Does God Even Like Me? (Ephesians 3:14-19)

Ever feel like God loves you because He has to, but you’re not sure He actually likes you?

In this episode, Austin Gardner breaks down Ephesians 3 in plain language—or what he calls "Tennessee hillbilly." We dive into why it’s so hard to believe we’re truly loved, especially when life gets messy or we feel like we haven't performed well enough.

Austin explores the two big words Paul uses: Rooted and Grounded.

• Rooted: Like a tree that doesn't "work" to get nutrients, we are called to simply live from the love already given to us.
• Grounded: Building your life on the solid foundation of Grace rather than the shifting sands of other people's opinions.

Stop fighting to get love and start living from it. It's time to realize that your identity comes from your Father, not your past.

SEO & Metadata

Primary Keywords:

• God’s love
• Ephesians 3:14-19
• Grace vs Performance
• Rooted and Grounded in love
• Austin Gardner podcast
• Faith-based personal development

Tags/Keywords for Platforms:
Christianity, Grace, Forgiveness, Biblical Teaching, Ephesians, Spiritual Growth, Gospel, Prodigal Son, Mental Health and Faith, Austin Gardner, Alignment Ministries.

Thanks for listening. Find us on YouTube, Substack, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.

Transcript

A Question About Being Loved

Austin Gardner 0:26

Bibles, if you would, and turn with me to the book of Ephesians. I have a question for you to kind of get you started in thinking this morning. Why is it so hard to believe you're loved? Why is it so hard to believe that our Father really loves you, that God loves me? Sometimes it's because we're in sin. You know, we're doing wrong. We know we're doing wrong. And we like, I don't know, I wouldn't like me if I was him. And so maybe that's it. Sometimes it's because we somehow we twist this grace thing into God got us started, but we got to keep it going. And so we kind of learn a little bit of self-hatred there because we think, well, I'm not doing good enough. I'm not what I ought to be. And so we change that. Sometimes it's because life hasn't turned out like we wanted or expected. You know, we're sick or somebody else is sick or somebody died or some family problem, some issue happened, we got hurt. And so it's hard to believe that we are loved. It's hard to accept that we're loved. But this passage of scripture is like crazy today. We're in Ephesians chapter 3 and verses 14 through 19. And here's what Paul basically says. I have to take a knee. This is what he says in plain old Tennessee hillbilly language. I have to take a knee here and acknowledge God. I have to just go ahead and say up front, he's the father of all living, he's the father of me, he's the father of everybody. And what I'm about to tell you is so hard to believe that if he don't help you believe it, you probably aren't going to believe it. Because he says in verse 16, I want you to be strengthened by might, by spirit. But then I want you to listen with me as I read to you verse 17, that Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith, that you being rooted and grounded in love. Now, I want y'all to realize you are rooted and grounded. That's what the Greek words actually end up saying. It's already true. I need you to realize that. I need you to accept that. I need you to live like that is true, that you are rooted and grounded in love. And he said, now I will admit what I'm talking about is hard to believe. So this is what he says: that you'd be able to comprehend verse 18 with all the saints. I want you, with all the, hey, all of you. We all got problems with this. He said, with all of us, we need to understand the breadth, the length, the depth, and the height. And to know the love of Christ, verse 19, which passes knowledge. Yes, you just can't understand this. It's beyond knowledge. You just can't get a hold of. We're too human. We're too finite. We're too little. We're too nothing to understand how such a great almighty creator, God, could love us. It's beyond what we could know. And then I guess I'd like to show you verse 18 because I skipped that word, but look at this. He said, you can't comprehend it. He said, you know, I think we would all agree that we have a head knowledge that we're loved. If you have a head knowledge you love, say amen. You know, we know it. We don't know it sometimes. We know it in our head, but in our heart it's kind of hard to accept. It's like, okay, I know he says he loves me, but in my own personal life, it's been kind of like this. I know he says he loves me, but does he like me? It's one thing to love me. Okay, all right, all right. You love everybody. God is love, and God loves everybody, but I know me and you know me, and I ain't sure you like me. But he does love you and like you. Now, I've got a whole lot to say to you, but know why we bow the knee, don't you? Because he is basically saying you're loved. That changes everything. There are no more rules, there's no more effort, there's no more what you got to do. Paul wants you to know the love of Christ. If he knows what the emphasis is, if you caught the emphasis here, it's not on do you love God? It's on God loves you. I've spent my life thinking I gotta love him. Now, we've been in Ephesians and we're in chapter three. We're about to go into chapter four, chapter four. There's gonna be some things he's gonna say, you know, y'all ought to be living like this. This ought to be true in your life. He's gonna get to that. That's what all real preaching is, you know. Real preaching is what it says, do this. But that's not how the Holy Spirit writes it out. The Holy Spirit writes it out and says this. Chapter one, God loves you. Chapter two, God loves you. Chapter three, God loves you. Chapter four, why don't y'all just accept it and live like it's true? It's a whole different way of than normal, regular preaching. We were created to live from love. Not to get love, but from love. No more fighting to get it, no more trying to earn it. We live from a love that's given to us by Christ. We live from that, his love. Now, before I dig a little deeper, let's just go over rooted for a second. Rooted. That's talking about trees, plants. You know, what does a tree do? Does a tree really work at saying, I gotta get nutrients? No, it just lets the roots do its thing. Can we get an amen right there? It puts down the roots and the roots do their thing. Uh, it doesn't touch a going, I need vitamin A today. You know, that's how I live. Pass me another vitamin, pass me another pill, something else to fix me. But God says, I want y'all to be rooted. I want you to just realize you're already in Christ. He's already in love with you, and it's the love of Christ coming out of the ground and flowing through you like a tree. It's not you digging for it, it's not you trying to find it, it's there. He loves you, and all you're doing is living from it. Can I get an amen right there? Now listen, I know you're looking at me like uh, well, I don't know what that means. I know it's pretty hard. That's why he said you can't comprehend it.

SPEAKER_00 7:22

It's kind of like that. I was talking to a friend, and we were on Zoom.

Austin Gardner 7:31

And his little six-year-old daughter ran in the room and she took over the conversation. She started talking to me. I knew her when she was a baby, and she started talking to me. And he sat there going, honey, I'm really trying to I said, You realize what's going on here? She knows she's loved, accepted, and it don't matter. And she just took over and finally said, Baby, I really need to talk to Austin a minute. And but she's like soaking up to love. Can I get an amen? She's just like, everything's all right. My daddy loves me, my mama loves me, Austin Gardner loves me, everybody loves me, that's just who I am.

SPEAKER_00 8:07

And that's what God's calling us to live like. By the way, he's the one that started this love affair. Not you.

From Head Knowledge To Heart Trust

Austin Gardner 8:19

It was him before the foundation of the earth that said, I know they're gonna mess up, I know they're gonna sin, I know they're gonna fail, I know they're gonna walk away, but I am gonna go to them and I'm gonna pay their sin debt. I'm gonna do everything so they can have forgiveness and freedom and eternal life. He just wants you to be living rooted, putting down roots, just living in it. Now, I'm gonna go to the next word in just a second, but can I just say what that means what you we got to do a little something here, okay? That because it's so foreign to our thinking. So we're gonna transform our way of thinking, Romans 12, 2. We're gonna bring some thoughts into captivity. You need to say every day, I'm just gonna meditate on that. Uh, I don't want you to get a rule going here, but I just want you to think at some, you just need to sit down tomorrow and go, for God so loved me, put your name in it, that he gave his only begotten son that I would not perish, but that I would have everlasting love. Now, I just want you to think about that. I want you to think about God said he loved you so much that you were of such value to him that he was willing to send his son to the cross that God in human flesh would die for us. And then the next day, maybe you pick another verse. It doesn't matter. You can pick rooted and grounded, you can pick, but God commended his love, God showed his love toward me. And while I was still a sinner, while I was still doing wrong, Christ died for me. That's you you can meditate. Oh, how about I like this one? Look, behold, the kind of love the Father has that he would call me his son. 1 John chapter 3, verse 1. So you want to kind of meditate on it because can I be honest with you? I have this battle with my thoughts. We went over this the other day, but we think about six to seven thousand thoughts a day. Every minute we're going through five, six thoughts, seven thoughts, boom, boom, bit of flushing through our head. Three-quarters of them are negative. Well, I really messed that up. Good night, I don't deserve to be loved. And we come up with all kinds of junk and we just run it through our heads and think it over and over. And and we're thinking, but we're not thinking Bible thoughts. We gotta pull that out and change it and transform it so we are rooted. Just sink your roots into the love. It's there, by the way.

SPEAKER_00 11:00

Whether or not you're living like it, it's still true.

Meditating To Renew Your Mind

Austin Gardner 11:06

In other words, the love is there. He loves you, he found you, he saved you, he's working in you, he's been working in you, and whether or not you admit it or recognize it, it's already happening. You know what? Here's the deal. You're like the multimillionaire that's got all the money in the bank and you don't act like it. You are loved by God. So live, send down your roots in that. Now, let me give you one more. Grounded. He said, rooted and grounded. Now, grounded is a word about putting down the foundation. By the way, trees don't worry about whether or not they're rooted. They just tree. That's all they do. They just do the tree thing, right? They're not worried about it. You don't go out here. When you go walking by one of the trees, you're not gonna hear going, man, I hope I'm rooted. They don't do that. You're not gonna walk by a tree and hear, I don't know if he likes me or not. You're not gonna hear that. A tree just gonna be like, hey, hey. Okay? And and and then grounded is like the foundation. If you were to pull this building up, you'd find that they went down before they went up. They put a foundation down before they came up. You know those big skyscrapers they build in New York City? They got to go way down before they can go up. And so he says you're grounded, you need to realize you are built on love. Your foundation is in the love of Christ. And he wants you to get a hold of that. So there's a story in the Bible, you know, about the guy who built his house on the sand and the guy who built his house on the rock. And so that's a grounded story. Where do you ground yourself? Well, if you ground yourself on how other people think about you, or how you think about you, or how your mama thinks about you, or how your daddy thinks about you, or how your cousin thinks about you, how your friends think about you, well, that's some shifting sand. You know, I mean, it's like, okay, my mama loved me. Well, not this week. We had a great Thanksgiving, but Christmas didn't go that good. You know what I mean. It's kind of shifted. It's not steady, it's not solid. But he said, I want you to realize you're grounded in my love. And then he, you know, it's so amazing how the Holy Spirit, through the Apostle Paul, says, uh, well, y'all gonna need to be strengthened. It's gonna take some work of the Holy Spirit of God to get you to understand this. Can I just tell you, I still don't think I understand it. It's hard for me to grasp. How could he love me? But he loved me so deep that no matter how deep I went in sin, he came after me. He loves me so high that no matter what I do with my life, he's already there. He loves me so wide, no matter how far I run, he's there. He loves us. It may be almost impossible to comprehend, but we are called on to comprehend his love for us. And that's the reason Paul bows his knee. Paul's like, I give. I give. I think it's kind of easy for us to do a transactional relationship with God. If I do things for God, God will do things for me. If I love God, God will love me. If I attend church, God will do this for me. If I pray, God will do this. If I give, God will do this. And it's like, it's like a tit for tat. It's like, God, I pay you, then you do. That's kind of how we will. Come on. And that's why when you forgot to read your Bible every day this week, you're wondering, oh, does he like me today? Yeah, he does. Yes, he does. The length, the breadth, the depth, the height. And it passes all knowledge. It's beyond what we can understand. But what we got to get to is this as rooted, we're rooted in him. He's our source. He's the one that started all of this. You know, we didn't wake up one day and say, I'm gonna go see if I can be saved. I know some of you think you did. You really think you started salvation. But John 3.16 was in the Bible a long time before you were born. Could I get an amen? Romans 5.8 was in the Bible a long time before you were born. Our identity comes from our Father, not our past. Our identity comes from our Father, not our past. We are not defined by our sin or our failures. I think we think we are. We are defined by the love of a Father. And then we see all that love revealed in Jesus and what he did for us. You know what the Bible says? He chose us before the foundation of the world. If you're a creationist like me, you think the world started like 7,000 years ago. That means 7,000 years ago, you already loved me. If you're an evolutionist, billions of years ago, he still loved me before all that started. If you believe the Bible, before any of this ever got started, he already loved us. Can I get an amen? That's right. That's Ephesians chapter 1 and verse 4. He chose us in him before the foundation of the world. Now I need you to remember this. This is uh I can sometimes I think I think we think I think maybe we're raised with this concept of transactional. It's kind of that way with my dad.

SPEAKER_00 16:44

It was like uh with my dad, if I didn't run fast enough, he got mad.

Austin Gardner 16:52

If I didn't make the right grade, he wasn't happy. And it was always like, I gotta do things to get him to like me. And so we kind of moved that around to God. But I need you to understand that God loved you first. And he loved you when you were totally, completely unlovable. God didn't love you the day you walked in a Baptist church. And God didn't go, oh, I think I might have to love that one. That's not what he thought at all. He was like, when you were living in the most wicked and dirty and vile sin, he loved you. Romans 5.6, he loved you when you were without strength and you were ungodly. In Romans 5.8, he loved you while you were still sinning. He loved you. He doesn't wait for you to change. He doesn't love you because of your performance or your religion. He loves you because he is love. You know what we what really has to happen here? We just gotta wake up and realize we're loved.

SPEAKER_00 17:57

I think I probably told you this. But when my oldest daughter, her first baby was born, he got sick.

Foundation Of Love Versus Sand

Austin Gardner 18:06

Philip, he's like 25 down, he's bigger, way bigger than me. He was sick, but she stood up all night mom doing the mama thing. You know, wiping the fever brow and putting the cool presses on him, and you know, all the juck you mamas have done. You babies. And the next day she called her mama and she said, I don't know. I just think I just now realized how much you loved me. Because if you love me like I love my baby, you must really love me a lot. And she just told her mama that. You just gotta wake up to it. You gotta read the scripture and just wake up to how much God loves you. And see, Paul's saying, I want that to happen. I want Christ to dwell in your hearts by faith. You just gotta believe this, even though it's hard. And that's found in Ephesians chapter 3 and verse 7 of verse 14. And it's Christ in us, the hope of glory. See, that's the whole point. It's not about, did I get baptized? Did I go to church? Did I do enough things? Did I quit my sinning? Because here's the problem. You feel like trash because uh you got saved, come on, be honest, and you fell back into some sin. You got drunk, adultery, looked at pornography, and you did something wicked. You're like, I don't know who he likes me now. And he's like, that ain't what determines it. I live in you every day, all day. It's Christ in you, the hope of glory. That is Colossians 1:27. It's Christ in you, the hope of glory. Now we're rooted in that. We put down roots in that, and we believe that from the bottom of our heart, but we're also grounded in that. That's our foundation. We build our life on Christ and His love, not religion, not his approval looking for approval. We don't build our lives on shame or fear or guilt. We build our lives on love. We realize that we're already complete. Boy, this is hard for me. We are complete in Christ. Colossians 1. I'm like, I ain't that complete. I ain't that complete. But he says, Oh, don't worry, you are in Christ. You are complete. It's already done. We do not work to be loved. His love surrounds us. Ephesians 3, 18 said, that we may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth, the length, the depth, and the height. His love includes everyone. In Ephesians, he's really talking to a church that's full of Gentile believers and some Jewish believers are in there, also. And he's saying, Hey, it don't matter who you are, I love you. Don't matter what your color is, what your language is, what your nationality is, I love you. Uh my love is expansive for everybody. You can be the poorest person on the planet, you can be the richest person on the planet, I love you. It's the picture you get of the prodigal son. It's the prodigal son. That's a love I don't understand. Come on, tell the truth. You know, if your son runs away, he takes all your money, and before he does, he looks at you and says, I wish you were dead. Just go ahead and give me what's mine when you die. I want you to kind of imagine that. Your son walks into the house and says, When you die, I get half. Give it to me. Or a third, give it to me. Well, I ain't dead yet. Well, just die or give it to me. And then he leaves and he wastes all your money, ruins your reputation, causes people all over the community to talk about how you blew it as a dad, you know. And then he comes back. He comes back walking into town. And when he comes walking into town, my reaction would be to go meet him and say, all right, you listen here, you little punk. You can come back. But there are 10 things. You're gonna tell you you're sorry to everybody, you're gonna tell them it wasn't my fault. I'm gonna give you all these conditions. You you you live up to these conditions, you're gonna apologize in front of the church, you're gonna make acknowledgments.

SPEAKER_00 22:26

And then, and then, if you make it six months doing right, okay, we'll be all right. Well, make it a year, probably. We need to make it a year.

Austin Gardner 22:37

Yeah, come on. And then Jesus says, Can I tell you how my father is? That ain't how he does things. He ain't Baptist. He said, the father in the story goes running towards the son, picks up his stinky, smelly, pig laden body with pig poop on him, swings him around, kisses him, starts yelling, we're having a party. My boy was dead, but he's alive. He was a gone, but he's back. Well, let's have a party.

SPEAKER_00 23:11

And then he says, That's how I love you. Wait a minute, that ain't the story.

Austin Gardner 23:16

There's an older brother. Now he was a Baptist. He was sitting over in the corner and he said, I don't like what dad's doing here at all. He, Daddy, why are you throwing a party for the puck?

SPEAKER_00 23:29

He did wrong. I am not going in the party.

Austin Gardner 23:34

Now, in their culture, that older brother was supposed to be one leading the party. It was his job, kind of help dad fulfill dad's wishes. But no, this guy's like, no, I do my thing. But you know what happens, don't you? The father, the old man, gets up, goes outside to speak to the son who's mad. The son who's mad says, I don't get it. I've always been your slave. I've done everything you've ever asked. And you ain't never even killed a goat panty for me. Huh. As a father, I'd be like, back into you in the next week. I'm gonna put you in the next one. I ain't putting up with that. That's not what he does. He says, son, you're always my son. And everything I got sure. I don't know what you're so mad about. Don't you see the story? It's rooted and grounded in love. It is rooted and grounded in love. It's everyone, even you. That's what we gotta let set in. I think there's a part of us that's too proud to say, well, I need love like that. Sometimes we get a little pride to it. We get to thinking, well, yeah, but I ain't like the prodigal son, you know, I ain't never been to the pig pen. Well, so we gotta like, I gotta deserve a party. That's an older brother. He went to both extremes. He showed the really rotten punk son, and he showed the really righteous one, and they were both wrong, but he still loved both of them.

SPEAKER_00 25:12

Rooted and grounded in love.

Transactional Faith Challenged

Austin Gardner 25:16

And nothing, nothing can separate us from that love. Here's one of those verses you meditate on in Romans chapter 8 and verse 38 and 39. Nothing, not things that are high, not things that are low, not things that are demonic, no powers, nothing can separate you from the love of God. Not life, not death, not angels, not future, not past. Nothing can separate you from the love of God. In Philippians chapter 2, he loved us so much, he stood up, took off his kingly robes, took off his garments of power, laid them down, and became one of us. So he could die in our place. He became a human and he came down to our sin and our shame and our brokenness. And he lifts us up. You know what he did? He left heaven, he became one of us because we were a long way from God, way down here, a long way from God. And he's up and said, Come on back. I'm taking you home. That's how he loves us. That's how he loves us. And he loves you that way. He loved you that way before the foundation of the world. He said in John 14, I'm going to my father to prepare a place, and I will come back, I will get you, and I will take you home. We are to be rooted and grounded in love. He loved us when we were dead in sin, like the prodigal son was dead to his dad. If you want to know what it means to be dead in sin, it's what it meant when the father said, This, my son was dead. In other words, he was cut off from me. He was a long ways from me. He wasn't interested in me. He wouldn't listen to me. He wouldn't come back to me. That's what dead was. And he said, now he's alive. He's come back to me. And the communication is open. He loved us enough to give his only son. His only son. He loved us enough to accept us. To accept us. I walked into a church, oh, I don't know, 20, 25 years ago. And I was kind of a little nervous about it because I was a missionary. It's a larger church. Out there, 300, I don't know. Not large, but larger than us. And I wasn't sure as a missionary how I'd be treated in that church. And so I walked in and I walked in the back door. And the pastor sat up on the platform, and I mean it's a full building. I mean, it was packed.

SPEAKER_00 27:45

And that pastor stood up, walked down the stairs, walked all the way back past where Brother Hayward is and hugged. No way. I'm accepted. You know what the father does?

Austin Gardner 28:03

He says, I come to you, I find you in your mess, and I make you accept it. I know it's a love beyond comprehension. It's a love that we can't understand in our heads. But he loves you this morning. I want you to go home thinking, wow, I don't deserve this. I want you to go back to your Tennessee hillbelly roots where you grew up in a house without running water and was poor, and people drove by poor people lived there. I mean, I want you to just realize he said, I came to where you are. I loved you, I accepted you, and I'm taking you home to be with me. Fact is you're already seated there. It's a love beyond comprehension. How can you not just wake up and go, Thank you for loving me, Jesus? How many of you would say that? Say amen. Thank you for loving me. I don't deserve it, but thank you for loving me. If you haven't played your trust in Him, today is the day for you to put your trust in Jesus and what he did on the cross at Calvary.