How to Know God Is Good

Katie Laitkep: I knew that God was good. 

Dannah Gresh: This is Katie Laitkep, telling us about her mindset as a teenager.

Katie: I grew up hearing that and believing it, but I didn’t think that God was good to me.

Dannah: Katie was in a hospital with multiple symptoms, cut off from her friends and family. And a lie took root in her heart; she thought, God’s not really good to me.

Do you ever feel that way? Today, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth will help you counter that lie with this truth.

Nancy: He is good, whether or not His choices seem right to us, whether or not we feel it, whether or not it seems true, and whether or not He gives us everything that we want.

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Lies Women Believe, for Tuesday, August 2, 2022. I’m Dannah Gresh.

Nancy is about to open God’s Word and help us understand why we can lean on this simple yet life-changing truth: God is good.

But why are we so tempted to doubt this? Before Nancy starts teaching, we’re going to hear the story of Katie Laitkep. When you hear about the suffering she went through, maybe you’ll be able to relate to the temptation she felt to think God wasn’t good to her.

Katie: I grew up in the church and in a home where the Bible was taught. There’s not a point that I can think of where I first heard the name of Jesus. It was just part of my childhood. But I had never really needed God in the way that I did once I started to get sick.

I could kind of live my life. I was successful in school, good at school. I liked it. I was able to do what I wanted to do without having to depend on the Lord for anything. I had a relationship with Him, but it was mostly focused on me.

I had gone to a private school where I would sit in chapels each week, and I regretted that I didn’t have the same testimony that a lot of the speakers did. I remember when I was an elementary school student wanting to be the person who had a dramatic testimony—someone who had experienced incarceration or drug abuse, just so that I would have that kind of story.

I had no concept of what the grace of God is, no understanding of the nature of the Cross and what my sin had done. So at that point, I would say that I was a believer, but I wasn’t believing God for much.

When I was in fifth grade, I first started getting sick a lot. I was missing school all the time. The year after that I was in sixth grade and I was hospitalized for the first time with a very severe migraine that just lasted for weeks. It was pain that would not stop, no matter what we tried!

My symptoms have primarily been neurological, mostly different forms of headaches and migraines, but also different forms of migraines—ocular migraines that cause me to lose my vision—a lot of fatigue, brain fog and memory loss, joint pain, arthritis-type symptoms, some psych symptoms where the illness causes anxiety and even depression at times. The worst have been cluster headaches—which are nicknamed “suicide headches.” When those happen, you feel like you’re being stabbed in the eye with an icepick.

By the time I was about sixteen I was told that I had multisystem organ dysfunction. My family became really desperate, so I went to a health clinic in Dallas. It was a place for people who have exhausted all conventional medical options.

The walls were completely steel porcelain. It was just a really cold, clean kind of place. You weren’t allowed to have any kind of fragrances or electronics. Nothing could be brought in from outside, because they were afraid people would become allergic to it, and it would make them worse.

I was the only pediatric patient at that time, the only teenager. I would sit on a metal stool for about eight hours a day in this room that felt a lot like an aquarium. I would just sit there and about every ten, fifteen minutes or so, I’d walk to the front of the room and I would get an injection in my arm, and then I would go back and sit and wait.

Then I’d go back every ten to fifteen minutes. I would do that for eight hours a day, just day after day after day for weeks at that clinic. If you brought in a book, it had to be wrapped in cellophane because of the concern of paper and ink and how that can cause allergic reactions, so it was really difficult to even have a book.

You couldn’t have electronics, so you just sat there all day long and just waited for them to get to you and give you the shot, and then you would back down. So it was a lonely place, it was pretty miserable. Days were very, very long. I remember it being fairly big and empty, but I just felt claustrophobic all the time in the midst of the circumstances that I was in. 

I just felt like day after day I was trying different things and nothing was working, and it just became suffocating! I knew that God was good, I saw that in other patients; I saw it in my family. I grew up hearing that and believing it, but I didn’t think that God was good to me! I didn’t know if He really could be trusted.

It was easy to believe that when things were good, but when things were not working out the way that I wanted, it was hard to know if He really was good to me. I put my faith and my hope in my doctors, thinking that they were going to give me the answers that I wanted. As they failed, I had to turn to Christ. I just remember begging Him to show me if He was good and if He was trustworthy.

After I had been there for probably a few weeks at that point, I think the doctor realized that I was still a teenage girl, and among all these adults I was the only one. He could see that I was in a lot of pain and that being there was miserable! It was how I was spending my summers as a high school sophomore and junior.

So he finally said, “I’ll write you a prescription, and this will allow you to use an old classic iPod. You can take that into these testing rooms while you’re getting injections, and you can take it with you into the sauna.”

So at that point I had heard about Revive Our Hearts. I downloaded all of the old episodes, all of the old radio series that I could find onto that iPod, and I just sat there. While I was waiting for injections every ten to fifteen minutes, I would sit there and just listen to Nancy teach . . . for hours and hours and hours!

Dannah: We’re about to hear the truth of God’s Word just like Katie did on that classic iPod. Let’s pause Katie’s story and focus on the question that plagued her: “Is God really good?” Here’s Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth.

Nancy: A woman wrote and shared with me how she had four healthy children and then God gave her a set of twins, one of whom had Down Syndrome. She said this little girl is an incredible challenge.

And then she said she got pregnant again, and this time she had a child who was born with a lung problem. They had to get his lungs cleaned out in order for him to be able to breathe. She said he was now able to breathe, but because of a lack of oxygen, he ended up with cerebral palsy.

She said he can’t swallow, he does not smile when you play with him . . . and then this part.She said, “My heart is so sad! It’s like my son has died, only I must continue to do everything for him.” And then here’s the real heart of why she wrote. She said, “Is God really good? Doesn’t He make any mistakes?” 

This week we want to look at some of the lies that women believe about God. Now, I’ll say that it’s not just women who believe these lies, but these are lies that women have shared with me, that they have found themselves believing about God. And at times, things I have wrestled with in my own experience.

Nothing is more crucial than what you and I believe about God. In fact, what we believe about God is foundational to everything else about our lives. If we believe things about God that aren’t true, we are laying a faulty foundation for our lives that will sooner or later crack.

If we have wrong thinking about God, we will have wrong thinking about everything else. Because, you see, what we believe about God ultimately determines the way that we live. Now, most of us don’t consciously believe that God is not really good. And if we do feel it, we would never dare to say out loud, “God is not really good.” Because, theologically we know better. We know in our heads that God is good. 

I believe that deep in many of our hearts as women there is this lurking suspicion that, “Yes, God may be good to everybody else, but God has not been good to me.” This lie is at the core of much of our wrong thinking about God.

Let me send you back to Genesis chapter 1 and look at what God made and then see the description. Everything God made was good. Of course it was, because it was a reflection of a good God.

But when Satan wanted to tempt the woman to rebel against God, He planted in her mind a seed of doubt about God’s goodness. When turbulence comes into our lives, disappointment, pain, when we lose people we love, when things don’t go as we had hoped or planned; Satan tempts us to wonder, Is God really good?

“If He were good, how could He have let this happen? How could He have let my husband abandon me? How could He have let my parents treat me this way? How could He have let me lose my job? Why would God have kept this good thing from me?”

I hear from many unmarried women doubting in their hearts the goodness of God because God has not brought to them a husband that they’re longing for. It’s not just true, by the way, on a personal level. It’s true in our world. This is one of the things that people really challenge about God.

When you look in this fallen world at the wars, the famine, the natural disasters, these things are a reality. And Satan uses these realities to try to put God in a negative light. Once we doubt the goodness of God, we’re going to find it hard to trust God. You can’t trust a God who is not good.

Now, how do we counter that lie in our minds and in our hearts? If we have this lurking suspicion that maybe God really isn’t good—maybe you’re at a season in your life when it’s tempting to think, God hasn’t really been good to me—how do we counter that?

Well, we always counter lies with the truth. We replace the lies with the truth. The truth is that God is good. He is good! I was looking over the weekend through the psalms and I found thirteen references that said, “God is good.” Over and over again in the psalm book of Israel, they affirm God is good, the Lord is good.

It also says His Name is good. His lovingkindness is good. His mercies are good. His judgments are good. His Spirit is good. He is good, whether or not His choices seem right to us, whether or not we feel it, whether or not it seems true, and whether or not He gives us everything that we want.

Dannah: Let me just read you a few of those psalms Nancy’s been talking about.

Oh, how abundant is your goodness, which you have stored up for those who fear you and worked for those who take refuge in you, in the sight of the children of mankind! (Ps. 31:19 ESV)

Taste and see that the LORD is good. How happy is the person who takes refuge in Him!” (Ps. 34:8 CSB)

For you, O LORD, are good and forgiving, abounding in steadfast love to all who call upon you.” (Ps. 86:5 ESV)

Nancy had to cling to verses like this when she was in her early twenties. That’s because she got a call that her father had a heart attack and instantly died.

Nancy: God did something very gracious for me in that moment. My dad and I were very close and in the days that followed there were lots of tears and an enormous sense of loss, that I feel sometimes even to this day. . 

But in that very first moment, before there was any other thought, God brought to mind a verse that I had read (I think it was just a week or so earlier). It’s from Psalm 119, verse 68. Paraphrased it reads, “God is good, and everything He does is good.”

My dad had spent the first twenty-some years of my life teaching me that God is good and everything He does is good, but in that moment, theology that I had in my head became doxology in my heart. I knew that whatever we had to face in the days ahead, God was good!

God laid in that understanding, that reminder of His good character, a foundation that became a resting place for my heart, a steadying place for my emotions. It and allowed us to walk in the days and the months and the years that followed confident in the goodness of God.

Dannah: That’s Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth in a classic teaching, Lies Women Believe About God. That’s the kind of teaching Katie Laitkep heard as a teenager, stuck in a hospital with a debilitating illness. 

Katie: So as I was listening to Nancy to teach, it allowed me to breathe a little bit more and to be able to realize that this was the place where God had me. And that if He had put me here, then it was with great purpose. This was the background that He was using for me to get to know Him personally and to bring glory to Him.

I could all the sudden stay there and feel peace and feel like even if it didn’t work—even if I was wasting my time so to speak—that I was in this place where God was present. And sitting in the midst of it, just hearing her teach, I could get to know Christ in a way that I would never be able to if I was healthy and out doing normal teenager things.

All the sudden, I had all this time to get to know who He was, to know His character, and know His heart and get to study in a way—by listening to those messages—study His Word and find out more about Him.

Nancy has always said that anything that makes you need God is a blessing. In that season I needed Him desperately. ut through what was being broadcast, I realized that even these terrible things that were making me need God, could be good, because they forced me to rely on Him and to know Him in different ways.

Dannah: We’ve been on a journey with Kaite Laitkep. As a teenager battling illness, she fell for the lie, “God isn’t really good to me.” The Lord used the teaching of Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth to help combat that lie with the truth. The Lord also used Nancy’s book, Lies Women Believe and the Truth that Sets Them Free.

Katie: I read Lies Women Believe the year that I turned eighteen. It was just what I needed at that point, because I knew that my future was not going to be anything like I had planned. For so long I had put all of my identity in academic achievements and accomplishments, and now I didn’t know if I was going to be going off to college the following year, or if I was ever going to be able to leave my house and function in the world. A lot of what I thought I knew about the world had shifted. And so, I got that book.

Dannah: As Katie read this book, the Lord began to open her eyes to another lie she had believed. That lie was: “I shouldn’t have to live with unfulfilled longings.” She discovered the truth that unfulfilled longings could increase her longing for God.

Katie: So if I didn’t get that book, I think it would be a struggle to get out of bed!

Dannah: “I shouldn’t have to suffer,” that was another lie that spoke to Katie’s situation. But then she saw the truth: “My suffering will not last forever.”

Katie: I started to realize that my illness was not just about me. 

Dannah: Here’s another lie Katie read about in Lies Women Believe: “It’s all about me.” As she read the book she realized everything is all about God and His good Kingdom purposes.

Katie: I think without the book I would still be enslaved to a lot of different lies! The Lord just started showing me how revolting my selfishness and my pride are to Him as well. And it began to change the way I looked at Christ, because I knew physical pain, and I knew how sinful I was.

I looked at Him and I saw that He knew more physical pain than I did, but He didn’t have any of the same sin that I did. He still chose to suffer so that I would be righteous. Experiencing the suffering that I was going through changed the way that I looked at Christ’s suffering.

It was extremely humbling to know what He took on, and that He would step into this broken world. The more I had to repent of my selfishness and making things about me and focusing on my own glory versus God’s, made me realize that I had always thought my biggest problem was my illness. Once I was diagnosed, I thought that my biggest problem was bacteria. But sin is such a greater problem than my illness! One of the big lies that I believed was that God should heal me, or that He should fix my problems, that I deserved to have a life of comfort or of healing, that these are things that are expected.

I’ve benefited so much from people like Joni Eareckson Tada, who I heard on Nancy’s broadcast. Hearing her talk about what God was doing in the midst of her suffering, knowing that she was still very much in the battle, that she wasn’t telling her story from a place of complete physical healing, that she’s not going to see it this side of heaven. But God was still using her to spread His hope and His joy and purposes to others in the midst of her struggles. This made me realize maybe my illness was not going to just be about me.

At that point, I remember reading Luke 1 and the prophecy that’s given about Christ. He’s referred to as “the Sunrise.” At the end of the passage, it’s referring to Jesus, and says, “Because of the tender mercy of our God whereby the Sunrise shall visit to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to move their feet into the way of peace.” (vv. 78–79 ESV).

And I remember hearing that Christ, who is the Sunrise, that He came to give light to those who sit in darkness, both in the darkness of our sins . . . But I also started to think of all of the people that were like me, that had been sitting in circumstances where there was no light that could be seen, no hope of healing anywhere near, and not a lot of comfort to be found. People just sitting there knowing, “This is probably going to last for a really long time!” And knowing that Christ came to give light to my darkness. I started to hear those verses as a command, that I needed to find a way to give His light to others who sat in darkness.

So I now work in Houston as a hospital teacher. I work for the public school system, but I get to teach sick kids and those that are in really similar situations to what I experienced in middle school and high school. 

I’ve had several kids who did not leave the hospital, kindergarteners and second graders who have gone home to be with the Lord way before they should have. I’ve gone to both Christian celebrations of life and some of the darkest, most hopeless memorial services that you can imagine. 

I’ve sat through services for students who were not believers, it has increased just the sense of urgency, that time is short, that God is good, and He is willing to redeem. But we don’t know how much time He has given each of us. It has forced me to rely on Him in different ways and to figure out how to serve Him well with the time that I have. 

It took ten years before I was diagnosed with Lyme disease. Through Nancy’s teaching I learned that if I do have Christ and I have His Word, I don’t even need health.

For years that’s all I was chasing, to find a cure or not even a cure, to find the diagnosis of what was making me so sick, to find out what was wrong. I thought that if I had that, then my life would all of the sudden be better, if I could just be well, then my life would be fulfilled.

I spent so many years chasing all these different things thinking that what was I needed. Through Revive Our Hearts I realized that if I have Christ, I’m okay!

Dannah: That’s Katie Laitkep. She’s been sharing with us her journey from doubting God’s goodness to embracing the truth that God is good.

The Lord used the teaching of Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, some of the same teaching we’ll be hearing about of God’s goodness this week. He used Nancy’s book Lies Women Believe and The Truth That Sets Them Free. If you related to any of the lies that tempted Katie, I hope you will get a copy and that you will fill your mind with the truth, that you will start walking in freedom.

To get a copy of Lies Women Believe, just visit ReviveOurHearts.com and make a donation of any amount. We’ll say thank you by sending you this book. Your donation is going to help us continue speaking the truth to women who need to hear it, women just like Katie.

Katie: By donating to Revive Our Hearts people may think that they’re just giving money or their resources. But they’re giving people like me—like patients and teenage girls who have no other hope—they’re giving us Christ. That’s what they did for me!

People don’t realize that those messages changed my life! I should have brought Kleenex!

Dannah: You can help us have that kind of effect on Revive Our Hearts listeners. Every time you support this ministry, you’re helping us to work in hearts in that same way. Just visit ReviveOurHearts.com to make a donation. You’ll be able to let us know that you’d like a copy of Lies Women Believe as our way of saying thank you. You can also call 1-800-569-5959. 

I hope you’ll check out the video of Katie Laitkep’s story at the Revive Our Hearts website. You’ll find a link on today’s transcript.

Tomorrow, Nancy is going to continue addressing Lies Women Believe about God. I hope you’ll be back for Revive Our Hearts. To close our time in prayer, here’s Nancy.

Nancy: Father, we acknowledge that many times our hearts question, “Are You really good?” But the truth with which we must counsel our hearts is that we know You are good! Grant us, O God, faith and confidence in this truth. May we counter the lies of the enemy with the truth that You are good, and everything You do is good! I pray in Jesus’ name, amen.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth exists to call women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ. 

*Offers available only during the broadcast of the podcast season.