This world is constantly bombarding us with lies. You aren’t good enough, strong enough, smart enough, pretty enough — you are not enough. These lies come from the enemy…but also from ourselves. Defining our worth is difficult. It’s our nature to want to fill our minds with lies like these, that we are not worthy.
Defining Your Worth – Debunking Lies with God’s Truth with Mary DeMuth
In her new book, Worth Living, Mary DeMuth debunks the lies that we so often tell ourselves and replaces it with God’s truth. She answers the question, “Am I enough?” There are so many standards we place on ourselves to live up to, yet, as her book reminds us, we are really only supposed to be living for God.
God loves us. Just as we are. It really is that simple. I can’t wait for you to listen to this interview with Mary. This episode is going to be another fan favorite.
On a “Simply” & “Joyful” side note…
I love hearing from Titus 2 women about how they have learned to simplify. Their responses are so often just what my heart needs to hear. I think you’ll enjoy hearing from Mary about how her secret to simplifying starts with contentment.
Get ready for a great interview — and get your own Simply Joyful Podcast mug HERE!
In This Episode…
In this episode, Mary and I talk about her new book Worth Living. Worth Living debunks all the lies we tell ourselves while bringing the “audacious truths.” Mary is a full time writer and speaker who talks about God’s restoring process. She has three older kids and her family lives in the Dallas area. I know you will be so encouraged by this episode!
Highlights from This Show…
- Mary talks about how growing up in a difficult environment made her wrestle with her question of what she was worth in light of her upbringing.
- Mary shares a little bit about her past. She was raised in a home that she would not want to duplicate later—which made her a very stressed out and anxious parent.
- I ask Mary what she things are some of the main unhealthy things that women tend to do to fill God shaped holes in their lives. Mary says that there are so many things we look for to fill us up and eventually we come to acknowledge that nothing and no one can fill us up except for Jesus. All the lies we run for are incomplete gods and will never ever, ever satisfy us.
- “It gets frustrating for people because they get mad at God for things that don’t satisfy them, but in actuality, they haven’t made that decision to first go to Him for their ultimate satisfaction.” – Mary DeMuth
- I bring up a line from Mary’s book that she used to describe herself. Scared and scarred. She also uses Philippians 3 sharing how we need to forget what’s behind and strain towards the future. I ask how Mary encourages people to not just get over not the victim mentality, but how to move forward from the past.
- “I think we have become guilty of not letting God be the creative God that He is. We look backward and see the way He has worked and then we pray to Him and prescribe to Him what we want Him to do in the future or the present and it looks a lot like what He did in the past.” -Mary DeMuth
- “You might have a tragedy and it is worth lamenting; you see throughout Scripture that lamenting is important…but eventually, we have to move beyond it and think about our future as this ‘epic to anticipate.’” – Mary DeMuth
- I ask Mary when and where she saw God changing “her storm into a story.” Mary said a lot of her healing came during college when she just cried for four years and told people her story—people who were Christians and prayed for her. When her daughter turned five, the same age that she was herself when she was raped, she fell apart and got more counseling—during which there was more healing. In the past couple of years, Mary says she has been exploring what trauma does to the soul; she went to revisit the place where the violations happened and afterwards she was throwing up for hours and hours; she acknowledges that the trauma is still inside of her.
- “It’s a process and it takes a long time and I know it gets frustrating and that’s okay, it’s normal, but we have to pursue healing. We cannot just sit on the couch and expect God to zap us with healing; we have to want it.” – Mary DeMuth
- “Jesus said to the paralytic, ‘do you want to get well,’ and I think He asks that of us. I think our dysfunction and our pain and our past oftentimes becomes our comfort zone; it’s what we know, even though it’s creepy and terrible and awful.” – Mary DeMuth
- “It is worth the pursuit even when sometimes it feels really long.” – Mary DeMuth
- “I think it’s so important for people to see that even when they don’t have a traumatic past, they have a tremendous future if they focus on where God is taking them.” – Kristi Clover
- “Regardless of what your past is, God wants you to do big things.” – Kristi Clover
- I say that in Mary’s book, she targeted 10 lies and replaced them with 10 truths. Being a people pleaser, I think that if I’m not encouraging people, I’m not pleasing them. I ask Mary why she thinks it is that we are so preoccupied in this world with trying to meet other people’s’ expectations. Mary says that we bend over backwards to keep conflict at bay and that doing so is fueled by insecurity. A good question to ask ourselves is how we would have lived differently if we knew and believed that we were loved.
- “The more I understand God’s love and the more I grasp how wide, how deep, how high it is, the less I am concerned what people think of me, the less it matters to me.” – Mary DeMuth
- I bring up a part in Mary’s book where she says that God smiles when we rest. Mary says that in the rat race of ministry during the busy days of church planting, her family set aside a day of the week to rest. Even her grown up children know that it’s important to pull away from all the lies and activity that keeps going and stop to listen to our hearts and simply rest in God. I mention that when I first started a blog, it was an activity of rest for me, something I could do to unwind (though now I need to take a break from it for real rest once in a while).
- I ask Mary what she thinks what the most challenging and healing part of writing the book was for her. Mary says the greatest struggle is to understand that God loves her. It’s so easy to say, but it’s another thing to receive it and to live within it. She said part of writing the book was exploring the why behind that. She says she is still a victim of what culture declares is beautiful and that she always needs to remind herself that she is fearfully and wonderfully made and that it’s still hard shaking hands with the person in the mirror.
- “We all waste so much time on all these petty things that the world tells us we’re supposed to be paying attention to.” – Kristi Clover
- I ask Mary what is one message that she hopes women take away from reading her book. Mary replies, “That Christ is sufficient and that He is all you need.”
- ‘We waste time trying to prove our worth in a hundred different ways and we don’t need to.’ —Mary DeMuth
Please Note…
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Connect with Mary DeMuth…
Mary DeMuth is a former church planter in France and the author of more than thirty books, including The Day I Met Jesus. A sought-after speaker and longtime blogger, she has overcome (through Jesus’s healing) a difficult past to become an authentic example of what it means to live a brand new story. She lives in Texas with her family. Learn more at www.marydemuth.com.
You can check out Mary’s books HERE on Amazon! Be sure to visit her site as well at www.marydemuth.com.
*And don’t miss her awesome podcast:
Re-Story Show
Thank you, Rend Collective for allowing me to use your incredible song “The Joy of the Lord is My Strength”!
(This podcast is by Kristi Clover. Discovered by Christian Podcast Central and our community — copyright is owned by the publisher, not Christian Podcast Central, and audio is streamed directly from their servers.)