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
45 episodes
A. W. Tozer and the Night Train to Texas (Psalm 42:1)
A porter on a train out of Chicago brought a small man his toast and tea, came back down the aisle, and stopped short. The passenger was down on the floor between the seats, praying, with the train rocking underneath him. His name was A. W. Toz...
R. A. Torrey: The Sentence His Mother Said He Could Not Outrun (Psalm 34:6)
R. A. Torrey stood in the doorway of his family home at fifteen and told his mother he was finished with her Bible and finished with her praying. She said one sentence to his back as he walked out, and it followed him for years.Torrey e...
F. B. Meyer: The One Key He Would Not Hand Over (Romans 12:1)
F. B. Meyer knelt in a quiet English house with a ring of keys in his hand. He had already given God his pulpit and his good name. One small key was still closed inside his fist, and he could feel the Lord waiting at the end of the hall.
Hudson Taylor and the Prayer That Opened China (Philippians 4:19)
The true story of Hudson Taylor, the young missionary who slipped out of a packed Brighton church in June of 1865 because he could not bear the singing while a million a month died in China without Christ. On the sand of Brighton beach he opene...
Phillips Brooks: The Failure Behind a Beloved Christmas Carol (Psalm 37:23-24)
The true story of Phillips Brooks, the twenty-year-old teacher who failed so badly at Boston Latin School that the headmaster told him he would never succeed at anything else. God took that fall and turned it into a pulpit, a Christmas Eve ride...
Samuel Morris: The Prince Who Heard God's Voice (1 Corinthians 1:27)
The true story of Prince Kaboo, a teenage Liberian chieftain's son held captive and beaten daily until a light flashed over the jungle camp, a voice said flee, and the ropes fell from his body. He ran through the jungle for days, hiding in holl...
John Harper: The Preacher on the Titanic (Acts 16:31)
The true story of John Harper, the Baptist pastor from Glasgow who put his six-year-old daughter in a Titanic lifeboat, gave his own life vest to a stranger, and spent his final minutes in twenty-eight degree water asking one question of every ...
Andrew Murray: The Revival He Tried to Stop (John 15:4)
The true story of Andrew Murray, the young South African pastor who tried to silence a revival in 1860, then spent the next fifty years teaching the world to abide in Christ (John 15:4). The year is 1860 in Worcester, South Africa. A Sunday eve...
George Liele: The First Baptist Missionary America Forgot (Hebrews 6:10)
The true story of George Liele, born a slave in Virginia, ordained in 1775, and set free to preach, who sailed to Jamaica in 1782 and became the first Baptist missionary in history, ten years before William Carey (Hebrews 6:10). July 1782. The ...
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...