Frequently Asked Questions

Each morning, FirstWord delivers a short, focused email to your inbox — one verse of Scripture, a brief meditation, and a prayer. The content is personalized to the topics, tone, and life stage you choose during onboarding.

You sign up, pick what matters to you, and the rest happens automatically. No app to open. No algorithm to fight. Just His Word, first thing.

Yes. FirstWord is completely free to subscribe to. Enter your email, set your preferences, and your daily devotional starts arriving the following morning.

Your daily devotional is sent every morning. The first email arrives the day after you sign up, so you wake up to it ready and waiting.

Delivery times may vary slightly based on your email provider, but most subscribers receive their email between 6–7 AM Eastern Time.

Yes — but each subscription is tied to one email address. If you want to receive, say, both a Daily Meditation and a Lectionary Journey, you'll need two separate subscriptions with two different email addresses.

The easiest way to do this is with email aliases — a feature built into most major email providers that lets you create variations of your address without making a new account.

Gmail example: If your address is john@gmail.com, you can subscribe with john+daily@gmail.com and john+lectionary@gmail.com. Both will land in the same inbox, but each gets its own preferences and journey progress.

Outlook, Yahoo, and most other providers support the same +alias trick. Just add +anything after your username and before the @ sign.

When you sign up, you choose the topics you want Scripture to speak into (like Work, Marriage, Discipline, or Faith), a writing tone (Direct, Reflective, or Balanced), and your current life stage.

Each day's content is generated with your preferences in mind — same unchanging Word of God, shaped to meet you where you actually are.

Visit your subscriber dashboard to update your topics, tone, or life stage at any time. Changes take effect with your next morning's email.

Each email also includes a link to your dashboard at the bottom — no password required, just click the link from your inbox.

To switch to a new email address, simply sign up again with your new address and set your preferences. Then unsubscribe from your old address via the link in any FirstWord email.

First, check your spam or promotions folder — FirstWord emails sometimes land there on first delivery. If you find it there, mark it as "Not Spam" so future emails arrive in your inbox.

You can also add howard@firstword.co to your contacts to help ensure reliable delivery.

If emails consistently don't arrive, visit your dashboard to verify your subscription is active, or re-subscribe at firstword-vxdv.polsia.app.

Every FirstWord email includes an unsubscribe link at the bottom. Click it and you'll be removed immediately — no forms, no confirmation hoops.

You can also manage your subscription from your subscriber dashboard.

We use the English Standard Version (ESV® Bible) translation.

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated into any other language.

Users may not copy or download more than 500 verses of the ESV Bible or more than one half of any book of the ESV Bible.

You can access the full text of the ESV bible for free at ESV.org which offers a web-based bible app that supports bookmarks, highlighting and notes also free.

Each meditation is generated fresh each morning using AI, guided by Scripture and shaped by your personal preferences. The theological foundation is drawn from the beliefs you can read about on our What We Believe page.

The Word itself never changes. The reflection is crafted to meet you where you are — this season, this morning, this need.

Yes — and we'd love that. Share this link: firstword-vxdv.polsia.app

Each email also includes a "Share Today's Meditation" link that generates a clean, shareable page for that day's content — perfect for sending to someone who needs that particular word.