I don’t rate books based on stars or numbers. I tend to classify them mentally more in terms of books: “to avoid,” “not worth your time,” “good for a specific person or season,” or “everyone should prioritize reading this.” It’s not as memorable or clean as the stars approach, but it’s how I think about books (especially as a pastor who views recommended resources as part of shepherding).
Glenna Marshall’s newest book, Known & Loved: Experiencing the Affection of God in Psalm 139, would be in the “everyone should prioritize reading it” class. The structure (Psalm 139) and style (deeply personal and deeply biblical) root the reader in Scripture with the aim of seeing just how much God’s knowledge of us and love for us can change our everyday life.
She states her goal clearly: “to understand the blessing of being known and loved by God so we can live confidently in His knowledge and love” (24). Part of that confidence springs from understanding how a holy God can truly love a sinful people, a question Glenna answers throughout the book from multiple angles. God’s knowledge of us and love for us is based on the Son He sent for us. The gospel holds together God’s transcendent holiness with His nearness and love.
The chapters move section by section through Psalm 139, wringing out the goodness and truth from David’s beloved psalm. “Psalm 139 proclaims what it means to be fully known by God but in a way that brings comfort, joy, and peace rather than shame, doubt, and fear” (14). Psalm 139 accomplishes this feat because it “celebrates all the ways God intimately knows us, stays near us, is invested in our lives, and suffuses our lives with meaning. After grappling with His omniscience and steadfast love, we must respond with faith. We must believe that we are known and loved, and we must live like we’re known and loved” (145).
Here are three (of several) reasons why I recommend Known & Loved.
1) It’s a focused meditation on one passage.
Sometimes it’s nice to vacation and constantly be on the move so you can cover a lot of ground. I loved touring New England a few years ago and being in a new state every other day. But sometimes it’s nice to stay place in one city or state and feel like you really get to know it well. Similarly, sometimes it’s nice to read books that trace a theme across Scripture’s entire storyline (like God’s dwelling among us) or that center around a topic (like sanctification), but I also really appreciate a book that sits in one chapter of the Bible. It helps me get to know one passage well rather than bouncing around the Bible but never feeling anchored anywhere specific.
Known & Loved is a focused, sustained meditation of Psalm 139. It does bring in the rest of Scripture, and it’s really strong on natural gospel connections from the NT, but each chapter focuses on one small section of from just one psalm. It’s biblical meditation in practice. It offers the reader a chance to sit in a passage, mull it over, consider it from multiple angles, and soak it in until it gets in your bones
A couple similar books I’ve really enjoyed would be David Gibson’s The Lord of Psalm 23 and Ray Ortlund’s book on Romans 8, Supernatural Living for Natural People. Although Psalm 139 might not be as well-known as Psalm 23 or Romans 8, Glenna’s book helps us cherish and chew on this beautiful psalm of David. We need more books like this that can take us deeper because they stay put in one chapter, story, or passage of Scripture.
2) It’s both robust and relatable
Glenna’s books stand out to me as great examples of including both depth of biblical insight with depth in personal transparency. What I mean by that is she’s able to write in a way that is full of sound teaching without it feeling like an impersonal commentary or impractical lecture. She includes several stories from her own life, but rather than these getting in the way or feeling drawn out, they give evidence to how she learned and practiced these truths personally. Her stories illustrate and apply biblical teaching while keeping God’s Word as the star of the show.
This is harder to do than it sounds. Some books feel very personal. You really get to know the author through their stories and anecdotes. But sometimes, the stories feel like the meat of the chapter and the teaching feels like a side dish tossed in in. Other books are strong on teaching, exegesis, and sound doctrine, and yet they feel so impersonal and abstract that you put the book down without any clue of how the truth applies to ordinary life. My favorite Christian books are both full of rich biblical doctrine and yet connected to the struggles and situations of 21st century life. They are well-written and relatable without losing the substantive content.
Glenna’s writings (online or in print) combine these elements so well. Part of it is that she is both a good writer (her books are clear, concise, enjoyable, and personable) while simultaneously being a really good teacher (her points are clearly connected to Scripture, faithfully apply Scripture, and help make sense of Scripture). But Known & Loved is a great example of Christian writing today that is both robust in content and relatable in style.
3) It’s God-Centered from cover to cover
One mark of a good Christian book is you know God better because of it. You grow in clarity of who He is or are reminded of specific truths, promises, or actions of God in Scripture. You’re not just reading to learn but reading to learn more about God. Known & Loved is a thoroughly God-centered that keeps the reader’s eyes on Him. At the end of every chapter, I found myself both reveling in and resting in God’s love.
You will better know the God of Scripture by reading this book. But you’ll also grasp how much God knows you, not just in the sense that He’s aware of the details of your life, but He’s fully interested and intimately invested in you. His love for you reflects a good and kind Father who takes pleasure in knowing and enjoying His children.
In fact, another strength of the book was how many practical areas of life Glenna related back to God’s love. God’s omniscience means He knows us and our circumstances comprehensively, but paired with His omnipresence, it also means He is with us and for us in that knowledge. We are both fully known and fully loved. His knowledge of us and love for us includes the trials we’re enduring, our broken bodies and failing minds, and the overwhelming burdens hidden to everyone but the God who knows us inside and out, completely and compassionately. His perfect love and absolutely sovereignty can free us from our fears and worries. He is committed to us and cares about us. God’s mercy and forgiveness covers our shame. His faithfulness and power means He will keep us and love us forever. His love is tied to His justice and holiness, so His love seeks our best, which includes His loving fatherly discipline that aims to set us free from our sin.
Loving the God of Love
God’s love isn’t cool and calculated. He delights in us. He isn’t obligated to love us but He loves to love us. We are fully known by God and His love is steadfastly set upon us. His love isn’t based on anything in us or done by us but in His purposes and pleasure in setting His love on us. Because it’s rooted in God, rather than us, it doesn’t change or fail when we do.
Known & Loved is a good book because it’s full of good news. It’s thick with the gospel. It reminds us how God has, does, and will eternally love sinners like us who become His beloved children in Christ.
10 of My Favorite Quotes
“He’s not only aware of your dark suffering, He’s the shepherd who guides you through it, protecting your heart as He walks you to the other side.”
“Your hidden suffering is seen by Him, because as our psalmist demonstrates, darkness is not dark to the Lord.”
“No matter how much research we can dig up on a troubling issue, we can’t control the outcome because we are human. We do not have the omnipotence to go along with omniscience. But God does. In addition to His strength and knowledge, He is also good. And that means we can trust Him with our scariest scenarios, our deepest fears, our most crippling anxieties.”
“Wherever you go, He is there. Whatever you try to hide, He has already seen. If your heart is His, there is no corner you can keep Him out of. He is too big and too good to leave those shadowed, shame-filled places alone. He elbows in, turning on lights and casting a beam on the places we think we can’t be free from. He exposes our sin so that we will flee from it.”
“Whatever it is you’re thinking or concerned about, you can, like David, ask the Lord to sift it. You can ask Him to reveal anything that doesn’t need to be there and to carry anything that’s too heavy for you to bear.”
“He carries your burdens, but He also corrects your sin. As often as we pray for Him to take the anxious thoughts we carry, we should also pray for Him to reveal the areas of sin we’ve missed.”
“We must see God’s love as corrective, not permissive. We must also see His correction as love, not as punishment.”
“[God’s love] goes far deeper than a sudden bloom of infatuation in response to a person’s good features or traits. Those features or traits can be quickly lost when the ugliness of temper or selfishness or envy rise to the surface. Thankfully, God’s love is more than that. He loved us in our ugliest, most unlovable state. Before we ever took a breath, He knew about all the things that make us unlovable, and He set His affections on us anyway. To be loved while you were the worst iteration of yourself is to reimagine the very idea of love itself.”
“Like the comforting hands of my mother when my fever raged, Gods nearness is a balm that binds you up with healing. He presses in because He loves you. He has dealt with your sin and He has made you His own. Rather than keeping Himself from you while you scramble to get your act together, He is invested in your life, teaching, correcting, guiding, and growing you in faith. Enjoy His comforting Presence. Take confidence in knowing that your sin was paid for at the cross and Jesus has made it possible for you to draw near to the Father without fear.”
“But this close, squeezed-in love is wound up tightly in the death of Jesus. So we must preach the gospel to ourselves over and over again to keep that love front and center. When we forget Jesus, we forget who we are. When we forget His sacrifice or grow cold to it, we forget that we are loved. We forget we are His. Paul’s praise for the certainty of God’s love in Christ helps us live known and loved. He reminds us not to forget God’s love, not to fear its loss, and to let it motivate us to walk in obedience to Him.”
photo credit to Hope Francis (Moody Publishers), taken from https://www.glennamarshall.com/tag/known-loved/
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