Lift Up Your Day
Lift Up Your Day with Pastor Rodney Coe — a 5-minute Christian devotional podcast for the heart that needs lifting.
Every Take 5 episode is a true story from history and Scripture about ordinary people God used to do extraordinary things. Pastor Rodney Coe — author of 5 books, devotional writer, and pastor — tells the stories warm, well-paced, and pointed at the part of your day that needs the most lifting.
You'll meet missionaries saved by angels (John Paton), a watchmaker's daughter who forgave a Nazi guard (Corrie ten Boom), a Tennessee farm boy who took a hill in the Argonne (Alvin York), a Senate chaplain who wasn't ready (Peter Marshall), a man who walked with God at 4 a.m. (George Washington Carver), and more.
Each episode ends the same way: "And that, friend, is how God lifts up your day."
Free 7-day devotional When Worry Won't Let Go at rodneycoe.com/worry-devotional. Books and blog at rodneycoe.com.
Subscribe for weekly Take 5 stories. Keep Looking Up.
Episodes
36 episodes
William Wilberforce: The Fight He Refused to Lose
The year is 1787. A small, sickly young man stands up in the British House of Commons and proposes something that will make him one of the most hated men in England.William Wilberforce, barely five feet tall, often too sick to stand, is ...
Martin Luther: The Fear That Sparked a Reformation
July 2, 1505. A young law student named Martin Luther is walking back to university through the German countryside when the sky turns black.A bolt of lightning slams into the ground right next to him. Terrified, certain he is about to di...
John Wesley: The Boy Pulled From the Fire
Just before midnight in 1709, the Wesley family's rectory in Epworth caught fire.Samuel Wesley counted his children in the freezing yard and came up one short. Five-year-old John was still upstairs, trapped above the flames. There was no...
Charles Spurgeon: The Sadness He Couldn't Preach Away
The greatest preacher of the 1800s wept in the dark, and he never hid it.On a single night in 1856, a false cry of fire sent a packed London crowd into a deadly stampede while 22-year-old Charles Spurgeon stood helpless on the platform. ...
Augustine: The Prayer He Was Afraid to Pray
In the year 386, in a garden in Milan, a brilliant young professor named Augustine sat under a fig tree and came apart. He had wanted God and his old sins at the same time for years. Then a child's voice came over the garden wall singing, "take up...
Billy Graham: The Rule That Kept Him Honest
In November of 1948, in a hotel room in Modesto, California, a 29-year-old Billy Graham gathered three friends and made a list of every sin that could destroy them. Then he built a fence around his own life that held for sixty years. This is the ...
George Whitefield: The Voice That Emptied Franklin's Pockets
Benjamin Franklin came to the meeting with his mind already made up. He would not put one coin in the collection. Then the preacher began to speak. By the end, even the gold was gone, and the most famous skeptic in America walked home with empt...
Frances Ridley Havergal: The Box She Packed with Joy
A brilliant young Englishwoman sat at her desk one day, packing nearly fifty pieces of jewelry into a box to give away, and called it the happiest packing of her life. This is the story of Frances Ridley Havergal (1836-1879), who wrote t...
Matthew Henry: Robbed and Still Thankful
A robbed man picks up his pen, and what he writes will still be preaching three hundred years later. On a dark road outside Chester, thieves took every coin in Matthew Henry's pockets and disappeared into the woods. He walked home shaken...
Jonathan Edwards: The Sermon That Shook a Village
A preacher with a weak voice. A bored New England town. Twenty minutes of monotone reading. And heaven came down anyway. On a warm Wednesday in July of 1741, Jonathan Edwards stepped into the pulpit at Enfield, Connecticut. He never look...
Fanny Crosby: The Blind Woman Who Wrote 8,000 Hymns
When Fanny Crosby was six weeks old, a traveling doctor treated her infected eyes with a hot poultice and left her blind for life. He packed up and left town, and no one ever saw him again. She would never see a sunrise or her mother's face. She...
Christmas Evans: The Mountain Where He Got His Fire Back
A preacher rode alone through the mountains of Wales, and his heart was cold. His name was Christmas Evans. Born on Christmas Day, 1766, into deep poverty. Orphaned at nine. At seventeen he still could not read a single word. After he met Christ, ...
Civil War Revival of 1863: The Unfinished Baptism
In the winter of 1863, soldiers waded into half-frozen creeks to be baptized, too full of new faith to wait for spring, and many of them knew they might not live to see it. This is the story of the Great Revival that swept the Civil War camps on b...
Mary McLeod Bethune: Faith, Education, and Detour
They told her there was no place for a Black missionary to Africa. She called it the greatest disappointment of her life.Mary McLeod Bethune was born in 1875 on a South Carolina cotton field, the fifteenth of seventeen children of former...
C.S. Lewis: The Atheist Who Found God
C.S. Lewis was a brilliant Oxford atheist, certain that Christianity was a myth and determined to keep God at arm's length. This is the story of how the evidence, a midnight conversation with J.R.R. Tolkien, and a quiet ride to the zoo in his brot...
Eric Liddell: The Olympic Runner Who Gave Up Gold for God
The fastest man in Scotland was about to throw away the race of his life. The 1924 Olympics were in Paris, and Eric Liddell was the favorite to win the 100 meters. Then the schedule came out. The heats fell on a Sunday. And Eric Liddell, who belie...
Lottie Moon: The Missionary Who Starved to Feed China
She weighed just fifty pounds when they carried her onto the ship. Lottie Moon, four feet three inches tall and fluent in five languages, had given away all her food and money to starving families during a famine in China. She had spent nearly fo...
John Newton: Amazing Grace and the Slave Trader Who Wrote It
The Atlantic had turned black. Wind tore through the rigging, waves crashed clean over the deck, and a sailor who had spent years mocking the very idea of God was clinging to a rope and certain he would not live to see morning. His name was John ...
George Müller: The Orphan Father Who Prayed for Every Meal
He started out as a thief. By sixteen, George Müller had stolen from his own father, run out on hotel bills, and landed in a German jail. By the time he died, he had cared for more than ten thousand orphans and handled over a million pounds, and h...
D.L. Moody: The Shoe Clerk Who Sparked a Revival
A Sunday school teacher named Edward Kimball stood on the sidewalk outside a Boston shoe store, working up the nerve to go in. He nearly turned and walked away. Then he pushed the door open and went looking for a clerk named Dwight Moody.
Samuel Rutherford: Letters from Prison, Higher Summons
They summoned him for treason. He told them he had already been summoned by a higher Judge.Samuel Rutherford was a country pastor banished to a cold northern city, where exile turned him into one of the most beloved letter-writers in chu...
Horatio Spafford: It Is Well With My Soul (The True Story)
A man stands at the railing of a ship in the middle of the Atlantic late at night. A few weeks ago he had four daughters, Annie, Margaret, Bessie, and little Tanetta who was only two. Now the captain has come to find him with the words no fathe...
Fulton Street Revival: The Man Who Prayed Alone
Noon on a Wednesday in 1857, in a third-floor room above an old church in lower Manhattan, a forty-eight-year-old man sat down by himself to pray. For thirty minutes, nobody came. Then footsteps on the stairs. Then five more men. Within a year,...
Amy Carmichael: The Prayer God Answered With No
The true story of missionary Amy Carmichael and the childhood prayer God answered with 'no' (Isaiah 55:8).A little girl in Ireland once begged God for blue eyes and woke up disappointed. She had no idea He was preparing her for a rescue ...
Dietrich Bonhoeffer: The Pastor Who Defied Hitler
The true story of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the pastor who left safety in America to resist Hitler in Nazi Germany (Hebrews 11:6).In 1939, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was safe in New York City. His American friends had arranged a teaching post at Uni...