Author: DwightClough

For many people, this is their greatest fear. For others, this is their greatest hope. What would our country look like if we were truly, 100%, a Christian nation?

Let me offer some observations.

To begin with, no one would be lonely. Ever. Everyone would have an abundance of friends. There would be no divide, no culture war. Instead, all relationships would be characterized by understanding, respect, trust, and love.

We would be a nation of truth tellers. Everyone—politicians and journalists included—would be trustworthy and trusted. No one would be deceived or trying to deceive.

Elections would not divide the country into winners and losers. Instead, they would unite our country around our common values. Candidates would meet often—not to debate—but to collaborate on how best to serve the people. The candidates would be friends.

There would be no bullying, gaslighting, mud slinging, narcissism, con artists, or anything like that.

Any person of any age, gender, race, or look could walk down any street in any neighborhood any time day or night and be perfectly safe. Good people—no matter what they looked like—would never have anything to fear from the police.

Unions would be unnecessary because employers would be outdoing each other to take good care of their employees. The wealthy would be leading the way in serving the needy. There would be no real poverty because we would see ourselves as on the same team, and we would do what we could to bring out the best in everyone.

You could expect breakthroughs in technology, energy, and learning because we would be a nation of high functioning people.

Children—almost without exception—would grow up in stable, loving, two parent families. Marriages would be happy and healthy with divorce almost unknown. Addictions would be unheard of. (And, yeah, no judgment here. I get it. Life happens. But I’m describing what God desires for us.)

Gratitude would characterize the national mood rather than resentment, victimhood, entitlement, or arrogance.

Pain lies, limiting beliefs, bad tapes playing in your head—whatever you want to call it—messages like I’m not lovable, I don’t have what it takes, I’m not safe, I’m human garbage—and any of a thousand other negative messages—all would be vanquished. They would no longer feel true at any level.

That, in my view, is what it would mean to truly live in a Christian nation.

Why are people afraid of this? Because they don’t understand it. They imagine it must be top down, outside in, coerced, with someone in control sending out the religious police to enforce rules nobody wants to follow.

But that’s not what it is.

The Kingdom of God is bottom up, inside out, voluntary. It doesn’t begin until you say yes.

But if this does sound good to you, what’s the next step?

Invite Jesus in. Invite Him into your life and give Him permission to be who He wants to be, do what He wants to do—not once and done, but day after day invite Him in, and watch Him transform your life.

Here’s the video version of this post…

Be encouraged!

Dwight

#1 It’s baked into our identity. God created us in His image, and God is a world changer. Every decision we make affects others including people we will never meet in this life.

#2 Jesus gave us the assignment to change our world. The Great Commission of Matthew 28:19-20 tells us to make disciples of all nations teaching them to obey everything He has commanded. Imagine a world like that! That is a changed world, and that is our assignment.

#3 Your assignment is for you. You can’t use a proxy. You can’t hire a professional clergyman to do it for you. It rests on you and you alone. Your assignment is for you.

#4 Your specific assignment is unique to you. No one else can do exactly what you were called to do. You alone have the gifts, the connections, the personality, the placement to carry out your mission.

#5 Our assignment has consequence. You and I were sent here to bring eternal good into many lives. If we don’t carry out our assignment, I don’t know if there’s a way to measure the loss.

#6 You and I are accountable for completing our assignment. We will need to turn in your homework. We will report to Jesus, and He will ask us what you did with the assignment He gave us.

#7 You are uniquely equipped to carry out your assignment. You have been given the tools you need and the opportunity to acquire the skills you need. Nobody is better qualified than you to do what God has asked you to do.

#8 The ticket to heaven comes with transformation attached to it. If your ticket does not have transformation attached to it, maybe you got a ticket to a different destination.

#9 Our job is not just to put people on the train to heaven. Our job is also to bring heaven to earth.

#10 We fix ourselves before we fix our world.

Bonus: #11 We’re better together.

Here’s the video…

In case you’re interested, I’ve identified five Kingdom Styles—that is, different ways that God has equipped us to bring good into our world. I also created a free, quick and easy quiz to help you identify your Kingdom Style. I need some people to try out the quiz and give me feedback. If that’s you, let me know, and I’ll send you a link.

Thanks!

Dwight

Does it bother you that Christianity has lost much of its influence over our culture?

It bothers me.

It bothers me for multiple reasons. It paves the way for persecution—and I don’t want that for anybody that I love. It opens the door to crime, corruption, and all kinds of evil. It positions our nation to be on the receiving end of Divine judgment. And it’s symptomatic of a church that has—in part, it seems—lost its way.

We are meant to be the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a city on a hill. And, I’m sure, at times we are. But, wow, look around, and ask yourself: What went wrong?

I’ve been obsessing about that for a long time.

Here’s a question I ask: Did we get our message wrong?

We go out into our world and say, “Hey, everyone! I have a free gift for you! It’s called eternal life. All you need to do is pray a prayer, and then your sins—past, present, and future—will be forgiven, and works-free grace will open heaven’s door for you.”

How does that transform a culture? How does that “make disciples of all nations” and “teach them to observe all things I have commanded you”? (Matthew 28)

I’ve been sending a different message to my world. The grace that saves transforms. (Titus 2 and, maybe, the rest of the Bible.) This isn’t a one-and-done business deal with God; this is a new life—as in an entire life. Eternal life is free and it costs you everything.

It shows up in some of my recent YouTube videos like my most recent 38-minute video on the Kingdom of God.

(And if 38 minutes of Dwight is too much, I’ve recently posted about 35 ten-second YouTube shorts; you can check out some of those.)

Most people in our world don’t know or believe that God is good, so I tackled that in this video.

And, of course, when Christian fixes don’t work, we lose our credibility with our culture, so that’s covered in this video which got over a thousand views.

Anyway, I’m doing what I can to reverse this lack of influence in our culture.

What do you think? How can we restore and increase the influence of Christianity in our culture? What would it take? I’d love to hear or read your thoughts.

Dwight

Why is it that most Christian fixes don’t work?

You have a problem with anger. Christian fix? Forgive!

Yeah, sure. How?

You have a problem with panic attacks. Christian fix? It’s a sin to worry.

Thanks!

You have a problem with lust. Christian fix? Don’t.

Whatever you say.

Most Christian fixes boil down to two words: Try harder. Or, alternatively: Don’t sin.

Not only does this not work, but it forces Christians underground with their problems. (Hmm. This didn’t work for me. But it must be working for everyone else. Since it works for others but doesn’t work for me, there must be something wrong with me. Out of shame, I need to hide.)

Yeah.

Newsflash! These Christian fixes don’t work for anybody. (Or hardly anybody.) So don’t feel bad.

They don’t work because they’re not designed to work. The Christian life wasn’t designed to be accomplished by trying harder. The Christian life is impossible. That’s why we need Jesus.

Most people leave it there, but don’t tell you how to bring Jesus into the problem. So you’re left to guess.

Let me explain what works for me.

I have a problem. It leaves me with a bad feeling. When I’m in that feeling, here’s where my mind goes. When my mind goes there, here’s what feels true. If my feelings could talk, this is what they would say.

Jesus, what do You want me to know?

And then wait. Give Him a chance to say what He wants to say, to show what He wants to show, to rewire your brain and your heart.

Hope this helps!

Dwight

What does it take to bring Jesus to a broken world?

First and foremost, you need to bring Jesus to a broken you. I need to bring Jesus to a broken me. Until Jesus starts occupying the broken places in your life—I’m sorry, it doesn’t matter how smart you are, how educated you are, how highly trained you are, you’re just not positioned to do a whole lot of good.

Here’s why…

We replicate who we are—with all our hurts and hangups. We’ll think we’re doing good, we’ll think we’re doing God’s work, we’ll think we have an amazing ministry, but we’re just replicating ourselves with all our blind spots in other people.

It’s just a law—we reproduce who we are. My four kids look like my wife and me. We reproduce who we are. That’s true physically, and it’s true spiritually.

Years ago I heard people say: Those who God uses greatly He hurts deeply. I don’t think that’s exactly true. First of all, God doesn’t hurt people. God heals people. But, more to the point, all of us are hurt deeply. That’s part of the human condition.

The difference is this: Not everyone has found the courage to take Jesus to those places of pain. And until you and I bring Jesus to our own brokenness, we’re not equipped to bring Jesus to a broken world. So that’s step #1, and it remains step #1 throughout our lives.

More in this video…

Be encouraged!

Dwight

In Genesis 3, we read the story of the fall of humanity. The serpent opens his dialogue with Eve by creating doubt.

“I heard a rumor … could it possibly be true?”

If you look at this chapter carefully, you will find that almost everything the serpent says is true, but it is a twisted truth designed to deceive. Here the first spin doctor dresses the truth the way he wants us to see it.

The real message of the serpent is this: “Maybe there’s something about God you don’t know. Maybe once you knew, you would find that He isn’t as nice as you thought He was. In fact, God really cannot be trusted. God is trying to withhold something good from you. If you were like God (a little god yourself), then you would know what God is up to, and you could protect yourself from His schemes.”

All of us will have doubts about God at some point or another. The question is not, “Will we have doubts?” The question instead is, “With whom will we discuss those doubts?”

Eve learned a bitterly painful lesson: You don’t discuss your doubts with the devil.

You take them to God. God knows about our doubts, and He isn’t threatened by them. He is happy to talk them through with us any time we’re ready.

More in this video…

Be encouraged!

Dwight

The Bible starts where it should:
in the beginning.
By kicking off the most important book in history with these words,
God tells us something:
We need to pay attention to where things started.
God cares about how things began.
Do you have a problem?
If you go to God for the solution,
He will probably take you back to where the problem began,
there you and He will correct it together.
Go back far enough, and you will find God.
And, if you need it, you will also find a new beginning.

I just started a through the Bible video series, and the above is a snippet from the first video which is found here.

Getting through the Bible is so challenging for so many people. And I get it. It’s an intimidating book. And, if you don’t know how to read it, you can quickly get lost or bogged down. So I wanted to make it easy without watering it down or insulting a viewer’s intelligence.

I decided to go at it like this:

Each video will contain passages from the Old and New Testaments. I’m trying to tie together related passages so viewers can see the flow of thought through the whole Bible.

I’m using my own rendering which you might love or hate. I don’t pretend that it’s some new scholarly translation of the Bible, but I do think it helps make things more clear (plus it keeps me out of copyright trouble).

I plan to take some creative approaches to family trees, laws, geography, architecture—some of the parts of the Bible that can cause some readers to tune out.

Anyway, I hope it meets a felt need for someone out there so that we can achieve our ultimate goal—sharing the heart and mind of God to invite people to experience the great love God has for each of us.

Much love from my home to yours!

Dwight

You and I have at least one thing in common: we’ve both suffered damage as a result of living in a broken world. And what we do with that damage determines the kind of life we’re going to live.

We all have pain within.

Most people deny, ignore, try to forget, suppress, or otherwise minimize that pain, but that doesn’t make it go away. Instead, it festers, coming out later as addiction, anger, arrogance, depression, disease, dysfunction, marital infidelity, sin, political activism that doesn’t help anybody, and so on.

This denial is a form of dishonesty. We lie to ourselves and pretend we’re okay when we’re not.

Some people have even converted this dishonesty into a Christian teaching. We’re supposed to forget the past, ignore what happened, and pretend it didn’t.

In the process, we circumvent the deep work God wants to do in our lives, and replace it with try-hard Christianity which tells us to ignore the pain and work hard to make God happy.

But we can take our pain directly to Jesus. We can look at what happened, find those painful lies—the harmful messages that play in our heads and feel true (even if we know they aren’t), and ask Jesus, “What do You want me to know?”

When Jesus speaks His truth into our lives, the lie—and with it the pain—evaporates. We’re left with peace and the grace to live a better life.

More in my most recent video.

Be encouraged!

Dwight

Many people claim to be able to tell you what the Bible teaches. Some of what they teach is good, some is pure baloney. How do you tell the difference?

Here are some thoughts that might help.

The Bible is unlike any other book.

Paul writes, “The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit.” (1 Corinthians 2:14 NIV)

If we want to understand the Bible, we must invite the Spirit of God to teach us. If He doesn’t teach us, then we won’t understand it. We might think we do, but we won’t. This is true for all of us; none of us are exempt.

How do you get the Spirit of God to teach you?

I’m going to skip over some things I hope are obvious—I have a video that goes into more detail—and get right to the sticking point:

If we want the Spirit of God to teach us the Bible, we must remain correctable.

This is where many wannabe Bible teachers seriously mess up. They think they can use the Bible as a weapon to go and correct everybody else. But they don’t shine the spotlight back on themselves.

We need to remain correctable. We need to be humble enough to admit that we don’t know very much. We might think we have it figured out just to discover we don’t. We might think we’re okay when we’re not.

My beliefs and my understanding of the Bible have changed over the years. They continue to change as I grow. That doesn’t mean that I’ve abandoned Jesus or abandoned the faith. Not at all. I love God more now than I ever have. But I’ve allowed the Spirit of God to correct my false or incorrect beliefs.

If your beliefs haven’t changed in twenty years, then you might want to ask yourself: Are you really growing? Are you correctable? Or do you think you’re so smart that God can’t teach you anything?

I need to ask myself the same questions. We all do.

We don’t reach a point where we are beyond God’s correction.

One of the biggest things that keeps people from understanding the heart and mind of God is arrogance. We cannot be arrogant and understand the meaning of the Bible. Its meaning will elude us. God gives grace—and, I might add, wisdom—to the humble.

Many people try to get the Bible to agree with their theology or their lifestyle choices. Let’s be honest, we’ve probably all done that. I certainly have. But I see people twist and turn the Bible to try to get it to say yes to what they want it to say yes to. If we go to the Bible to try to wrestle it to the ground to get it to say what we want it to say, then the meaning of the Bible will escape us.

We must remain correctable. God calls the shots; we don’t. He’s in charge; we aren’t.

If we want to understand the Bible, we must be willing to admit we could be wrong. Some Bible teachers are willing to admit everyone else could be wrong, but won’t turn the spotlight back on themselves. That’s a dangerous place to be.

James talks about the wisdom that comes from above. What does that wisdom look like? Humility. Submissive. Correctable. (See James 3:13-18.)

If you take that posture toward understanding the Bible, it will yield its secrets to you.

Be encouraged!

Dwight

“…in the hope that God will grant them repentance leading them to a knowledge of the truth…” 2 Timothy 2:25

Repent. Repentance.

These are Bible words–words that you don’t often see or hear, except maybe in church, or on a sandwich board sign.

But they are important words, and they are deeply misunderstood.

For most people, repent has a confrontational, negative, or even comical connotation to it. The idea is this: People are bad. God is mad. Clean up your act. Repent.

But that doesn’t begin to convey the real meaning.

Let me tell you a little story. When I was three years old, I lived on a farm with my grandparents. One day a man came onto our farm, started up Grandpa’s tractor, and drove it away.

I was hysterical, horrified. Someone was stealing Grandpa’s tractor!

But then someone who had access to more information than three-year-old me told me the truth: The man was borrowing the tractor. He had Grandpa’s permission. Everything was okay.

To repent means to change our minds, and it really carries the idea that God lets us in on something we didn’t know before–something that completely changes everything.

When we get the truth from God, our fears subside, our shame evaporates, our anger diminishes, and we are at a deep, deep level… okay.

It is a gift. Given by God.

You need it. I need it. We all need it.

More in this video…

Be encouraged!

Dwight