Author: Dwight Clough

Jerusalem! Jerusalem! … How often I’ve ached to embrace your children … — Matthew 23:37 The MessageA few years ago, a bumper sticker appeared on the back of police cars, minivans, family cars — for a while it was part of the fabric of American culture. It read, "Have you hugged your kid today?"I would like to turn this little saying around, and ask it a different way: "Have you let God hug His kid today?"Who is His kid? You are!Did you know that the best thing you can do for your world is let yourself be loved by God?…

But the LORD God called to the man, "Where are you?" — Genesis 3:9Here we have God’s basic question after the fall, and man’s biggest problem. What we bring out into the open before God, God can fix. What we hide in the shadows, festers and infects, and keeps us unclean.So much of life is God wooing us out of the shadows. Not violating us by dragging us into the light, but gently awakening us to the truth: Jesus is willing; He will touch us and we will be clean.God knows all the secret corners of our hearts. What we…

… you were bought at a price. — 1 Corinthians 6:20When Jesus pays with His own blood, He doesn’t buy junk. If you are a child of God, God’s work in you is far more powerful, far more enduring than any propensity you may have for sin or any burden of wounds or bondage you carry. At your core, you are no longer one who practices sin, but instead a son or daughter of God.God designed the Christian life to be impossible, so that it would never work apart from His supernatural intervention. That’s why trying harder never works. So,…

Now [King] Ahab told [Queen] Jezebel everything Elijah had done and how he had killed all the [false] prophets with the sword. So Jezebel sent a messenger to Elijah to say, "May the gods deal with me, be it ever so severely, if by this time tomorrow I do not make your life like that of one of them."Elijah was afraid and ran for his life … — 1 Kings 19:1-3In the showdown between the LORD and Baal, the LORD clearly won — fire fell, the people were convinced, rain came, and Elijah ran ahead of Ahab back to Jezreel.…

"Go and look toward the sea," [Elijah] said to his servant. And he went up and looked."There is nothing there," he said.Seven times Elijah said, "Go back."– 1 Kings 18:43Sometimes we go to the cupboard looking for answered prayer, and there’s nothing there. A pastor I knew was an air traffic controller in Korea during the Korean War. One night he was faced with a terrible dilemma. A North Korean bomber was flying around the hills trying to find their base and bomb it. Everything was blacked out, so the bomber was dropping bombs harmlessly in a deserted valley nearby. …

Neither circumcision nor uncircumcision means anything; what counts is a new creation. — Galatians 6:16The work of God is deep inside our hearts. A new creation is what we are. Who does the creating? God does. What is the result? The result is you are uniquely you and I am uniquely me; and God, you and I can all celebrate that. While, yes, sin is sin, God does an amazing thing in this verse. He liberates us from cookie-cutter righteousness. Righteous you and righteous I look totally different, just like each of my four kids looks totally different. There’s a…

Brothers, if someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual should restore him gently. But watch yourself, or you also may be tempted. — Galatians 6:1I like chocolate. It has become a joke among those who know me well. I contend that chocolate is a great weight loss food because if you’re hungry for chocolate and you eat something else, you’ll eat and eat and eat and never get full.If I’m hungry for chocolate, I’ll sometimes dip pretty low. I’ll even eat generic kids snack chocolate that tastes more like plastic than the real thing. But give me…

Brothers, if someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual should restore him gently. But watch yourself, or you also may be tempted. — Galatians 6:1If you take away sin, what is left?Think about it. I think this is a very important question that most people haven’t considered, yet it is the reason so many people have so many problems.I think most Christians would say that if you take away sin you are left with righteousness or obedience or goodness. But I disagree. If you take away sin, you are left with a vacuum. You are left with…

Counting on GOD’s Rule to prevail, I take heart and gain strength. — Habakkuk 3:19 The MessageThere are a few truths we need to come back to, and this is one of them. God’s work isn’t finished. Justice may seem like a joke, but sooner or later everyone comes face to face with God. The rope may be long, but it will hang the evildoer in the end. Many things in life seem true, but aren’t. It may seem that God doesn’t care, that He is on vacation, that we are all alone. But even though those things may seem…

… who will get what you have prepared for yourself? — Luke 12:20In the animated Disney version of Peter Pan, Peter is puzzled because Wendy cannot fly. He cannot figure it out, until it dawns on him that she was never sprinkled with pixie dust.Like Wendy before pixie dust, money keeps us earthbound until it is given to God. Like tentacles reaching up from the grave, so also the lies we believe about money twist and tangle around us, until we cannot escape their gravitational pull without God mercifully hacking us free. What do we truly believe? Money is the…