Cage Free Voices Spoken Devotionals

Kingdom of God Series: The Tree That Was a Man: Understanding the Kingdom of God

This is an unplanned, Spirit-led episode born out of reflection on the Kingdom of God and a desire to ensure clarity—especially for those who may be hearing about the Kingdom for the first time.

In this episode, I gently admonish listeners to revisit the Kingdom of God series, and I share a story written to explain the Kingdom in a way that is accessible to everyone—especially young children.

Through the allegory The Tree That Was a Man, we meet a tree whose very nature is love. From him flows life, and from that life grows fruit—love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and temperance. Those who are joined to him draw from his life and begin to bear the same fruit, becoming part of a growing grove rooted in love and truth.

Powerful Women of the Bible Series: Deborah: A Prophetess Who Led Israel to Peace

In this episode we explore Deborah, a prophetess and judge raised up during Israel’s era of the Judges. She exercised divine authority without pedigree, summoned Barak, and delivered God’s command that led to Sisera’s defeat and forty years of peace.

Deborah’s story shows leadership rooted in obedience, prophetic clarity, and faithful stewardship of authority — a reminder that calling, not title or lineage, establishes true influence.

Powerful Women of the Bible Series: Jael: When a Woman Becomes God’s Deliverer

In this episode of Cage Free Voices Spoken Devotionals — Powerful Women of the Bible, we focus on Jael (JL) from Judges 4–5: the Kenite woman whose decisive act against Sisera fulfilled Deborah’s prophecy and brought deliverance to Israel.

We examine how her choice of covenant loyalty over political peace highlights faithfulness after deliverance, and we close with a brief devotional reflection and prayer for courage to remain obedient in compromised seasons.

Powerful Women of the Bible Series: Lydia of Thyatira: How a Merchant's Home Built the Kingdom

In this episode of the Powerful Women of the Bible series we meet Lydia, a Lydian merchant from Thyatira whose faith reshaped the first church in Philippi. The Lord opened her heart to Paul’s message, she was baptized, and she opened her home as a base for the early believers.

The episode highlights how the kingdom of God advances through faithful stewardship rather than political power, showing Lydia’s courage in refusing idol worship, using her resources for hospitality, and risking economic and social cost to follow Yeshua.

Powerful Women of the Bible Series: Meroe's Queen and the Road to Revelation: The Untold Story of Amanitore

This episode explores the often-overlooked world of the Kandakes of Nubia and the African setting behind Acts 8. Philip is moving within Roman-occupied Judea, and the encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch occurs on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza—a desert trade route long used by African kingdoms to move people, knowledge, and resources between Judea, Egypt, Nubia, and the interior of the land known in antiquity by African peoples as Alkebulon. This meeting takes place within African mobility and sovereignty, not at the margins of it.

Set against the backdrop of Meroe and the Kushite kingdom, the episode examines how Queen Kandake Amanitore and her lineage of ruling women governed a literate, centralized, and independent African state. The eunuch Philip encounters is not an outsider seeking validation, but a senior Nubian official returning home from Jerusalem, shaped by the Kandake court’s intellectual traditions, administrative discipline, and theological inquiry.

Within this context, the eunuch’s encounter with Philip likely extended beyond personal transformation. As a trusted royal servant with direct access to the Kandake household and the mechanisms of governance, he would have been positioned to carry the gospel back into Nubia itself. In this way, gospel expansion into Alkebulon occurs not through coercion, empire, or foreign domination, but through African literacy, established travel networks, and indigenous systems of authority.

The episode reflects on how Nubian resistance to Roman domination, female rulership, and disciplined administration created conditions in which the gospel could move freely without imperial permission. Rather than flowing outward from empire, the gospel traveled along African trade routes, through African political structures, and into African intellectual life.

By re-centering Acts 8 within its African and first-century reality, this study disrupts imperial assumptions about gospel expansion and restores Nubia—and the Kandake queens—as active agents in the early movement of the gospel, not passive recipients of it.

Scholarly note:

The term Alkebulon reflects African oral and philosophical traditions referring to the continent as a unified land long before European cartography. Its use here centers African self-identification rather than later imposed geographic labels.

 

Powerful Women of the Bible Series: Huldah: The Woman Who Spoke for God When Kings Trembled

In this episode of Cage-Free Voices Spoken Devotionals, The Queen Bathsheba turns our attention to Huldah, the Judean prophetess whose brief appearance in Scripture carried nation-shifting power. When the long-forgotten Book of the Law was rediscovered, it was Huldah—deeply rooted in Jerusalem’s Mishneh district and respected among temple authorities—who confirmed its authenticity and delivered God’s word that set King Josiah’s reforms in motion.

This devotional invites listeners to recognize the God who elevates seemingly overlooked people—especially women—to shape the course of history. Huldah’s story reminds us that the One who sees and knows us also calls us, even when we feel hidden from the world’s eyes.

Silenced: When Power Fails Women, But God Does Not

In this powerful devotional episode, we step into the world of Jesus’ teaching on divorce—not through modern assumptions, but through the gritty reality of first-century Jewish life, where religious law, social hierarchy, and male authority often left women without protection or a voice.

We explore how Jesus’ words in Matthew 5 and 19 were not a condemnation of the broken or divorced, but a direct confrontation of a system that allowed men to discard women at will. Drawing from the Torah’s requirement for a "get" or sefer keritut  (certificate of divorce) in Deuteronomy 24:1–4, we see how the Law was originally designed to protect, not punish, women. We examine the Pharisaic divisions between the Hillel and Shammai schools, the rise of Mishnah Gittin (c. 200 CE), and how rabbinic legal loopholes often left women trapped, shamed, or economically devastated.

This episode connects the ancient injustices Jesus confronted with the silencing women face today—through religious institutions, legal systems, workplaces, and cultural pressures that still diminish women’s agency, voice, and worth. Yet woven through every moment is the truth that God has never aligned with systems that crush the vulnerable. From Scripture to history, from ancient context to modern reality, this devotional reminds us:

• Jesus defended the abandoned and exposed the oppressors.

• God stands with women when human power fails them.

• Being divorced or remarried does not make you defiled or disqualified.

• God’s covenant restores dignity where institutions try to erase it.

Whether you’ve walked through divorce, felt silenced by religious gatekeepers, or simply need to remember the God who sees and defends the oppressed, this episode brings clarity, compassion, and liberation.

 

God has not forgotten you. God has not failed you. God has always defended your voice—even when the world tried to silence it.

Hospitality & Holiness Part II: When God’s Messengers Are Rejected

In this second installment of Hospitality and Holiness, we turn to a sobering theme: what happens when God’s messengers are rejected. Scripture shows us that the way a community responds to those who carry God’s word reveals far more than hospitality—it exposes the posture of the heart toward God Himself.

Yeshua addresses this directly in Matthew 10, continuing the instructions He gave to His disciples as He sent them into towns and homes throughout Israel. After commanding them to travel without wealth, provisions, or security, He warns:

“And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet.

Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment, than for that city.”

—Matthew 10:14–15 (KJV)

This is one of the strongest statements Yeshua makes in the Gospels, and it echoes throughout biblical history. The rejection of God’s messengers is never treated lightly, because to reject the messenger is to reject the One who sent them (Luke 10:16).

Hospitality and Holiness Part I: Yeshua’s Mission, Ancient Ethics, and the Test of the Stranger

In this episode, we unpack Yeshua’s radical instructions in Matthew 10, where He sends His disciples out with nothing—no money, no provisions, no security—relying entirely on the hospitality of others. By exploring the ancient Near Eastern context, from Abraham and Sodom to the Mari tablets and Hammurabi’s Code, we reveal how hospitality was a sacred moral duty that reflected the heart of a community.

Discover how these timeless principles test the hearts of those who receive strangers, challenge our assumptions about generosity, and illuminate the kingdom of God. We also discuss how to practice this ethic today with discernment, obedience to the Holy Spirit, and safety, turning the act of welcoming the stranger into a living expression of covenant love and faithfulness.

The Agony of Expectation: Resting in God When the Wait Is Long

This episode delves into the deep ache and hidden purpose of long seasons of waiting. Drawing on the lives of Abraham, Joseph, David, and Job, it reveals how deferred hope can wound the heart even as it shapes the soul. Rather than portraying delay as divine absence, the episode shows that waiting is the very terrain where trust is tested, faith is refined, and character is formed.

Listeners are invited into a posture of surrendered rest—a way of living faithfully in the present while releasing control over the future. In this quiet yielding, they may discover that God uses delay not as punishment but as preparation, aligning people and circumstances, strengthening their inner life, and shaping them for the fulfillment of what He has promised.