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Remember Cleopas?

(I have a picture of him just above my computer screen.)

He was having a really bad day. At great personal risk, he invested everything he had into this new movement, this movement that was going to change the world. Their leader was unstoppable. He could do anything. He wasn’t afraid of anyone. Of course they had enemies (who doesn’t?), but they weren’t afraid. God was at their back, and the future belonged to them.

But then the unthinkable happened. A member of the inner circle turned into a mole, a traitor. He secretly arranged for their leader to be ambushed in the middle of the night, hauled off to a sham trial, convicted of crimes never committed, and then publicly executed in the most painful, humiliating way possible.

The message was clear: You don’t mess with the powers that be.

Now every member of the movement was like a rat in sudden sunshine, scurrying for cover, trying to find a place to hide.

Cleopas and his buddy (sorry, I don’t have his name), were getting out of town, trying to find a place to lie low, and figure out what to do with their broken dreams.

They’re walking along, and this stranger decides to join them.

“What’s going on?” the stranger wants to know.

“You haven’t heard?”

What follows is the conversation Cleopas never expected—about how human bullies don’t have the power to mess with the plans and purposes of God, how hope can be found in the most unexpected place, how even death cannot stand in the way of God.

Then their eyes were opened. The stranger wasn’t a stranger at all.

He was Jesus.

(You can read the story in Luke 24.)

Yes.

That’s how it works.

It is both comforting and startling, seismic at a soul level, it changes everything. One moment it feels true inside that we are all alone, we will never be loved, we don’t have what it takes, something bad is going to happen, and it’s all our fault—we will be ruined.

And then Jesus.

Call it a paradigm shift. The wind has stopped, the lake is still, and now, finally, we realize who is in the boat with us—the Master of all our storms, the only one who can say, “Peace, be still; don’t cry; Lazarus, come forth!”

Jesus changes what feels true inside, and in the place of all our panic, where we once felt the need to hide—even from ourselves, the storm has stopped, our soul is still, and the peace that cannot be explained remains.

So yeah.

Any time you can check that box, that’s a big win for the Kingdom of God.

Be encouraged!

Dwight

I heard somewhere that 41 million Americans who call themselves born again Christians plan to stay home on election day and not vote.

If that’s you, then this post is particularly for you.

3 things we Christians should know before we vote:

#1 We will answer to God for how we vote

Our vote, just like everything else in life, does not belong to us. It belongs to God. When Jesus bought us with His blood, He also bought our vote. It belongs to Him. It’s part of the power and influence we have, and we are accountable for how we use our influence. So it just makes sense…

Father in heaven, (how) do You want me to vote? Who do You want me to vote for?

#2 We get our truth from Jesus

Jesus is the truth (John 14:6). We don’t get truth from political candidates, political parties, or media outlets. Am I saying they always lie? No. But they lie often enough so you need to filter everything they say through Jesus, and ask Him for His perspective.

#3 Defend your religious freedom

I add this because it should be on our radar that 200 million Christians have been murdered for their faith in the last 2,000 years. Worldwide there is a fanatical hatred for Jesus and His followers. And yes, it is here also. Christians are actively persecuted for their faith in over 50 nations, and yes, it can (and does) happen here.

The time to defend our religious freedom is early on while we still have the power to do something about it, not later, when you get that knock at your door in the middle of the night.

More in this video…

 

One final thought…

I often come back to this passage in Joshua 5:13-14:

Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, “Are you for us or for our enemies?”

“Neither,” he replied, “but as commander of the army of the Lord I have now come.”

Then Joshua fell facedown to the ground in reverence, and asked him, “What message does my Lord have for his servant?” (NIV)

We aren’t Republicans and we aren’t Democrats. We come from a different place, and we’re part of a different army.

Be encouraged!

Dwight

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