FamilyLife Today®

Ann Wilson: What do you think was the greatest lie that I believed growing up?

Dave Wilson: I know what it was.

Ann Wilson: Automatically. Probably because we've been married so long, you've dealt with it this long.

Dave Wilson: I'm going to tell you what it was and even if you disagree, I'm right and you're wrong. I'm kidding.

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, and you can find us at familylifetoday.com.

Ann Wilson: This is FamilyLife Today.

Dave Wilson: I would say at least what I heard, especially when we first got married, was you did not think you were pretty.

Ann Wilson: Oh, you think that was the number one? I had so many. I just didn't think I was worthy. We talked about that a little bit yesterday just because of abuse, but I totally believed that.

Dave Wilson: Those two are connected for sure, but I remember I would get so frustrated. You'd get mad at me because I'd say, "You're so pretty, you're so beautiful." "No, I'm not." I used to laugh, but then it hit me. It was years later, and I thought, "Oh my goodness, she doesn't believe that. She doesn't know." And you really believed a lie. I did not believe it was possible for you to think that.

Ann Wilson: I didn't even like you saying it. It was like, "Just be quiet. Don't even say that." Why would I bring this up? Because today we're going to talk again with Dannah Gresh. Dannah, welcome to FamilyLife Today.

Dannah Gresh: I'm so glad to be back, and you are gorgeous. Knock-dead gorgeous. It's so hilarious to me how just obvious Satan's lies are to other people. It's always the beautiful women that think they're ugly. It's always the smart guys who think they're stupid. Have you not noticed this?

But we can't see our own deception. And I do believe that Satan has a piece of wanting us to shut down, and he's whispering just like in the garden. He's whispering lies, just as he whispered to Adam and Eve, "Did God really say?" That kind of lie in Genesis.

Dannah is back with us in the studio. Yesterday we talked about her book called *Lies Girls Believe*. It's a workbook really. It's called *Lies Girls Believe and the Truth That Sets Them Free*.

Dave: I want to know this, Dannah. Have you ever struggled with the same lie?

Dannah Gresh: I could not look in the mirror. To this day, I can put my mascara on without looking in the mirror because that's how I learned to do it in high school because I hated what I saw. If I saw myself in the mirror, I'd be in the fetal position.

Dave Wilson: You're so pretty! What?

Dannah Gresh: I did that. It was terrible. And you know when it changed? In college, I started reading my Bible every day.

Dave Wilson: The better mirror.

Dannah Gresh: It's a much better mirror. James calls it a mirror. Exactly. And I didn't do it because I felt ugly. I did it because I felt drawn to the Word. But one day I walked past the mirror and I was like, "Oh, I just looked at myself and I didn't melt down."

Now, I didn't look at myself and be like, "Hey, hottie," but I was able to look at myself. And as the weeks went on, I thought, "It's not that I'm not hating what I see, it's that I actually see good in what I see." The Word changed that lie, not by me specifically reading something about my beauty, but just by me reading the Word.

Ann Wilson: I've gotten into a new habit now of when I discover a lie I'm believing, I'll ask God, "God, will You show me the first time I started believing that lie?" And He'll answer in a lot of different ways through His Word. Maybe a memory will pop up.

But that one was an easy one. I think our listeners have heard me say it, but I was 15, getting ready to have pictures taken for cheerleading and for the program. I was super insecure at 15. Anyway, we were all getting ready in the house and we all went out to have the pictures taken, but I forgot something in the house.

When I had walked in the house earlier the day, my friend's mom saw me. She said, "Oh, Ann, you look so cute." And I thought, "Oh, thanks." But then when I went back in the house and everyone was gone except my friend's mom and her sister, I could hear them talking. They didn't know I was in the house.

I heard the sister say, "Why would you tell Ann she's cute when she's so ugly?" And her mom said, "I know, but she tries hard." And then I went out to have my picture taken. And ever since then, I thought, "I'm ugly. And if people tell me I'm not ugly, they're lying."

Dave Wilson: I want to go back there and just tear down that house even right now when I hear that. I'm so mad because I've lived with her and she's lived through that lie.

Ann Wilson: But I remember I was walking with my best friend and one time she said, "Ann, I think that what we need to do as women is we need to gaze at God's Word and glance at ourselves in the mirror." I love it.

But what we end up doing is we gaze at ourselves in the mirror and we just glance sometimes at God's Word, if we're even in the Word. And if we're going to do that, then we're not going to hear the truth of who God says we are.

Dannah Gresh: 1 Peter 3:3-4 says that our beauty shouldn't be of braided hair and gold jewels and fine clothes, but that of a gentle and quiet spirit. A challenge I give 7 to 12-year-old girls sometimes is, "Did you spend more time today in God's Word grooming your heart, making it gentle and quiet, or did you spend more time today in front of the mirror making your hair braided or putting on cute clothes?"

And that's something that we never really outgrow, is it? Because if we're more obsessed with what we see in the mirror than what we read in the Word, the feeling of lack of beauty persists. I think all girls are struggling with this, even now in our culture.

Dave Wilson: I hate to tell you that you need to talk about girls, but this is even more prevalent today for men and boys than it was 20 years ago. When I was coaching middle school basketball a few years ago, back in my day if you went and had a little scrimmage, you'd go, "Hey, you guys be shirts, you guys be skins."

I realized 10 years ago, coaching middle school boys, I said, "Hey, you guys go skins," and they said, "There's no way I'm taking a shirt off." And a parent said, "That's abuse. You cannot ask middle school boys to take their shirt off."

They see Muscle & Fitness magazine now, and there's much more concern for a boy now about his body than it was 30 or 40 years ago. I'm not saying it's bad or good, but they believe the same lies that I think women do about beauty and about their own bodies.

Dannah Gresh: Well, what we dwell on is what we believe. There are now magazines and fitness pictures of men and bodybuilders, just as that was true for us growing up. But think about this, you and I only had to compare to 10 supermodels. Now we're on Instagram and social media and TikTok, and now we have to compete with millions.

And it's not real. It's filtered, it's perfected. I think at the end of the day, it's a fistfight between our Creator—who Psalm 139 says, "I am fearfully and wonderfully made"—and our enemy. Then think about this, the psalmist says, "I know it full well." That's what the Lord wants for us. He wants us to see our fearfulness and our wonderfulness and know it full well.

Satan looks at us and says, "I don't want them to know they're fearfully and wonderfully made. I want them not to know they're made in the image of God. I want them to have amnesia and forget." And so for women especially, he strikes at the heart of our sense of our beauty.

Dave Wilson: So girls are believing this lie that they're not beautiful, that maybe even their worth comes from their outward image.

Dannah Gresh: When I was writing *Lies Young Women Believe* for teenage girls, we did focus groups across the country. Beautiful or not beautiful, girls believed, "I will have more worth if I'm physically beautiful."

And that is a lie because our beauty fades. 2 Corinthians says, "outwardly I'm wasting away, but inwardly..." We're being renewed day by day. If we could just grasp onto that, whatever stage of life you're in, that yes, you are becoming less physically, but this physical body is not who you really are. Who you really are is your spirit and your soul. And as that is becoming stronger and built up, even if this is fading away, you can feel your worth.

Dave Wilson: How do moms do that? You two are moms. When you have daughters in this culture, they're comparing themselves every second. Anytime they open a phone and pull up Instagram, any image.

And yet I'm listening to two women who, when you start to quote a Bible verse about beauty, you both are saying it simultaneously, which means you've memorized it, you've meditated on it, and it's very important to you. I'm thinking, "Would guys be able to do that?"

So you have daughters and you're trying to raise them in this culture. They're fighting it like crazy. How does a mom help guide a young woman, a girl, to stop believing the lies? Obviously replace it with Scripture, but how do you do that practically?

Dannah Gresh: I tell girls in the book, "Jesus wants to be the boss of your thoughts." And that's biblical, because we're supposed to take every thought captive to be obedient to the voice of Christ. When we are letting ourselves feed on that Twitter feed or that TikTok feed or that Instagram feed, and we're mindlessly scrolling and comparing ourselves every single time—and not just 13-year-old girls, but 33-year-old moms are doing this—we are letting that medium be the boss of our thoughts.

Dave Wilson: You're being discipled by it.

Dannah Gresh: Totally. When Satan lied to Eve, there was one mouthpiece he used for lies, and that was a snake. But today, Satan has many mouthpieces and many means of introducing lies to us. If we aren't introducing our daughters to the discipline of meditating on the Word of God, it's hard.

When I wrote *Lies Girls Believe*, I asked moms and daughters—I did focus groups and surveys with girls—and 70% of these 8 to 12-year-old girls were not reading their Bibles. 30% of them were.

Dave Wilson: I'm surprised that 30% are reading their Bible. I'm glad that at least... I thought it was lower.

Dannah Gresh: Well, but here's the thing, we learn habits when we're young. We learn to brush our teeth, to say thank you, to make our bed, to meet deadlines, to do our homework, all that stuff because habits make us. We carry them into adulthood. Is there any more important habit than opening our Bible every day and exposing our mind to truth in a world that's saturated with lies?

Ann Wilson: And you're telling this to moms.

Dannah Gresh: I'm telling this to moms. And the moms are like, "But there's nothing out there." Well, when I wrote *Lies Girls Believe*, there wasn't really a lot out there for 8 to 12-year-old girls.

Since then, my ministry, True Girl, has developed Daily Devos every day, and it's written for 8 to 12-year-old girls. I don't care if they use my devos, I don't care what they use. Get your daughter and your son into the Word of God. It's the most important habit that you're going to teach them. It's really a spiritual discipline, but it's a habit.

Ann Wilson: How would you do that? If you haven't done it before, how would a mom go about doing that?

Dannah Gresh: That's why we created Bible studies. Right after I wrote *Lies Girls Believe*, I started writing Bible studies that are written for that age group, 8 to 12, to study the whole book of Ruth, to study the life of Miriam, or the life of Mary.

Teaching her that, and you know how cool it is when you start studying the Word of God and you're like, "I get it! I see something I did not understand before." You get drawn to it when you start to experience the power of it. I want little girls to feel that.

We started the devos, we started the Bible studies, and those tools are available at mytruegirl.com. But you can look online and there's lots of different tools you can use. I do think you need tools. Even for me at my age, it's hard for me to just take my Bible sometimes. There are times when the Lord has me just in the Word, but generally, I'm using a prayer journal, or I'm using a Bible study.

Tool your daughter up. Give her the tools she needs. Even if it's just a little diary and you're like, "Instead of writing about yourself, like most girls do when they write in a diary, just write, 'Dear God, today I read this Bible verse. Here's what I think it means.'" Just start there. It's that simple.

My mom did that for me when I was eight years old. I look back and I think what a gift. She just handed me a *Children's Daily Bread*. She said, "You're supposed to read this every day because you're a Christian." And I was like, "I am? Okay." And I did. I still have that pattern and habit in my life. It's a lifeline in a world full of lies.

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Ann Wilson: Let's talk about the lies that moms believe. Because I'm wondering, as moms, we get so busy, we've got kids, we've got work, we've got activities for our kids, and a mom's thinking, "I don't even have time to read my Bible. And now you want me to get my kids to read the Bible too? I feel all of this weight." Encourage her.

Dannah Gresh: Well, here's what my encouragement would be: You cannot disciple your daughter to live in truth if you are not living in truth. When I wrote *Lies Girls Believe*, I did focus groups in 11 cities. We gathered 100 moms or so in each city, and we had these little clickers so that they could respond to me anonymously when I would ask a question.

I could measure what percentage of moms were answering which way. I identified the fact that moms were believing lies about being a mom. One of the biggest lies about being a mom was, "I am not worthy to disciple my daughter in fill-in-the-blank." Whatever your teenage sin or trauma was.

For me, it would be sexual sin. "I am not worthy of teaching my children to live in sexual integrity because I didn't when I was a teenager." For other moms, it was, "I am not worthy to disciple my daughter in having a healthy body image because I had an eating disorder. I am not adequate to disciple my daughter in substance abuse or porn because I struggled with that thing."

And that lie, that shame, was still strangling her from discipling her daughter in truth. If you don't operate in truth and if you don't overcome that shame from your past, you're just going to pass it on to your daughter. A lot of times they think, "If I don't talk to her about porn or if I don't talk to her about boy-craziness—the things that I struggled with—then there won't be an opportunity for lies to present themselves."

Well, really, how do you know? If you don't talk to your daughter about something, how do you know what she does or doesn't believe? I would just challenge you to get into God's Word. If you're feeling inadequate, insecure, insufficient—all the "ins" really as a mom—then that means that you're believing lies about yourself and you need your heart to be set free.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth has a book called *Lies Women Believe*. It really teaches you as an adult woman how to process through the lies. I wrote *A Mom’s Guide to Lies Girls Believe* that identified the top three lies moms believe.

Ann Wilson: What are they?

Dannah Gresh: Well, one of them was, "I can or cannot control what my daughter believes about blank." Have you ever had those yo-yo days as a mom where at the beginning of the day you deserved Mom of the Year award, but at the end of the day you were the worst mom ever?

Most days were like that when our kids were little. You get this paralysis that you can control it or you can't control it. I guess the paralysis is when you can't control it. You get this pride of, "I am in control of my daughter's belief system." And then in the same day you might also get the paralysis of, "I've got nothing to contribute here."

That yo-yo feeling that we have as a mom was one of the lies. Another was, "I am not capable of discipling her in fill-in-the-blank because I have sin in that area of my life." Or here's one of the scariest: "My daughter is not struggling like other girls."

When I ask moms, "Are you concerned about girls believing lies today?" 80% of them said, "Oh yes." And then I said, "Is your daughter falling prey to the lies of the culture?" 80% of them said, "No." And I was like, "Well, those don't go together."

So then I started asking them questions about submission. "Does your daughter obey you and your husband?" Stories would come out about them being disobedient at school, treating Dad like a brother instead of a father figure.

A lot of those moms were saying, "I think she's repeating the behavior they're seeing in me in the way they treat their dad." They were falling under some conviction. But there was just this overall sense that their daughter wasn't sinning, their daughter wasn't believing the lies.

Yet when we started talking about a specific area like submission, 53% of them now said, "Oh yeah, my daughter is really struggling with lies and I need to do something about it." So we need to be objective as moms.

Ann Wilson: I think that is interesting too because as a mom of boys, I can remember being with groups of women when my boys got older and we were talking about pornography. I'm with moms that have boys between the ages of 14 and 19, and I remember asking, "What's the discussion like about pornography in your home?"

The majority of the moms said, "Oh, my son doesn't struggle. He never has struggled." And I remember telling Dave that, and he's like, "Can I say what I think about it?" Exactly. I said, "I'm just going to say statistically speaking, almost every boy that age has, in this time of life in the culture that we're living in."

I was amazed. You don't think that the world's impacting? Is it denial? Is it almost "I don't want to know because then I don't have to deal with it"?

Dannah Gresh: I think there is an element of denial. Adam and Eve are in this perfect garden where there's never been sin, and God doesn't say to them, "Let me tell you how ugly and gory death is." But He does say, "Don't eat of that tree or you will surely die." He's not afraid to talk about the danger, just not with detail.

What we fear as parents is, "If I'm going to talk to my kids about porn, they're going to have pictures in their head of what porn is." No, they're not. You can say something like, "Hey, the internet has good pictures and bad pictures. I want to know if you ever see a picture that you feel is a bad picture." "Well, how will I know it's a bad picture?" "Well, you might think, 'Am I supposed to be seeing this?' Or you might think, 'I don't think that I would want to watch this or see this if Mom was here or if Dad was here.'"

This is a discussion for boys and girls. There are easy ways to talk to them about God, warning them about that without robbing them of their innocence. That's what God models for us in the Garden of Eden. We have to be objective enough to know this child lives in this world, which is full of lies.

The Bible says all of us are sinners. This child's going to fall. This child's going to fail. I have to do everything I can to plant truth in them so that that's as infrequent as possible and there's as little brokenness as there can be, but I also have to be objective and realize that just like Adam and Eve fell when they had a perfect Father in a perfect garden, my child is going to fail.

When we lose the objectivity, we're not there. We don't read the telltale signs when there are sticky emotions that are leading them towards acting out on a lie. And we're not ready to run in with the grace and the warm fur garments to comfort them the way that God did in the Garden of Eden.

Ann Wilson: As I'm listening, I'm just thinking—you probably feel this too, Dannah—I want to call all moms to step into this. We're living in a day and age—and we always have—but I just feel like at alarming rates our girls are falling to anxiety and depression.

We as moms, I think the place we start is on our knees. Start praying for your daughters. Let them know your story of, "This is something I believed growing up. How are you doing with this lie?" And be in God's Word. I love your admonition of being in the Word. There's a lot of great tools out there that can help us get in the Word, but also help get our kids in the Word too.

Dave Wilson: Well, that was an incredible couple days with Dannah Gresh.

Ann Wilson: We're talking about *Lies Girls Believe*. And I'm telling you, there were the lies women believe too. And that's what the book is called, *Lies Girls Believe and the Truth That Sets Them Free*.

Dave Wilson: Go to familylifetoday.com right now and get your copy. You can just click on the link in the show notes and get a copy or get a few copies.

Ann Wilson: FamilyLife Today is a donor-supported production of FamilyLife, a Cru ministry. 50 years of helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.