17: Love & the Promise (Advent: Part 4)

(0:01) Stephanie Warner: Season 4, episode 17. Hello, Father.

(0:04) Marcus Warner: Hello, daughter. Yeah, we got the red and the green.

(0:6) Stephanie Warner: Hey, we’re both Christmas today, so this is good. Merry Christmas. You are red and I am green. I know most of our community here is still listeners, but for those of you listening and not watching, we are red and green today. Spirit of the season, right? I mean, you’re just red and green all on yourself. You’ve got green behind you and everything.

(0:28) Marcus Warner: Yep, I got my bright red sweater on and you have your beautiful green dress on.

(0:37) Stephanie Warner: Oh, thanks. Well, oh my goodness, this is the last episode of 2025. Wild that we are here. We’re going to be taking a break over the holidays and we’ll be back in January. And I will tell you, my plan is for us to be back on January 12th. But if anything changes with that, I’m going to announce that on our social media. So stay tuned, especially to our On the Trail podcast Instagram account. Or if you’re in our Mighty Networks, or I’ll usually post it on our YouTube channel, and in the little community area too. So you can keep an eye on that for when we return. But yeah, we’re wrapping up. With that in mind, I just thought it would be fun, and I just started sketching out that, oh my goodness we’ve been doing so much at Deeper Walk in 2025.

And I was just looking at that we had launched the year with our Rise Above Conference. We had an online marriage conference in the spring. We launched the Deeper Walk experience with three events, one online, and two in person, all epic. We launched the Spirit and Scripture course. We launched Pastors Boot Camps. Gosh, we have had so much going on with the School of Ministry, from advanced courses, to cohorts of prayer ministry certification, and more. You trained faculty in Austria and you’re heading back to do more of that next year. Do you wanna briefly say what that was about?

(2:06) Marcus Warner: Yeah, one of our partners is TCM. They oversee 13 campuses on three continents, and Deeper Walk and heart-focused discipleship is a new partnership for them. I got a chance to train their faculty on the book Breakthrough and the five engines of emotional healing. It was good. And I’m heading back to not only teach faculty again, but I’m also going to be teaching doctoral students. And also there’s going to be a gathering for Ukrainian pastors who have been scattered because of the war. There’s going to be a gathering of them that I’m going to have an opportunity to interact with. So big stuff is coming up in Austria this April.

(2:52) Stephanie Warner: That’s amazing, that’s amazing. And also, as you mentioned Breakthrough, that’s another thing. We launched the Understanding Breakthrough class which is a school ministry thing too. And we joined in with other’s events, like podcasts or things where you made guest appearances. I’m also thinking we had the Trauma Healing Center event. We had the Disciple Making Forum event. We had the Hope Together conference. We did our Walk in the Spirit conference with Asherita Ciuciu. Your Bible, Your Brain, and You event with Jim Wilder and more. Okay, I’m gonna stop trying to summarize. There was a lot this year. It was fun. I hope it was helpful to everyone and hey, we’re not gonna stop. We’ve got a lot planned and a lot still in the planning for next year and beyond.

So I did want to just take this moment, one more time for the year, to invite you to partner with us in all of this wonderfulness that we are getting to partner with God in. As we are spreading heart-focused discipleship and helping to make it the norm to Christians and churches everywhere. We just invite you to prayerfully consider joining us in your end of year donations. And you can find more on how to donate at deeperwalk.com/donate. Anything you want to add there, Father?

(4:18) Marcus Warner: Well, on top of that, I get to speak at a whole lot of churches and meet a whole lot of great people. You hear a lot of wonderful stories from folks. In fact, just before we got on, I saw another email of somebody who came across the free video series, Understanding the Wounded Heart on YouTube. She prayed through the prayers and met Jesus in a memory and said, I didn’t know this was possible. It completely reinterpreted her way of looking at what had happened. She described it as a phenomenal breakthrough in her life. That’s kind of why we do this, right? We just want to see more and more people experiencing breakthrough, experiencing greater freedom, and growing deeper in their walk with God. And so stories like that make it all worthwhile.

(5:08) Stephanie Warner: Mm-hmm. Amen. Well, hey, for Advent, we’ve been going through our Abrahamic covenant of promise series. And this week is all about love. So we are going to be looking more at the aspect of love and specifically the gospel in the promise. So, Father, would you take it from there?

(5:33) Marcus Warner: Absolutely, as we have pointed out in Galatians 3:8, the Apostle Paul talks about the promises that the gospel preached in the Old Testament. And it’s a new idea for some people.The same gospel preached in the New Testament was actually preached in the Old Testament ahead of time, but it was preached as a promise of what was going to come. And we think about this promise that all nations on earth would be blessed through Abraham’s family line, and specifically through, “the seed.” There was going to be, “a seed” that was coming and this one singular seed, Jesus, he was going to do something so spectacular that it was going to open the door to blessing to all nations.

And we see that started at the cross and it’s going to continue and be completed when he returns someday. And that’s why that continues to be the blessed hope of the Christian, the future coming of Christ. And it’s interesting because Christmas also is a great time to dwell on the second coming. In fact, a lot of our Christmas songs actually overlap on those themes, because when you think about the first coming of Christ, you also think about the second coming of Christ. And what you realize is that whether  it’s the promise, whether it’s the first coming,or whether it’s the second coming, all of these things are motivated because God loved us so much. He wanted us to be in relationship with him. He wanted us to experience belonging. He wants joy to be normal. He wants peace to be normal. He wants those things for us. He wants us to experience tastes of it now and an eternity of it in the age to come. So I look at all this and it’s all motivated because he loves us. And if it wasn’t for love, none of this would be happening. And so, yeah, everything about this is going to remind us that God loves us.

(7:33) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, he made this promise and he fulfilled the promise at great cost to himself because he loves us. We pulled out a couple of scripture references that I would love to read as we are discussing this. So Galatians 3:8, “And the scripture foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham saying, in you shall all the nations be blessed.” We talked at the start of the series about blessing to and blessing through. Would you want to pick that conversation back up?

(8:05) Marcus Warner: So there were three blessings to Abraham specifically that he would have seed, that would be a family. That he would have land, so they’d have a place to live. And they would be uniquely in relationship with God. He said, I will be your God and you will be my people. And then there was a blessing through Abraham, and that is the blessing you just read. That through Abraham, all nations on earth would be blessed. And so that’s the covenant in a nutshell that we’ve been unpacking through this Advent season.

(8:36) Stephanie Warner: And then John 15:13, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.”

(8:44) Marcus: Yeah, so we talk about the connection between the promise and love, and it is not hard to connect the dots. How hard it is just sometimes to get along with people in our lives. And it is hard to get along with some people, it just is. And there are sometimes that there have been differences that have created fractures in the relationships and brokenness in the relationships. And not all of those things can get fixed by us. Sometimes it takes time. But God’s love is such, that at the heart of God’s love is reconciliation, and he longs for reconciliation. He loves it when there’s reconciliation in this life.

Everything that he is doing through the covenant and through the promise, through the new covenant fulfillment of the promise. Everything that he is doing is to bring reconciliation into broken relationships. When you look at a broken world and you look at the broken relationships that are created by this world, what God is doing in the covenants of the Bible, and what is illustrated there, is him taking steps to reconcile that which has been separated. To redeem that which has been broken. And all of that is because he loves us so deeply.

(10:16) Stephanie: Which leads us to Romans 8:32, “He who did not spare his own son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?”

(10:26) Marcus: Yeah, it’s one of my favorite verses. Because sometimes you get afraid. What if God doesn’t provide this time? What if God doesn’t come through this time? You know, maybe I haven’t done enough. I have to remind myself routinely that everything we do is in response to God. Like we love him because he first loved us and his love towards us is what we’re responding to. And the God who did not withhold his own son, but freely gave him up for us all, I can trust that, God. I can trust him to not keep my life free from suffering, but go with me through that because even Jesus wasn’t free from suffering. But I can trust him to provide what I need and for his grace to be sufficient. And so it’s a helpful thing to meditate routinely on this idea of how deep and wide, how vast and high. How long is, and all the adjectives you want to put in there, the love of God for those who are in Christ Jesus.

(11:39) Stephanie: That takes us just so nicely right back into the story of Abraham and Isaac.   God’s covenant with them and how this analogy was on full display of love.

(11:57) Marcus: Absolutely. So the singular event that is probably most associated with the promise is an event called the binding of Isaac. And it’s called the binding of Isaac because he wasn’t sacrificed. They didn’t go all to that point. Abraham was told, I want you to take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love. And I want you to go on this three day journey to the mountains of Moriah and offer him to me as a whole burnt offering. And that is just a remarkable request at many levels. And the point here is that only God has the right to make a request like that. Like I gave you life, I can take that life. He’s making a request like that. But he’s doing more than just testing him. He’s also testing whether or not Abraham believes the promise. Because God had already promised that Isaac was the seed through which his family would be built.

And that family that would be built was going to be the vehicle through which blessing was coming to the nations. Like everything in the promise hinged on Isaac getting married and having children. And so here’s Isaac not yet married and God saying, I want you to offer him as a sacrifice. And for Abraham, this wasn’t just the pain of you want me to kill my own son? It was the pain of the confusion shall we say of, wait a second, you made all these promises about Isaac? And so he’s working this through in his mind and comes to the conclusion that, well, God must be going to raise him from the dead. Because Abraham believed that God would keep his word so profoundly. His faith that God was going to keep the promise was so deep that he said, even if I kill Isaac, I know that God will be raising him from the dead. Because he is going to get married, he’s gonna have kids, and all this is going to happen yet in his life, because God has promised it.

It’s easy for us to get hung up just on the moral dilemma that people talk about with this, but I think at some level what’s going on here is, do I trust God to keep His word? And then the way that this all plays out is really just an allegory of what God Himself is going to do. And He’s saying, Abraham, I’m not actually asking you to do something I am not willing to do myself. In fact, I am not going to stop the knife from coming down on my son. I am going to allow the beating. I’m going to allow the crucifixion. I’m going to allow the taunting, the betrayal, and all of these things, so that he fully drinks from the cup of the human experience of suffering.That nobody can look at Jesus and say, you don’t get it. You don’t understand. You don’t understand what it’s like to be human.

But he fully participated in that and God did not stay his hand. And so we see the love of God for Abraham, that he asked him to do something very hard, but at the last minute he stopped it. But in his own case, he didn’t. He let it go through. And in his own case, he did rely on raising his son from the dead to fulfill all the promises that hinged on him. And so Jesus faced a similar dilemma to Abraham, and Isaac, both. He was going to the cross knowing that God has promised that he would do these things for him, but nobody’s ever actually put this to the test before. We don’t often think about it, but in his humanity, Jesus still had to have faith. And he still had to trust that God was going to keep his promise and that this was all going to be worth it.

(16:16) Stephanie: So we talked through this story a little bit during our Bible study series several episodes ago. One of the things that we also talked about there was Isaac and Jesus and their participation in it too, that they could have backed out. They could have fought. So it’s just a very interesting story. But the point for today is definitely on this idea of love and gospel.

(16:50) Marcus: Yeah, and as hard as this was, there was only one reason for it to happen, and that was God’s love. And that’s why we read over and over, for God so loved the world that he sent his one and only son. All of these things, that in his love he predestined the whole plan. He predestined that this was going to take place.That his son was going to come and make provision, that those who were in Christ would receive all of these blessings. It was all forethought and that plan came out of love. And it was executed with wisdom. It was executed with power. It was executed in a lot of ways, but its motivation and its ultimate goal was always love. That we would experience the love of God more fully. That’s the message of Christmas.

(17:38) Stephanie: It is, it is. I was just looking at the time and trying to decide, do you want to give a quick recap of Kierkegaard’s story?

(17:52) Marcus: When I think about the gospel as a love story, the first story that comes to my mind is Soren Kierkegaard, he was a Danish philosopher. He was in a constant battle with the state church in his country because they had made religion this very perfunctory thing, that didn’t have much to do with the heart. And he’s like, you have to understand the gospel at its heart is a love story. And he told a story that’s called The King Who Loved a Humble Maiden. And I tell this story in my book, Toward a Deeper Walk for people who want to read it a little bit more. But it is the idea that there was a king who went in disguise out into his kingdom and he met a young lady and he fell in love with her.

And so he made sure to come into that town and he presented himself as a carpenter. He would do odd jobs and eventually he won her heart. It got to the point where she had decided, yes, I want to marry this young man. There’s something special about him. And it was only then that he revealed his true identity as the king. He knew that he could have overwhelmed them and he could have forced her to marry him. He could have made all this happen, but he wanted to woo her and he wanted to win her heart. And that’s the gospel in a nutshell. God loved us so much that he emptied himself of all the royal powers and he became human. He entered into our world and he did it all for one reason, so that we could have a life together forever. And that’s the ultimate love story.

(19:43) Stephanie: So how can we meditate on this practice and this teaching of love during Advent here as we enter our Christmas season robustly?

(19:53) Marcus: It helps me to remember that this was all predetermined,.God had this in his heart from the beginning and these things don’t happen by accident. The whole point of everything we go through is that in the end God wants a love that will last forever. And it’s one of the reasons I think why we love, love stories, and love romances. They touch something deep in our heart that longs to be known, to be loved, and to experience a deep, long, meaningful connection forever. And there’s something that eternity brings to this as well. So there’s just so many elements here to meditate on.

And it’s also the absence of love and the lack of it is the most painful thing that we experience as humans. When we love someone who doesn’t love us and when there doesn’t seem to be love available for us. Like, sometimes it feels like everybody experiences love but me. And God’s like, no, this is a love that’s for everybody and it’s something that we can have forever. There are just so many angles that you almost won’t run out of them as you begin meditating on how does God express his love to me through the gospel story.

(21:14) Stephanie: Mm-hmm. Beautiful. Well, I want to give one more invitation and then ask for your final thoughts on the Advent series. And then I would love for you to close us out in prayer. So before we wrap up this episode, I just want to remind everyone, my last call. If you are excited about the things that Deeper Walk is doing, if you love being On the Trail and wanna press on into 2026, we invite you to consider joining us with an end of year donation. I was even just thinking about the testimony Dad, you were sharing earlier, about the Understanding the Wounded Heart free videos.

That was a completely donor funded project that was available and people are continuing to experience life change from it, and it’s wonderful. So thank you everyone. Thank you everyone who’s already donated. Thank you everyone who gives us encouragement, who’s on our prayer team, who prays with us and all the things. We see you, we love you. Thank you. And all right, Father, any final thoughts for the Advent series?

(22:26) Marcus: Well, if you think about it, Advent is symbolized by four candles and a wreath. And these candles are, let me make sure I get them correct. The candles are our hope, peace, joy, and love. And they all point to love and they all flow out of love. And it’s because the love of God is the source of our hope. It gives us peace as we put our faith in it and it’s the source of joy. And so I look at all of this and it all connects together and that’s why I love Advent. It’s a wonderful opportunity to revisit the foundations of the Christian faith. To revisit the core things of what this is really all about and what our relationship with God is really all about.

And it’s an opportunity to take stock and say, maybe it’s time for me to cut out some other things that I’m getting too busy with and to refocus on these foundational things. Love comes to life in our hearts and through that love, all the other things flow. And so as I think about Advent, those are the things that come to mind.

(23:40) Stephanie: Thank you. Oremos. Shall we pray?

(23:44) Marcus: Father God, we are grateful for the Christmas season, not only for the joy that it can bring, but also for the provision that you grant to each one of us. I pray especially for your provision for those people who have real needs right now. They’ve got relational needs. They’ve got financial needs, they’ve got other kinds of needs right now. God, would you just show that you are a God who can be trusted to provide, and that your provision would be abundant?

I pray God that you would help each one of us to recognize what we need to say, no to so that we can say, yes to those things that are truly foundational and core. Those things that are truly satisfying and not just temporarily pleasurable. And most of all God, we thank you that you loved us so much that you sent your son Jesus. That we might be reconciled to you, and that we can look forward to life, and life eternal because of your love for us. And it’s in Christ’s name we pray all these things, Amen.

(25:00) Stephanie: Amen, and Merry Christmas.

(25:01) Marcus: Merry Christmas.