About | My Family Devotion

My Family Devotion is a free devotional for families to read aloud together. It works through the Bible a passage at a time, in order, rather than hopping between favorite verses. Each devotion gives you a passage to read aloud, four questions to discuss, with answers to help you along, something to do about it, and a prayer to close. There are currently 245 devotions, covering 13 books.

There is nothing to sign up for, no account to create and nothing to buy. The site does not run analytics and does not ask you for anything at all. The privacy page explains how advertising works and what you can control.

Who writes this

My name is Matthew Pavey. Christ-follower, husband, father, reader, developer, in about that order on a good day.

I started this because sitting down to read the Bible as a family is harder than it should be. The problem was not a lack of desire. Finding fifteen minutes, a passage, a few questions to discuss and a prayer took more preparation than most evenings had in them. Building software is what I have done for a living for close to thirty years, with a computer science degree from Rose-Hulman. So rather than keep looking for the thing I wanted, I built it, and then I kept going.

I am working on a Master of Arts in Christian Apologetics at Liberty University. What I study is the evidence behind what Christians claim: arguments for the existence of God, the historical case for the crucifixion and the resurrection, and how to talk about all of it with reason and with grace. The How We Know sections here come from that same work, cut down to something a family can hear at a table.

There is more about me at pavey.me.

How these are written

I write these with the help of AI, along with a good deal of checking, editing and review on my end. Every verse is compared against the Berean Standard Bible before anything is published, so the text you read matches the published translation.

That does not make it perfect. Mistakes get through. I have caught some of them myself and there are almost certainly others still sitting there. If you find one, please tell me. I would rather hear about it.

Where this stands

Broadly evangelical, and written so that most Christians can share it. Grace before works, salvation by grace through faith, in Christ alone, scripture as the final authority, God as the one who acts first.

You will not find arguments here about baptism, church governance or end-times schemes. Those are real questions, but this is not the place for them. The goal is to help families read the passage and talk about it together, without getting pulled into debates that can wait for another time.

Who I read

Anyone deciding whether to read this to their children can reasonably ask where it comes from. The grouping below is loose, because most of these writers refuse to stay in one lane. The same author may write about history in one book, doctrine in the next, and caring for a grieving family in the one after that. I have taken something from all of them.

The writers I keep going back to: Augustine, Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Jonathan Edwards, and Charles Spurgeon, who preached to ordinary people and still reads that way out loud.

Then the pastors and preachers, who showed me what to do with doctrine: J.I. Packer, R.C. Sproul, John Piper, D.A. Carson, Tim Keller, Paul David Tripp, Dallas Willard, John MacArthur, and Billy Graham.

And the ones who taught me to make a case: John Lennox, William Lane Craig, J.P. Moreland, Alvin Plantinga, Norman Geisler, J. Warner Wallace, Lee Strobel, Mike Licona, Richard Bauckham, Douglas Groothuis, and Alister McGrath.

The How We Know sections come from the apologetics end of that reading. Greg Koukl in particular taught me to lay out the evidence and let a person reach their own conclusion, which is how those notes are written.

C.S. Lewis sits a little apart from the rest. He wrote about serious things in ordinary words without ever talking down to anybody, and he is the closest thing this site has to a model for how it ought to sound.

These writers do not agree with each other about sovereignty and free will, the age of the earth, or whether the miraculous gifts continue. Neither does the church. Where the people I read divide, these devotions describe what the passage says and leave the argument with you.

How We Know

Some devotions carry a short note on the evidence behind the passage: another ancient text that mentions the same person, a law or custom the scene assumes, an object recovered from the right place and period, or the oldest surviving copies of the passage itself.

Not every passage has evidence like that. Where it is thin, the note is left off rather than padded out, because a weak case presented as a strong one is worse than none at all. Where a claim comes from outside the Bible, the source is named so you can check it yourself.

Scripture

The scripture text is the Berean Standard Bible, released by its publishers into the public domain and free for anyone to use. I am grateful to the translators for that decision. It is the reason a site like this one can exist without a licensing bill.

That deserves more than one sentence, because the honest answer starts somewhere else.

Why this translation?

For years my own Bible has been the English Standard Version, and it still is. I like how it reads out loud. I know where things are in it. Nothing below is a complaint about it, and if the ESV is your Bible, keep reading it.

So why is it not the text on this site? Not quality, and not money. It comes down to fit.

Crossway publishes clear terms for quoting the ESV without having to ask first, and they are generous ones. You may use up to five hundred verses. They cannot run to more than half of any one book of the Bible. They cannot make up a quarter or more of whatever you have written. And they are not meant for use in a commentary or other biblical reference work.

Those terms are written for a sermon, an article, a book with scripture threaded through it. This site is a different animal. It works through whole books in order and prints every verse of them, which is well past five hundred and is whole books rather than half of one. And a devotional that stops to explain the passage is arguably the reference work that last condition has in mind.

Which would leave me either asking Crossway for a license of my own, or making a judgment call about that last line on somebody else's text. I did not want to do either.

None of which is Crossway being difficult. Translating a Bible takes years and real money, somebody has to pay for it, and every publisher of a copyrighted translation has to draw the line somewhere. Mine simply falls on the far side of theirs.

What I did not expect about the Berean

So I went looking, expecting to settle for something. That is not what happened. Four things surprised me, and they seemed worth sharing.

Free really does mean free. The text was placed in the public domain on 30 April 2023, under a Creative Commons Zero dedication. No license is required for any use at all. Attribution is appreciated and not required. A publisher may print it and sell it without asking anyone. There is no permissions page to read before you quote it, because there is nothing left to permit.

There are real scholars behind it. Free can sound like amateur, and I half expected that. The advisory editors named by the translation committee are Dr. Gary Hill, Dr. Grant Osborne, Dr. Eugene H. Merrill, Dr. Maury Robertson, Dr. Ulrik Sandborg-Petersen and Dr. Baruch Korman. The committee also credits Dr. Gleason Archer for translation notes that fed into the work, and the coordination was done by the Bible Hub and Discovery Bible teams.

You may have read it already without knowing. It is the text behind much of what Bible Hub publishes. Hundreds of ordinary readers, along with pastors, teachers and professors, sent in comments while the translation was still being worked on. A Bible revised in the open by the people using it was not something I had come across before, and it has grown on me.

You can check my work word by word. This is the one that matters most for a site like this one. Some of these devotions turn on a single word, and the Berean comes with a free interlinear, so you can look up any verse and see the original word sitting right above the English one, with its grammar and its dictionary entry a click away. If a devotion here leans on a word and you want to know whether I leaned on it fairly, you do not need Greek, an account or anybody's permission. You need the verse number and a minute.

The Berean Standard Bible is at berean.bible. The committee page and the terms are both there, and I would rather you read them yourself than take my summary of them.

Copyright

Read them, print them, and use them with your own family, your small group or your class. Please do not republish them, sell them, or feed them into another product. If you would like to use this material somewhere beyond your own household, ask first and the answer will usually be yes.

Getting in touch

Corrections, questions, or a passage you would like to see covered: the address is on the contact page. There is no form and no mailing list, and it comes to me rather than to a support queue.

Corrections get read first. If something here misquotes scripture, points at the wrong verse, or claims more than the passage will carry, I want to know.

Supporting it

This site is free and will stay free. It carries advertising to cover what it costs to run, and what that sets on your device is set out on the privacy page.

If these have been useful to your family and you want to help with the bills, there is a Buy Me a Coffee page. Everything here remains free.