FamilyLife Today®

Rachel Faulkner Brown: This resurrection life is not a timid grave-tending life. And that's how most of us live. It's adventurously expectant, greeting God with the childlike, "What's next, Papa?" because we know You're good, we know You're faithful, we know You're never going to leave us. We know that no matter what happens or comes our way, I'm not alone. You're with me.

Ann Wilson: Welcome to FamilyLife Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson.

Dave Wilson: And I'm Dave Wilson. You can find us at familylifetoday.com. This is FamilyLife Today.

I've said this many times and I'm going to say it again. I think the two most important beliefs a person can ever carry are what we believe about God—theology, belief about Theos, God—and identity, belief about my ID, who I am.

I think every decision we make, literally little ones, big ones, every day is based on what we believe is true about our Father, God, and what we believe is true about ourselves. That means bad decisions when it's based on a false identity and a false theology, and good ones when we understand we are safe and loved.

Ann Wilson: I totally agree.

Dave Wilson: So we're going to dive into that because there's nothing I like talking about more. I think we miss this. As a pastor, I think I've missed it even teaching it because it's clear in the Word, but we can blow it up. So who do we have in the studio?

Ann Wilson: We have Karen McAdams and Rachel Faulkner Brown back with us in the studio. It's so fun to have you. Welcome back.

Rachel Faulkner Brown: This is a dream for us. This is our favorite thing to talk about, our favorite thing to teach on. We could just talk for hours because, as I was telling you earlier, Ann, there's just nothing that we love to talk about more than how much He loves us and how good He is.

I think you were talking about identity and theology, and I think most of us have had things happen in our past that just muddy the waters. Whether it's religion, whether it's wounds, whether it's trauma, most of us have had things that have caused us to believe lies about who Papa is, who Father God is, and then who we are in light of that.

Father's House is just a journey to help uncover who He really is and also to uncover that little girl. For us, we're teaching to women 90% of the time, but it's to help her discover who she was always meant to be. That's why we have the little girl on the cover because at nine years old is when a little girl looks in the mirror and she sees the things that are wrong with her.

Ann Wilson: Do you think as a 50-year-old, we often see that nine-year-old and what we thought about ourselves?

Karen McAdams: Absolutely.

Ann Wilson: And when you're referring to Father's House, you're talking about this eight-session study that you two have created. It's a video study.

Karen McAdams: It's plug-and-play digital. You just download it and watch the videos. You can do it alone, but ideally, you would do it in community because healing takes place in community.

Rachel Faulkner Brown: And just being able to share what's so unique about it too, Ann, is that every week has what we would call an activation after each session. You're watching the video and getting this teaching, this biblical truth. You're hearing stories which are connecting the truth to your heart, and then you get to have an encounter with a living God that most of us have never been taught to see.

Encounter leads to revelation, which leads to intimacy. That intimacy is the Holy Grail of Christian life. Everybody wants it, and everybody wants to write a book on how to get it, but they don't know how to get it.

Ann Wilson: Dave, do you think that's true for men?

Dave Wilson: This isn't a male-female thing, I don't think. But I think there are guys listening that often go, "Head knowledge is enough. I don't need to feel some encounter." Again, I'm sort of exaggerating for the guy that may be pushing back a little bit, but explain to him and maybe her—because there's women who have the same thought—do I really need an encounter? What do you mean by experience God's love?

Karen McAdams: Can I just bounce off that for a moment? Because I just think you say you don't need feelings, and men, I'm just speaking for some of the guys—sorry, some of the guys—I'm not talking about you, Dave. We say that, and yet you're feeling things all the time.

Our subconscious informs us much faster than we can logically think through something. Something happens to us and we wonder why in the world—we've all said this—"Why did I get so triggered by that?" Because subconsciously we're experiencing something that has its roots in our past.

When we exclude this very human experience of feelings and we say, "No, all I need to do is know it intellectually," we're missing out on how He wired us. He wired us for feelings.

Rachel Faulkner Brown: I love having women in here. This is great. I will argue this point until I'm blue in the face because it changed my life. It changed my life when I felt the feeling of being loved rather than just intellectually knew I was loved.

I grew up with parents who had been raised by depression babies. They were just pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and saying, "Let's just move on. Let's not try and feel a feeling. Let's just gut it out. We just need to put food on the table." Then you taught another generation how to do the same thing: "Let's not talk about anything hard because that kind of upsets the applecart."

My parents had no idea. They were just doing what they knew. So I grew up without an emotional vocabulary. I couldn't have told you what a feeling felt like for love nor money.

Ann Wilson: Which is amazing too, because you get married at a young age and lose two husbands. We didn't even say that at the beginning of this program.

Rachel Faulkner Brown: I have this high capacity for joy, and yet I didn't experience really any other emotion but joy. It's like, "Let's just be happy all the time." But it created a very shallow spirituality. You cannot be a healthy Christian and not feel. There is absolutely no way to be an emotionally healthy Jesus follower without having emotions.

Dave Wilson: Connect these dots. Again, I'm thinking of the guy because I've done this and I've even watched it from the stage. I play in the band and we're singing a worship song. I look out there and see—and I'll just say men, though I'm sure there are some women—who are sort of locked up emotionally.

I've said many times later, "We're not doing a concert, sing!" but they're just looking at us. Those are the same guys that if you take them to an NFL football game, they are chest-bumping each other, raising their arms, and shouting when their team scores a touchdown.

You talk about emotion? It's there. You put them in a church setting and ask them to express emotion? They're locked. It's like it's separate: "No, this is different." Why is there a struggle for some—and I'm going to say men, but women too—to unleash some emotion when it's going vertical to praise their Father?

Karen McAdams: Is it that they're locked up, or is it that they've never experienced the joy of being loved? Therefore, they have nothing to give back. It's one thing to try and get somebody to worship God—raise your hand or whatever you think that expression looks like—but if it's not coming out of a place, if you've never received it, you have nothing to emote.

Rachel Faulkner Brown: And here's the thing too, we teach this to women all the time, even in this first week of love. How do you receive a compliment? When somebody tells you you look beautiful, I would say 95% of women would say, "Oh, this old thing?" or "Oh, my blah, blah, blah."

Ann Wilson: Oh, absolutely. This was our first years of marriage.

Rachel Faulkner Brown: We do not know how to receive, and it translates to Jesus, Father God, and Holy Spirit. If you do not learn how to receive from humans... I will say too, this is the problem with most of us is that we have looked to our daddies on earth, if we had daddies. We have looked to them and we've said, "Oh, Father God's like him."

Maybe he wasn't a good dad, or maybe he abused us, or maybe he was just silent. My dad was very quiet growing up.

Dave Wilson: Or he walked away. My dad walked away.

Rachel Faulkner Brown: And so you're like, "Well, Father God's going to leave. I can't trust Him." My dad did the best he could, but it wasn't like he was telling me every morning I woke up, "Babe, you are beautiful to me."

I think fathers give identity. It's a tall order and, at the same time, that's why we have therapy and inner healing if you don't have a good dad. But at the end of the day, I do think it is such a real thing for people to connect the dots: "How did I relate to my earthly dad?"

Mothers play their role; they relate to the Holy Spirit. Jesus is our friend, and then Father God is Dad. It's really interesting. We help people to connect those dots from their childhood because most people do not connect those dots.

Rachel Faulkner Brown: We were listening to a song this week, "The Detour is the Journey." We often think like all of these things that have happened in our life are detours, and they're really not. It's part of the journey. When you look at biblical characters that we love, our heroes—look at Joseph and what he had gone through with being imprisoned and everything. He's gone through so much and it was part of the journey.

Dave Wilson: So much of as I walk through Father's House—and I know it's not for me, it's for women—but I picked it up.

Rachel Faulkner Brown: It is for everyone. It's for you.

Karen McAdams: We've got stuff for men that have taken it.

Dave Wilson: It really is for both men and women. I know you wrote it and you do women's conferences, but I'm reading through this stuff and I'm like, "Oh my goodness." It's about theology, who is God, and identity. You start with—and I'm going to just quote you and I want you to just riff on this—what it means to be lavishly loved and fully forgiven.

I'll do something real quick.

Rachel Faulkner Brown: We're breaking out the guitar! What's happening? This is so fun.

Dave Wilson: There's a line of a song I know you know it because it became a very famous worship song. But I remember the first time I ever heard it, probably two years ago or a year and a half ago, I thought, "What a beautiful lyric."

(Singing) I've never been more loved than I am right now. Wasn't holding You up, so there's nothing I can do to let You down. Doesn't take a trophy to make You proud. I've never been more loved than I am right now. Because You are Jireh. You are enough. Jireh, You are enough.

Listen to that lyric. Jireh, You are enough. Jireh, You are enough.

Karen McAdams: Literally singing that over and over and over again to yourself, and you start to connect. It doesn't take a trophy to make You proud. There's nothing that you can do to make Him love you any more than He does right now or any less.

It's not just a love that accepts us and says, "And you just go on doing what you're doing and I'm just going to love you anyway." It's a love that says, "I've got something so much better for you. There's a life that you can have lived in My presence that's going to change everything about your life. It's going to set you free from shame that we talked about in the last episode. It's going to set you free from the identity that you think you are. Let Me tell you who you really are."

Dave Wilson: Man, as we celebrate 50 years of ministry, we continue to hear stories of how God is transforming families through FamilyLife.

Ann Wilson: Like Andrew and Eileen, for example. When they married, they were so full of hope.

Dave Wilson: Weren't we all?

Ann Wilson: But life storms came fast. A newborn, family tension, and strains on their marriage, and their home just felt heavy. But God wasn't finished. Through FamilyLife's Weekend to Remember and Love Like You Mean It cruise, they rediscovered Christ's design for marriage. They were even—listen to this—able to help Andrew's parents reconcile after years of distance.

Dave Wilson: Which is really what it's all about. God changes our marriage so we can impact others. Well, here's the thing: thousands of couples are facing storms like this right now, and some are quietly hurting. Some are on the brink of divorce, and some need hope today.

Ann Wilson: This ministry is supported financially from partners like you who say, "I believe in this and I want to give." Right now, every monthly donation will be matched for a full year, doubling the impact of your gift.

Dave Wilson: So we really hope and pray that you'll consider joining us. All you have to do is visit familylifetoday.com or call 1-800-FL-TODAY. And together, we can shape the next generation of families who walk with Christ.

Ann Wilson: Let me ask you both this: if I would have asked you before you'd gone through this transformational Gospel experience with Jesus, if somebody would have said, "Who are you?" I said this with the Detroit Lions wives one year. I started the Bible study before the season started and I said, "Introduce yourself without saying who you're married to or any accomplishments that you've done."

There was silence. No one knew how to answer that question. So if you had to say, "My identity was found in..." what would you have said before Jesus?

Rachel Faulkner Brown: 100% being a mom. 100% being a mom. And what's so interesting, I'll never forget going to MOPS for the first time after I'd just quit my job and had Davis, my first child. I remember they asked me to introduce myself and I thought, "What am I? I don't have a job. I'm just a mom."

I remember thinking, "I'm just a mom." I was successful. I was an executive. I drove a car that they paid me for. But it's funny, I remember even then feeling like my identity had been stolen because I wasn't in a job. It wasn't enough to just be a wife; it wasn't enough to just be a mom. It was like, "Wait, that was what I did." Everything is about what we do. It's not about who we are.

Karen McAdams: Same, for sure. I remember going to the pediatrician and he would always say, "What do you do?" And I would be thinking, "Well, I'm just a mom." Why do you have to ask this question? It's so uncomfortable if you're not working, quote-unquote. For some reason, we denigrate being a mom. But anyway, we just define ourselves around our work. And even then, mom is a form of work and accomplishment.

Dave Wilson: Of course men do it.

Rachel Faulkner Brown: Oh yeah, that's how we're known, what we've done. It's interesting what I've started asking people at parties or dinners: "What do you love to do?" Because to me, that question takes a hard right turn to who they really are. "What do you love to do?" instead of "What do you do?" It's just a tiny tweak.

Karen McAdams: Well, and then the other question is, how are you known by the Father?

Rachel Faulkner Brown: How do you answer that one? What the Lord's been saying recently to me is I'm an attendant of the bride. I help others encounter Him as the bride. Every time I do any kind of thing, there's just this supernatural gift of faith that the Lord has given me.

I think faith is the conduit of heaven. So as we step out in faith and take risk, I think that's what identity has allowed me to do. It's allowed me to be risky. That's the currency of heaven. Faith equals risk. To me, that is how He moves through me to other people with words or comfort or hugs so that other people can come in.

Karen McAdams: But I think what's important is, knowing that identity for her and me knowing this identity, it enables us to then line our lives up in what we do. And that's how we're meant to live. What we do comes from who we are.

The other thing that it does is it helps you not to compare with other people. We live in a culture with our social media where we're being bombarded with what other people are doing. If you talk to younger people and you ask them, "What do you want to do with your lives?" they'll say, "I want to be an influencer." An influencer is a good thing, but a lot of it has to do with, "I want to be like that person."

Ann Wilson: I remember saying that to our kids. God has something so unique for you. You're different from your brother. The way you think is different, the way you respond is different. I cannot wait to see what God has planned for you.

That way you get out of the, "Mine's different than yours," and you say, "I'm going to celebrate you because together it's the body of Christ." The gifts of the Holy Spirit are all working together.

Rachel Faulkner Brown: And every person who takes Father's House, we want them to walk away confidently saying, "I'm His favorite." If you cannot confidently say, "I'm God's favorite," then you don't know who you are. Because you are His favorite. That doesn't make Karen any less favorite.

That's the thing about Christianity and following Jesus and demonstrating the Gospel. When you get lifted up, everyone around you gets lifted up. But in our culture, when you get lifted up, everyone gets pushed down. That is so counter-intuitive to the kingdom. Honestly, Jesus was preaching the kingdom.

Rachel Faulkner Brown: And that's it for us. We want to preach the kingdom. I'm just feeling for people that are listening, thinking, "Well, I don't know what my identity is." Let you know it's okay because He knows exactly where you're at, He knows the journey that you're on, and He will do everything in His power to unveil to you who you really are.

Ann Wilson: Ask Him.

Dave Wilson: Absolutely. I remember hearing a talk on this. We were at dinner with some friends and he was talking about this. I was like, "I want to know my identity. Who am I? What's God call me?"

It was just this interesting—as soon as I said that, I was just praying privately in the car, "Lord, what's that look like? Who do You call me?" Then I had this thought come to my mind and I thought, "Well, what was that? That wasn't anything." But in my mind, I heard "Warrior of Women."

Ann Wilson: As soon as it came out of her mouth, I thought, "That is exactly who you are." I could have told you that, but of course, I'm too much into me.

Rachel Faulkner Brown: But had you told her that, it would have never been the same.

Ann Wilson: And I think we wonder, "Was that the Father?" or "Was that me?" So even to say, "Does that align with scripture? Is that what other people are saying? Does that correlate with my passions and my gifts?"

Dave Wilson: You gals know this better than anybody. You y'all know this better than anybody. When you understand your identity—which again, as I'm looking even at your chapter titles and read through them—that you're fully forgiven, you're lavishly loved, you are radically righteous. We didn't even get into that. That is deep theology.

But when you really grasp that's really true about me, it's what Paul said in Ephesians 2:10, "You are God's masterpiece, poiema, work of art." When that is true, I remember doing a sermon years ago where I said when you understand that you're accepted by the King of Kings, you can walk in any room and not need the acceptance of the people in the room.

So you walk in the room with confidence. So often we walk in rooms and there's a bit of fear: "I've got to win them over," or "I'm not sure." You walk in the room sort of like, "I am God's chosen." And it's not that I'm better than anybody else. I can bring something to this room. And I can speak out what God says to me. I'm not going to live timid; I'm going to live bold. And that's in theology and identity.

Karen McAdams: Our lead scripture for the study is Romans 8:15-17. In The Message, it says, "This resurrection life"—that's what we're talking about here—"is not a timid grave-tending life." And that's how most of us live.

"It's adventurously expectant, greeting God with the childlike, 'What's next, Papa?'" And that's really the invitation to all of us, is to wake up every morning instead of saying, "God, what do You want me to do for You?" He's saying, "No, just go, 'What's next?'"

Flung the doors open wide. This life, when I'm with You, we can be adventurously expectant because we know You're good, we know You're faithful, we know You're never going to leave us. We know that no matter what happens or comes our way, I'm not alone. You're with me.

Rachel Faulkner Brown: And we are His beloved daughters. We're in union with Him. That's been a big thing for us. When I study cake baking and I look at all the ingredients that go into the cake, I cannot once that cake is baked, once you've said—

Dave Wilson: I'm sorry, "When I study cake baking"?

Guest (Male): I just did that last week. That was very impressive.

Rachel Faulkner Brown: When you study baking, you're just like—don't miss the point here, people listening—but it is so fascinating because we are in Christ. And if we're in Christ, we've been baked in, just like that baking powder's baked into that cake. You cannot separate out that baking powder, which means I get to do so immeasurably more than I can ask or imagine in every situation because I'm baked in.

There's no separation. And it doesn't mean that our lives will be free from conflict, free from pain or suffering. No. But He's with us and we are in Him. Never alone. It's amazing.

Dave Wilson: Great being with Karen and Rachel again. Just to remind, their book is called *The Father's House: The Path That Leads Home*.

Ann Wilson: I really love them. I think you'll love this book too, and you can get your copy by clicking the link in the show notes at familylifetoday.com.

Dave Wilson: If this conversation encouraged you today, maybe it gave you some fresh hope or a new way to think about your marriage or family, don't keep it to yourself. Right now, share this episode with a friend, a couple, or someone you know who could really just use it. Just text them the link or tell them about FamilyLife Today. It's super easy and it might make a big difference for them.

Ann Wilson: And hey, while you're on the podcast app, whether it's Apple or Spotify or wherever you listen, would you take a quick second to leave a rating and a review? Because it really helps more people to discover these honest, hope-filled conversations about God's plan for relationships. And hey, thank you so much for being part of this. We're really grateful for you.

Dave Wilson: FamilyLife Today is a donor-supported production of FamilyLife, a Cru Ministry, celebrating 50 years of God's faithfulness as marriages grow stronger and families flourish in Him.