God is Smiling at You: Breaking the Performance Trap with Mike Pennington

Are you tired of trying to prove you deserve God’s love?

In this episode, Austin Gardner sits down with his cousin, Mike Pennington—a former missionary and pastor—for a deeply personal conversation about the "bedrock of a healthy soul": Belovedness.

For decades, both Austin and Mike lived under the heavy weight of legalism, relating to God through performance rather than relationship. Mike shares the transformative moment in the Colorado mountains where he finally heard the Father say, "Yes, you are my beloved child."

Inside this episode:

• Why we treat salvation like a gift but live like we have to pay it back.
• How childhood traumas of shame, fear, and anger color our view of God.
• The "Trifecta" of blockages that keep us from resting in grace.
• The life-changing truth of John 17:23: God loves you just as much as He loves Jesus.

If you’ve ever felt like you were on the "trash heap" of ministry or life, this episode is your invitation to stop striving and start being held.

Connect with us:
Visit waustingardner.com for more resources on grace and leadership.

https://belovedlivingnow.com

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

Transcript

Welcome And Mercy That Pursues

Austin Gardner 0:28

I am so glad to have the opportunity to be back with you. You know, the theme is Followed by Mercy. Surely, goodness and mercy. Pursue me, follow me all the days of my life. And I have the privilege of having my cousin here. He's older than I am, wiser than I am. He's always been a little bit ahead of me because his little brother was like my favorite go-to cousin. And Mike was the big guy. And so now I am honored at your mom's funeral when you preached on Beloved. I promise you, brother, it was like my soul started singing and screaming because that's what the Lord was teaching me. And so I am excited to have you here and to have you just talk about that. If you want to just say a few words of introduction, then I'll start asking some questions.

Mike’s Story From Pastor To Missionary

MIke Pennington 1:19

All right, sure. Well, I'm Mike Pennington. I live in Hendersonville, Tennessee, native Tennessean, but lived in Missouri, was as a pastor there after going to seminary in Texas, then from Missouri, we were missionaries for 12 and a half years in Venezuela. Came back here and I was then an associational missionary, a director of missions for a local Baptist association. But I retired four years ago. But four years prior to that, back in 1978, I discovered belovedness in a way that was just transformative. I've always believed in the unconditional love of God, but something happened to me, something clicked that had just simply not clicked just yet. And so I'm excited for the opportunity to talk about that today. You mentioned, Austin, my mom's funeral, and when I was sharing it, Christy, after the funeral, she said, somebody behind me was saying, Amen, every other sentence that you said. And it had to be you. Guilty, guilty. Absolutely, absolutely. So it um, yeah, God has taken you and me on a different path, but similar path, and we've arrived at the same conclusion is that the love of God is beyond comprehension, and we will just uh keep plumbing the depths of it until we get to glory.

Austin Gardner 2:39

Amen. I think, and I'm gonna ask you to explain all that, but I think that one of the biggest problems, you know, I grew up legalistic as I'll get out. And I have been I have been legalistic. I have preached legalism and lived legalism and gotten tired under legalism. And some of you listening to me may say, Austin, something's happened to you, you're wrong, you're different. But you know, I knew God loved me in my head, but it's been a hard journey to get it to my heart. But here's the beautiful thing, and I want my cousin, my friend Mike, to explain it to you. But you know, here's the deal for all of you listening, the Holy Spirit's working in you too. And and and He does it, He loves you. Uh huh. And Legal loves him, he still loves you. And if you run from him, he still loves you because you can't get away from it. God is love. So, Mike, why don't you just I know this ain't even following my thing here, but I gave you, but what does belovedness mean?

MIke Pennington 3:42

Boil down into simplicity, it means that God loves me just like he loves Jesus. When we first heard about this uh concept, and I I've no the scripture uses the word beloved, and so I've heard it for years, and pastors will get up and say, Well, dearly beloved, today we're going to talk about so-and-so. And so I'd heard the word, but when we went on that particular retreat eight years ago in the mountains of Colorado, the the leader of the retreat kept saying, belovedness is the bedrock of a healthy soul. And he would say things like, You've got to settle belovedness. It is the first um uh it is the first step. Until you settle belovedness, nothing else really matters. And frankly, I got tired of hearing about it. I believed in the unconditional love of God all of my life. I was raised in it, that God loves us. And so John 3.16 and Romans 5.8, I I knew all of those things. And so I kept wanting them to go on to something different or something, something new. But all that week I I could just sense God really um speaking to me, and I was resisting. It was um until I think part of it was just the fact that when Steve Smith, the founder of Potter's Inn, a ministry in Colorado, and Steve's now on Substack, he's got a big following on Substack because he's retired from the Potter's Inn ministry specifically. But he said when Jesus was baptized, he was lowered into the water, comes up out of the water, and it says that the heavens were torn open. It doesn't, this is the gospel of Mark, torn open. They were ripped open. It was like God was out of the universe saying, I've got to get to my son and tell him something. And he says to Jesus, You are my beloved son, I'm well pleased with you. And Steve gave a dramatic pause and said, At this point in Jesus' life, how many miracles had he done? Amen. None. How many people had he raised from the dead? None. Had he walked on water, had he fed anybody, had he healed any lepers? And he said, Jesus' beloved relationship with his father was based on relationship, not performance.

When Faith Turns Into Performance

Austin Gardner 6:03

Amen.

MIke Pennington 6:04

And Austin, you and I had a similar upbringing, and we can talk some about family and some of the things good and bad that we uh learned and maybe even inherited. But I began to realize that I had been relating to God on performance. Now I knew he loved me, and I knew I loved him, but somehow I was trying to, I was relating to him on performance. I heard Steve Smith in a podcast, and I apologize that I don't remember who he was interviewing, but this person said most of us were delighted to receive salvation by grace through faith. But then we spent the rest of our life trying to prove we deserved it.

Austin Gardner 6:46

Yep.

MIke Pennington 6:47

And that was me. As you remember when we were growing up, I think there was a stronghold of anger in our family from granddaddy and I never knew great granddaddy, but granddaddy and my dad and his brothers and your dad, and that they could fly off the handle in just a blink. And I don't know, I don't know that that impacted my view of God or not. I knew, but but I had an angry father, and he's in heaven, and so I'm not going to speak ill, but it was there were times when when I was younger, I I can name three traumas that happened in my life that that probably scarred me. One was I was led into shame quite accidentally, but it happened. It was a sexual encounter thing. I wasn't abused, but still that there was a shame that entered. I feared my dad in his anger. I feared of not being good enough on the farm if he taught sent me to do something. I remember so clearly one time that he'd sent me out to bring in the calves into the uh into the corral, into the pen. And those calves did not want to be obedient. And I yelled and hollered and not through rocks, and I was terrified to go back and tell my dad that I failed.

Austin Gardner 7:59

Yeah.

MIke Pennington 8:00

And so fear. And then when we moved from the country into a town, we were in a school where basically the rich kids went. Too much to unpack here, but but I was the doctors and lawyers and business people, and I was a country kid from way out in the hills. And so I was teased and bullied, called a hunt country hick, and worse than that. And so I kind of hit for the trifecta, and that was shame, fear, and anger. I hated where I was. So that colored my worldview as well. It's kind of like that if it's to be, it's up to me. I had to do something in order to make my world make sense. I became a leader. I eventually began to preach. I was a leader in my youth group and all of these things. And so I loved God, but I had these seething emotions down deep, and especially shame. And I hope you and I can explore that a little bit somewhat, somewhat later. But I was saved when I was nine. I never have doubted that to speak of. Baptized in a creek out in the out in the hills, and and so I knew I was saved, but at the same time, I was kind of living this dual life. I was the good kid at church, and I wasn't a bad kid anywhere else, but it was just, again, those emotions. I was not, I was not growing in belovedness. Now I accumulated a lot of head knowledge and eventually went to a Christian college and went to seminary. And so I can quote verses on most any topic, but I was not really experiencing the love of God like He wants me to.

Austin Gardner 9:39

Well, I think I think that what you've hit on is I've often thought my dad, my view of my dad affected my view of God. And I think our dads were probably pretty similar in that. Very similar. And you know, the I always thought, well, God's not that pleased either.

MIke Pennington 9:57

Yeah.

Shame Fear And The Angry God Image

Austin Gardner 9:58

And and I still battle that, I'll be honest with you. And I I want your help. I still battle it, you know, because I'd say, all right, now I'm learning it. I'm learning, it's moving from here, but still I I wake up in the mornings and I say, I don't know, Lord, if I'm worth even keeping me alive. And I go, okay, excuse me. Go ahead. Why don't you just address me and help me up in my weakness here?

MIke Pennington 10:20

Will you ask at the very beginning for me to explain belovedness? Let me do do that in a little bit better way. Jesus was beloved because of his relationship with his father and not because of his performance. And I immediately, when I heard that, I thought, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's Jesus. That's not me. You don't know what I've done. You don't know what I have felt. You don't know what I've set, said. You don't know the people that I have hurt. You don't know the failures. That's one thing to call Jesus the beloved, but this person, Steve Smith, he said, you need to be able to put your own name in that um uh uh in that verse. That Michael, you are my beloved child, and I am well pleased with you. I'm gonna jump forward for a while uh and and I'll unpack more of this story later. I have a friend that I call my spiritual director. He's a spiritual listener. It's not a uh it's not a woo-woo kind of thing. It's a spiritual listening, and my I've been trained in it now myself, just listening to people's story. And I was talking to my friend Phil and and uh about just some of the great things that God had done in my life in the past four or five years. This was a few years ago when he said it, but he stopped me and he said, Mike, what's God doing right now? And that's a question I don't think I'd ever ask myself necessarily. What's God doing right now? And I began to cry. And I said, Phil, God is smiling at me. And that was overwhelming to think of God smiling at me. And so belovedness is realizing Jesus is the beloved, it's accepting the fact that now he calls me his brother, and that I'm a joint heir, I'm joint, I'm a joint, I'm part of Jesus' family. And John chapter 17, verse 23 says that God loves me just like he loves Jesus. Now, how do you get there? Well, it's kind of like garbage in, garbage out. There's all kinds of misconceptions that I had in my head, and so I needed to be reprogrammed. And first of all, I thought, can this really be true? That God calls Michael Pennington beloved because of my relationship to him. Because I've been trying to perform really well. I was a pastor, I was a missionary, then I was a director of missions, which is like being an area missionary, encouraging pastors. I could tell others about the love of God, but I was telling them, not based on my own experience of it. And so I had to reprogram my mind and look for it. It's all through the Old Testament. I've loved you with an everlasting love. Our pastor is preaching through the Old Testament right now, and the passage that we looked at this past uh Sunday was the one that says that um that I am the compassionate one, the loving one, the gracious one, blessing those who fear me and honor me to the to the thousand generations. Now, that same context is where he says, I'll visit the sins of the fathers on the third and fourth, and that's all we remember. Instead of going and realizing that he said, I bless those who love me to the thousandth generation. And so that was just a different thing. Uh you know, again, helping me see that God is not about performance, he's about relationship. Isaiah chapter 43 says, I created you, you are mine, I created you for myself, I know your name. You are precious in my sight.

Austin Gardner 14:17

Amen.

The Breakthrough Question In Colorado

MIke Pennington 14:17

And I love you. And I, at that retreat, I keep referring back to it, I went to Steve Smith and I said, Steve, I think I just need to go somewhere and weep because I'd been on the verge of tears the whole week of this uh five-day retreat. And he said, Well, you've got all afternoon, go take a nap and then go be with God. And so I went to a place called the Cleft of the Rock after the nap. And I just knew that's where God would meet me. It uh I felt nothing. I thought, well, God, this is where it's supposed, whatever it is, it's supposed to happen this uh this afternoon. And so I even tried singing, stop holding on, just be held. I said, God hold me, and God just ignored all of my questions, all of my it was good to sing, but but still I didn't, I didn't feel anything just yet. And I get to that little park place. There was a bench, looking over at a rock that had been split in eternity past sometime. And I thought, well, I might as well sit in it. I know it's not magic, but I'm gonna sit there anyway. And I had asked God several times, God, what's wrong with me? And again, it was all about me. God, what's wrong with me? And um, instead of what's right with him, I sit down on the cliff of the rock, still felt nothing. And I said, God, what's wrong with me? And then God spoke. He said, Michael, why don't you ask me the question you really need to ask me? And I said, Father, I don't know how I got the words out. I said, Father, could I really be your beloved? And I I it wasn't out loud, but I heard it really loudly. Yes, you are my beloved child. And the damn broke. I wept shame and sin and fear and degradation and abuse and everything. It just it just poured out of me as I just wept and wept and wept and wept because for the I mean, I was saved when I was nine, I don't doubt that. But this was a moment when it was just just incredibly real that he, his arms were around me and that he was um was confirming to me that I was beloved. And let me hasten to say this. I've had people ask me this do you have to go to Colorado to find this? And the answer is no. You found it in Georgia somehow. And no, find that place and just begin to study those verses of belovedness. Not just John 3.16, but that one for sure. And Romans 5.8 and Romans 5.1, that having been justified by faith, we have peace with God. And not only peace with God, it goes on to say we have access. We're in the room already with him. I mean, it's just, it's just astounding. And then Romans 8.1, there is therefore now no condemnation to those that are in Christ Jesus. I had felt such condemnation, I'd felt such shame, I'd felt such, uh like you expressed it a few minutes ago. My wonder has been not that God would send me to hell, but he would just throw me on the trash heap and just set me aside. And um, he he never did that because he loves me with an everlasting love, and I am his child. It is just beyond, beyond description. And I just think about what Jesus did. It's all through the scripture how he treated people with beloved love. The woman at the well, the woman caught in adultery, the woman who burst into the party kind of and began to anoint his feet. And he said, Leave her alone. She's doing a good thing for me. He was, he treated people with love and grace and um belovedness. He healed those ten lepers, even though one uh only one of them came back and said, Thank you. He he just gave away. He gave away love, he gave away his peace, he gave away his life uh even before the cross, giving to people. And it's like, how did I never see this before? How did I never see this before? John said that um we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten Son of God. And now that beloved Son of God lives in me, and he's made me his brother, he's made me his child, and so I can live in that belovedness. So how do you discover belovedness? Look at the truth, receive that truth, but then you need to get rid of these blockers. And we can talk about this uh a little bit later, but there's enemies of belovedness that want to try to steal it. Like you said, even though now all that you have learned about God's love in these most recent years, that you wake up in the morning and think, well, did it stick? You know, is it really, is it really true that that that God is like this? Well, I see the truth, I accept the truth, I live the truth, and then I begin giving it away. And and I'm not anywhere anytime without talking about belovedness. I I just do it all the time, even in the hospital with my hip replacement recently. I said to the nurses that just in case no one's told you today, God loves you very much. And it led to other conversations as it's changed my life. Understanding that I am his beloved child, and that he loves me just like he loves Jesus. Now, think about that. That God loves Austin Gardner just like he loves Jesus. Well, how did God love Jesus? Perfectly, completely, eternally, steadfastly, any uh modifier we want to put on that, that's how he loved Jesus, and he loves Austin just that same way. Isn't that astounding? It is.

Austin Gardner 20:07

You know, you can we'll we'll just break this up at any time, but what I've thought, what I've seen is how man-centered I've been. I have been what Austin does, what Austin thinks, what Austin, how he fails, how he succeeds. And I realized that too much of my life has been built around what Austin, and it needs to be built around my father. Go ahead. Go ahead, take off.

MIke Pennington 20:32

Well, and so much of my life has been being a people pleaser, living not only for myself and what I wanted, but to keep everybody else, uh, keep everybody else happy. God doesn't require that uh of me. I heard uh there are a couple of psychologists that we listened to. One is uh Dr. Kirk Thompson, and the other one is uh uh Dr. Michael Kusick. They they both have podcasts. Uh Michael Kusick was interviewing someone, and uh they were just talking about how people-centered and and um people pleasing and all of this. And Michael just made the statement. He said, Well, you know, other people's opinion of you is none of your business. And I just thought, wow, other people's p opinion of me is none of my business. In other words, I live for an audience of one. If I'm pleasing my heavenly father, then that is uh that's the audience that I want to uh live for.

Austin Gardner 21:29

I think most of us would say that. But because I've said that for years. But living it. But living it is different. And I think what Mike has said that we all got to catch is we gotta quit living for what everybody else thinks. Go ahead. Go ahead, Mike.

MIke Pennington 21:45

Yeah. Uh because um the one who knew no sin was made sin for us that we might be the righteousness of God in him. And when I give out of my own resources, they run out pretty quickly. But his resources are new every morning. And so I just want to continue uh this this life of this life of love in 1 Corinthians. I may need to look up the verse and give it exactly, but there's a verse toward the end of 1 Corinthians, uh, chapter 14, I believe it is, where it says, Let everything be done in love. And that's a great translation. But a friend of mine rephrased it and reversed it. It and said, let everything you do, or no, be kind and loving in everything you do. And so that to me is letting belovedness overflow. To be kind to those nurses. Even the nurse that woke me up at four in the morning to take my blood four days in a row. You know, because I had a I had a UTI, I had an infection that had come in. So they, but I I wanted to be kind and loving in everything that I do. That's the life that Jesus lived: a life of kindness, a life of gentleness. And he was blunt with the Pharisees. He was blunt with those who were, who were putting obstacles up in front of people who wanted to come to God. And so, hey, I was telling some people earlier, uh, earlier today that not every opinion I have needs to be expressed, not every thought that I have needs to be talked about. I need to give people the benefit of the doubt and be loving and gentle and listening because that's what my father does for me. And so I'm retired now, so I'm not building a ministry or keeping anything going, but I do have a ministry of soul care, helping people care for themselves for their own sake and the sake of others. And I'm a spiritual director, which means I'm a spiritual listener. I hold people's stories gently within myself and ask questions, hopefully, to help them go deeper with God. Because it's amazing, Austin, how many people out there think God's mad at them. And you and I, through our performance, wanting to prove to God and to others just how dedicated we were and how everything else that we were. God is just saying to me, slow down, listen, rest, be held, and help others to discover that beloved love that you have discovered now. And again, you don't have to go to a retreat center in Colorado to find it. The Hound of Heaven, God is pursuing you right where you are. Get a place in your own backyard or maybe a quiet place in your own home and get with him and hear the truth and let the truth just wash over you.

Austin Gardner 24:43

Well, I think what we'll do is take a break right here and do another podcast. I think we definitely want you to talk about what did you call it, blockages?

MIke Pennington 24:51

Yeah, blockage, the in the enemies of uh of belovedness.

Austin Gardner 24:55

Okay. How about if next uh session you dig into that? So if you're listening, you cannot miss tomorrow's podcast. Because I think you've heard you've heard wonderful truths. Not that Mike's wonderful or I'm wonderful, but our father's wonderful. And he loves you right now, right where you're by the way, if you are the sheep that ran away out of just being a dumb sheep, he's right there with you. If you're the lost coin hidden in the dirt, you still have value and he still loves you. If you're a son that went a long ways off, I just want you to know we are chased, pursued by mercy. All of us. I'm not a believer. Oh, don't worry. He is love, so he can't quit loving you. So I look forward to talking to you tomorrow. Thank you for listening, and I will be back with you uh tomorrow. God bless everyone of you.