My spouse and I spent about two years working through two classic daily devotionals together, Spurgeon’s morning and evening collection and Lettie Cowman’s compilation. Now we’ve finished both and nothing we’ve looked at since has felt like the right fit.
What are some good daily devotionals with real substance, the kind that holds up over daily use?
The two that have held up for me are Oswald Chambers’ My Utmost for His Highest and Paul David Tripp’s New Morning Mercies.
If you’ve finished Spurgeon and Cowman, Chambers is the natural next step… He’s dense, and one entry can stay with you all day, but his sentences take a few weeks to get used to.
If you want something a little different, Valley of Vision. It’s not technically a devotional, just a collection of Puritan prayers. At home we read one every morning for a year and got more out of it than most of the 365-days-of-encouragement type books.
Carson or Daily Light.
D. A. Carson’s For the Love of God follows the M’Cheyne Bible reading plan and gives commentary on each day’s passages. There are 2 volumes, so it can carry you through the plan twice.
Daily Light on the Daily Path works too. It has morning and evening readings made entirely from connected Scripture passages, with no commentary at all.
For reading together, Carson gives you more to talk about. Daily Light leaves more room to pray and make your own connections.
Timothy Keller’s The Songs of Jesus. A short note and a prayer each day through the Psalms, short enough to read out loud, and we did a second year with it and it held up.
Alistair Begg’s Truth for Life too. Reads like a short sermon on a passage but still fits in a daily slot.
The Songs of Jesus. Reading the short prayer aloud each morning helps the Psalm settle in.
Songs of Jesus packs a lot into a short daily reading. The prayer at the end makes it easy to read together with someone.
The Psalm-based setup is why it holds up on a second pass, more than most one-year devotionals I’ve tried.
My husband and I almost quit Chambers after the first 2 weeks. Then something clicked and we couldn’t picture starting the day without him.
His widow pulled the entries from his lectures and talks after he died, which explains the abrupt rhythm.
