Susie Larson at Ocean City Tabernacle

Remember God

You Missed Something Extraordinary

Every once in a while a speaker takes the Ocean City Tabernacle stage and the room shifts in a way that is hard to explain after the fact. The morning of July 26th was one of those mornings.

Susie Larson, national radio host and author, opened her message with a title — Remember God — and a warning: if we forget God, we forget who we are, we tell our story incorrectly, and we cannot flourish in the calling God has given us. Then, with remarkable courage and pastoral precision, she spent the next hour showing the room exactly what it looks like when a life is rebuilt around remembering him.

This was the 8:30 AM Traditional Service. It did not feel like anything traditional about it in the best possible way. The full service is available on the Ocean City Tabernacle YouTube channel and it is worth your full attention, a box of tissues, and a notebook.

Who Is Susie Larson?

Susie Larson is a national radio host, speaker, and author who has been bringing the Gospel to women across America for decades. She hosts Live the Promise with Susie Larson on Faith Radio, reaching listeners in markets nationwide. She is the author of more than a dozen books, including Fully Alive, Your Powerful Prayers, and Closer Than Your Next Breath.

She arrived at the Ocean City Tabernacle on July 26th carrying an advance copy of her newest book — More Than You Can Imagine — with a foreword by Lee and Leslie Strobel, not yet released to the public. The Tabernacle had early copies for its congregation, a first for Susie.

But what she really brought to the Tabernacle stage was the kind of testimony that can only come from someone who has walked through extraordinary darkness and come out — not unscathed, but deeply rooted. This was not a motivational speech. It was a witness.

“If You Forget God, You Forget Who You Are”

Susie opened with the thesis that shaped everything that followed: we remember God first because he is worthy of our praise, but also because memory of who God is is the only thing that keeps us anchored to who we are. “It’s impossible to flourish in your God-given calling if you forget God,” she said. “If you forget him, you forget yourself in the bigger story. You forget who you are, whose you are, and how mighty God is.”

She grounded the challenge in Psalm 145’s call to be thinking about God’s works, rehearsing them, speaking about them. The enemy, she said, would love nothing more than for the church to become ho-hum about this God — the one who merely breathes and the bottom of the ocean can be seen, the one at whose presence the earth trembles and the trees clap their hands.

She quoted Dr. Rob Reimer, a regular guest on her radio program: “What you believe about yourself and others will shape how you live. But it isn’t enough to have the knowledge of the truth. Your life must be built upon this foundational truth, and it must be deeply integrated into your daily existence. You need to build your life on the foundation of who God says you are — and this is your identity in Christ.”

“You will tell your story incorrectly if you forget God. And truly, you cannot live out your God-given calling if you forget him and what he is like.”

A Story That Explains Why She Talks Like She Does

Susie had told the congregation she didn’t have time to tell her full backstory. But she gave enough of it that the room understood why every word she speaks about identity, fear, and the goodness of God carries the weight that it does.

She grew up in a large family of seven children in a denomination where she knew, viscerally, that God was real — but where the Gospel was not preached. She didn’t know she needed a Savior. Her father was the mayor of their city. Her family was visible.

At nine years old, she was assaulted in the laundry room of her home by four of her brother’s friends. She told no one — terrified of bringing scandal on her family, uncertain whether it was her fault. “I shoved it into the basement of my soul,” she said. “But you can’t do that with trauma. It will affect your body, your health, your mind.” She became a fearful, insecure child.

At ten, walking home from school and seeing those same bikes in front of her house, she made a vow to herself. She took a different route across the baseball fields. A group of boys ran her down, knocked her to the ground, and beat her badly — laughing as they walked away. When they were done, she heard a voice, not audible but unmistakable: “I can get to you anytime, anywhere. And God will never stop me.”

“At that moment,” she said quietly, “I knew the devil was real.”

“The devil’s threat to you is very connected to your threat to him. He goes after you before you know your potential and tries to dismantle your sense of identity. That’s what happened with me.”

“I Knew I Was Saved. I Didn’t Know I Was Loved.”

She came to Christ in eighth grade — sneaking to a Bible study in the next town over, lying about where she was going, falling in love with Jesus and with the Word of God in a way she had never experienced.

But there was a gap between knowing she was forgiven and knowing she was loved. She carried the identity hole into adulthood — joining gymnastics, singing in the choir, staying busy, using her gifts to manage people’s opinions and prop herself up rather than from a place of security.

“When you don’t know who you are,” she told the room, “you will misuse your time and treasure and talents to prove something that Jesus has already proven.” Many Christians, she said, know they are saved but have not let that truth reach the place where they live. They use gifts to manage, to perform, to earn — rather than to give from the overflow of a loved and grounded soul.

She told the story of meeting her future husband Kevin at a Christian singles retreat — and the mortifying first impression she made on his parents, who had adored his previous girlfriend. Tripping on a step, her backpack sailing over her head to hit her future mother-in-law, falling at the woman’s feet, she looked up from the floor to hear her first words: “Honey, her socks don’t match.” The room laughed. Susie let them — and then turned it back to the point. She was still trying to earn her place in a story where she already belonged.

“I knew I was saved. I didn’t know I was loved. And so I used those gifts to manage people’s opinions, to prop myself up — to dig myself out of the identity hole I felt I was in.”

Three Things That Keep Us Out of the Promised Land

Turning to Psalm 106:7 in the Amplified Bible, Susie drew three lessons from Israel’s failure to enter the Promised Land — failures she said still mark the church today.

First: they did not understand or appreciate God’s miracles. They had a front-row seat to signs and wonders in Egypt and the wilderness — and they became numb to them. Susie’s counsel: if you are in between miracles, borrow one from Scripture. Borrow one from your own history. Borrow one from a friend. She pointed to Rahab — a woman who left her vocation, her location, and her people to follow a God she couldn’t see, based on stories of miracles that happened before she was born. That single gesture of faith was enough for God to graft her into the lineage of Christ.

Second: when God’s answers finally came to the Israelites, the answers did not benefit them — because faith had not been cultivated in the waiting. Susie was direct: “I shudder to think of how many answers I’ve cried out to God about — raging symptoms, medical bills — but I’ve done nothing about my heart in the time in between. So when the answer comes, I don’t even see it when it arrives, because it falls flat.” The invitation in the waiting, she said, is always to prepare your heart to receive what God is bringing.

Third: they did not imprint God’s loving kindness on their hearts. This one, she said, took her the longest to learn — and a health crisis finally forced her to.

“When you cry out to God, work on your faith in the meantime. What else does God want you to believe him for? There are things God wants to bless you with that he wants to bring — but we’re not ready for them. We think God is holding out on us. But just maybe we are holding out on him.”

Building a Case for the Goodness of God — Through the Darkest Season

Ten years ago, Susie’s health collapsed. She had been managing cyclical symptoms of chronic Lyme for years, but then discovered she had been unknowingly exposed to black mold — and had developed seven areas of brain damage. She was on the radio live when her tongue and chin began going numb. She forgot words mid-sentence. She forgot how to spell while writing her latest book. At night, stroke-like neurological surges would wake her.

“There were times,” she said, “where I told God: you either have to kill me or heal me. Because I can’t keep going on like this.”

A close friend came to her and said: “Susie, the light has gone out of your eyes. You’re living bracing for impact, waiting for the next shoe to drop.” And Susie recognized the truth of it.

“I had turned away from noticing his goodness. You cannot live with locked elbows, waiting for the next hard thing to happen, and simultaneously live with open hands, worshiping with a holy expectancy that God is going to be good. You can’t have faith in the devil’s badness and faith in God’s goodness at the same time.”

So she began — quietly, deliberately — to build a case for the goodness of God. Not denying her circumstances. Not performing gratitude. But sincerely cataloguing what she would miss if it were gone tomorrow. Month by month, her husband Kevin noticed something shifting. Her eyes looked different. Her skin looked different. Physiologically, she later came to understand, the body responds to worship and trust — cells literally open up. She went on to write Waking Up to the Goodness of God: 40 Days Toward Healing and Wholeness out of that season.

She closed this section with a testimony that stopped the room: a woman given a stage four cancer diagnosis — told there was nothing more medicine could do — was given Susie’s book in the hospital. She began to believe that God was good. She said she felt her cells change. She left the hospital. She pursued integrative health. She is healed. She went back to that hospital with a stack of the book and handed them out.

“You can’t have faith in the devil’s badness and faith in God’s goodness at the same time. So I started to make a case for the goodness of God — and over time, my body was healing from the inside out.”

The Woman at the Well — and the Mirror It Holds Up

As she moved toward her closing, Susie showed a clip from The Chosen — the scene of the Woman at the Well from John 4. She asked the congregation to watch the woman’s furrowed brow.

“I’ve lived like that for so long,” she said. And in the clip, that brow loosens — as Jesus, who knows everything about her story, does not condemn her but sees her, names her, and offers her living water.

The parallel to Susie’s own journey was unmistakable. A woman who felt outside the circle. Who carried shame she didn’t deserve and made choices out of a wounded identity. Who was seen and known by Jesus — not in spite of her story, but precisely through it.

“God loves you so much,” she told the room. “And I believe there are some here today whose trauma is still telling their story. Or their past sin is still telling their story. Or their current disappointment is dominating the narrative. And the Lord is inviting you to flip the script — not to deny those things, but to tell a better story.”

“Sometimes the very things we are telling ourselves are the things that are weakening us. God is writing an amazing story. And you get to play a part in it.”

How Much Real Estate Will You Give Him?

Susie closed with Ephesians 3:20-21 — the passage she called the clincher: “God is able to do exceedingly, abundantly above and beyond all we could ever dare to ask or imagine.” But the verse doesn’t stop there.

“According to his work within you,” she said. “He wants to. He will do. He can do. But how much access will you give him? How much real estate will you give him? Because whatever you’re not surrendering to God, the enemy is occupying in one way or another.”

She closed with prayer — asking God to show the congregation the lies they picked up when life let them down, to fill them with expectancy, and to help them perceive the new things God is doing right now, in the present moment, even in the middle of the hard season.

“Whatever you are not surrendering to God, the enemy is occupying in one way or another. God is able to do exceedingly, abundantly above and beyond — according to his work within you.”

A Closing Word — and a Room That Responded

Susie closed with the prayer that had opened the service — and it was the right bookend. “God in heaven, holy is your name. Your kingdom come and your will be done on earth, in this place, in our hearts as it is in heaven. Show us the lies we picked up when life let us down. Help us to tell a more redemptive story. Fill us with an expectancy that you are up to something good.”

It was the kind of morning that invites you to take stock of what story you have been telling yourself — and whether that story is true, or whether it is the one the enemy has been whispering since you were too young to know better.

The Ocean City Tabernacle’s 2026 summer season has featured some of the finest preaching and testimony this stage has seen. But July 26th was something else. It was a woman who has walked through fire, built a case for the goodness of God in the ruins, and come back to tell the rest of us what she found there. It was Susie Larson saying, from a place of hard-won conviction: I know my God. And he is not who the enemy says he is.

The full service is available on the Ocean City Tabernacle YouTube channel. Watch it. And then share it with someone whose light has gone out of their eyes.

Watch the Full Service — Ocean City Tabernacle on YouTube

If you missed Susie Larson’s message in person, the full service is available now on the Ocean City Tabernacle’s official YouTube channel. Watch it, share it, and come back next Sunday.

Watch Susie Larson: “Remember God” — youtube.com/@OceanCityTabernacle

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