Episode 2: God Really Loves Us

Carol Anne Beck: Erin Davis wants to tell you about someone who’s confident in the love of his parents and the love of God.

Erin Davis: Let me tell you about my third son, Judah. He’s ten. He is my most confident kid, which you would not be able to tell by looking at Judah. He would blow away in a stiff wind.

He has always been sort of small and underdeveloped. His older brothers are naturally tall and strong, and Judah looks pretty scrawny by comparison.

School has always come pretty easy for my oldest sons. They’re just flying right through. It hasn’t always come so easily for Judah, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

His preschool teacher once sent me a photo of some art that Judah did. I don’t know what the assignment was because the end result was totally undecipherable. But she said that Judah looked at his work of art. He pushed back from his desk. He put his hands in the air, and he said, “Nailed it!” (laughter) That’s my Judah!

Carol Anne: This is The Deep Well with Erin Davis. I’m Carol Anne Beck.

Last time, Erin began a study in Psalm 92 and then invited us to a life of flourishing. You can’t really flourish if you’re not confident about being loved. That’s why this message is so important. Erin’s going to show you why you can count on God’s love as a source of your flourishing.

To begin, let’s get back to the stories of Erin’s third son.

Erin: Here’s my favorite Judah story: we were going to go on a hike. (Any of you with small children already know what a bad idea that was.) But we got the baby in the backpack. We get everybody’s shoes on. We decided to leave the cabin. And I am not exaggerating, we only got across the street before my oldest son bushwhacked my next son. My husband pulled out his pocket knife and managed to slice his hand, and we had to turn around.

We got back to the cabin, and Judah said, “Wow, good walk!” (laughter) And he meant it!

Why am I telling you all of this? Well, I’ll use any excuse to talk about my boys, but also, Judah is going to be our poster child in this episode, because Judah lives like a child who knows he is deeply loved and fully accepted.

My poor first two sons, they had to teach me how to be a mommy. There was a lot of yelling and crying involved. I always tell Eli, my firstborn, “Buddy, you’re my petri dish kid. It’s all an experiment.”

But by the time Judah arrived on the scene, the Lord had graciously shown me how to parent with love, and it shows in his little life.

I’m going to connect the dots of why that matters together with you in this episode. It’s time for me to say my favorite words, “Open your Bible.” We aren’t going far. We’re still in Psalm 92, but we’re going to park in that first stanza.

Let me read you Psalm 92, verses 1–4:

It is good to give thanks to the Lord,
   to sing praises to your name, O Most High;
to declare your steadfast love in the morning,
   and your faithfulness by night,
to the music of the lute and the harp,
   to the melody of the lyre.
For you, O Lord, have made me glad by your work;
   at the works of your hands I sing for joy.

Before we examine these four verses more closely, I want you to remember our thesis statement. It came from verses 12 and 13:

The righteous flourish like the palm tree
   and grow like a cedar in Lebanon.
They are planted in the house of the Lord;
   they flourish in the courts of our God.

So again, according to God’s Word, those of us who are in Christ will flourish like giant healthy trees. I love that mental picture of the people of God like a grove of giant Sequoias, tall and thriving.

So where verses 12 and 13 give us a thesis, verses 1 through 4 give us a formula. Let’s look again.

Verse 1: “It is good to give thanks to the Lord, to sing praises to your name, O Most High.”

Now, you might read that and think that thanking God for what He’s done and singing about it is a good thing to do . . . and that’s true.

But what the Psalmist was also saying, and that he had no way of knowing except for the Holy Spirit revealed it to him, because there was no brain research; a life of gratitude to God and singing is not just the good thing to do, it’s good for you. I’m talking about in ways that can be measured on a CT scan.

Here’s what the data reveals about the power of living thankful.

Researchers have tracked us, and they have found that, when we are thankful, there’s a little command center in our brain that releases two chemicals: serotonin and dopamine. You’ve probably heard of them before. They are “the feel-good chemicals.”

This is the same part of your brain that controls your emotions and your behavior. It also controls higher order thinking skills like focus and attention.

So, science has caught up to God’s Word and shows that being grateful, which is a choice never contingent on our circumstances . . . And as Christians, we’re grateful towards someone. We don’t just send our gratitude out into the universe. No. We’re grateful to God.

And science is telling us that when you live grateful, it’s actually good for your body. Well, that’s what the Psalmist said. “It’s good to give thanks to the Lord, to sing praises to your name, O Most High.”

So think of that in light of the Psalmist’s thesis, that “the righteous flourish.” Because what we now know is that gratitude helps us flourish at a neurochemical level. In other words, “It is good to give thanks to the Lord.”

What about singing? What happens in our brains when we sing?

Well, it reduces cortisol. That’s another chemical you’ve probably heard of because that’s our stress hormone. And researchers tell us that our brains are bathing in it.

They’ve also found that singing releases aminoglobin A, which is an antibody your body secretes to fend off infections. So think about that.

God wired your body so that when you sing, you are less likely to get sick. It improves memory function. It improves your mood. And the results get even better in a group.

One study found that those of us who sing together have a strong sense of well-being and a meaningful connection to each other. I know that because I sing with my friends in church every Sunday.

God knows what He’s doing.

I want you to begin to think about Psalm 92 less like a warm fuzzy. It’s not really just an observation: yes, God’s people flourish. Because it is possible to be a follower of Jesus and not flourish.

I don’t think it’s just an observation. And I don’t think it’s just a suggestion. I think it’s a challenge. “The righteous flourish like a palm tree. They grow like a cedar in Lebanon.”

So it’s a challenge God’s Word is issuing. Because of our love for the Lord, and as an outworking of His work inside of us, we are committed to flourishing lives. We should ask, “How? How do we flourish?”

The answer’s really simple. It’s so simple we sometimes miss it. And it’s so practical. It’s right there in verse 1. We do the things Scripture calls us to do. We thank God for all He has given us, and we sing praises to Him whenever we get the chance.

I want you to keep the “it is good” from verse 1. It’s one continuous thought that takes us through the rest of that stanza.

Verse 2: “It is good to declare your steadfast love in the morning and your faithfulness by night.”

Verse 3: “It is good to sing to the music of the lute and the harp, to the melody of the lyre.”

The Psalmist is saying, “Grab what you’ve got.” If it’s a lute, if it’s a harp, if it’s a lyre . . . I don’t have any of those lying around my house. Those were common stringed instruments when the Psalmist was writing this. But we could say, “Bang a pot. Make a tambourine out of paper plates and beans.” (You remember doing that when you were a kid?) Drum on your steering wheel, or use what you’ve got in your vocal chords and make some happy noise. Praise God.

Why? Verse 4: “For you, O Lord, have made me glad by your work. At the works of your hands, I sing for joy.”

We don’t have to over spiritualize this. This is a practical, real-time blueprint for flourishing.

The Psalmist is saying, “The righteous can flourish, and here’s how: declare God’s steadfast love in the morning and His faithfulness at night.”

You can wake up every single morning of your life and, before your feet even hit the floor, before your eyes even pop open, before you have a chance to do anything for anybody, you can know: God loves me. He really loves me.”

Now, I’m a firstborn. I often say I’m not type A; I’m type double-A. I’m an achiever. And that means I have spent most of my life trying to earn the love of others. Even those who love me without me earning it, I’m trying to earn it, even though I already have it. Whew! It’s exhausting.

I’ve spent too many years of my Christian life trying to earn God’s love. But I have God’s love. He loves me.

And trying to live in that fervor, that position of trying to earn His love, it will keep you from flourishing. You’re going to be too exhausted to flourish.

Listen with fresh awe to Ephesians 1:4–5. This squashes any idea that we have to earn God’s love. 

Even as he [the he here is Jesus, even as he] chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love [circle it, underline it. In love] he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will.

Don’t miss this. When did He choose you? “Before the foundation of the earth.” Before you had a chance to do a single good thing to impress God or a single bad thing to disappoint Him, He chose you.

And why did He choose you? He says it right there at the end of verse 4: “in love.” Did He choose you for His glory? Absolutely. But He chose you in love. He loves us! He really, really loves us!

This is so elementary, but somehow I got away from it for a long time, and it’s so important. God has always, always, always, since before there was time, loved you. And God will always, always, always love you.

We don’t ever outgrow that song, “Jesus Loves Me.” It never stops changing the reality of our lives.

God’s love for us is not a thermostat. It doesn’t go up a few degrees if we’re good and go down a few degrees when we’re bad. In fact, Scripture says that no one’s good. And yet, listen to the beauty of Jeremiah 31:3:

I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.

Now, I know a day is coming when Judah will wonder, Do my mom and dad really love me? And it won’t be because of anything we did. We’re all broken by sin in our hearts. We just can’t be sure this can be true. We’re just not sure that we’re really loved.

But right now, that little boy has never had that thought. That has never occurred to him . . . and he’s flourishing.

As I parked in Psalm 92 this year, I’ve often woken up to this thought: “I have nothing to prove. I have nothing to lose. Nothing is on the line here today, because Jesus’ love for me will be no less than it is now.” That’ll make you flourish.

One of the things I am most looking forward to about heaven—and I am looking forward to heaven—is the final end to all striving. I’m not going to have to work my way into anything.

And yet, Jesus taught us to pray for things here to be like they are there. I think part of what He meant is for us to function knowing that we are already completely, irreversibly, undeservingly loved.

And the psalmist is saying, “Know that. Soak in it. Remind yourself of God’s love every morning, and it will lead to flourishing.”

Don’t you remember what you were like when you first fell in love with your man? I do! I was fifteen years young. And there’s just this glow that comes upon a woman who knows she’s loved. Jason Davis has loved me well for a very long time.

And that’s like a teeny tiny pale snapshot compared to the way that we can live and operate in the world when we do as the Psalmist said—we declare His steadfast love in the morning and His faithfulness by night.

You can wake up every morning and say, “God loves me today.” And then you can crawl into bed every single night and honestly say this, “God, You were faithful to me today.”

Whether God gives you a thousand days or ten days more, every day of your life you can wake up and say, “I am fully loved by God.” And every night of your life you can go to bed knowing, “He didn’t fail me today, and He won’t fail me tomorrow.” It’s so steadying.

Listen to these verses. Let them sink in. The first one is 2 Thessalonians 3:3, 

But the Lord is faithful. He will establish you and guard you against the evil one.

If you know the context of 2 Thessalonians, you know that Paul wrote this letter to believers who were facing intense persecution in a perverse and wicked culture.

And he wrote to them to say, “Stand firm.” And essentially, he was telling them it is possible for you to thrive when the whole world seems to be against you. And as he was giving them that message, what he wanted them to hold on to for, literally, dear life in some of their cases, was the faithfulness of God.

Hebrews 10:23 says, 

Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, [why?] for he who promised is faithful.

This is the chapter that sets up what we often call, “The Great Hall of Faith,” God’s people who flourished against all odds. And as the writer of Hebrews was about to point to those things as examples, he said, “Hold onto your hope.” Why? “Because God is faithful.” Not because we are faithful.

One more example from 2 Timothy 2:13. As I read it, I want you to consider how it could pour fertilizer on your mind, your heart, your faith to meditate on this single thought every night as you drift off to sleep. 

If we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself.

I don’t know why, but mom guilt starts about the time you see the two lines on the stick. Right? I love my kids, and I promise I’m parenting them the best that I know how. But I get into bed most nights, and all I can think about are the ways that I blew it. That’s not going to lead to anybody flourishing.

But on the nights I crawl into bed and think, If I’m faithless, He’s faithful—for He cannot deny Himself. It gets me off that hamster wheel of “my mistakes, my shortcomings,” and rightly places my thinking where it belongs—on the faithfulness of God.

No matter what kind of day you have, no matter how big you blow it, no matter how weak your faith feels, even when you crawl into bed and you feel like your bone marrow is tired and you’re not even sure you have mustard-grain faith, He will be faithful to you. Why? Because you belong to Him, and He cannot forsake His own.

Chasing through a rabbit trail here . . . I spent the early years of my marriage terrified that my husband would commit adultery. That comes from my childhood. I won’t unpack it all here. There was zero evidence that he had cheated on me, but I was constantly on guard. I would not describe our marriage as flourishing in that season.

Twenty-three years later, though we are not perfect—I’m a sinner married to a sinner, that’s just the way it’s always going to be—we are flourishing. And I no longer put my head on the pillow and think he’s dreaming about somebody else. I know Jason Davis will remain faithful. Even more, I know that God will remain faithful.

There’s such freedom in this! There’s such freedom in soaking and knowing that God’s love won’t change, and His faithfulness won’t change.

Jason will remain faithful because I am his, and he is mine. That’s a shadow of what’s true about God. You are His, and He is yours. And that will always be true.

And living like that’s always true, how can that not lead to our flourishing?

I wonder if your spiritual life feels chronically shaky. What would happen if you began to simply put into practice what the Psalmist describes here? “I will declare Your steadfast love in the morning, and Your faithfulness at night.”

You can get out some commentaries if you need to. You can compare the ancient languages if you want to. It might give you a deeper understanding. But I think what the Psalmist is telling us to do here is to declare God’s love in the morning and His faithfulness at night.

Lamentations 3:22–23 is a favorite passage of mine. It says this:

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
   his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
   great is your faithfulness.

I’m a sunrise watcher because the sun rises a parable. Every morning: He is faithful. He is faithful. He is faithful. He is faithful.

There is that one time when the sun stood still—you have to read your Old Testament to find it. But other than that exception, since the first sunrise, the sun has told the story: He is faithful. He is faithful. He is faithful.

And the sunset tells a similar story. You have not lived a single day of your life when God was not faithful to you, and you never will. God cares very much about the rhythms of your life.

I once heard a pastor say that God must care about the mundane because there sure is a lot of it. And there is. But if the thesis is that God’s people can flourish, what if the application is so simple. We rest, we root our lives, we tether ourselves to the love and faithfulness of God.

How would it pour fertilizer on your heart if you woke tomorrow morning, and before you headed into your to-do’s, which are always waiting for you, you just took a moment, and you thought to yourself, I’ve got nothing to lose. There’s nothing really on the line here. I am already fully loved. And nothing I do or don’t do today is going to change that. I can tell you, it will free you up just to enjoy the life that God has given you.

And what if tonight you tucked yourself into bed, probably exhausted to the very tips of your toes, and you just started a new habit? Maybe you just slipped to your knees first, and you just had this thought (it doesn’t matter how tired you are, you can think this sentence), “God was faithful to me today, and God will be faithful to me tomorrow.”

I can tell you from experience that those two seemingly insignificant rhythms can move the needle in taking you from flailing to flourishing.

I don’t know that we can go back to the basics too often. And these basics of resting in the love of God, of resting in the faithfulness of God, they free us to flourish because we stop striving. We stop white knuckling our way through the Christian faith.

Flourishing is ultimately a heart posture. It is not based on circumstances.

I know you have things you have to do today. I do, too. I know you have stresses. I do, too. And pressures. We all do. I also know that you probably have some big things in your life that you really wish were different. Me, too.

The beauty of this passage, of this psalm, is that none of that means you cannot have a flourishing inner life that spilled out onto others.

I want you to consider that beautiful list that Paul gives us in Galatians 5, the fruit of the Spirit—you know the one. It’s in Galatians 5:22–23.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.

Isn’t this a checklist for flourishing? Look at your own life, or the lives of somebody you know. If you see love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, whether you realize it consciously or not, you’re going to say, “Whoa, that woman is flourishing!”

That’s the outer fruit of an inner life of someone who rests in God’s love and faithfulness. Scripture calls these virtues fruit. And good fruit can only ever grow in good soil.

So what kind of soil does the flourishing life grow in? It’s the kind that knows God loves me. He really loves me. And God is going to be faithful to me. I don’t have to do a bunch of stuff. I don’t have to walk around like a giant ball of stress all the time. I don’t have to respond to everything that is happening in the culture or in my life because my eyes are on Jesus. He’s got this.

The psalmist is giving you such a practical recipe here. It can seem too easy. Right? Surely there’s more. I mean, if I’m going to really flourish, surely I have to do something more than wake up and declare God’s love and go to bed and declare His faithfulness. Well, maybe you do. But we could start there.

Give thanks to Jesus. Sing to Him. It’s good for you. Wake up in the morning and think, God loves me! And go to bed at night and think, God took care of me. It’s good for you.

To close this episode, I want to give you a blessing that I give to my sons every night. It comes from the book Habits of the Household.

I will pull each little boy—some of them are not so little boys—but I will pull each boy onto my lap, one by one, and I will look them in the eye—some of them are very squirrely, so the look in the eye part takes a minute. And I’ll use Judah as my example. 

I’ll say, “Judah, do you know that I love you?”

“Yes, Momma.”

“Judah, do you know that I love you no matter how good you are?”

“Yes, Momma.”

“Judah, do you know that I love you no matter how bad you are?” (This rhythm is very important when they’ve had a day that they didn’t make good choices.) “Do you know Momma loves you no matter how bad you are?”

“Yes, Momma.”

And then I will say, “Who else loves you like that, Son?”

Ezra says, “Everybody except the people I don’t know.”

He’s right. To know him is to love him. But the rest of them say, “Jesus.”

That’s the gospel. I want my sons to know that the gospel is that they are already fully loved by a faithful God, and it doesn’t shift by degrees.

Now, I’m sinful. And mine sometimes does. I’m an imperfect example of this at best. But I want them to understand that the gospel doesn’t want them to just be very good boys. The gospel means that they can flourish because of God’s love and faithfulness to them.

And then I will pull them forward and kiss them on their forehead, and I will say, “Let’s rest in that.”

So that’s my blessing to you. You are fully loved by a faithful God. Rest in that.

Carol Anne: Maybe you know someone struggling because they don’t really know what unconditional love is like. I hope you’ll send them a link of this episode of The Deep Well. You can find it at ReviveOurHearts.com and send the link from there.

While you’re atReviveOurHearts.com, I hope you’ll also check out the podcast series from Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth called, “How to Fall and Stay in Love with Jesus.” Nancy will continue to help you know for certain how loved you are. That series is part of the podcast Revive Our Hearts. You’ll get so much out of the teaching from Nancy each weekday.

Erin Unscripted

Erin: One of the distinctives of The Deep Well is that there is always somebody new in the co-host seat, and that is so fun for me. And in this season, that’s you, Carol Anne Beck! We’re new friends, but I feel like I’ve known you forever.

Carol Anne: I feel the same.

Erin: And you are an elementary music teacher, which I love. And you have two littles—a little boy and a little girl. Tell us their names.

Carol Anne: Asa is six, and Selah is almost two.

Erin: I feel like I know them, too, even though I haven’t met them.

Our hearts are just united by our love for the Lord and our love for His Word and our love for women. So I’m really grateful to get to spend this time with you.

Carol Anne: Thanks, Erin. I’m so happy to be here. And it’s time I get to ask some questions as we move into “Erin Unscripted.”

You mentioned several ways you’ve patterned your life in front of your kids, but I was wondering if there are any other specific things that you have implemented as a mom, as a parent to showcase the love of God for your kids.

I know you mentioned singing a lot, which I love. I’m an elementary music teacher, so I highly resonated with that. But are there any other practical things you’ve implemented in your parenting?

Erin: I am always fearful of coming across as a parenting expert because I am a cracked pot raising cracked pots every day of the week.

But I love that you asked this question because I think it takes intentionality. We can’t just assume our kids understand our love. I really believe part of God’s design for the family is that what we experience in our families is supposed to help us understand the context of God. So it really does matter.

My oldest said to me the other day, “Mom, I think we say we love each other way more in our family than my friends’ families.”

I think that’s actually a compliment that we do say it a lot. That can feel rather obvious, but it does take intentionality on my part to tell my children I love them frequently.

I think I’ve told this before on The Deep Well, so I’m sorry if I’m repeating myself, but we remodeled our old farmhouse that we live in. When it was stripped down to basically nothing, everybody got Sharpies. We wrote verses about God’s love for us and who God is everywhere—on the subfloors, on the drywall, on the beams—before we covered that up.

So our house is truly saturated in truth about God’s love for us. You can’t see it anymore, although there is now art on the walls, too. But if you could see behind the walls and floors of our home, what you would see is this house is built on our confidence in God’s love for us.

Now, we only had two little boys when we did that, and they were three and five. I’ve had two more since. But they know. That’s kind of the lore of our family. “You know there’s verses written on the floor that you’re walking on about God’s love?”

And I think, in discipline . . . I am not as perfect mom. Let me make that really clear. I definitely can get frustrated and discipline in anger. But I am also intentional in saying, “Do you know that no matter how much you blow it or how angry Mommy gets, my love’s not on the line ever. And God’s love is not on the line ever.”

So I think the things that we talked about in this session of just being so grounded in God’s unchanging love that it becomes the way that we talk to each other.

I often will have my older boys, when they have a big test at school or they’re trying out for the basketball team or things that feel big to them, and I wouldn’t want to minimize them, I’ll have them take a Sharpie and write, “NTL,” on their arms, which means “Nothing to Lose.”

Which is the idea, “If I make the team—great. If I don’t make the team—great. I don’t really have anything to lose here because Mom and Dad’s love is not on the line. God’s love is not on the line. So, let’s swing for the fences. Let’s try out for the team. Let’s do the thing and see what happens.” So I think it’s just part of the dialog of, “Love is constant.”

I grew up with loving parents, and I always want to honor them when I talk about them. But I grew up with complicated parents, as everybody does. I’m not sure that I understood that love was something I didn’t earn. It was something that I had by nature of being theirs.

And, therefore, when I came to Christ as a teenager, I did not understand that God’s love was something that I didn’t earn. So I spent a lot of time trying to earn it, and that’s a really anxiety-ridden way of trying to follow Jesus.

I’m grateful that through His Word I’ve been able to see. It’s pretty hard to deny when you look at Scripture. Like, “Oh, He really loves me.”

And what He really wants me to understand about His nature is that He is a loving God. And what the stories of Scripture communicate over and over is that God is love, and He has love for His children. That is so elementary and so important. When that started to really permeate my heart and life, it started to change the way I operated in the world.

And I hope that my children would say, “I am in a loving home, and my mom and dad love me no matter what.”

I hope that as they begin to walk out their faith in the Lord, that that would be such an anchor for them.

So, it’s not one thing. It’s many things.

What about you, Carol Anne? How have you experienced the Lord’s love. Can you think of a specific time when you were overwhelmed in knowing, “He really loves me”?

Carol Anne: There are so many moments, but I think it’s more in looking back now, five-and-a-half years, when my first husband passed away that I see God’s love holding me.

I think many times it’s not that overwhelming emotional feeling that we would like to feel all the time. I think that causes us in our weak days and our flesh to doubt God’s love because we don’t feel His strong arms keeping us up.

But looking back, I remember a dear close friend of mine asking me within those first few months after Matt passed away what I was studying. I felt so guilty for saying this, and I wish I could go back and just hug myself and tell myself, “That’s it. You’ve got it. Hold on to it.” Because I felt guilt in admitting that I had just come back to the basics of the cross and that Jesus loves me.

And I felt, like you mentioned, elementary, going back to those basics. But therein lies the foundation of my life and what God has accomplished. Christ’s death on the cross, Christ’s life was the redemption plan of God Himself, my Creator. So what greater truth could I have dwelled on in those darkest valleys than Jesus loves me?

I remember waking up and reminding myself, because I didn’t feel it, that Jesus loves me. And I needed no greater proof beyond the cross. I wanted greater proof. I wanted God Himself to write it in the sky for me what His plan was.

Erin: Like, if He really loved me, He wouldn’t take my husband from me.

Carol Anne: Oh, absolutely. You nailed that one, but I was too ashamed to say that one, but you said it for me. So, there we go. But absolutely, looking back.

I’m so thankful that I had people around me who reminded me of God’s love, especially when I didn’t feel it. I’m thankful that I was in a position to put myself in God’s Word and listen to music that reminded me that Jesus loves me, and I needed no greater proof than that He lived a perfect life and willingly gave up His life as a sacrifice for me.

Erin: Right. I say to myself often, because I do have those insecurities, though the Lord is growing me there, but I will often say to myself, “Jesus, I will measure Your love by the cross and Your power by the resurrection. I won’t measure Your love by if I feel loved. I won’t measure Your love by if I’m lovable because I’m often not.” But as you said, there is no greater proof than what He was willing to do for us, in love. That’s what Scripture motivated Him.

But I won’t measure whether I think You’re on the throne by whether You are responding to my prayers in the way I think You should. I know You’re powerful because You rose from the dead, and nobody else ever can or will.

So, we do have to remind ourselves of those things. I do think sometimes mature Christians feel like maybe we should move beyond John 3:16, but why?

No! There’s no moving beyond John 3:16 that “God so loved the world that He sent His one and only Son.” You were saying that passage as we were getting our mics warmed up and ready. That’s it. We ought not to move past.

Carol Anne: Would the people around you say your life is marked by grumbling and complaining? Or is it marked by gladness? On the next episode, Erin tells us why gladness is so important, and she’ll help you put gladness on display.

The Deep Well with Erin Davis is part of the Revive Our Hearts podcast family calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

All Scripture is taken from the ESV.

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