Gospel Mom 02: On Understanding Why Motherhood is Hard + Other Things (GM - C1-4) Transcript
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Emily Jensen: If you've been with us for any length of time, you have probably heard the words Creation, Fall, Redemption, Consummation. What is it? CFRC is what we have dubbed it. It's really the framework that we have been using since the beginning of Risen Motherhood to help us apply the truth of the gospel and to think through what it means to live in light of Christ's resurrection. That's how this whole thing was born. Go back to episode one if you're like, "What are they talking about?"
Laura Wifler: Did we do this on episode one?
Emily: I don't think so. Not episode one, but it was definitely in there.
Laura: It was early. I know it was early. I can't even remember episode one. You don't have to go listen, people, because we were new. Not great. The point of that is—we didn't invent CFRC, of course; theologians have been using it for a long time—but it is something that we have felt has been really, really helpful to provide scaffolding for the conversations that we hold at Risen Motherhood and how we want to talk about how the gospel impacts our lives.
When we talk about the gospel—I think that it's funny because you and I will probably go ten to fifteen shows at a time and probably not define “the gospel” necessarily explicitly for people. We're talking, “The gospel, the gospel”— and sometimes you forget what vocabulary word that word is. You can mean “the gospel” in a couple of different ways. You can say “the gospel,” which is just the good news of Jesus Christ and walking through everything from God's design for humanity, to the fall, to Christ coming and living on our behalf a perfect life, three days—I'm doing this very quickly.
Emily: The whole story, yes. It's all this big, good news. This is what God's doing. It's the gospel story.
Laura: Yes. Okay, I'll keep going.
Emily: What's the other way?
Laura: Then, the other way that we can talk about it is just really zeroing in on the good news of Jesus Christ and what he did for us. Those things that we share with someone to help them be saved and understand that they're a sinner and that Jesus Christ came and he lived a perfect life in their stead, and now they can trust in him and spend eternity with him. You can talk about it with this big, broad look at all of these different facets—really, that's the CFRC that we've been talking about—or you can really zero in to just that transformative moment that Christ did on the cross that we typically think of for evangelism.
Emily: Yes, absolutely. This is like the first big foundational principle that we want to share in terms of: what does it mean to be a mom who is centering her whole life and all of her decisions and her heart around Christ—around following God? And we're calling that a gospel mom. Of course, she has to understand the gospel.
Sometimes, when we hear “gospel mom,” we're going, "Okay, great. Now I have a new formula, a new thing, a new paradigm to think about.” We want that to have been a whole set of easy, clear-cut answers and things to follow. Yet, the reality is a gospel mom—especially if we're thinking about creation, fall, redemption, consummation, the whole Bible—we're basically saying it's so important to understand the whole counsel of God—all of Scripture—in order to understand God's will and apply biblical wisdom to different situations.
If we skip that part, then there's a whole bunch of application stuff that we're not going to be able to get right. We really have to spend time in this. We dedicated four chapters of the book to this. Over and over again, we kept going, "Should we just condense this? Should we just remove this?" This can feel cumbersome.
Laura: It feels heady.
Emily: And yet, this is understanding gospel motherhood.
Laura: I liken it to a little bit of—how many hours do us as moms spend on sites like Baby Center or Instagram reels or wherever moms are hanging out these days— especially young moms—where you're learning the ropes of how to feed your child and give them medicine.
Emily: We're willing to do all the research.
Laura: Yes, we're willing to do the hard work there. We do find it fascinating and interesting and immediately would be able to be applied. There's some instant gratification. Actually, learning the gospel is very similar to that. There is instant gratification of like, "Oh my gosh”—there's these light bulb moments. And you're like, "Wow." There's some deep head scratching where you're like, "I'm confused, and I don't know which way to go." Just like when we're researching stuff for motherhood.
I think it can feel hard, but it's so worthwhile, and the payoff is so much greater than any topic that we can research in motherhood on the internet because this is a payoff that has eternal consequences. It has eternal results and rewards. What we want to do is today, number one, just encourage you that wherever you're at on your path to understanding the gospel, you can do this and that it is little by little. That is how we grew in motherhood. When we started, we didn't know what we were doing. We fell into this whole thing.
Emily: It's years. It's decades. It's a lifetime.
Laura: Years and decades, yes. God is faithful to meet you with whatever knowledge you have. You don't have to feel like "Wow, I got to really jump in the deep end—know it all right now" for the gospel to be applied in your life. Whatever knowledge you have, as you go faithfully towards it and say, "Okay, I'm going to research this topic right now in the Bible," or "I'm going to read just through the Bible in a year"—the Lord uses those little inputs that we do in huge ways. Our encouragement is just start today. If you've never done this before, great. How exciting—this is going to be so much fun. If you've been doing this for years and years, good news: you get to do it for years and years more and learn new stuff. That is the overarching thing is—this is so foundational, and also, you can do it.
Emily: Yes, you can do it. So, what we're going to do on today's show is just walk through what we mean by each word: Creation, Fall, Redemption, Consummation. I always have to think really hard about it. Then, we're also going to talk about: how do you find that in Scripture? How do you go about applying this to your motherhood? Again, I feel like we really poured everything into the book that we know. Not like a shameless plug—
Laura: —the highest flyover you have ever received because we are already six or seven minutes into the show, and we are never going to have enough time. Because we have lots of things we want to do on the show, as you guys heard in the preamble. Actually, I think we're going to have to give them a high level of creation. Then, we're not trying to plug this book, but also, it will teach you. Everything you need is in there. So, Em, start with creation. Get us going.
Emily: Essentially, creation is just understanding how God originally designed or intended things to be. The main way that we comprehend or understand creation is, of course, by going to the Bible—his unchanging, authoritative truth for the way things work best. We can look at everything from Genesis to the way that he created the world—the way he made Adam and Eve, the way he laid everything out. Honestly, I would say every single section of Scripture has elements where you can look at that and glean insights about who God is, about what his character is, about his intentions for his people—his plans and purposes and his will for mankind. That's what we're talking about.
Even if you fast forward all the way to the New Testament, and you're seeing how the early church is being set up, there's a lot of instruction in there about how Christians are supposed to go about life and how they're supposed to meet together. There's instruction about elders, and there's instruction about family. That's all saying, "Hey, this is God's intention. This is God’s design for how things ought to be."
One of the things we talk about in the book is how important it is that our hearts acknowledge that God's design is good and that we agree with God and we're willing to come under that design. It really takes a lot of—I don't know—reading over time to be able to spot some of those things.
Laura: There are other ways that we do this, especially what some people call the “book of nature.” This is something that God, through his common grace, reveals himself and his design for mankind through the things he has made. This will be taking in things like scientific discoveries and research and psychology—great art, culture, things like that. We have a whole big list in the book, like we said.
I think that one of the main questions that we can think through in this is just the question: “How did God originally intend or design this to be?” That is a question that, when you're thinking about how little sleep you're getting at night—and maybe it's as you start to process through the gospel: creation, fall, redemption—so you're not going to have your answer just in creation. If you start to think about sleep—okay, well, God did design us to get rest, and God did design us to have adequate sleep at night. We know that's the original design, but then you have to move to the fall.
Emily: You got to keep going.
Laura: Got to keep moving.
Emily: I feel like none of these things stand alone.
Laura: This is cliffhanger!
Emily: They build on each other. The next piece is the fall. That's essentially just understanding how sin and brokenness have caused a divergence from God's design. Of course, we see the beginning of this in Genesis chapter 3—that's the one to go back to every time to understand how all of this started. There are implications of this, again, throughout all of Scripture. It doesn't matter whether you're reading in the Psalms or you're reading in Job or you're reading in Ecclesiastes—you're going to find marks of the fall everywhere. It affects our hearts; it affects our relationships. There are sins of action and inaction. It just implicates everything. I think we really dive into a lot more of these categories and the nuances of that in the book. Definitely go read that. It's a tough topic.
Laura: I think one of the questions that you can ask here is: “How has sin infiltrated my thoughts, words, or actions, and how is it keeping me from living according to God's good plan?” Now, of course, there's more than sin at play in the fall, right?
Emily: Yes.
Laura: There's also ways that it's diverged—and just brokenness of the world. In this case, going back to our sleep example, we can start to think about, "Oh, now when I don't get enough sleep, immediately that's all that I can think about, and my attitude gets bad. I am angry at the interruptions that occur whenever I don't get enough sleep. Maybe I'm angry with my body because I have restless legs, and I'm not sleeping very well at night." There are just some things where we can see the brokenness of chronic pain, and then we can also see where that sin comes into play.
Emily: All right. The next piece is redemption. This is understanding how the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus—and having the Holy Spirit as a follower of Christ—impacts the way we live as believers. This is that “already but not yet” stage that we're in. I know you guys have heard that phrase probably many times before, but this is the gospel that most of us are familiar with—the means by which God provides salvation from sin and death. Honestly, I feel like we don't need to go too deep into it here because we have spent every single episode of Risen Motherhood talking about how redemption changes motherhood.
Laura: That's Risen Motherhood.
Emily: That's Risen Motherhood. This is where the rubber meets the road. It's in essence saying, not just “How do I live as a mom and do this?” but “How do I live as a Christian mom?” As a believer and as a follower of Christ, how do I walk forward in these situations? How do I think about these things? Luckily, with the Holy Spirit in us and the church around us and the Word of God and all of those different things, we are progressively understanding that more and more.
Laura: A question that we can look to on this is: “How can I look to Christ's example while he was on earth as a model for this topic?” Just thinking even off the top of our head—you can go and research this to the ends of the earth—but we know that Christ went away, and he went away to rest and get away from the crowds. He slept—think about the boat in the storm—but he also had days or seasons where he did push himself. He got less sleep. He was up all night in the Garden of Gethsemane. There's just one example from his life.
Another example is that he wanted Martha to rest. Even just thinking through that; we can sleep or nap and rest according to our needs because getting work done doesn't prove our worth. That's even knowing how you're eternally called good before God—how it frees you to do good. You can push yourself, but you can also take a nap, and there's freedom in those things knowing that Christ sustains and provides for us. That's just some very quick off-the-top-of-our-head application. Emily, what's consummation?
Emily: The last piece of the puzzle here is consummation. This is understanding what's to come and how the future hope that we have transforms our lives today. I feel like consummation is one of those words that I have to Google every so often because I'm like, "What does that word mean again?" We'll just tell you: it means to finish something or make it perfect. Now, a long time ago, we used to say “Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration,” and we changed that to “Consummation” after we learned that definition and further clarified the hope that we have is that God is not just going to make things good again. He's going to make things complete and perfect. This is, of course, when Christ returns.
We go, again, into a lot more detail in the book about the hope of heaven, about the reality of judgment, about what it's going to mean for those who followed him in this life and who didn't. There are very real, significant implications of that. I think that it's so helpful to us in the moment as moms, when we think about these things, to realize that is what we hold on for. Jesus said it was for the joy that was set before him that he endured the cross. It's really the fact that we know we're going to have eternity with him—that our reward is coming, that God has seen everything that's going on, and he is going to repay—that keeps us going through really hard times.
Laura: I think a question here that we can apply is: “How can I trust that God is working for my greatest good in this situation, knowing he's sovereign and I'm part of the greater story he's writing?” We can know that, even if you're not getting rest right now—we know that there's eternal rest someday in heaven with Christ. Getting all of this under your skin can be hard. You heard us rattle a lot of things off very quickly here, but that's because we have been doing this so consistently for years and years and years.
It may feel hard or cumbersome for you at first, but we just want to remind you that this isn't an area to shortcut, or this isn't an area to speed through. Let it take time and know that that's okay with God that it takes time. Because I think we can feel under pressure or a little bit eager to get it done and to cross it off our list, but this is something that you're ever going to grow and evolve in, and we're really excited for you guys to start to learn it for yourselves and to get better and better all the time.
Emily: Let's get down to some behind-the-scenes questions. Laura, what was your favorite part of these chapters one through four?
Laura: Always in the CFRC grid—it's always consummation pretty much every time. I bet yours is going to be redemption. I don't know.
Emily: Yes. You got me.
Laura: I already know what our crutch sections are in the gospel narrative, but for me, it's always consummation. Well, I actually don't know why it's because—but I think because I'm a planner; I'm a forward thinker. I tend to be pretty optimistic about things—opportunistic. There's an element of consummation and this idea that, hey, I don't have to have everything that I want today because I'm going to get it someday in heaven. That just sings to my heart, and it gives me comfort because I'm such a doer. It's something that I think reminds me of what really matters.
Emily: I'm glad because you took the first swing at that chapter, so you got to work all of that out.
Laura: There are a lot of great heavenly promises waiting for us. I wrote them all down.
Emily: Definitely. I love the redemption section. I remember we rewrote and reformatted that entire chapter—
Laura: —Yes, that was brutal.
Emily: —multiple times because there were so many truths about what happens in justification and sanctification and all those different things that we needed to get in there, and it was hard to organize it all. I'm really happy with where we landed and walking through each step of what Jesus's life and death meant for us today and trying to really spell it out. There's a quote that I liked, and it says, “We don't strive for the world's definition of success and status because Jesus modeled a life of humility, and he was lowly, and he went about things in a very upside-down, kingdom-minded, unexpected way.”
I think this is just something we need to remember as moms, because so often I think, with social media especially, I feel a lot of pressure—like there's an aesthetic that my life needs to look like, and I want things I do to be liked and socially acceptable and fit into this tribe and all of these different things. It's like being successful online and having an Instagram-worthy life sometimes feels synonymous with being effective and important and being a good mom, and redemption shows us that's not the measure of success.
Okay, question two. Laura, what is something you've learned since writing or you're thinking about right now related to this topic?
Laura: I think that I'm continually struck by how timeless the gospel really is and how these truths really are transcendent for every time, every culture, every person that's ever lived. And that's wild to me.
My pastor was recently talking about how the disciples were likely really young—seventeen to twenty years old. I had never thought of them like that, but he had this whole reasoning about why they were so young and where we can find that biblical evidence for that. Then, I saw this other reel on Instagram, and it was talking about the Founding Fathers being really young. Again, not all of them—Benjamin Franklin was seventy.
Most of them, again, were in their upper teens or in their low twenties, which is just wild. I started to think about Gen Z and the generation coming up—and some of you guys who are listening are probably in that generation—and just how exciting it is to think that you are going to take these old, old truths and apply them in fresh new ways. It's still going to resonate for you. That is really exciting for me. I even think about my own kids and how for every generation—no matter what new has come—AI or social media—all that's new since the disciples' time. Yet, that same gospel that was sufficient for them is sufficient for us today. I think that's really cool.
Emily: That's awesome. Mine was going to be “Wah-wah”—the effects of the fall everywhere.
Laura: Also on brand. On brand for Emily. [Laughter]
Emily: I think I said that earlier though, so I won't repeat it. Alright. Laura, where do you think moms are most likely to fall into error here or struggle?
Laura: I think in this, it's probably just crutching on Bible teachers or influencers to just straight up answer their questions. I know there's so many AUAs on social media. We've done AUAs on our podcast too, so there's nothing wrong with those. But oftentimes, I will see these deep theological questions that are really designed to probably be worked out in the community and applied to your own unique situation, and they are answered publicly and in a prescriptive way.
I feel like that can be really dangerous. I think there can be some helpful things, and I've certainly learned and grown through online Bible teachers, but it can also become something where we're just crutching and leaning on it. Suddenly, that's actually not the motherhood that was meant for us—that God had designed for us. It's one person's interpretation of it.
Emily: Yes, so true. I remember falling into that trap a lot as a new mom of just—I had a few people who I really, really liked everything that they said. I just grabbed onto that as like, "Oh, that must be the way to prescriptively handle every single one of these gray areas in motherhood." It's really been years of studying Scripture, and I don't know how many topics I have really seen that there's more freedom in, as I've studied creation and realizing, "Oh, it's not only this one way. There's actually a lot of different ways moms across the world throughout time, as they followed Christ, are living in different ways, and they're all ways that can be faithful to the Lord." I definitely think that that's a trap moms can fall into.
Laura: Okay, Emily, if a mom wanted to do one to two things right now to help her grow and apply these things, what are some ideas?
Emily: I feel like one thing you can do is learn how to study a book of the Bible. Learn how to study it for yourself. Inductive Bible Study method is the method that we have really talked about the most here at Risen Motherhood over the years. We have a version of that called the Abide Method that is in the Gospel Mom book. It used to be free on our website, but it's in that book if you want to read into it more.
It's really just choosing a book—like start with something short. Pick Ephesians, or pick Philippians or something that you're like, "Okay, I think I can get to the end of this," and give yourself one to two months to work through it. Maybe just try working on it three days a week. I think thirty to forty-five minutes, three days a week—you can get through a lot of study. Remember, this also doesn't have to be first thing in the morning before your kids wake up. You could do it any time of day. I think that's one thing you could do is just really start getting familiar with the Bible and starting to understand what God's Word means in context and all of those different things.
Laura: Another thing we've talked about on the show before is just plow and trowel. This is a method where—Emily was explaining what trowel is, which is the Abide Method. You're digging in deep to Scripture—you're mining for gold—but the plow is also really helpful. I think as moms, whenever you're just in a busier season, or maybe you can't figure out how to get those thirty or forty-five minutes in—plow through Scripture, which really means you are going to read through or listen through large chunks of Scripture at one time to really get your arms around something and just to start to learn it well.
I have been recently listening to a lot of audio Bible, which is unusual for me. I typically don't do that. The other day, I was listening through I and II Samuel. It was a Sunday. I was meal prepping and making all these vegetables and stuff. I just had my headphones in listening. I was like, "Man, this is like a movie." I knew all the stories, but I was riveted. I was like, "Oh, Jonathan. Oh, Saul." There's just a lot of chasing and wars. It's really fun to listen to all the way through and to really get a full picture of a time in the Bible. You don't have to do those longer books. You can do Ephesians and just go over and over and over again. With repetition comes knowledge and knowing what the Bible says. Those would be the two main things I think we'd give.
Emily: We threw a lot at you guys there because this is such a massive topic. We're basically saying learn your whole Bible. [Laughter]
But we promise it's something you can grow in. This is so exciting. I feel like this is so empowering. There's so many exciting things you get to start to do when you understand God's Word, and you're learning how to apply it and understand it rightly. Anyways, we hope you guys will dig into some of those practical things today. Stay tuned for the next principle.
