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You + Jesus = Life

Here’s why (video) …

Here’s a link in case the above embedded video doesn’t show up…

Much more could be said about God being our Father. But here are a few thoughts to wrap up this series:

• He likes you.
• He likes hanging out with you.
• He likes listening to you. You can talk to Him about anything.
• He protects you from bullies.
• He will teach you how to defend yourself—if you’ll let Him.
• He’s smarter than you are; even when you think He isn’t.
• He sees your potential; He’s excited about your future.
• He isn’t about to settle for second best. And He doesn’t want you to settle for second best.
• He wants you a whole lot more than He wants anything from you; and He wants that to work the other way around also.
• He cares a great deal about how your brothers and sisters treat you, and how you treat your brothers and sisters.
• He understands you.
• He sends you out to represent the family.

Hope these thoughts are helpful.

Hey, have you been to my free resources page at DwightClough.com? Every so often, I post something new. I just posted “God’s purpose in your suffering,” a fresh look at the book of Job. It’s all there—no sign up, no hoops to jump through.

If God is your father, that means He is your provider. That’s gonna look a little different for each person, but it will always involve an exciting adventure with Him.

Here’s what that looks like in my life.

I live in an old house.

That means things fall apart, and you need money and skill to fix them. I have neither.

So I came up with this idea. Why not tear this house down, build a bigger, better house, rent most of it out, live in some of it, and let my tenants pay for the cost of all that?

Great idea, but you can’t exactly go up to a construction company and say, “Build me a castle, and I hope to pay you some day.” You need money up front.

I was explaining all this to God and a couple friends. Then my friend Brett said to me, “Just do it. Other people have money.” And God seemed to say, “Stop dreaming and start doing.”

Okay. I met with an architect. I thought he would tell me I was crazy, but he didn’t. We met with a builder. Then we found a real estate investment consultant. And we found a couple of investors. Then, instead of tearing down my house, we decided to buy this million dollar property, tear it down, and build a $30 million property in its place.
Keep in mind, I have no money. None at all.

We bought the property. The redevelopment plan didn’t go through, so we sold it for a modest profit to another developer. I walked away with cash in my pocket. Not millions. Not peanuts. But a tidy sum. Not enough to restore our old house or buy a new one. But enough to help.

We were afraid to sell our house because we thought with our income we’d never get a mortgage on a new one. But then the decision was made for us. Our homeowner’s insurance company stopped insuring homes, so we needed to find a new insurance company. No one would touch our home. The roof was too old, they said.

Replacing a steep roof on an old Victorian two-story house with a hundred years of roofing layers on it; let’s just say that’s not cheap. No way could we afford it. (This was before we sold the investment property.) So we had to sell.

Then Kim came up with this great idea: Let’s sell our home, and see if we can rent it back from the new owner for a while so we can look for something else.

We sold the house, and made a little bit of money on that.

Not enough to buy a new home outright, but maybe we could buy some land out in the middle of nowhere and put a trailer on it, and live in that until we got enough money to build something.

So we found land we loved. Five acres. Wooded. Beautiful. Secluded. Cheap. Almost bought it, but the deal fell through.

Somewhere in there, we met with a lender. “Hey,” he said. “Your credit is good. We can loan you something.” Not a mint, but something.

So we started our search. Land with a little cottage on it that could add on to or build new on later.

After several months of searching, we found a two-bedroom two-bath house a half hour north of Deforest on 1.6 acres of land. The house was built in 2016. Everything is new. We made an offer; it got accepted, and Lord-willing, we close on March 29.

For us, what God provided is perfect for this season in our lives.

God is your provider. Whatever that adventure looks like for you, enjoy it with Him!

A note about the image: This Flickr image was supplied as a Creative Commons image by pellethepoet. The original image, Bird Nurseries was by Mary Baker (1936) and was published by Jewson, London as a postcard. According to pellethepoet, “The silhouette artist Mary Baker (1897-?) was the sister of children’s book author Margaret Baker (1890-?). They collaborated on many books published from the 1920s to the 1940s.” Based on this information, I believe the original illustration is probably in the public domain, but I could be mistaken.

If God is your Father, then that means that God is your coach.

What is a coach? A coach is someone invested in empowering you to succeed. He wants you to win. When you stumble, He picks you up, dusts you off, and gets you back into the game. When you don’t believe in yourself, He believes in you. He sees potential in you that you don’t see. He will draw a level of performance out of you that you didn’t know you had in you.

Let me tell you a story of how this came into focus for me.

I was behind on my mortgage. I’m self employed. I don’t get a regular paycheck. My income is somewhat unpredictable. Anyway, I was behind on my mortgage.

I had every confidence that God could supply what I needed. I had seen Him do so many times before. But this time was different. This time, for some reason, I believed He wouldn’t. I believed that I had screwed up—somehow, and He was just going to make me sit in the mess I had created.

I felt horrible.

As I focused in on what was going on inside me, I came to this place in my childhood. I was about eight years old. My dad had been away of a remote military deployment for a year and he was coming home. While he was away, I was playing with his tools—his hammers, saws, wrenches, pliers, whatever. The only problem was this: my dad was very particular about how his tools were to be put away. And I was clueless on how to follow his system.

As we counted down the days to my dad’s return, dread filled me. When he finally did come home, one of the first things he did was yell at me because I left his shovel out in my sandbox.

I had screwed up, and I didn’t know how to fix it.

But here God spoke to me. He said, “Your dad used the parenting tools that were in his parenting toolbox. I’m a different kind of dad. I have different tools. When you don’t know what to do, I come along side you and help you.”

Wow! All the angst I felt about that mortgage instantly vanished. In its place was this beautiful anticipation: God is going to help me. He will show me how to win.

Of course, the money came in, the mortgage got paid, everything was fine.

God is our coach.

More next time…

Sport image created by Solominphoto – Freepik.com

What does it mean to have God as your father? I’d like to take a few posts and start to unpack that.

I’ll start here: God is proud of you.

He’s proud of us.

I have four kids. I love them dearly. Each of them is fully and uniquely human. Each one has made mistakes. And some of those mistakes have been public mistakes.

Sometimes I get a little bit of push back from people about mistakes my kids have made. I’m not going to go into the details, but I’ll tell you, I don’t appreciate it. Not one bit.

I am proud of all four of my kids.

All four.

Without exception.

I have reason to be proud of each of my children. No they’re not perfect. Neither are your kids. But they are wonderful human beings—full of dreams and hopes to make their world a better place. I learn from them—all four of them. I’m a better person because of them. If you got to know them, you would be too.

I sense that God feels the same way about each of His kids. He’s proud, fiercely proud of each one of us. He hates it when His kids are bad mouthed. When Satan the accuser comes along to point out all our faults, God says, “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t see the child I see.”

God is proud of us. More next time…

I think maybe the time has come to make some things public that I haven’t shared before.

No, it’s not a scandal or anything like that.

Instead, it’s the story of what happened. It’s the story of how I started writing books, and why I write the books I write.

It all starts in the backwoods of Maine in the late 1800s. Something happened there that has had a ripple effect across four generations… A young woman died. Some say it was an epidemic. Some say it was poison. Some say it was murder.

Anyway, I tell the story, or stories, here…

I want to share some thoughts about sin. I want to address these thoughts to people who consider themselves followers of Jesus Christ. If that’s you, then this is for you.

I am concerned by what I see as some unhealthy perspectives on sin.

I’ll start here. Some seem to take perverse delight in showing us how far short of the mark we fall. I have been in churches where every sermon could be entitled, “Yet Another 15 Ways You Are Sinning And Didn’t Know It.”

I asked the Lord today, “Is it true that we are constantly sinning?”
This is what I heard.
God: That isn’t where My focus is.
Me: If You’re focus isn’t there, then where is it?
God: Sharing life with you.

It got me thinking. Behavior management (and attitude management) is only a small part of healthy parenting. Healthy parents are focused on other things: relationship building, coaching, encouragement, quality time, laughter, identity building. Sure, good parents correct their children. But that’s just a small part of a big picture.

Our heavenly Father doesn’t condemn His children. (Romans 8:1) Condemnation is paralyzing. It leaves us without hope and without recourse. God does sometimes correct His children. (Hebrews 12:5-11) That’s a very different thing. God’s correction is motivational. God gives us specific steps we can take to get ourselves out of trouble.

If I had a child who was constantly focused on all the ways he has failed or disappointed me, I would be concerned. If the only time my child talked to me was to apologize, I would be very concerned. (And, of course, I’d be concerned if my child never apologized.)

Do we mess up? Yeah, sometimes we do. But that isn’t where the spotlight is. We deal with it. We move on. Our focus is sharing our lives with God, enjoying His presence, allowing Him into our lives.

Much, much more could be said here, but I think I’ll wrap up for today.

Enjoy life! Enjoy God! Live well!

Dwight

What causes fear and anxiety?
In most cases, fear and anxiety are caused by a belief or set of beliefs. For example, if you’re in an airplane and the engines go out, fear is an understandable response. It’s based on the belief, “This plane might crash; I might die.”

Usually the beliefs that cause fear are faulty. For example, stepping into an elevator will make some people feel anxiety or even panic. Why? Because there is an underlying belief: “I’m permanently trapped; I’m going to die.” Are those beliefs based on reality? No. The person holding those faulty beliefs probably knows they are not true. But they feel true.

I call these beliefs that feel true “gut-level beliefs.”

How do you correct faulty gut-level beliefs?
All of us have faulty gut-level beliefs. And those beliefs came from somewhere. That somewhere is our life experiences. At some point in our lives, mostly in our childhood, we learn false lessons like: I’m worthless. I’m not worth protecting. It’s all my fault. There’s no hope. I’m not safe. And so on.

Experiences with Jesus can correct our faulty beliefs at a gut level.
Here’s the technique we’ve found to be effective: We focus on the feeling in order to identify the gut-level beliefs behind that feeling and the events that created those gut-level beliefs. Then we invite Jesus to offer whatever He has for us in that vulnerable place.

The result? Time after time, we’ve seen panic disappear, fear subside, anxiety lessen. It may take several encounters with Jesus, but it really does work.

Getting help
Sometimes you can do this on your own. More often you need help. Here in Madison, Steve Freitag of CrossCounsel.com or Kim Clough are trained to help, as are some Christian counselors. I teach the system behind this in my course, Spiritual Self Defense.

Hi

I am so excited.

For years I’ve been obsessing about how to make the Bible easier to read, more approachable, more accessible, more understandable. As a professional writer, I understand that most people are going to have a tough, tough time picking up the Bible, starting at Genesis, and plowing their way all the way through to Revelation.

That’s why I am so excited to announce a Bible reading plan that will get you through all 1,189 chapters of the Bible without getting you bogged down. But we’re not gonna take the Genesis through Revelation route. Instead, I’ll show you a whole different way to get every page read.

Here’s what I’ve done. I’ve arranged the Bible into seven sections, each one centered around a person:

1. Jesus, Author of Life
2. Paul, Transformed Leader
3. Moses, the Man Who Built a Nation
4. David, the Man After God’s Own heart
5. Solomon: Magnificence to Decline
6. Isaiah: A Towering Vision of God
7. Daniel: Rebuilding After Disaster

Each of these people will be the focus for seven weeks of reading. You’ll read an average of 91 verses a day—or around three chapters—sometimes more, sometimes less.

Less than a year! Keep up with it every day, and you’ll read the entire Bible in less than a year. Start today, and you’ll finish on December 27, 2018. Miss a day? No problem. Just pick it back up, and keep on trucking.

I’ve posted the whole plan online. You don’t need to sign up for anything or pay for anything. It’s all right here…

And could you do me a favor? If you know anyone who would like to read the entire Bible, could you pass this message on?

Many thanks!

Dwight

So…what can we do to restore those who have stumbled?

There are a few things any of us can do.

We can listen. By listening, you’re letting someone know that they’re worth understanding, worth spending time with, worth the friendship. And by listening, you can help a person process what’s going on inside, helping them move from where they are, to where they could be.

Nonjudgmental listening can offer your friend a glimpse into the unconditional love of God. We all mess up. God knows this. Restoring us is just part of who God is and what God does.

We can validate. A few years ago a dear friend reluctantly admitted to me that he was having an adulterous affair. After he finished telling me about it, he said, “What do you think of me now?” I said, “I think you’re a guy looking for a solution just like all the rest of us.” On a deep level, we all are really the same. We’re all looking for love, respect, and understanding. Sometimes we all just get mixed up about where we’re gonna find that. We all do crazy things sometimes.

If the person you’re helping is struggling with a specific behavior, you can ask, “If you give up this behavior [or whatever], what do you lose? What does it feel like to think of this no longer being in your life?”

It may take a while for that person to find the answer to that question. But we don’t engage in sinful, unhealthy behavior unless we believe—at some level—that it helps us. If sin is a solution—and I think it is, then we gotta figure out what problem we’re trying to solve.

What you’re doing with that question is helping them identify the fear, abandonment, shame, confusion, hopelessness, invalidation, powerlessness or whatever that’s robbing them of the rich inner wealth that Jesus offers.

Once that’s out in the open, don’t argue with them. Don’t put them down for feeling what they feel. Don’t try to convince them not to be afraid, or ashamed, or lonely, or whatever. Don’t quote Bible verses at them. Just ask if they’d be willing to receive what Jesus has for them. If the answer is yes, then here’s a very simple prayer, “Jesus, what do You have for him/her?”

Is this a one-time fix, good forever? Usually not. You may need to do this not once, but many times. But, in the process, you give Jesus room to repair the damage in someone’s soul.

Sometimes you need to bring someone else into the process—someone with more training and expertise in this area. And that’s okay. Some people have the gifts, training, and experience to do what you don’t have the expertise to do. We all need each other.

But meanwhile, you can be a friend.

And never underestimate the value of that.

 

For further study: Galatians 5:1-5, John 8:1-11, 2 Timothy 2:23-26, John 21:15-19

This entire series is available as a pdf document here…