Author: Dwight Clough

He restores my soul. — Psalm 23:3A few years ago, I tried coming up with a testimony to give at a small group I belong to. I couldn’t figure out how to put my arms around what God has done in my life.That bothered me. So many people have dramatic testimonies — God saved them from booze – or God saved them from bankruptcy – or they left their lucrative business and followed God to the mission field – or whatever. My life has been transformed by God, but I couldn’t figure out how to show that to someone.Then it…

The Lord is my shepherd … — Psalm 23:1Even though I lived, briefly, on a sheep farm, I don’t know much about sheep and shepherds, except that sheep aren’t very smart. Sheep munch on grass and don’t pay much attention to anything else, except when the shepherd’s dog races out to round them up.If it wasn’t for the shepherd, the sheep would have no water (on our farm it needed to be pumped into the troughs), they wouldn’t get out to pasture, they wouldn’t get back to the safety of the barn at night, they would never get any medical…

The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not be in want. — Psalm 23:1We imagine ourselves to be very busy and terribly short on time. We must understand that this is a lie. God is not stingy. He has not shortchanged us on time. We have time in abundance. It is a joy and a privilege to finish a task, but God will release us from every unfinished work that didn’t fit into His perfect plan. We have time for God-ordained interruptions, time for acts of kindness, time for wonder and reflection.As it says in Ecclesiastes 3, there is a…

I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. — Psalm 139:14I want to continue yesterday’s thoughts with this:The human body is made up of about 100 trillion cells and contains millions of different kinds of molecules. The blueprint for your entire body is somehow contained in each one of those 100 trillion cells, but nobody fully understands how to read it. You could argue that your body is one enormously complex chemical reaction, but no chemist can predict exactly what your body will do, or tell you how to…

"Can anyone teach knowledge to God, since he judges even the highest?" –Job 21:22 You can take almost any topic and divide everything there is to know about that topic into three categories: 1. What God has revealed. 2. What humans have discovered on their own. 3. What God knows and we don’t.Do you grasp how incredibly important this is? If we deny what God has revealed, we lose our footing, and every conclusion we come to is corrupted by skewed and unreliable information. We have no way to test our conclusions against rock solid truth.If we don’t allow humans to…

"Peace be with you!" — John 20:19These are the first words of Jesus to His gathered disiciples after His resurrection. Here they are — gathered together in secret for fear that the authorities will find them and crucify them, bewildered and overcome with sorrow that their Messiah had been killed, alarmed at reports that His body was no longer in the grave. They had given their lives to Jesus, and now Jesus was gone and they had no idea how to pick up the threads of a life that no longer existed.And now, the last thing they expected. Jesus Himself…

Now the earth was formless and empty,darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.– Genesis 1:2I come back to this passage because here we are.God gives form to those things that have not yet taken shape. When our lives don’t make sense, God is here, giving shape to our dreams and our experience. The day will come when our eyes are opened and we will see what has always been there, but is now hidden from our sight.God fills what is empty. Sometimes we don’t have what we should have. …

For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. — Matthew 11:30 Several of our pastors were sick one day, so when the call came in that someone in the mental health center requested a visit, the request was referred over to me. With a little hesitation, I agreed to go. It had been several years since I had visited anyone in this lock down facility, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. But as I was walking up to the door of the building, I felt that the Lord was reassuring me that He would be with me…

… he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does. — James 1:8There is a spiritual side to us — or sometimes a religious side to us — that is happy to go to church, to read the Bible, to sing hymns, to hang out with God and His people. Then there is another side — or sides — that would rather be doing something different — something very different.So what is the cure for double-mindedness? Years ago, I would have said that we should feed our spiritual selves (substitute the word "religious" for "spiritual"), and starve everything else. …

Therefore keep watch … Matthew 24:42What exactly does Jesus mean? Are we supposed to keep an eye on the sky? Do we climb up on the roof, dressed in sheets, ready for the resurrection?If we keep reading, we find out what He means. The remainder of chapters 24 and 25 make it clear that Jesus expects us to look for Him, not in clouds per se, but in "the least of these brothers of Mine" (25:40). When we are delighted to serve the body of Christ humble and weak, then we are ready to meet the Risen Lord in all…