My dad would have a piece of advice that he would say over and over again to me and my sisters as we were growing up. It has proven to be such good advice and what's interesting is that it started out as dating advice because I was not good at picking boyfriends. My dad would always tell me and my sisters, "Girls, just don't settle. Don't just settle to have someone. Wait for someone who's crazy about you."

When I moved down to Texas over 20 years ago, I was looking for a job in radio and I did get a job in radio, but I was only making minimum wage. Because of that, I was also working at another job where I was making pretty decent money. I really had some some thoughts about forgetting about the radio idea so that I could just make some money. However, I would remember my dad saying, "Rebecca, if you do that you're settling. I've always taught you not to settle."

I was thinking about that very moment over the weekend as we were teaching through the book of Philippians at the HeartStrong Faith Women's Bible Conference. One of the things that I think you can take from that book is the idea of not settling. I think that we tend to do that sometimes with Bible study because there are Instagram memes with Bible verses, or we read devotional books that are about God where they pepper a couple of verses of Scripture in there. Although, Paul has such an incredible vision of Jesus that he says "to live is Christ and to die is gain". (Philippians 1:21)

I think that if Paul were here today, he would say: Don't settle. Don't settle for Bible verse memes and don't settle for just devotionals. When you have the richness and the treasures of Scripture, bound together in one book, which is definitely NOT how they got to read their Bible. They had one letter at a time or they had to sit and listen to a passage at a time, but we have the whole thing! Not only is your God crazy for you, He's jealous for you. He's jealous for your time. So don't settle. Don't settle for riding the coattails of someone else's faith when you could have your own relationship with the king of the universe.