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“Don’t cry.” Luke 7:13

Three minute video here, and/or read on…

I go around and around the Bible and I keep coming back to this verse. A widow has lost her only son. The funeral procession carries his dead body to the grave. Everyone is clothed with sadness.

Everyone but Jesus. “Don’t cry,” He says.

Call it audacity. Call it power. Call it compassion. Jesus slices through human tragedy and brings to us what we didn’t dare imagine: life from the dead.

This time when I visit this verse, I ask God the question that troubles me. “Why did You only raise one widow’s son? There were many. Why did you leave the rest?”

The Lord reminds me that the show isn’t over. This world is too small and this life is too short for God to show us the whole load of kindness. The book doesn’t end in chapter one, though God shows us enough about Himself so that we start to have a pretty good idea of how things are going to turn out.

Dwight

PS. One of the most difficult—and misunderstood—requirements of the Christian faith is to forgive those who have hurt us. This week in Inner Wealth, we’re exploring why God asks us to forgive, how it’s commonly approached or understood in the wrong way, and how you can find God’s grace in the real world to forgive even terrible offenses.

“Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” Luke 6:38

Three minute video here, and/or read on…

I’m not much of a TV watcher, but years ago I used to watch Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. For those of you not familiar with the show, people contact the network explaining why they need their home remodeled—often there’s an illness or some other tragedy or disaster that requires a change in the person’s living environment. The network got 1,000 applications a day and, of course, can choose no more than one family per week.

In one episode, an eight-year-old cancer survivor, Kassandra, sent a tape to the network explaining that she didn’t want her home remodeled. She only wanted help going back to the children’s cancer ward to brighten it up and make it a happier place for the children who were there.

The network sent Kassandra and her family to the hospital with a team of Disney animators to create beautiful murals on the walls in every room of that children’s ward. They remodeled the play room and made it beautiful for those who were suffering.

What Kassandra and her family did not know was this: While they were busy painting rooms and encouraging patients, over 300 people were busy with their home. They tore it down and built a beautiful mansion in its place. Kassandra, her mom and dad, and her five brothers and sisters came home to the surprise of their lives.

Well, I cried. This is so much like God. While we are busy losing ourselves caring for others, God is building a mansion. Some day the door of that limo will open, the crowd will cheer, the bus will move, and we will experience far more than we could ever ask or imagine.

Dwight

PS. Need help forgiving others? That will be our Inner Wealth topic starting this Saturday.

Three minute video here, or read on…

How do you get God to answer your prayers?

Lots could be written here, but here’s one thing: Husbands, be nice to your wife. (1 Peter 3:7)

Years ago, there was a rocky time in our marriage when I wasn’t treating my wife with much kindness or gentleness. That really cooled down my relationship with God. Most of the things I was angry with Kim about weren’t her fault anyway—they were my own problems that I was pinning on her.

As God started showing me my wife through His eyes, I realized two things, no three things: (1) I had been a real jerk. (2) God gave me a really good wife. (3) I can’t expect to waltz up to God, ask Him for something, and expect Him to hand it over to me when I’m treating His daughter poorly. He cares about things like that. And, in retrospect, I’m glad He does.

Dwight

PS. I needed to learn to forgive my wife, and forgive others for their offenses—real and imaginary. In the process of learning how to do that, I learned some amazing, but little-known, techniques that I will be sharing with my Inner Wealth subscribers next Saturday.

Video here, or read on …

For many years, I didn’t understand how real change takes place. We think we can just modify our behavior. But it goes much deeper than that. Here’s an example:

In the past, when my wife got sick, I got angry. I really treated her poorly. Here she was sick, in bed, trying to get better, and I was demanding to know when she would be better, accusing her of trying to push her responsibilities off on me, yada yada. I really was being a jerk. And, like most of us, I was mostly blind to what a huge jerk I was being.

At some point, I started processing why I was feeling upset when she was sick. I discovered—no big surprise—that it stemmed from something that happened in my childhood. When my mom got sick, I felt terribly unsafe. As a result, this message got drilled into my heart: When the woman in your life is sick, you are not safe.

I didn’t even realize I was walking around with this message in my heart.

But God did. I don’t remember the exact way God replaced that message with truth, but He did. As a result, I was no longer controlled by that belief.

This change in perspective brought me to this experiential belief: I am perfectly safe even though the woman in my life might be sick.

The next time my wife got sick, instead of browbeating her, I was compassionate and helpful without being filled with resentment. That change was NOT a result of me setting some goal to change my behavior. It was 100% a gift from God.

If you’d like to better understand this process of how we change, I invite you to check out my Inner Wealth subscription.

See video here, or read on…

If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. Luke 6:32

Jesus brought a life-changing gospel to this earth. He fully expected the gospel to make such a profound change in our lives that no one could point to human effort to account for the difference.

If you set good goals, work hard, and remain disciplined you will achieve what the pagans achieve. You will live an admirable life.

But Jesus isn’t about creating admirable lives. He is about creating supernatural lives.

What gives the gospel its power? The gospel is powerful because it plugs Jesus into our lives. Wherever Jesus is connected to life where we live it, the supernatural takes place.

This verse talks about cranky people. Do you have people in your life who are impossible to love? Stop trying to love them. You can’t. Instead bring your anger to Jesus and let Him do what He longs to do in you: the supernatural.

Dwight

PS. For our Inner Wealth subscribers, starting this Saturday we’ll be looking at the much misunderstood Biblical concept of repentance. For years, I had no idea what repenting actually meant. I thought it meant changing our behavior, something we all try to do and often fail at doing. Wrong! Changed behavior is the outcome of a supernatural process called repentance. I’ll share how this works in the real world.

Video here, and/or read on:

When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at Jesus’ knees and said, “Go away from me, Lord; I am a sinful man!” Luke 5:8

Simon Peter reflects what I suspect is in all of us—the kind of shame that says, “Lord, go away, and please don’t come back until I figure out some way to clean myself up.”

Running to God, rather than hiding from God, is counter-intuitive and has been ever since Adam and Eve took the forbidden fruit.

Yet this counter-intuitive choice is what God longs for and what the church and all humanity desperately need. Running to God with all our inadequacies, sins and imperfections frees us from trying to do what we cannot do, and it frees God to do what only He can do.

Only God can clean us up. Only God can give us a pure heart and a willing spirit. Only God can untangle the mess we find ourselves in.

Do you want to know the difference between success and failure in the Christian life? It boils down to one thing: which direction we run.

Dwight

PS. If you’ve ever tried to change a bad habit, you know how difficult that can be. Starting March 23, 2019, I’ll be sharing with those of you who are Inner Wealth subscribers how sustainable change takes place and how God can give us the power in the real world to make these changes.

As I share in the video I just posted, we all have a line in our hearts. On one side of the line, we’ve said yes to Jesus. On the other side, we haven’t yet said yes.

We Christians like to camp out on the yes side of the line. But growth takes place when we go to the line, find the next no, and figure out why it’s there. Why are we saying no to Jesus? Inside that reason is a lie. So we take that lie to Jesus, allow Him to bring His truth to us, and then the lie disappears. The reason no longer makes sense, and we’re able to turn that no into a yes.

This is the essense of spiritual and personal growth, and it’s a beautiful alternative to try hard religion.

Dwight

PS. For those of you who are Inner Wealth Subscribers, starting Saturday, March 23, 2019, we’re going to be discussing how sustainable change takes place, and we’ll go into more detail on changing those no’s to yeses.

Video here and/or read on:

One day, back at our previous home, our sump pump went out.

I’m no handyman—not by a long shot. But I made an honest attempt to troubleshoot the problem. When I realized I couldn’t fix it myself, I asked God if He would fix it. But I felt like He was saying, “No, I want you to go out and buy a new sump pump.”

Hmm. At that time I was scrambling to pay my bills—just barely hanging on, and any added expense was not welcome—not welcome at all.

“All right,” I prayed, “but could You get me a sump pump under $100?”

I drove down to the big box hardware store to find a new pump. They were mostly all around $149, but tucked away on the shelf I found one for $99.99.

I got up to the counter and it rang up as $119.99. Yes, $119.99 was the correct price, but they mislabeled it on the shelf so they graciously gave it to me at $99.99.

I bought it, came home, installed it, walked upstairs and checked the mail.

There I found a check—out of the blue—not expecting it at all—for $111.

Isn’t God good?

Dwight

PS. Tomorrow morning I’ll be starting a new video series for you if you’re an Inner Wealth subscriber. God has provided for each of us an amazing identity. Once we truly understand who we really are, everything changes. But here’s the problem: We can understand it in our heads, but not get it deep down, in our hearts, where it counts. How do we fix that? That’s the topic I’ll be tackling tomorrow.

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Luke 4:18-19 NIV

Three-minute video here and/or read on:

Those of you who fly frequently can probably recite this from memory: “If we should experience a sudden loss of cabin pressure, an oxygen mask will appear…please secure your own mask before assisting any children who might be with you.”

At our house we call this the “oxygen mask principle.” You have to be able to breathe before you can help someone else breathe.

If we are going to bring Christ’s healing and freedom to our world, we must experience it ourselves. Christ must do a deeper work in us before we can bring a deeper message to our world. Or, as some put it: You must be before you can do.

This is a very different message than “try harder.” Instead, this is the message that says we stop going into denial about our own woundedness, that we too have been damaged, that every layer of our soul needs a Savior. It is not just the part of us that sinned that needs Christ; it is also the part of us that was sinned against that needs Him.

Dwight

PS. One of the biggest parts of our recovery is recovering our own God-given identity. For those of you who are Inner Wealth subscribers, I will be starting a video series on how to do that this Saturday, 3/16/2016.

When the devil had finished all this tempting, he left him until an opportune time. Luke 4:13 NIV

Exactly what is an “opportune time”?

You can watch my 3-minute video here and/or read on:

Well, first of all, forget about the devil fighting fair. It isn’t going to happen. He doesn’t shake hands like a gentleman and wait until you’re ready. He looks for the weakest moment, the time when you’re defenses are down.

My strongest temptations come in the middle of the night when I’m trying to get back to sleep. I’m tired, and the last thing I feel like doing is fight a spiritual battle. But that’s when the battle comes—when I’m weak.

Did Jesus have weak moments?

Let’s look at this occasion. Jesus had fasted for forty days and nights. Now he was ravenously hungry — His body was tearing apart internal organs to find the nutrients to survive. Food was not a luxury for Him in this moment—it was a necessity.

Along comes the devil. “So, you’re hungry, huh?”

(Does the devil care whether Jesus is hungry? Of course not.)

“Try my solution. Turn these stones into bread.”

What’s the temptation? To get Jesus to act independently of the will of God. To separate Him from His Father. To get Him to doubt the loving-kindness of the Father. To get Him to doubt His own identity as the Son of God.

Jesus got hungry, tired, angry just as we do.

If Jesus, in His humanity, had weak moments like we do, then the devil ran into something he did not expect: God’s strength is made perfect in weakness; God doesn’t need our strength to win the battle.

Dwight

PS. For those of you who are subscribed to Inner Wealth, you probably already know how identity lies can create a minefield of “opportune times.” How do we get free from those inner voices that haunt us with messages God never intended for us to receive? This coming Saturday I’m starting a new video series to address how to repair our understanding of who we are.