3 Day Bible Reading Plan - “Love Writes the Budget”
“When we truly fall in love with Jesus, our relationship with "stuff" utterly transforms. Our hands loosen their grip on possessions, not because we are forced, but because we recognize a greater treasure, a more profound security, and an infinitely satisfying joy found in Him. Love writes the budget, not scarcity, not ambition, not even rational calculation. It is an overflowing response to His immeasurable love for us.” - Pastor Paul Crandell, 11/23/25
Day 1
Featured Verse: John 12:1–8 - “Mary therefore took a pound of expensive ointment made from pure nard, and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair.”
What does Mary’s extravagant act of pouring costly perfume on Jesus’ feet and wiping them with her hair reveal about the nature of true worship, and how might it challenge our modern understandings of devotion and sacrifice?
The scene is filled with sensory details—fragrance filling the house, the intimacy of touching Jesus’ feet, the scandal of a woman letting down her hair. What might the Holy Spirit be teaching us through these embodied, almost shocking elements about the incarnational nature of worship and love for Christ?
Days before Jesus washed the disciples’ feet (John 13), Mary washed His feet with her perfume and her hair. What does this reveal about Mary’s spiritual insight or humility—that she, a woman and a disciple, instinctively took the posture of the lowest servant toward her Lord before the Lord himself modeled that same posture for the Twelve?
Pause and Reflect: What is the “costly perfume” in your own life that Jesus is inviting you to pour out recklessly on Him—and what fears or voices are telling you it’s wasteful?
“She gave away that which was most precious to her, and she gave it to the most precious of all beings. She broke the box; she broke her heart too, I doubt not, in doing it. There was a double breaking: the alabaster box and her own heart were both broken. Oh, that we might have many such in all our congregations, who would break their alabaster boxes of precious ointment upon the head of Jesus!” - Charles Spurgeon
“Mary’s love neither reckoned cost nor consulted prudence. She thought nothing of the mocking wonder of the guests, nor of the waste. She only thought, ‘My Lord is here, and I love Him, and this is the best I have.’ That is the true spirit of Christian sacrifice.” - Alexander Maclaren
Day 2
Featured Verse: Matthew 26:8–13 - “Why do you trouble the woman? For she has done a beautiful thing to me.”
When the disciples indignantly ask, “Why this waste?” Jesus calls Mary’s act “a beautiful thing.” What does this clash reveal about the radical difference between a kingdom economy of lavish love and a human economy of prudent stinginess?
Jesus declares that wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what Mary has done will be told in memory of her. Why does Jesus eternally memorialize an act of apparent extravagance—and what does this say about the kind of deeds He considers most worthy of remembrance?
Jesus ties Mary’s anointing directly to his burial (“she has anointed my body beforehand for burial”). What does it mean that a woman—excluded from priestly or rabbinic roles—performs a profoundly priestly and prophetic act over the true High Priest and coming Sacrifice?
Pause and Reflect: What in your life right now (your time, your money, your reputation, your tears, your worship) is being labeled “waste” by the people around you, or even by the cautious voice inside your own head, while Jesus is quietly waiting to call it beautiful?
“The heart that loves Christ will never count anything too good or too costly for Him. ‘Why this waste?’ say the Judases of the present day. Ah! the answer is, ‘Because I love Him.’” - C.H. Mackintosh
“My brethren, there is no waste where there is real love to Jesus.” - Charles Spurgeon
Day 3
Featured Verse: John 11:25–26 - “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?”
If the same Jesus who received Mary’s perfume at His feet now stands before you and asks, “Do you believe that I Myself—not a theory, not a future event, but I AM the resurrection and the life—do you believe this?”—what parts of your life are still being held back from that belief?
Jesus says whoever lives and believes in Him will never die. How does the lavish, “wasteful” love shown by Mary demonstrate what it looks like to already be living the undying life He promises, even while we still walk through a world of graves?
Jesus wept at the tomb, yet He is the resurrection. Mary poured perfume for His burial, yet He is the life. How do these paradoxes invite us to bring our most costly gifts—our grief, our worship, our very deaths—to the One who both enters our tombs and shatters them?
Pause and Reflect: If the One who is Life itself asks you to die (to your plans, your reputation, your treasures, your very self), what are you finally willing to pour out and bury with Him, trusting that nothing surrendered to the Resurrection ever stays dead?
“When Christ says, ‘I am the resurrection and the life,’ He declares that eternal life is not merely a gift which He bestows, but that He Himself is the principle and fountain of it; so that to have Him is to have life, and to be without Him is to remain under the power of death forever.” - Jonathan Edwards
“These are the sweetest words that ever came from the lips of the Son of God: ‘I am the resurrection and the life.’ He does not say, ‘I give resurrection,’ but ‘I AM.’ O weary soul, come and lean thy head upon the bosom of Him who is the very life itself!” - Robert Murray M’Cheyne