Episode 3: Bring Back the Gladness

Erin Davis: Well, it’s kind of a running joke in our culture that when somebody asks you how you’re doing, you should default to one of two answers: “Fine,” or “Busy.”

Carol Anne Beck: This is The Deep Well with Erin Davis. I’m Carol Anne Beck. Your life in Christ was not designed to be full of drudgery. Yes, life can be very hard. But at the same time, Jesus also brings us joy. Erin is going to invite you to bring back the gladness in your life. She's in a series called, “Among the Sequoias.” Okay, let’s get back to that seemingly innocuous question, “How are you?” I know we’ve all answered either “fine” or “busy.” 

Erin: I’d like to give you a couple of new options. Are you ready? “Glad” and “Delighted.” In the last episode we made it through the first three verses of Psalm 92. Let me read you those verses again:

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.

As I began to soak in this psalm and trust God that I could actually live a life of flourishing, this word started to tumble around in my heart and mind: delight. What we read here in Psalm 92:1–3 is the life of someone who knows how to delight in who God is and in the world He has made. 

In the first episode, I described a trip my husband, Jason, and I recently took to see the giant sequoias. That was the one and only thing on my bucket list. So, I’m officially ready for Jesus to come back or to take me home. I’ve done everything I want to do here. But my husband, Jason, was so kind to me on that trip, as he always is. Every time I would take my phone out of my pocket and try and take pictures of those trees, he’d say, “I got this, Baby. You just enjoy.” Or when I’d come to a spot in the trail and I’d look at the tree and then, me being me, I’d just want to immediately rush us off to the next stop, he’d say, “Hey, we don't have to be anywhere. Let’s just sit here a while.”

The trip was a gift. And then Jason just kept giving me the gift of an invitation to delight. And if I’m honest, before Psalm 92 invaded my life, delighting was a muscle that had basically atrophied in my life. I was so busy doing things and often convincing myself that I was doing those things for God that I never really took the time to develop the discipline of delight. And it is, like so many other things of value in the Christian life, a discipline.

So when we take these practical steps that the Psalmist outlined for us, when we give thanks to the Lord, when we sing praises to our God, that’s good for us! That’s a good thing to do. When we wake up every morning knowing and trusting that we’re already fully loved, that’s a good thing for us to do, and it’s good for us. When we crawl into bed at night, instead of focusing on our failures or how we’ve been offended, or doom-scrolling, we take a minute and think, Hey, God was faithful to me all day today, and He will be faithful to me all day tomorrow. When we sing, when we dance a little bit in the kitchen, we live a life of delight.

Now, the Psalmist doesn’t use the word “delight,” he uses the word “gladness.” I’m using those two words interchangeably to describe happy-heartedness. Again, I think when we recognize all that God has done and we live the life that Scripture has called us to live, inevitably that starts to ooze out of our spiritual pores. It helps us to flourish. It helps others to flourish. 

We pick it up again at verse 4: 

For you, O Lord, have made me glad by your work;
   at the works of your hands I sing for joy.
How great are your works, O Lord!
   Your thoughts are very deep! (vv. 4–5)

I’m flourishing now because I make enough money to pay all of my bills, and I put my money toward my 401K, right? No, that’s not what Scripture says. I can flourish because all my adult children are walking with the Lord, right? No, that’s not what Scripture says. I can flourish because there’s zero interpersonal conflict in my life. I sure hope it’s not that one!

I want you to remember that the Psalmist is moving us toward verse 12 where he will declare that the righteous flourish like giant fruitful trees. How is that possible? It’s right there in verse 4. “For you, O Lord, have made me glad by your work.” 

Now, there are verse and stanza breaks in our Bible. Those are there to help us keep organized. They’re helpful. But sometimes I like to remind you that they’re not inspired. This is one continuous thought. After the psalmist said, “You, O Lord, have made me glad by your work. At the works of your hands I sing for joy,” he looped back and started talking about his gratitude again. After telling us it’s good to declare God’s love, after he meditated on God’s faithfulness, after he told us to sing to the Lord, he said, “You have made me glad,” and then he burst into song and started the cycle all over again, giving thanks and singing. 

Verse 5, “How great are your works, O Lord.” There’s no question mark there. Not, “How great are your works?” No. “How great are your works, O Lord! Your thoughts are very deep!” He’s going right back into the gratitude-praise-love-faithfulness-singing cycle. You know what we do with people like this? We assume something’s wrong with them. 

My mom has always, always had this unique level of joy. She loves Jesus and Jesus loves her. And much like Judah, I’m not sure it’s ever occurred to her that God doesn’t love her. She really is in many ways like a real-life Snow White. She is always singing. She got me through my entire childhood by singing. We had songs for chores. We had songs for schoolwork. We had songs for getting up and going to bed. We had songs while taking walks. We had songs for when we were fighting. My mom was always singing. 

When I was a little girl (this happened a lot) people would often ask me a strange question, “Is your mom really always like that?” It’s only now in retrospect that I can understand what was happening there. Because, a woman who is truly flourishing, who is confident in God’s love, who is sure of His faithfulness, who is made glad by the things He has done, who can enjoy and delight in her life, not because it’s perfect—it isn’t—but because of what God has done for her; a woman like that is so rare. A woman like that is so alluring. I would always say, “Yeah, she’s always like that!” And then I’d skip off and play. She really was always like that. 

There’s a hard question I had to ask myself as I soaked in Psalm 92 and you should probably ask yourself too. Here it is: If I’m honest, is there anything about my life that those who do not know Christ would want?

It’s time for me to tell you about the baseball cap. I have a blue baseball cap that says, “Struggle Bus Driver.” I’ve got to tell you, I had it made, custom! When I would wear it, people would always make comments about it. I’d say, “Not only am I on the struggle bus, I am driving the struggle bus down the road!” And everybody would laugh. If you’ve ever seen a mom with four small boys, you understand that there is some reality to that. But the more I read Psalm 92, the more convicted I became about that hat. I can no longer bring myself to wear it. But I haven’t thrown it out yet because it reminds me that the righteous flourish. And while we may at times find ourselves on the struggle bus, we should not be the bus driver. 

Do I have struggles? Of course I do. Again, this is why we read our whole Bibles. There is a lot about my life that is totally upside down because of sin and because I live in a sin-soaked and God-cursed world. But if the only difference between me and my non-Christian friends is that I go to church and they don’t, something is off. 

If my head is barely above water all the time, if my life is not marked by gratitude and praise and singing and gladness and delight, if it’s been too long since I stopped and marveled at the works of God’s hand, like the Psalmist did in verse 4, is there anything they want that they don’t already have? I mean, on the surface they may seem to be flourishing more than I am. The Psalmist is going to write about that in a moment. But is there an inner flourishing, is there something that would make them think, Are you always like that? Is this for real?

Now there’s a tension here. I don’t ever want to oversimplify Scripture or God or life. We want to be somber about our sin. We want to be humble before the Lord. We want to be mindful of how we approach a holy God. But if we look to God’s Word, one thing that I missed for a long time is that gladness is one of the hallmarks of God’s people. Don’t ever take my word for it!

In 2 Chronicles 29, we find the Israelites singing praises to God, just like the Psalmist commanded. And verse 30 describes how they were singing to God: they were singing with gladness. This was no dirge. They were singing praises with smiles on their faces. Maybe tambourines! We see a lot of those in the Old Testament, or some of those hard to pronounce instruments. 

In the next chapter of 2 Chronicles, we are told that the Israelites celebrated for seven days with gladness. If you really read your Old Testament, you will find that God’s people knew how to party, and not the world’s version of partying. Partying with gladness and delight and with food and with singing in celebration that they were God’s people and He just kept rescuing them. 

In Nehemiah 12 we read that when the Israelites dedicated the rebuilt wall of Jerusalem, Scripture says they dedicated it with what? With gladness. They were happy! Their holy city which had been decimated by invading armies because of their sin, God in His mercy let them come back. He let them rebuild the wall, and they were glad about it . . . and they should have been. That passage also tells us that at that dedication ceremony there was thanksgiving, singing, cymbals, harps. 

The book of Esther (this is interesting to me) mentions gladness over and over. If you know the book of Esther, you know that parts of that story are rather dire. And yet, even in the shadow of genocide, God’s people were glad people. 

The Psalms are filled with the call to gladness. Psalm 30:11 says, “You have turned from me my mourning into dancing. You have loosed my sackcloth and clothed me with gladness.” I love the imagery of the psalms, but here it is. Gladness isn’t just something we do, it’s something we wear.

Psalms 51:8 says, “Let me hear joy and gladness. Let the bones that you have broken rejoice.” This speaks back to what we heard in the previous episode that sometimes the pruning process hurts. Maybe always. And here the Psalmist is saying, “Even when you break my bones, let me be glad. Let me hear and sing glad songs.”

Psalm 100:2 doesn’t sound like a suggestion to me, “Serve the Lord with gladness. Come into His presence with singing.” There’s a contrast here. I want you to listen to the middle of Psalm 92. Verses 6–9:

The stupid man cannot know;
   the fool cannot understand this:
that though the wicked sprout like grass
   and all evildoers flourish,
they are doomed to destruction forever;
   but you, O Lord, are on high forever.
For behold, your enemies, O Lord,
   for behold, your enemies shall perish;
   all evildoers shall be scattered.

You know, it’s not that Christians are the only ones who can ever flourish. It says that right there in verse 7. “All evildoers flourish.” That can be so maddening to watch, can’t it? It’s a relatively new realization to me that non-Christians can have happy marriages. Non-Christians can have good relationships with their kids. Non-Christians can flourish at work. But the Psalmist is saying here that the fruit of that flourishing is ultimately going to burn up. It’s right there in the second part of that verse, “They are doomed to destruction forever.”

If you go see the giant sequoias, first, take me with you. Second, I want you to pay attention to the signs the National Parks department has put along the trail. They did a pretty good job of educating trail walkers like me. Those signs frequently talk about the importance of fire. It’s essential for the ecosystem of sequoias. All of the giant sequoias have lived through forest fires. It’s not just that the flames haven’t gotten to them yet. They bear the scars of those fires on their rings inside the trunks. And yet, despite multiple hot forest fires, those trees still stand tall. How can that be? Well, their flourishing comes from within from the strength of their roots, and from the foundation of their structure. 

I’m telling you, I heard a thousand sermons when I walked among the sequoias. God’s Word was so rich and loud to me there because these trees, which have taken hundreds of years to develop, have endured a lot. It’s not that they’ve been closely protected by man, or we’ve given them the perfect environment to grow. No, they stand tall despite challenges. The picture the Psalmist is painting here just gets richer when we think about that, doesn’t it? We continue to stand tall. And yes, there are others who seem to be flourishing. But ultimately, they’re not going to make it through the fire. We have a kind of flourishing that will. 

I have a hunch this is a Davidic psalm. I base that on verses 10–11. David always liked to sneak in a couple of lines like this:

But you have exalted my horn like that of the wild ox;
   you have poured over me fresh oil.
My eyes have seen the downfall of my enemies;
   my ears have heard the doom of my evil assailants.

That word “but” is so beautiful. David was saying, “I look around and it seems like my enemies are flourishing.” David’s enemies, by the way, were other kings and warring armies. It seemed like they were winning all the battles. They’re conquering all the other kingdoms and getting all the other land. It seems like evildoers are flourishing, but what David knows is their flourishing ultimately cannot last. He knows that God’s Word, God’s people, the hope that we have in God, that that’s a kind of permanent flourishing that evildoers can never have. It’s a kind of permanent flourishing that we can have. It’s a source of lasting strength.

There’s a John Piper quote that I have not been able to stop thinking about. Piper said, 

Christianity in America has been ravaged by the teaching that decisions are more basic in defining a Christian than delight. 

I should’ve just started with the Piper quote and dropped the mic, right? This is a really important point. 

Has your walk with the Lord become more about making decisions to try to please Him than to delight in who He is? Than to delight in the unshakeable reality that because of Jesus, God is already pleased with you? It shifts things in ways that are so subtle and so powerful. “Jesus, help me read the Bible more” becomes “Jesus, help me to delight in your Word.” 

That’s how Psalm 119 describes the Word of God. He said, “Help me to delight in your Word.” You will make time for the things you delight in. It’s not like, “Give me enough energy to get up fifteen minutes early so I’ll read your Bible.” It’s, “Help me to delight in your Word, God.”

“Jesus, help me become a better wife,” becomes “Jesus, help to delight in the husband you have given me.” Jason is another one of my favorite topics. I talk about him a lot and don’t apologize for it. We’ve been married twenty-two years. He is my favorite person currently walking the earth. If I didn’t know for sure the Lord hung the moon I might think Jason Davis did it. And what defines our marriage at the twenty-two-year mark is delight. We just enjoy each other so much. And guess what? You are going to be a better wife when you are delighted by your husband. I didn’t say delighted by everything your husband does. I don’t think there’s a qualifier there that you need. But just delighted in who he is and how God made him and the years you’ve spent together. 

“Jesus, help me stop yelling at my kids,” or “Help me be patient with my kids,” becomes “Lord, help me to delight in my children.” We can actually say to them, “Ah, you’re a delight to me.” 

Do better, try harder faith becomes, “Lord, teach me to delight in You.”

Christians should be the most delighted and the most delightful people in the whole world because God has given us so much! He has made us glad, and we should be glad about it! This is so practical. I don’t want us to over spiritualize anything here. 

The Psalmist is saying, “You’ve made me glad by your works.” Now, you’ll forget that in the first twenty minutes of your day if you’re not intentional. So, we do things like take walks and delight in God’s creation. I’m convinced Christians would be a lot less grumpy if we just went outside more. That’s Romans 1. We can observe the nature of God simply by seeing the world He’s made. I bet you’d be surprised how long it’s been since you’ve seen the stars. I bet you’d be surprised how long it’s been since you picked a flower, since you put your feet in the grass. 

To live a life of delight means sometimes we sit in the hammock with nothing better to do than to delight. It means sometimes we rest for rest’s sake because a nap sure is a delightful thing. Part of the outflow of Psalm 92 in my life (and this is going to sound trivial, maybe) is that I have lunch with a friend once a month. It’s on my calendar. Not the same friend. It’s a non-negotiable that because I want to live a delighted life I spend time with delightful people and eat delightful food. 

 

Piper has long been a proponent of something he calls Christian hedonism. Now, I don’t have the brain that Piper does so I had to look up the word “hedonism.” This idea of Christian hedonism is the doctrine that pleasure or happiness is the sole or chief good in life. That can’t be right, right? Well, it comes from this profound statement that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him. And that there is joy to be pursued, that the outflow of that pursuit of joy is gladness.

One more Piper quote. This is so rich. He said, 

Not only is there no conflict between your happiness and God’s glory, but His glory shines in your happiness when your happiness is in Him. 

Are you living a delighted life? 

Let me tell you, things get good in a hurry when you’re committed to living a delighted life. The bowl of blueberries you had for breakfast suddenly becomes so amazing! “Lord, thank You for giving me these blueberries! I’m delighted by them. And You gave them to me because You’re delighted in me!” And a loud house, which I have a very loud house, becomes such a source of delight. “Lord, you have filled my home with four children! And they are the most fun people I know! Thank you!”

I’m going to take a walk, not to lose weight, not because I know it’s good for my heart, but because I want to live a delighted life. I want to delight in the Lord. I want to serve the Lord with gladness. 

Have we overcorrected because we’re so fearful of believing that faith can result in prosperity in a way that the world defines it that we’ve forgotten to enjoy God? And that in enjoying God, we will flourish? So go on. Ask me how I’m doing. I’ll tell you the truth. 

As I was preparing this episode, a song from my childhood bubbled up. I’m not much of a singer, but this is actually really good theology. 

He has made me glad, He has made me glad. 
I will rejoice for He has made me glad. 
He has made me glad, He has made me glad.
I will rejoice for He has made me glad.

Carol Anne: Erin Davis has been showing you why gladness is a crucial part of a life flourishing in Christ. It’s time for Erin Unscripted where I get to ask the questions.

Erin Unscripted

So Erin, you talked a lot in this episode about showcasing gladness and delight. I know this as a young mom myself, and I know that many of our listeners think, How in the world can I showcase this to my family? So my question is, how do you implement this into your life as a mom? And how do you showcase this in front of your children?

Erin: I think there’s a choice to have a glad life. I am not naturally wired this way. I’m a doer. I am task-oriented. I don’t apologize for that. The Lord has used those wirings to empower me to do lots of things for the Kingdom and for others. But that isn’t always a way to build glad children and glad marriages, to always be task-oriented. 

Carol Anne: You’ll be happy! You will like it!

Erin: You’ll be happy working from dawn to dusk and repeating it! So, we take a lot of trips. Our back porch has a hammock for every person. We hang out in our hammocks a lot. We try to be intentional about watching the sunset. We live on a beautiful farm with beautiful sunsets, so that makes it easy. But it would be also easy to just be inside doing the dishes and eating dinner and miss the sunset. 

So it’s little things, but it’s just that I want to enjoy my children, and I want my children to enjoy me. I want to enjoy my husband and I want my husband to enjoy me and not just enjoy who I am as a person, but to enjoy each other, to spend time enjoying each other. I want my kids to know that a day of hiking is not a wasted day. It’s a good use of the day. I want my kids to know that laying on the grass and looking up at the sky is not a waste of time, because it brings delight. 

I think the constant gravitational pull of family life, at least our family, is not bad. The constant gravitational pull of family life is to go to the next thing, do the next thing on the to-do list, run to the next activity, do the next chore, weed the next flower bed, on and on. It does take intentionality to enjoy each other. 

I think another commitment in our family that has really helped is the church phrase, “Christian hospitality.” Our home is a place where many people come, always. One of my favorite stories ever is when our friends, the Brossers, pulled into our driveway, and their little girl, June, said “Oooh, I wuv this place!” about the Davis farm. You couldn’t say anything better! So we are with our friends a lot. And in an era where people are spending less and less time with their friends, it’s more and more hard to connect, that’s a commitment that we have. 

Our home on the weekends is full of people all the time. That’s about enjoyment. That’s not–I could spiritualize it, I suppose. I could say it’s about our Christian witness, or it’s about discipleship. Some of that happens around the fire pit, but it’s about enjoying people and having people enjoy us. 

I don’t know. I don’t know practically exactly how we live it out except for that we try to build in fun, you know? I read an article several years ago that was encouraging you to consider what the hearth of your home is. Think about past eras where every home had a literal hearth. That was the place that families gathered around. This article was like, “What do you want the hearth of your family to be?” This isn’t going to sound really spiritual but this really is what I want the hearth of our family to be: fun. I want us to be a family that has fun and enjoys each other. So I think we build a lot of that in.

I’m throwing you this question as a curveball, maybe, but what would you say you want the hearth of your family to be?

Carol Anne: I don’t want to piggyback off of what you just said, but my mother-in-law says that all the time. We kind of tease about it in our house because she says it so much. Any time we’re visiting she always says, “You leave the kids here and y’all just go have fun! Just go get some ice cream, get a coffee, whatever!” She’s just such a southern belle, and I adore her. I do think of that. To this day when we’re visiting and my father-in-law comes home, my mother-in-law will leap out of her chair and go see him at the door. I wept the first time I saw that.

Erin: And they’ve probably been married longer than I have!

Carol Anne: Yeah, it just was so sweet. I grew up, like you said, with loving parents. But the dynamic in my home was different than that. So that was the first time I saw exuberant delight like that, to that level, in a marriage. I’m so glad my husband grew up with that because he has brought that into our marriage. 

Erin: Yeah, what a gift. Is Christian marriage supposed to put the gospel on display? Absolutely. And can’t we do that by just enjoying each other? That's what you described.

As you were telling that story I was thinking of my grandma. I have a legacy of women who modeled this well. I called her red-headed Granny because she had red hair. She was always doing such fun stuff. One year we went to visit her and she had dressed up as the fairy godmother. She was in this huge dress and glued stars to her face. She had a magic wand she’d use. And we had so much fun. 

My mom every summer would do what she called Kids’ Vacation. We’d spend a week and we would go into the city and go to the zoo and museums, and we could eat ice cream for dinner. It wasn’t all the time like that, but Kids’ Vacation was the ultimate! And we have the equivalent in our family which is called Cousin Camp. All the cousins come to the farm every summer and we play hide and go seek in the dark, and we watch movies outside, and we night swim with glow sticks, and we make huge banana splits, and we just have fun. We just enjoy each other. I think it’s a beautiful way to put the joy of the Lord on display, by being joyful and enjoying the life God’s given us.

Carol Anne: I absolutely love hearing you talk about infusing joy into your family and making that intentional. Because I’m a young mom, it does take intentional behavior to have fun with our kids!

Erin: Totally.

Carol Anne: Right now I’m working on when my little girl, who’s almost two, comes up to me. If I’m holding the phone, I’m trying to purpose in my heart, no matter what is happening, I’m going to put it down. She’s far more important than my phone. I want to enjoy my kids, like you said. I want my kids to know that I enjoy them. I want them to enjoy me. Our pastor just recently finished a study through the whole book of Ecclesiates.

Erin: Wow!

Carol Anne: That was just such a tremendous encouragement and rebuke. Through the whole book of Ecclesiastes, the writer is talking about how to enjoy life. It’s all we have. How is that different for a believer and an unbeliever? You talked about in this podcast episode that for an unbeliever, their marriage can be joy-filled. But that’s it. That’s all they have. It’s vanity. But for believers that are married, that joy and that fun has substance. I think what makes the difference there is that we as believers, in our marriage and in parenting and in our relationships, that joy and delight holds substance because it is a small picture of heaven and of what we’re going to experience.

Erin: You're onto something there.

Carol Anne: So, there’s substance there. There’s joy. It has longevity for the believer. That’s the hallmark of what makes it different from a family without hope, from parents who are married without Christ at the center, who are trying to have a marriage that works at a base level without Christ, or to parent without Christ. Enjoy life, because this is all you have.

Erin: This is it.

Carol Anne: There is no shadow of joy to come for them. 

Erin: Right. I love that you use the word “shadow.” C.S. Lewis said that we are living in the shadowlands now. The idea is that the world we’re in now, which is created by God—no less created by God than the future reality we long for—is a shadow in the sense of what is to come. What God has in store for us is untainted by sin. I wouldn't even begin to describe what I think that’s like because I have no idea. I only know sin and brokenness. 

But our best day, our very best day here . . . You know, the weather is a perfect 73 degrees, (the perfect temperature), the sun is shining, everybody gets along, you have the perfect breakfast, lunch, and dinner, (I’m such a foodie), you’re with your favorite people, in your favorite place, it’s a perfect day . . . it will feel like a shadow ultimately when we experience being in the presence of the Lord. That makes it that much sweeter. 

This is, to use a different metaphor, this is the appetizer only. Even though there are moments when this appetizer is amazing, the feast is yet to come! Imagine! The Lord blesses the righteous and the unrighteous, Scripture tells us that. That’s because of His great love. He loves all of His children. What a grace that whether you follow Him or not, you can still experience the sun on your face, the sand in your toes, a great meal, or someone else’s love because God is gracious, and He is showing love to you. But what you can’t experience is that there is so much more beyond that. 

Let me leap frog a little bit from a passage that seems to have nothing to do with this but has helped me wrestle with this a little bit. It’s that passage where Jesus talks about fasting, and He talks about those that fast publicly. They make themselves look sick, and they make it known that they’re fasting. He says they have received their reward. Then He tells us that when we fast we should go in private and do it for the eyes of our Father (see Matt. 6:16–18). I’d always read that and think, Oh, they didn’t get anything out of fasting. No, they got what they wanted. What they wanted was public praise. So that’s the extent of what they’re going to receive. But what I want is the ear of the Father. I want the presence of the Lord. I want Him to work in my life. 

I would look around and be like, every time Christians talk about marriage we act like we’re the only ones who are going to have happy marriages, and that’s just not what I see in the world. Or, we act like we’re the only ones who can parent our children with love. I know lots of non-Christian parents who love their children and parent really well. 

So what is going on there? Well, I think they are getting the reward that they intend. The ultimate goal is to stay married and be pretty happy with each other. Well, the ultimate goal of my marriage is to put the ministry of the gospel on display. Their ultimate goal of parenting is just to raise decent kids. No, the ultimate goal of parenting is to be this incubator for discipleship in which your children learn and long for the Kingdom, and they attach the love they have for you to the love of the heavenly Father, and they long to follow Him. And from your little “k” kingdom of your family, they are grown into the big, capital “K” Kingdom. So, it matters more. It’s not just about if we’re happy or satisfied, did we stay married, did our kids not go off some rebellious cliff. It’s about so much more. 

I do think that’s what the writer of Ecclesiastes was wrestling with, because had everything and it all felt pretty hollow. That’s the reality. “Oh, I can have multiple wives,” that man had! And lots of children and palaces and money and prestige. And yet, it doesn’t lead to something greater or more significant. For the Christian, the little things we do in the walls of our home that seem so insignificant, we know they are telling a grander story. So, I think that’s the difference. 

Carol Anne: Our pastor said so many times throughout our study, and we have adopted into our parenting (I think we actually said it to our son yesterday in a discipleship moment), it’s not that we don’t enjoy life. God gave us so many things to love and enjoy and delight in in this life. I think it pleases God when we enjoy His creation because we enjoy God’s character through creation.

Erin: Right.

Carol Anne: But our pastor would say, “Expect less from people and expect more of God.” It’s not that we can’t enjoy the things of this world, but they are never intended to satisfy.

Erin: Right.

God only Himself can fulfill that desire, that role in our life. So, we can never expect too much of God.

Yeah, because He has more. I love that passage in Job that says we’ve only touched the outskirts of His ways. We’re only seeing the fringes of His ways. He has more, infinitely more for us! The best gifts we’re enjoying here on earth again are just a foretaste, and that is the paradigm shift. Yep, enjoy each other, but know God has so much more for you. 

Carol Anne: Part of flourishing is flourishing in your physical body. On the next episode, Erin will tell us about a time when she struggled to flourish physically. We’ll hear what she discovered when she asked the Lord for help developing habits to help her flourish.

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

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