Dr. Barrett Duke is the Executive Director and Treasurer of the Montana Southern Baptist Convention. In this role he manages the association of Southern Baptist Churches in Montana and provides leadership to their commitment to work together to reach Montana and the world for Christ.
Since beginning his position in January 2017, he and his wife Denise have traveled all over the state getting to know the pastors, their wives, and the churches. Barrett speaks regularly in the churches and Denise focuses on a ministry of encouragement to the pastors’ wives.
Barrett came to Montana from Washington, D.C., where he served as Vice President for Public Policy for the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. After 20 years in public policy engagement for Southern Baptists, the Lord led him and Denise to Montana to serve Southern Baptists at the local church level.
His love for ministry in the West was born out of thirteen years as a church planter and pastor in Denver, Colorado, where he and Denise had the privilege of starting Cornerstone Church in a southern suburb of Denver.
Barrett earned his Ph.D. in Religious and Theological Studies from the Joint Ph.D. Program of the University of Denver and the Iliff School of Theology, where he
focused his studies on biblical interpretation.
Barrett and Denise have been members at Emmanuel Baptist since 2017, where Barrett serves as an elder. He and Denise have three grown children and two grandsons. Barrett is glad to be back in a position where he can serve the local church and enjoy so much of the beauty of God’s creation while doing it.
Read this introduction to the next 21 days and come back tomorrow for day one! If you prefer to receive a daily text containing a link to the devotions, click here for instructions.
If you prefer, you can download the entire 21-day devotion booklet here.
Introduction
God speaks. When He does, we must respond to what He says, whether that is to believe something or to do something. When we respond to what God has spoken, either by belief or action, the Bible says we are exercising faith.
Faith is believing with such confidence God has spoken that we do what He says or we order our lives and beliefs around it. The writer of the book of Hebrews tells us “without faith it is impossible to please God” (Hebrews 11:6). The apostle Paul confirms that “everything that is not from faith is sin” (Romans 14: 23). There is no room in these declarations for any negotiation. Our lives must be characterized by faith if we want to be pleasing to God. This means that when God speaks, we must do what He says.
One way God speaks is with the Bible. The Bible is his speech preserved for us in written form. When we read it and do what it says, we are showing the kind of confidence and trust in that speech which the Bible calls faith. This is what we did when we heard the gospel and trusted Jesus as our Savior and Lord. To fail to order our lives around what the Bible says is sin.
Another way God speaks is to reveal His will directly to us. I don’t know of anyone who has said they have heard God speak to them with their physical ears. I doubt that happens very often, if at all, today. But there are plenty of times when God has revealed to us what He wants us to do just as clearly as if He had spoken out loud. In those times, He is showing us His unique will for our lives. Failure to order our lives to achieve God’s unique revealed will is sin, as well.
We must learn to live by faith. When God speaks, we must do as He says. When we do so, we are exercising faith. This is the key to the victorious Christian life. In Hebrews 11, we meet people from the past who did what God told them to do and saw Him do some pretty amazing things. We can see God do amazing things through our lives, too, if we commit to do what He tells us to do, even when it doesn’t seem to make sense.
Let’s look over the shoulders of some of God’s choice heroes of the faith for the next twenty-one days and learn from them what it means to live by faith. You won’t be looking at all of the great men and women of faith in this chapter, but I think when you finish these next twenty-one days, you’ll have a good picture of the blessings and the demands of the life of faith. May God use these coming days in all our lives to help us to be the people of faith He calls us to be and that we want to be.