AI-narrated recordings
The publishers barred ministries from recording the devotionals and posting them on YouTube, which left us without audio.
Other ministries chose to narrate devotionals generated by AI. We built a process in which AI only reads each devotional's real text, without changing anything. It may still make a few mistakes, and these recordings are not posted on YouTube.
Producing them every day is costly. Thank you for your support and patience.
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Verse:“I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people.” —Jeremiah 31:33, NIV
Nearly half of young adults in the United States of America are inked with tattoos. A powerful motivation for getting a tattoo is to express one’s individuality and freedom. Another driving force is to identify with a certain cause or group, culture, or religious tradition. Other reasons can be darker: addiction, seeking attention, or drunken impulsiveness. The practice of inking the body with tattoos goes back in time across cultures.
Some Egyptian mummies have tattoos.
Some tattoos were religious symbols, such as the all-seeing Eye of Horus. Egyptian women used tattooing for cosmetic and decorative purposes. When tattooed with the name of a god, Egyptian slaves were marked as property of the god through his priests or pharaoh. In other cultures, past and present, tattoos invoke magical protection from evil or indicate group membership. In 1769 Captain James Cook documented the practice of tatau in the South Pacific islands. It was exotic to him because tattooing had been banned in Europe a millennium earlier by Pope Hadrian. It was considered to be sacrilegious because it disfigured God’s likeness (the human body). One might wonder whether Isaiah had tattooing in mind when he wrote, “Some will say, ‘I belong to the Lord’; . . . still others will write on their hand, ‘The Lord’s’ ” (Isaiah 44:5, NIV). Should I show my submission to God with a religious symbol tattooed on my hand? The Mosaic law, of course, commands us not to put tattoo marks on ourselves (Leviticus 19:28). We do not live in Egypt of antiquity, we are not God’s slaves, and we do not need a talisman to gain His protection. But His people are commanded to observe the Sabbath as “a sign between us” (Ezekiel 20:20, NIV). Sabbath observance is our mark of identity and group membership. It shows our allegiance to Him and acknowledges that it is the Lord who delivers us from the slavery of sin and who sanctifies and redeems us. Keeping the Sabbath shows loyalty to our Creator.
This is the right motivation to keep the seventh-day Sabbath. In turn God provides more than a skin-deep tattoo. He writes His law of love into our hearts and minds, and this is visible through obedient worship, our witness, and our loving acts for others.
Lisa Beardsley-Hardy