The world around you is loud, fragile, and constantly changing. Headlines rise and fall, cultures shift, and even your own emotions can feel like a stormy sea. In the middle of that chaos, Jesus made an almost shocking claim to His disciples: one day, even the sky above and the earth beneath their feet would be gone, but what He spoke would not. Today’s verse pulls our hearts away from the temporary and calls us to anchor our lives in the only thing that will never crumble—His unfailing Word.

Everything Around You Is Temporary

Jesus said, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will never pass away” (Matthew 24:35). That means everything you can touch, see, or measure has an expiration date. The mountains you admire, the nations that seem so powerful, even your own carefully built plans—all of it is passing. Scripture tells us the same truth again and again: “The world is passing away, along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God remains forever” (1 John 2:17). The Bible is not trying to depress you; it is freeing you from betting your whole life on things that cannot last.

If you feel unsettled as the world shifts under your feet, that unrest might be a mercy. It is God’s way of reminding you that you were never meant to stake your identity, security, or joy on circumstances. When relationships change, when health wavers, when finances tighten, the instability exposes where you’ve placed your trust. Let the fading nature of this world push you—not into fear—but into a deeper hunger for what is eternal. Ask yourself honestly: Where am I acting as if this world is my final home, instead of a temporary hallway leading into forever?

His Word Is as Permanent as He Is

Why can Jesus’ words never pass away? Because they are not just religious sayings; they are the very expression of the eternal Son of God. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). His Word shares His nature—unchanging, holy, utterly reliable. God had already declared this through the prophet: “The grass withers, the flowers fall, but the word of our God stands forever” (Isaiah 40:8). Creation is beautiful but fragile; God’s Word is beautiful and indestructible.

The permanence of His Word flows from the permanence of His character. “Forever, O LORD, Your word is settled in heaven” (Psalm 119:89). Jesus does not shift with popular opinion or cultural trends: “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8). When you open your Bible, you are not reading an ancient book that needs to be updated; you are encountering the living, unchanging voice of the King who will outlast the universe. His promises do not have a shelf life. What He meant when He first spoke, He still means now—and He will mean it ten billion years from this moment.

Building a Life That Cannot Be Shaken

If His words never pass away, then the wisest thing you can do is build everything on them. Jesus painted a simple, unforgettable picture: “Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them is like a wise man who built his house on the rock” (Matthew 7:24). You cannot control the storms that hit your life, but you can choose your foundation. Hearing without obeying always feels easier in the moment—but it is like building on sand in a hurricane. “Be doers of the word, and not hearers only. Otherwise, you are deceiving yourselves” (James 1:22).

This is why daily Scripture is not a religious extra; it is survival. “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (Psalm 119:105). You need that lamp today, not just on the “big” days. As you read, trust that “the word of God is living and active… It judges the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12). Let it expose your fears, confront your compromise, comfort your wounds, and realign your priorities with eternity. Open your Bible with this expectation: these words will still be true when everything else is gone—so I will let them rule how I think, speak, choose, and love today.

Lord Jesus, thank You that Your words will never pass away and that Your truth stands when everything else falls. Today, help me not only to hear Your Word but to obey it—show me one concrete step I can take to live by what You have said.

The Bible says that we are to present our bodies "as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God." Of course, if you give your body, you give everything it contains. That means giving yourself wholly to God, and the idea of giving yourself wholly to God contains three laws. The first law is the law of surrender. If you do not surrender, it will be totally impossible for the Lord to do anything for you. Surgeons have to have the surrender of their patients. If I went to a surgeon and insisted that I was going to tell him how to do the job and not only that but stay awake and resist him, the surgeon could not work. It would be impossible. Surgeons must put their patients to sleep so they cannot resist, so they are in a state of surrender. That is the law of surrender. A more beautiful and biblical description is the story of the potter and the clay, which illustrates the law of surrender further. The potter has soft, yielding clay, but if the clay does not surrender, the potter cannot do a thing with it. If there are burnt places, hard places or unsurrendered places in the clay, though the potter be a genius in making vessels, the artist still could not make anything useful and beautiful out of an unyielding blob of clay. It is possible for an object to be useful but not beautiful, like a garbage can. It is also entirely possible to be beautiful and not useful, like the lily. The lily has no utilitarian place in the world. It is possible to have a vessel that is useful without being beautiful. The old cream crocks in our spring house on the farm were useful all right. You could pour the milk in them, wait for the cream to rise and skim it off. They were not beautiful, but they were quite useful. Everybody has in their home beautiful little knickknacks. They are utterly useless, simply to be enjoyed for their beauty. But God wants His vessels to be both useful and beautiful. If God is going to make those kinds of vessels out of us, however, we are going to have to yield to the law of surrender. Give yourself to God as a living sacrifice and let Him have you--all of you.

When by reason of the time ye ought to be teachers, ye have need again that some one teach you the rudiments of the first principles of the oracles of God. - Hebrews 5:12

Consider the sad contrast of too many Christian lives. There are many so-called and, in a fashion, really Christian people, to whom Christ and His work are mainly, if not exclusively, the means of escaping the consequences of sin - a kind of "fire-escape." And to very many it comes as a new thought, in so far as their practical lives are concerned, that these ought to be lives of steadily increasing deliverance from the love and the power of sin, and steadily increasing appropriation and manifestation of Christ’s granted righteousness. There are, I think, many of us from whom the very notion of progress has faded away. I am sure there are some of us who were a great deal further on, on the path of the Christian life, years ago, when we first felt that Christ was anything to us, than we are to-day.

There is an old saying of one of the prophets that a child would die a hundred years old, which in a very sad sense is true about very many folk within the pale of the Christian Church who are seventy-year-old babes still, and will die so. Suns "growing brighter and brighter until the noonday! " Ah! there are many of us who are a great deal more like those strange, variable stars that sometimes burst out in the heaven? into a great blaze, that brings them up to the brightness of stars of the first magnitude, for a day or two, and then they dwindle until they become little specks of light that the telescope can hardly see.

And there are hosts of us who are instances, if not of arrested, at any rate of unsymmetrical, development. The head, perhaps, is cultivated; the intellectual apprehension of Christianity increases, while the emotional and the moral and the practical part of it are all neglected. Or, the converse may be the case; and we may be full of gush and of good emotion, and of fervor when we come to worship or to pray, and our lives may not be a hair the better for it all. Or, there may be a disproportion because of an exclusive attention to conduct and the practical side of Christianity, while the rational side of it, which should be the basis of all, and the emotional side of it, which should be the driving power of all, are comparatively neglected.

So, what with interruptions, what with growing by fits and starts, and long, dreary winters like the Arctic winters, coming in between the two or three days of rapid, and therefore brief and unwholesome, development, we must all, I think, take to heart the condemnation, when we compare the reality of our lives with the Divine intention concerning them. Let us ask ourselves, "Have I more command over myself than I had twenty years ago? Do I live nearer Jesus Christ to-day than I did yesterday? Have I more of His Spirit in me? Am I growing? Would the people that know me best say that I am growing in the grace and knowledge of my Lord and Saviour? " Astronomers tell us that there are dark suns, that have burnt themselves out, and are wandering unseen through the skies. I wonder if there are any extinguished suns among my readers.