God Is at Work in the Next Generation

Dannah Gresh: At Kansas University, several young women began a new chapter of their lives unaware that God was pursuing their hearts!

Karisa Anderson Kirkendall: I came into college not really that interested in investigating my faith, I was actually wanting to do the college scene.

Jena Parker: I came into college kind of thinking about pursuing my faith, but also was very interested in pursuing the college lifestyle.

Karisa: I didn’t think that God and college really went together . . . 

Haley Ryan: I dove headfirst into all the things college had to offer.

Karisa: . . . but then quickly saw the emptiness of that . . .

Haley: I was really experiencing a lot of the consequences from my own—just sin and choices—and feeling really broken and empty.

Karisa: “There must be something else out there.” I didn’t know it would be Jesus, but I’m grateful for someone that pointed me to the truth of that.

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Heaven Rules!, for December 28, 2023. I’m Dannah Gresh.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Dannah, I am so excited about today’s program for at least two reasons! 

Dannah: Oh, I can’t wait to hear!

Nancy: First of all, we’re going to be reminded that God is still drawing people to Himself. You know, sometimes it’s tempting to think that no one is really interested in hearing the gospel today. But this program is going to remind you of the power of Christ and His truth to reach and change lives!

You’ll see how a movement can spread when just one person shares with another the hope they have found in Jesus! Another reason I’m excited about today’s program is that we can fall into a trap of assuming that younger generations are just too far gone.

As we get older, it’s easy to point the finger and complain about all those young people and how lost they are! Well, it’s true. Everybody of every age is lost apart from Jesus. But today we’re going to hear about some of the beautiful things that God is doing in the lives of young women . . . and that excites me!

Dannah: It excites me, too, Nancy! We’re going to hear from several leaders in Student Mobilization, a ministry serving college campuses across the nation. We’re going to start by hearing from Jen Johnson. She’s the Heartland Regional Director of Student Mobilization, also known as StuMo.

Jen Johnson: I graduated from college myself back in 1998, and my life personally was impacted as a college student just from someone sharing the gospel and investing in me. I was a broadcast journalism major and was planning to go that route.

But when I graduated from college, I wanted to take a year or two years to go back onto the college campus, just to have the opportunity to share Christ with college students, like someone had shared with me. It just captured my heart, and now I’m going into my twenty-fifth year of sharing with college students.

Jena Parker: My name is Jena Parker, and I’m originally from Topeka, Kansas, and I live in Lawrence, Kansas. On the outside I was the one who looked like I had it all together. I got connected to a woman named Jen Johnson. She invited me to be in her Bible study as a sophomore in college.

She started meeting with me and sharing with me. She led me to the Lord and has discipled me ever since!

Dannah: Jen and several student leaders and staff from Student Mobilization joined us for the conference Revive ’15. The theme was Women Teaching Women.

Jen: We had used Nancy’s resources for several years, and I had always wanted to come to a conference, but we’d never had the opportunity to do that. So, about fourteen of us were able to come back in 2015.

Nancy at Revive ’15: Let me tell you ladies, truth is more powerful than anything or anyone who might oppose it! We’re swimming upstream today . . .

Jen: And so for all of us, I think it was just hugely vision casting, just to remember that there doesn’t have to be anything special about you, you just have to be available. God is going to equip you as you get to know Him. Just invest in your relationship with Him, and He’s going to use your life. He’s going to be able to impact the next generation, so it was a huge encouragement to all of us!

Nancy at Revive ’15: In the end, truth will prevail, and falsehood and those who promote it will be exposed and shut down and brought to an end.

Jen: Nancy and Robert were engaged. They gathered us in a circle and Nancy just really gave us words of life and encouragement. She really encouraged us to be women who walked with God daily. That if one day we wanted to be older godly women, to remember that the “older” comes quickly but that the “godly” is a daily pursuit. She really encouraged us to be women who knew God’s Word, who knew His truth, and dedicated our lives to it.

Jena: I think a highlight of being there was experiencing so many people outside of our context who are women helping other women with that Titus 2 mandate, wanting to receive this input from the Lord and from older women so that they could be an older woman and pass it on to younger women.

I think it was really inspiring. One huge highlight for me was the power of the Word, how powerful the Word is. When we pass that on to others—whether it’s through evangelism or discipleship—we have no idea what God’s going to do! But He’s going to accomplish what He is purposing to do in those people’s lives.

I remember leaving there thinking, Wow! I want to continue to put the Word of God in front of women’s lives!

Dannah: Nancy, do you remember the first time you met Jen and her team?

Nancy: Oh, do I ever! It was at the end of the conference, and we gathered in a big circle in a big hallway of the Indiana Convention Center. It was incredibly encouraging and I’ll say deeply moving as well to see so many young women excited about the Lord, eager to share their faith, and excited about the ministry of Revive Our Hearts and how they had been blessed by it.

We prayed with those young women, that they would live out what we had just heard at that conference, and that these young leaders would invest in and teach other women on our college campuses.

Dannah: Well, God answered that beautiful prayer! More and more women have been coming to faith in Christ on campuses in Kansas, Nebraska, and elsewhere!

Jena: I feel like just a very normal girl from the middle of Kansas. That God would even use my life to impact others, I think is really cool! I remember praying, “God, I know I have this one life and I just want You to use it in some way.” And then seeing things work before your eyes!

You read these verses in the Bible. I was like, “Yeah, okay, I want to be a ‘Paul’ that impacts a ‘Timothy’ and have those types of relationships.” And then seeing it actually happen before my eyes, that is so humbling and overwhelming at the same time.

Another word I would use to describe it is it just is very addicting, like, “Wow, how could I want to be doing anything else than getting to help other people come to know the Lord, and not just them to get a taste and see that the Lord is good, but they get a hunger for God, and that they would want to pass it on and pass it on and pass it on.”

Haley: So I grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, went to KU and came into college not wanting to grow in my faith really at all. I’m very thankful for my parents. They’re wonderful, and they’re following Jesus. But coming to college, I was ready to do the college life.

In high school I had been dabbling in living apart from God and just doing what I wanted to do, so in college I just wanted to do that even more. The second semester of my freshman year I was really experiencing a lot of the consequences from my own sin and choices. I was just feeling really broken and empty in my sin and not really knowing what to do.

Around that time, God crossed my path with a woman named Jena. I immediately knew something was different about her life.

Jena: I met Haley in February of 2015. I was actually going to hang out with another girl in her sorority and it ended up that she invited Haley to come. That’s where I met her for the first time.

Haley: She had this joy and this peace and contentment and fulfillment about her life that I did not have. I could not figure out what was different. She started sharing with me about Jesus, and it made sense that Jesus really was personal and would change a person if you were in a relationship with Him.

Jena: She was really curious and really searching for, “There’s got to be something more to life than what I’m living for.”

Haley: Over a span of a couple weeks, Jena started reading the Bible with me. Genuinely, she just cared for me and listened to me as I was going through a lot of really hard times, experiencing the brokenness from my own choices. 

Jena: We started meeting pretty regularly after that, and she had a lot of questions about faith and God, and, “How does that work in my life after all I’ve done in my past? Could God ever forgive me? I don’t feel good enough ever to come to the Lord.”

I was getting to help her to get into the Bible and listen and just process some different things that she was wrestling through. I believe it was a couple months later, in May, when she gave her life to the Lord.

It’s been such a joy to invest in her and to watch her grow and help her grow since then!

Haley: The way she cared and loved me and pointed me to the Word was the first time I really began to encounter Jesus, and He completely transformed me! It was seeing His death on the cross as the sufficient payment for the mistakes and the sin that I was currently living in.

It was the first time it really clicked that Jesus died to set me free from those things. I vividly remember telling her, “I don’t think God would want me back. I don’t think He could forgive me for the things that I’ve done, and I don’t think He would actually want to know me.”

And her being able to look me in the face and tell me that’s not true; that Jesus wanted to know me and He died for me to set me free! So I started following Jesus at the end of my freshman year of college, and then Jena discipled me throughout the rest of my time in college.

I was then able to be involved in the ministry throughout the rest of my time as a sophomore, junior, and senior years. I was just so thankful for the way someone had invested so deeply in me, helping me learn not only that I could know Jesus, but that I could also live for a purpose greater than myself, to help others know Him as well.

And so, I wanted to be able to help other girls in the same way that someone had helped me, so I decided to come on StuMo staff after I graduated from KU because I was not the girl who was going to go to church my freshman year, I was not going to go to a weekly meeting, I was not going to seek out my faith. But Jesus sought me, through Jena, so I wanted to be able to do that for other girls. 

Dannah: This is Lyndsey Mickle.

Lyndsey Mickle: I very quickly met a junior, when I was a freshman, in my sorority. Her name is Maddy, and she was involved in the ministry. She very quickly befriended me and started sharing her life and her faith with me. She invited me to come to a small group faith discussion that was happening in my sorority. That was a part of the ministry and that’s how I got involved initially.

Haley: I remember meeting Lyndsey in the fall of 2014, I believe, in her sorority house. I was actually with an older girl in her sorority named Maddy that I was discipling. I ran into Lyndsey and both of us got to become friends with her, and she started coming to our freshman small group in her sorority.

Lyndsey: It was about a month-and-a-half or two into my freshman year. I saw my sin was what was keeping me from a relationship with God. I saw that Jesus had died on the cross for my sins. After about a month of really seeing what God says in His Word about who He is, who I am, and what His plans and His purposes are for me, is when I made the decision to place my full trust in Christ and began to follow Jesus. That was November 13 of my freshman year.

Haley: Then the girl, Maddy, that I was leading at the time, started hanging out with Lyndsey and teaching her how to read the Bible and sharing the gospel with her. And when Maddy and I would meet, she’d be like, “How do I help Lyndsey? What do you think we do together? She has these questions.” 

And so getting to help Maddy process, “How do I help Lyndsey come to know the Lord?” And then she got to see Lyndsey come to know the Lord and started discipling her for the next couple of years. It’s been really fun! Now she’s following the Lord, and she’s led other girls to Christ, and some are missionaries overseas, which is really cool.

Lyndsey: So, Maddy was led to Christ and discipled by Jena, who was led and discipled by Jen, so I’m fourth in the lineage from Jen. I’m so very grateful. So it was kind of discipled into Jena, discipled into Maddy, and introduced to me!

Karisa:I came into college not really that interested in investigating my faith. I was actually more so wanting to do the college scene when I got there, but I quickly saw the emptiness of that.

Dannah: This is Karisa Anderson Kirkendall. 

Karisa: I thought that my college experience would be kind of the ultimate satisfaction of my life or the epitome of life. Then saw that it fell very short of that, leaving me disappointed. There had to be something else out there.

During spring semester of my freshman year, I met a girl who was following Jesus and involved in Student Mobilization. Through her inviting me to a Bible study and sharing the gospel with me is how I got plugged into that opportunity to grow.

I started following Jesus the summer after my freshman year, and then just completely right after that. My desires shifted; it was cool. The spotlight wasn’t as much on me anymore. God allowed for me to have a desire to want to shift the spotlight on Him, and Him be the main character in my life.

Through that, the Bible came to life more. I was craving to spend time with God, which was something I never thought would be true of me. I actually was enjoying going to things that would help grow my relationship with God, such as weekly meetings our campus ministry had, going to church.

As I started growing personally I thought, “Wow! The things I’ve gotten to experience in my personal relationship with God, I can’t help but want to have other people get to have the chance to hear these things, too, and get to experience such deep joy and purpose that I had. I couldn’t contain that to stop with me. I wanted other girls in my sorority and on the dance team to hear those things, too.

Dannah: Again, this is Haley Ryan.

Haley: Soon after coming to Christ I just could not get enough of reading the Bible. It was the first time I really was tasting and seeing that God’s Word really was truth, and it was setting me free from my life of sin before.

And so, Revive Our Hearts really played a huge role in my life after coming to Christ. I was beginning to listen to podcasts. Actually, the Thought Closet Makeover by Jennifer Rothschild was huge and very pivotal for me—just beginning to think that my mind could actually be filled with God’s truth instead of the lies that I was living in and believing before Christ.

And so then after that I just continued to listen to the podcast daily. A few podcasts were really pivotal for me, as well as different books and Bible studies that I did. The Seeking Him Bible study has been huge for me! I’ve done it a couple times now over the last couple of years.

Nancy at Revive ’15: Ladies, God is in the business of bringing the dead to life--renewing and redeeming the face of this fallen world—and He does it by means of His very breath!

Haley: Just getting to see God actually produce revival in my life . . . All the different times that I’ve done the Bible study and tilling up the fallow ground in my heart and removing sin and helping me to turn and to continue to walk in holiness . . .

I feel like the podcast, in different seasons of my life, has pointed me to truth. I’ve walked through a lot of different health struggles over the last couple of years, and I specifically went to Revive Our Hearts continuously, just searching for truth. 

I was trying to make sense out of how to understand what it would look like to live a life with a chronic autoimmune disease and medical bills and insurance. I didn’t understand. So I would just comb the depths of Revive Our Hearts for articles and blogs and podcasts about health and struggling. 

I was listening to people like Joni Eareckson Tada and other people who have struggled with chronic pain and illness over their lifetime—far greater than I’ll ever experience. That just breathed so much hope into me! Jena gave me Choosing Gratitude as I was diagnosed with my autoimmune disease. I remember getting it and thinking, Really? Choosing gratitude?

And then I read through Choosing Gratitude and realized that it really had set me free from so much bitterness I could have experienced as a result of health struggles. Specifically, I remember different series that Nancy has done over singleness that have really been pivotal for me! 

Being a single woman, I’m twenty-six—which in the grand scheme of life is not very old—but before coming to follow Jesus, the idea of being single and in my twenties terrified me! I did not want to surrender that area to God. 

But in following Jesus, seeing that His way is the truth and is the life and it is better than my plan . . . Nancy has just breathed so much wind into my sails. I feel like I have a picture of what it looks like to be a godly woman in your forties and your fifties as a single woman, if that’s how God would write my story. So, that’s been really pivotal for me as well.

I also think that some of the books over the years have not only gotten to impact me, but I’ve also gotten to see them impact the girls that I’m discipling. Lies Women Believe was huge for me. Over the years I’ve just gotten to interact with different friends on the college campus who were walking through different hardships in their own life—fatherlessness or things from their past. I recommend resources like Lies Women Believe or Choosing Forgiveness. I’ve utilized a lot of those chapters in different opportunities to get to invest and disciple truth into the women that I’m investing in. 

So, helping to cultivate truth about who God is, who we are, truth about sexuality, truth about our circumstances, our emotions.

Jen: We told Nancy that she kind of inadvertently has discipled all of us and didn’t even realize it! I got exposed to her content back in the late nineties and since then I have been using it, just even to counsel my own heart.

But then as I began leading and discipling women, I quickly will introduce them to Nancy’s resources—whether it’s her books or her podcast. And the reason I’m so committed to that is because Nancy is a woman of God’s Word and she drinks deeply of God’s Word, she knows HIs Word. 

I can have so much confidence pointing our staff and our students to any Revive Our Hearts material, because I know that it is going to be biblically solid, and their hearts are also going to be counseled with truth.

So our time with Nancy and Robert was very encouraging, very vision casting, and I think just encouraging us to continue the fight. We are going to be swimming upstream against the culture, but it’s so worth it! Dead things swim downstream; it’s worth it to swim against the stream and the culture because we know the truth. We have the truth and other people need the truth.

Lyndsey: I think one of the first things I was introduced to was The Thought Closet podcast, which was with Jennifer Rothschild.

Jennifer Rothschild: And many of the words that we say to our own souls are destructive! They do not lead to life. Many of the words we speak to our own souls are not truthful!

Lyndsey: That was extremely impactful for me, just getting to see, “What does God have to say about what is in our thoughts and how does God’s Word need to be what is dictating my thought life and the direction of my life?” That was one of the first things.

After I listened to that,I was just really hungry when I first started following Christ and was growing in my faith, and I just wanted more! Slowly over my years of following Christ, I’ve continued to listen to a lot of the podcasts and have read several books and have done the Seeking Him study.

Karisa: I was introduced by Jen to Nancy’s content very early on, and I kind of first was like, “Who is this girl? She seems a little bit older than where I’m at in life.” But right away after I listened to some of the first podcasts, I was just hooked. I was like, “Wow, this girl is all Bible!” 

And I was so grateful for that, because there are a lot of resources out there and different things I was just a little hesitant about. But with Nancy I felt so confident to get to learn from her as she really pointed to the Word every single time. Every resource she has does that!

Nancy on podcast: Brokenness is not a feeling; it is not an emotion. It is a choice!

Karisa: A talk that Nancy gave in the nineties, I think to CREW back in the day, on pride vs. brokenness. It was so big for me while I was in college! 

Nancy on podcast: It’s a lifestyle of agreeing with God about the true condition of my heart and my life as He alone can see it!

Karisa: I definitely had a lot of pride that God had to break through in my own personal life. It was cool to get to hear from her on that and just learn what it is like to live broken before God and others and even wanting my life to be something that could be used for God in mighty ways and wanting to grow in humility for that to be the case.

Dannah: Again, this is Jen Johnson.

Jen: Twenty-five years ago when I started, I would say most college students came into college at least with some sort of morality or even a faith background. But now twenty-five years later, so many students—even in the Midwest—come into college without ever having heard the gospel or having ever gone into the doors of a church.

And so the fact that we have this opportunity to be the ones to introduce them to a gospel that can change their lives is just incredible! They need something in their life that’s going to truly satisfy, and it’s going to satisfy for the long term and not just be a short term fix.

The student of today often doesn’t believe there’s an absolute truth. They believe that the truth comes from within, and it’s all about how I feel and what makes me happy. So there has been a bit of a shift, of people even just viewing the Bible as an authority in their lives.

So for us to be able to help them to see, whether we want to believe it or not, there is an absolute truth, and that absolute truth is God’s Word!

I think the other thing that we’re running into a lot more is gender confusion. We’re wanting to be on the front lines of helping women to understand, “You are created a woman on purpose, and it’s not an accident. Not only was it on purpose, but it’s good, and there is so much joy to be found in it! And if we live the way that God created us, then He is going to do beautiful things in our lives.” We personally feel called in college students’ lives to help them to see just how beautiful it is to live out God’s creative design.

I think that’s where Revive Our Hearts has been really helpful, because there are so many amazing resources—from True Woman 101, True Woman 201. Several of our staff right now are going through a booklet called A Portrait of Biblical Womanhood, and they are just loving everything that Nancy has to say in there. 

We just realize that there is so much life to be found when we’re living out God’s creative design! It’s helping us, in turn, to sit with our students and help them to understand the way that God has created them. 

It is helping them to unravel a lot of the things that they’re hearing in culture and to be able to put their finger on truth and why certain things aren't settling exactly right with them. The way that God designed us was to be a biblical portrait of Christ in the Church. Women are finding a lot of freedom, I think, as they’re recognizing God’s creative design.

Nancy: What a joy it is to hear how God is at work drawing college students to Himself, even in a time of such great confusion and darkness on our campuses.

Dannah: Yes, and we’re so thankful God has allowed Revive Our Hearts to intersect the lives of these young women!

Nancy: If you’ve supported the ministry in years past, you’ve been a part of this discipleship process! You helped make possible the audio and video programs that have encouraged these young women. And you’ve helped us produce and provide books and resources to encourage them in their spiritual growth. 

Dannah: We want to continue serving other ministries and individuals like these even more in the future, but we need your help to do it.

Nancy: That’s right! Each year, nearly half of the donations we receive for the entire year come during the month of December. So your gift now will help us continue to serve women like Jen and that whole team she leads in the Midwest.

As we’ve been sharing with you over the last several weeks, some ministry friends have seen the Lord at work through Revive Our Hearts, and they want to be part of stories like what you’ve heard today. They want to encourage you to join them in giving.

So these friends have provided a matching challenge of $2.1 million here in the month of December. What that means is that you can take your gift and multiply it times two! So would you pray that God would provide for Revive Our Hearts to meet that goal, and maybe even beyond it by this Sunday night, December 31? 

And would you pray about how much the Lord might want you to give? And if what’s on your heart seems to be beyond what you’re able to give, why don’t you ask Him to provide? You may be surprised at how He makes it possible for you to get involved at this time.

Dannah: Now, let me remind you to contact us by December 31. That’s this Sunday night. You can visit ReviveOurHearts.com to be a part of the matching challenge until then. That’s also where you’ll see a progress bar. It will show you how close we are to reaching that goal. You can call us at 1-800-569-5959.

Nancy, I recently heard about a new phrase you and Robert have been using.

Nancy: I think the one you’re thinking about is this: sometimes we remind each other, “That isn’t our circus, and those aren’t our monkeys!”

Dannah: That’s the one! Intriguing . . . and we’re going to find out what Robert and Nancy mean tomorrow. Please be here for Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth is calling women of all generations to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ! 

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