Unlocked is a daily teen devotional, centered on God’s Word. Each day’s devotion—whether fiction, poetry, or essay—asks the question: How does Jesus and what He did affect today’s topic? With daily devotions read by our hosts, Natalie and Dylan, and questions designed to encourage discussion and a deeper walk with Christ, Unlocked invites teens to both engage with the Bible and to write and submit their own devotional pieces.
READ: MATTHEW 6:19-34; 22:36-40
What’s your greatest treasure on earth? Maybe it’s a prized collection of vintage postcards, or a beautiful and rare electric guitar, or maybe it’s a sizable bank a…
READ: PSALM 104; COLOSSIANS 1:15-23
I love seeing the fall colors as the trees turn in autumn, the white snow that falls to the ground in winter, the new sprouts and flowers that come in spring, a…
READ: PSALM 102:25-28; HEBREWS 13:5-8
It can be comforting to have something in your life that always stays the same. You might have dinner with your grandparents every weekend, or you might have …
READ: DEUTERONOMY 30:1-10; JEREMIAH 29:4-19; MATTHEW 28:18-20
Imagine being exiled from your home where you’ve lived all your life and forced to move to a faraway land…for seventy years. Would you…
READ: PSALMS 13:1-6; 23:4
Feeling sad is the worst. It makes me feel helpless, small, and weak. So I try to avoid it. I distract myself, tell myself everything is fine, find something to be angry …
READ: JOHN 11:1-44; 15:15
As a child, John 11 was one of my favorite Bible passages. I loved listening to the story of Lazarus. Part of it may have been because the town where Lazarus and his sist…
READ: HEBREWS 10:14-18; JAMES 1:2-7; 1 PETER 1:13-16
Sometimes, we feel like we should be perfect, having no faults and never doing anything wrong. We might read James 1:4, which says, “For when y…
READ: 1 SAMUEL 16:1-13; LUKE 10:25-37
Just above the sea’s drop off into the cold depths lay the city of Aquis. Turrets of shell and pearl sparkled under the liquid bubble that encased the city, a…
READ: PSALM 139:1-6; ROMANS 8:26-28
Have you ever had to interpret for a toddler? As little ones learn their words, it can be hard for them to get the pronunciations right. Water might become “waw…
READ: PSALMS 33:12-22; 78:1-8
You may know that the Wright Brothers invented the first functional airplane, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, and Louis Pasteur developed a process that…
READ: PSALM 94:17-19; MATTHEW 6:25-34; 11:28-30
There are a lot of anxious and worried people in the world today, but that’s nothing new. People have been worrying for a long time, otherwise the B…
READ: PSALMS 32:5; 103:8-14; EPHESIANS 6:10-18; 1 PETER 5:6-11
Are you ever reminded of something bad you did, and just the memory of it makes you feel like you just did it again seconds ago? Some…
READ: PSALM 119:14; PROVERBS 2:1-5; JAMES 1:5-11
Have you ever cleaned out an attic in search of treasure? Like an old baseball card that could be worth a lot of money, found in a dusty old box. O…
READ: PSALM 46:1-7; MATTHEW 8:23-27
What’s the scariest storm you’ve ever been through? When you’re in the middle of a storm, you never know what could happen. As the wind picks up, trees start bl…
READ: EPHESIANS 6:18-20; 1 TIMOTHY 2:1-4; JAMES 5:13-16
One day, I heard a beautician chatting to her colleague as I was selecting a nail polish. She said, “I’m trying to stay strong, but when I’m…
READ: JOHN 8
It can be hard to answer people who question us about our beliefs, especially if they speak aggressively and make us nervous. Studying the Bible can help us have answers in our heads,…
READ: JOHN 11:32-36; ROMANS 12:15; HEBREWS 4:14-16
There are a lot of lies in our world, and one of them is that real men don’t cry. But what about Jesus? God became human, and it was well-documen…
READ: EPHESIANS 2:11-22
The village of Koselig had begun building ships. For too long the Blodugur clan had pillaged their tiny coastal town (and they, in turn, had done the same to them) and now …
READ: PSALM 66:16-20; JAMES 1:19-27; 3:13-18
Sometimes our orchestra would split into ensembles. In these smaller groups, we’d sit down with our sheet music, then all start at the same speed, or t…
READ: ECCLESIASTES 3:1-14
Do you ever feel like you’ve been stuck in the age you are forever? Maybe you have big dreams for the future, but you just don’t have the resources or experience or age t…