a wicked king, but the author of Kings is telling us that behind every event, God is sovereignly at work. Scripture is filled with these little reminders: God doesn’t just have power, he has ultimate power. Nothing in heaven or on earth moves outside His sovereign will, even when it involves kings and empires that seem opposed to Him. As we fast forward in the story, we see that the most stunning display of that power wasn’t in conquest, but at the cross where God used even the schemes of wicked men to accomplish our redemption. If this is the kind of God who governs history, even its darkest moments, then we can trust Him with every detail of our lives.
Matthew 7:1 | In our cultural moment, this text is often weaponized as a shield against any form of moral accountability. Western individualism trains us to see ourselves as autonomous moral agents, answerable to no one but our own inner voice. This leads to the first common distortion of the verse: “You can’t speak into my life.” The second distortion springs from a similar root, existentialism, which says the truest thing we can do is be true to ourselves, to be completely authentic. In both views, “judging” is interpreted as any external standard pressing in on personal authenticity. But that’s not what Jesus is teaching.
Jesus is warning not against all judgment, but against hypocritical and harsh judgment. The image He gives is comical and sobering: someone with a plank in their eye trying to tweeze out a speck from someone else’s. The issue isn’t the speck, it’s the arrogance of thinking we can confront another’s fault without first confronting our own. Yet Jesus doesn’t end with “don’t judge.” He says, “First take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” That’s love—self-aware correction that seeks the good of others in humility. And verse 6 (about dogs and pigs) makes it clear: we still must exercise discernment. Followers of Jesus are not to be blind affirmers, but gracious truth-tellers.
Ultimately, our ability to speak truth in love flows from the gospel itself. Jesus is the only one who could rightly judge us, and yet He came not to condemn, but to save. At the cross, He bore the judgment we deserve, freeing us from both the fear of being judged and the pride of being judgmental. Because we are recipients of such grace, we now approach others with humility, not superiority. The gospel doesn’t silence correction; it transforms it from a weapon of self-righteousness into an act of love grounded in mercy and a deep love for the other.
Wednesday
2 Chronicles 23 | In this chapter, we witness a dramatic turning point in Judah’s history: a moment of renewal after deep corruption. For years, the wicked queen Athaliah had usurped the throne, leading the people further into idolatry and bloodshed. But in a stunning act of courage and covenant faithfulness, the priest Jehoiada brings out the rightful heir, Joash, and crowns him king. The temple is cleansed, the covenant is renewed, and worship is restored. The people tear down the altars of Baal and reestablish the true worship of the Lord. This chapter is a reminder that even in the darkest seasons, God preserves a remnant and restores His purposes through His chosen king.
Matthew 8:3 | It’s not just a rule about cultural taste and general germ ickiness. You simply don’t touch lepers, and everybody knows that. It’s gross, but there’s more to it than that. The law of God made it about holiness, pronouncing leprosy as unclean in a ceremonial sense. You can’t go to the temple if you have leprosy, and if anyone touches you, neither can they for a period of time. But here’s the rub. You can’t get leprosy from just a touch. It requires closer contact than that. There’s lots of hand and foot washing in the Old Testament law, and it wasn’t until the 19th century that modern science caught up to the basic wisdom of cleanliness and germs. God’s law has real wisdom about the real world. But leprosy isn’t really spread that way, and yet God uses it to make an emphatic point about holiness and uncleanness. It’s against the law of God for a man to touch a leper. But here’s the rub: when Jesus touches him, he’s no longer a leper! But isn’t He technically touching a leper anyways, even if the result is something different? What’s going on? It all hinges on what the law of God was for, or what its whole purpose was. The law of God was actually made for this moment and the revelation of this Person, Jesus Christ our Lord. He referred to this already when He mentioned He didn’t come to get rid of the law and the prophets, He came to fulfill them—to complete their whole intention and design and purpose. The law of God has meaning because of how it points to Jesus! Not the other way around. Christ has come to make the unclean into the clean. The law still applies to the leper: he’s supposed to, according to the law of Moses, go present his new leprosy free body to the priests. And that law was actually also designed for this moment, so that it would prove to them who Jesus was. Someone greater than Moses has arrived. These rules and regulations had their greatest purpose fulfilled here: to reveal who Jesus was as God’s Son.
Matthew 8:23-27 | Several of these guys were fishermen, men who grew up on boats every day. Their panic wasn’t like a bunch of tourists or sailing noobs freaking out over a few swells in a rough sea. Their terror was true fear. They knew what happened to sailors in storms like these: you never heard from them again and their families grieved their loss. Every port has memorials to the men who lost their lives working on the water in storms like these. And Jesus rebukes their panic and tells them how little their faith is. Wow. No matter how justified you feel in your terror, in the end it’s just unbelief. Plain and simple.
Thursday
2 Chronicles 24:17-27 | “They peaked too early” is one of those epitaphs we sometimes use about prom queens, high school quarterbacks, and child actors. It’s a meme that seems pretty universal, and in Joash it becomes a cautionary tale. Early success for us is usually due to positive early influences. With the right mentors and training and leadership in our lives, we can often achieve amazing things. That was Joash’s story when he had the leadership of Jehoiada, the godly old priest. But when he dies, everything falls apart. Joash goes off the rails. Seduced by power, the influences of his friends, and the lure of idols, he becomes a villain. It’s a cautionary story for us to learn from, because we can all go sideways with God, even when we’re older and should know better. There’s a humility and dependence we must walk in, even into our old age, because the dangers of a hardened heart never go away. What a horror and betrayal—he actually kills Jehoida’s son. This is the deathwork that hovers waiting for us all when we abandon the grace of God. Don’t become a cautionary tale yourself.
Matthew 9:9–13 | In this passage, Jesus calls a tax collector—someone despised by society and considered a traitor to his own people—and without hesitation, Matthew gets up and follows. That very night, Matthew throws a dinner party, inviting Jesus and a room full of other “sinners.” You can imagine the mix of awkwardness and awe: former fishermen side-eying tax collectors, men with pasts trying to grasp grace, and in the center of it all—Jesus, at perfect ease. It’s a striking thought, isn’t it?
For many of them, this may have been their first time in the presence of someone who knew everything about them and didn’t recoil. No disgust. No lectures. Just an invitation: “Follow me.” That night wasn’t about religious performance, it was about mercy.
Jesus tells the Pharisees, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice,” because He hadn’t come for the righteous, but for sinners. That first night must have felt like the first time hope sat at the table with them. And it still does—for anyone willing to follow.
Matthew 9:38 | There are only a few specific things that Jesus tells us to pray about—let alone to pray earnestly about—and this is one of them. Take note and make this a priority. Jesus did. “Father, give us more and more evangelists!”
Friday
Joel 2:28-32 | In Acts 2, Peter stands up at Pentecost and declares that what the crowd is witnessing, the outpouring of the Spirit, is the fulfillment of Joel’s prophecy. Joel had spoken of a day when God would pour out His Spirit on all flesh, and Peter says that day has begun. But Peter also quotes Joel’s words about the “great and glorious day of the Lord,” a day of judgment and salvation. This shows us that the Day of the Lord comes in layers—partially fulfilled at Pentecost, ultimately fulfilled when Christ returns. The first coming of Jesus inaugurated the last days, bringing salvation and the Spirit to His people. But the final Day of the Lord will come with fire and final judgment, when Christ returns to make all things new. In between these two days, we live as Spirit-filled witnesses, calling people to repent and believe before the great day arrives. The gospel reminds us that the same Lord who poured out grace at Pentecost will one day return in power, and we are invited to live in joyful readiness.