PREPARE LIKE A BRIDE

The Heart Behind The King Devotional Series

By Nicole Charles

Part of The Abundant Faith Team

There are messages we choose to write, and then there are messages that seem to refuse to leave us alone. Prepare Like a Bride became the latter for me. What began as writing about the majesty of Jesus and the extraordinary reality of who He is continued developing into something much deeper: a growing burden to call the Bride of Christ back to the King Himself. Not simply back to church attendance, Christian activity, ministry, or even greater biblical knowledge, as valuable as those things can be, but back to intimacy with Jesus. Somewhere along the way, I became increasingly aware that we can become incredibly familiar with Christianity while becoming strangely unfamiliar with Christ. We can know how to attend, serve, build, lead, worship publicly, and speak the language of faith while quietly allowing the place of private devotion to grow cold. That realization is at the heart of The King Devotional Series.

The series began with The King in Majesty, because before we can understand what it means to prepare for the King, we must remember who the King is. Jesus has become familiar to us in ways that can sometimes cause us to lose our awe. We know the stories. We know the verses. We have heard His name thousands of times, and familiarity can quietly diminish wonder if we are not careful. Yet Scripture reveals Christ as glorious, holy, victorious, compassionate, powerful, and worthy of complete surrender. I wanted the beginning of this journey to invite readers to look again—to behold Him beyond the version of Jesus that culture has made comfortable and encounter the King who is worthy of everything.

From there came The King’s Pursuit, because the story of our relationship with Jesus is not merely about humanity searching for God. It is also the breathtaking story of a King who came looking for us. Scripture repeatedly reveals a God who pursues, restores, calls, rescues, and invites. Before we ever understood how desperately we needed Him, He had already moved toward us. That truth matters because preparation can easily become distorted into religious striving if we forget the heart of the One for whom we are preparing. We are not trying to earn the attention of a distant King. We are responding to the love of a King who has already demonstrated His desire for us through the cross.

Then the message became even more urgent for me with Keeping the Oil. Matthew 25 and the parable of the ten virgins would not leave me alone. Ten women were waiting for the same bridegroom. All ten carried lamps. All ten knew he was coming. All ten eventually fell asleep. Yet when the midnight cry announced his arrival, only five possessed the reserve necessary to keep their lamps burning. The distinction between them had been almost invisible until the moment it mattered. That picture caused me to examine my own life differently. It made me ask whether we have sometimes mistaken proximity to Christian things for intimacy with Christ Himself. We can listen to someone else’s sermon, sing along with someone else’s worship, read someone else’s revelation, and be encouraged by someone else’s testimony, but there is an oil that cannot be borrowed. No pastor, spouse, friend, parent, author, or ministry leader can cultivate our relationship with Jesus for us. There must be a place where our faith becomes personally rooted in knowing Him.

That is why I believe this topic is so necessary right now. We are living in an extraordinarily noisy generation. Information never stops. Our attention is constantly being pulled somewhere, and even within Christian culture there is an endless stream of voices competing for our focus. We can move from sermon clips to prophetic words to podcasts to worship videos to social media posts and spend hours consuming content about God without spending meaningful time alone with God. None of those resources are inherently wrong; many are tremendous gifts. The danger comes when they begin to substitute for the secret place. There is a difference between knowing what everyone else is saying about Jesus and knowing the sound of His voice for ourselves.

I also believe we are living in a time when many believers are tired. Some have waited for promises that seem delayed. Some have prayed prayers that appear unanswered. Some began assignments with tremendous excitement and now find themselves wondering whether they misunderstood God because the journey has taken longer than expected. This is why Waiting on the King became such an important part of the series. Waiting is not passive when it is surrendered to God. There are things He develops in us during seasons of waiting that could never be produced through immediate fulfillment. Waiting exposes our motives, deepens endurance, confronts our need for control, and teaches us whether our faith is anchored in what God gives us or in God Himself. Sometimes we become so focused on reaching the promise that we fail to recognize what the King is developing in us along the road toward it.

Ultimately, all of these messages lead toward The Wedding Feast, because the story Scripture tells is moving somewhere. Revelation does not end with a defeated, exhausted Church barely surviving until Jesus returns. It gives us the breathtaking picture of the marriage supper of the Lamb and a Bride who has made herself ready. That phrase carries enormous weight for me: His Bride has made herself ready. There is intentionality in preparation. We cannot determine when Christ will return, and I have no interest in building fear around timelines or speculation. What we can determine is how we will live while we wait. We can decide whether we will cultivate intimacy with Him, remain rooted in His Word, forgive when forgiveness is difficult, obey when obedience costs us something, worship through disappointment, repent quickly when we wander, and continually allow the Holy Spirit to shape us into people who genuinely know the One we say we are waiting for.

For me, this message has never been about frightening people into readiness. Fear is a poor substitute for love. A bride who loves her bridegroom does not live terrified that he might arrive; she longs for his arrival because she knows him. That is the heart I want readers to understand throughout this series. Preparing the Bride is not about living anxiously, constantly wondering whether we have done enough to satisfy God. It is about returning to our first love. It is about allowing Jesus to become the center again rather than one part of an increasingly crowded life. It is about knowing Him so intimately that His presence is not foreign to us and His voice is not lost among all the others competing for our attention.

This message has challenged me personally because I am not writing it from a place of having mastered it. I am a woman who is building, writing, serving, dreaming, and carrying responsibilities just like so many others. I know how easy it is for work done in the name of the Kingdom to consume the very time we once spent with the King. There will always be another project, another person who needs something, another opportunity, another deadline, and another legitimate reason to keep moving. Yet I have had to confront the reality that if everything around me grows while my relationship with Jesus becomes smaller, I have misunderstood success. Before I am an author, speaker, ministry founder, wife, mother, visionary, or anything else that may describe my life, I am His. Everything meaningful must flow from there.

Perhaps that is why the phrase Prepare the Bride has become so deeply rooted in me. I believe there is an awakening happening in people who are hungry for something deeper than polished Christianity. There are believers who are tired of simply going through the motions. They want the presence of God. They want truth that transforms rather than merely inspires for a moment. They want to recognize His voice, understand His Word, walk in obedience, and experience a faith that remains steady when life becomes difficult. I believe the Lord is drawing people away from performance and back toward presence, away from borrowed revelation and into personal encounter, away from simply knowing about the King and into actually knowing Him.

That is what I hope The King Devotional Series becomes in the hands of every reader—not merely another collection of books sitting on a shelf, but an invitation. An invitation to slow down, open Scripture, allow God to ask difficult questions, and rediscover the wonder of Jesus. An invitation to examine the lamp without condemnation and ask whether there is oil in reserve. An invitation to learn how to wait without losing hope, how to remain faithful when fulfillment seems delayed, and how to remember that the ultimate destination of our faith is not a platform, ministry, blessing, breakthrough, or earthly achievement. Our destination is the King Himself.

There will come a day when faith becomes sight and waiting finally ends. Until then, I want to live differently because I believe He is worth preparing for. I want my public life to flow from private devotion, my obedience to remain when no one is watching, my faith to endure through seasons I do not understand, and my love for Jesus to deepen rather than diminish with time. That is the prayer behind these books, and it is the invitation I hope they carry into every home they enter: Know the King. Love the King. Keep the oil. Learn to wait. Prepare for the feast. Prepare the Bride.

Nicole Charles is an author, speaker, entrepreneur, and ministry leader based in San Antonio, Texas. She is the founder of Fortress 29 Ministries and the creator of the Voices from the Fortress book series, a faith-centered collection of stories and teachings focused on identity, healing, spiritual awakening, and encountering the presence of God.

With a background in leadership, business operations, and creative media, Nicole combines bold faith with visionary storytelling to encourage people to walk fully in who God created them to be. Through writing, speaking, podcasts, worship gatherings, and community outreach, her mission is to awaken hearts to Jesus Christ and create spaces where truth, hope, and the Holy Spirit are welcomed.

Nicole is also involved in business development and community impact initiatives, helping build faith-driven projects that bring people together through creativity, discipleship, and purpose. Her work is marked by authenticity, encouragement, and a passion to see lives transformed through the love and power of God.