Our Daily Bread
Mention the word devotional to me and I instantly think of Our Daily Bread. The church I grew up in had a stack of them readily available on a table in the narthex. Said table was littered with various devotionals and aging bulletins that my friends and I would idly paw through while we waited for our parents to cease talking with each other (they insisted on talking for, like, a million hours after church each week). So for the better part of my life I associated Our Daily Bread with tiresome waiting.
And that was about all I thought about Our Daily Bread until more than a decade later when I actually read the thing. I remember being surprised by the level of insight inherent in every page. I shouldn’t have been surprised, there has been a stable of prolific writers and thinkers that make up its contributor list.
Our Daily Bread focuses on walking you through a passage of the bible, giving you context and a solid teaching about it. You can almost think of it as a mini-sermon. Unlike some devotionals, Our Daily Bread is written to appeal to the widest available audience. While the teaching is good, it does lack rigorous depth, although it might introduce you to some new ways to read scripture.
Also, It’s been published since 1956! You can find archives going back to 1995 on the Our Daily Bread web site. Not to mention it’s now translated into almost 30 languages like the following:
- Our Daily Bread in Spanish website
- Our Daily Bread in Indonesian, Thai, Russia, and Chinese website
- Our Daily Bread in Japanese website
- Our Daily Bread in Korean website
You can read it for free online here.
