Benediction

Dannah Gresh: Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth exhorts us never to take for granted the gifts given by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: The magnitude of the blessing that we receive individually and collectively from the triune God is deeper and wider than anything we could possibly imagine.

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Adorned, for December 31, 2025. I’m Dannah Gresh.

Nancy: Well, here we are—New Year’s Eve—the final day of 2025, and turning the page to a new year before us. My heart is full, and I’m grateful for so many reasons. In fact, I’m going to close the program today with something I like to do at the close of each year: we’ll have a benediction—a blessing—as we look back on this year finishing up, and as we look forward to the new year to come.

Dannah: It’s a special year for Revive Our Hearts. Our listeners might not be aware of this, but we are already well into our twenty-fifth year of ministry! Yeah, I know you want to clap for that! We’re so grateful for all of God’s blessings! Now, before we dive into 2 Corinthians chapter 13, our Board Chairman, Bob Lepine, has a few thoughts to share with us. Welcome, Bob!

Bob Lepine: Thank you, Dannah. I have been thinking back to the beginning of Revive Our Hearts, back when programs were first recorded in Little Rock, Arkansas, as we worked ahead so that we could go on the air in September of 2001. And now, here we are twenty-five years later, and I'm so grateful for what God has done, His faithfulness year after year! 

And we have a sense that God is about to do something amazing through this ministry for years to come. God has directed us to boldly take steps of faith to move forward on some significant ministry expansion, something we're calling the Wonder of the Word. This is a generational initiative to bring God's Word to women of all ages. 

We're seeing God move throughout the world in various places where women are hungry for God's truth. And we need to lay the groundwork to prepare the ministry to keep up with the demand and the growth. Now, our team has been hard at work putting together all we need so that this Wonder of the Word initiative can begin and the momentum can grow. 

And the cost to make all of this happen is something that is over and above the normal operating budget needed to support our ongoing expenses. And that's why I'm here today on behalf of the Revive Our Hearts Board of Directors, asking you to consider a year-end gift that will help this ministry meet the need this December. We need $4 million to cover the expenses of our ongoing outreaches. 

So, would you consider making a generous gift on this final day of 2025? And as I turn things back over to you, Nancy, I want to invite our listeners to check out the annual praise report to see how much God has used our partnership together in 2025, all of it for His glory. You can find the report at ReviveOurHearts.com. So, Nancy, let's get back to your year-end benediction.

Nancy: So many of our listeners have blessed us, have prayed for us, and have encouraged us this year, particularly over these recent weeks. So at the close of this year, I want to leave you with a blessing—a blessing from the Word and the heart of God.

Over the last couple of days, we’ve been looking at the last paragraph of 2 Corinthians chapter 13. Let me encourage you to turn there if you’re able to pick up a Bible or scroll in your phone to the end of 2 Corinthians chapter 13.

Now, this is a little complicated what I’m about to say, and it took me a while to figure it out, but most translations have fourteen verses in this chapter. The translation I’m using, the Christian Standard Bible, combines the last two verses into one verse, so it only has thirteen verses. So we’re going to look today at verse 13 in my Bible. It might be verse 14 in your Bible. Are you confused yet? You got it.

So we looked yesterday at the exhortations in verse 11: 

Finally, brothers and sisters, rejoice. Become mature, be encouraged [or comfort one another], be of the same mind, and be at peace [or live in peace].

And then we looked at the blessing: “And the God of love and peace will be with you.” That’s a blessing promised to those who live that way—individuals and churches. And then we looked yesterday at the greetings. In my Bible, it’s verse 12. Maybe in your translation it’s verse 13. But it says, 

Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints send you greetings..

So Paul says, “Greet one another . . . and all the saints send you greetings.” Now, I skipped one phrase right in the middle of that verse. Let’s go back to it.

Paul says, “Greet one another with a holy kiss.” Paul gives this same instruction at the end of three other epistles. “Greet one another with a holy kiss.” And the apostle Peter closes his first epistle by saying “Greet one another with a kiss of love.”

So what in the world is this all about? And does it mean anything for us today?

Well, it was common in the ancient world, and still is in some parts of the world today, for people to greet one another, when they’re arriving or when they’re leaving, with a kiss—sometimes on the cheek, often on the lips—generally men with men and women with women. 

I’ve been in churches in some parts of the world where, when you come and when you leave, the women—and I mean all the women, not just some really demonstrative women—they grab you. They grab each other by the face, they look at you, and they kiss you—not just on one cheek, but on both cheeks, and sometimes on the lips. I mean, they’re kissers. (And I’ll admit, for me, it took a little getting used to. That wasn’t something we did at my church here in this country.)

So, the idea of greeting one another with a kiss, even on the lips, would not have seemed strange in Paul’s day. It would have been the equivalent in our day, in our culture of greeting people with a handshake.

But Paul talked about greeting one another with not just a kiss, which would have been commonly understood, just a polite way to greet each other, but greeting one another with a “holy kiss.”

There was something distinctive and different about the way believers greeted each other in the New Testament era. It wasn’t just like the common handshake, “just everybody does this.” This was a “holy kiss.” It was different.

You see, in the Greco-Roman culture of the first century, the church was the one and only place where everyone was on the same footing. You had within one church many times Jews and Gentiles, rich and poor, slaves and masters.

And these were people who outside the church would have been worlds apart. They would never have connected with each other. They never would have hung out socially. They would have ignored each other. They would not have talked to each other. They would have been in different parts of the room or not in the same room at all.

But in the church, not only did all these different groups meet and worship together, but they also greeted one another with a kiss. Now, it’s one thing for two businessmen in the world to kiss each other, but for a slave and a master to kiss each other?

So the rest of the world is looking at the church in that era, and they’re going, “Who are these people? Something is so different about them.” This was revolutionary. 

In greeting one another with a kiss, the Christians were breaking class barriers and ethnic barriers and social barriers. This kiss was a leveler. At the cross, by grace, they were all of equal worth and dignity. This was a holy, visible demonstration of love, acceptance, affection and friendship between people who otherwise might have had nothing in common except for their love for Jesus.

These were people who, in the churches, did not stick in their own cliques, or their own groups or people who looked like them or talked like them or were like them. This was an expression of the fellowship and the oneness that we share in Christ. And this kiss in the church between these different kinds of groups was radical. It was “holy.”

Now, something else I want to point out about this “holy kiss” that Paul speaks of between believers was that it was a non-sexual kiss. And this speaks, I think, to the importance of pure, appropriate touch in the body of Christ.

There are some kinds of kisses and some kinds of touch between different individuals that are not “holy.” They are “unholy.” As I’ve been pondering this, I’ve been thinking how sin and Satan have a way of twisting and perverting what is good and what is holy and making it ugly and unholy. Satan does this on the one hand by promoting in our culture unrestrained sexual expression and by wounding people from physical and sexual abuse.

So either they want to touch everybody, and they have no boundaries, no restraints and just unbridled sexuality. Or they’re fearful, terrified to be touched because they’ve been wounded. They’ve been sinned against with physical or sexual touch. (That’s true of some in this room no doubt.) On the other hand, the enemy works to create circumstances in our culture that keep people from being able to touch in ways that are appropriate.

In both cases, whether people are touching inappropriately and they have unbridled, unrestrained sexualized touch; or they’re unable to touch, or they’re fearful of being touched, it’s all unholy. I think over the past couple of years we’ve lost in our world a lot of the beauty of pure, simple “holy” touch.

So Paul says, “Greet one another with a holy kiss.” That says to me that Scripture calls us to demonstrative, lavish, expressive love in the Body.

Now, I know some cultures are very touchy-touchy. I get into Latin America, and they’re all hugging and kissing and holding. It’s very easy for them. You get into other parts of the world, and people are, like, “Don’t touch me.” I’m not saying there can’t be differences, but there’s something precious here to be experienced in the Body of Christ, this demonstrative, expressive love.

There’s not just one way of doing that. I’m not saying that we should threaten others’ well-being physically, but I am saying we need pure, appropriate touch.

Now we come to the last verse of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, whether it’s 13 or 14 in your Bible. This is the benediction.

The word “benediction” literally means “to speak good of someone.” It’s taken from a Latin word that means “blessed.” It’s a blessing. In many of our church services, we have a benediction. It’s at the end of the service.

So we’ve been worshiping and singing and praying and listening to the preaching of the Word, and responding to the Lord and fellowshipping with His people. Now it’s time to leave and go back out into the world that we came from. We don’t know what we’re going to face there. Monday morning is coming, a new week, new challenges, difficult people, discouraging news. Whatever week it is, that’s likely. Each week there’s going to be some more discouraging news.

So the benediction at the end of our corporate worship sends us out into that world and into the unknown—unknown to us—with a blessing. The benediction is often the words of Scripture because there are some wonderful benedictions in the Old and New Testaments.

But these are words that remind us of what is true. These words in the benediction are a pronouncement of God’s promises, His presence, His grace, His blessing that is going to go with us out into this world no matter what we may face.

It’s a reminder that His grace will give you every resource you need—tonight, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year. As we prepare to walk into a new year, He’s going to give you every resource you need to bear up under pressure, to love others well, to be poured out, to be spent, and to represent Christ in your home, in your marriage, in your school, in your workplace.

So, as we come to the end of this year, and we prepare to walk into a new year, we have no idea what it will bring. We have no idea what we will face. But we know that He knows, and that He goes with us into this new year, and that He will give us all that we will need for whatever we will face. 

So here’s the benediction. Again, it’s verse 13 in my Bible. In many other translations it’s verse 14, the last verse of 2 Corinthians 13:

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

Now, this is a beautiful Trinitarian blessing. It’s the only benediction in Paul’s epistles that explicitly references each member of the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. One God, three persons, acting in one accord, relating to one another, and relating to those who have been adopted into the family of God.

Paul gives us this benediction, this blessing, from the Trinity.

And Paul says, “The grace of the Lord Jesus, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” (Sounds like Paul is a Southerner!) But he’s making clear that this is a plural you—not just with you, and not just with you, and not just with you, but with you all—all the believers there in Corinth, and all of the believers there in Philippi where Paul probably was writing from, and all the believers in all parts of the world.

This blessing, of course, is ours, individually, as children of God. But it’s also, and maybe more importantly, ours collectively, corporately. It reminds us that we are inseparably linked to the Godhead, the three-in-one, and to one another. Father, Son, and Spirit are with us and in us. Therefore, grace (the grace of Christ), love (the love of God), and fellowship (the fellowship of the Holy Spirit) are ours. And they’re not just with us as individual, isolated believers, but with us “all.” 

You say, “You sound like that’s a big deal.”

That is a big deal because I don’t just relate to God as Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth. Yes, I do, and yes, I am His, and yes, I am in Christ, and all these blessings are mine. But if you are in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is in you, then we are one with each other.

These blessings that come down from our Trinitarian God, our Triune God, to us are ones that we enjoy as one Body in Christ. As God has extended grace and love and fellowship, so we leave our fellowship, our times of worship, our times together as believers, and we go out into the world to extend the grace and the love and the fellowship of God to one another. But also, we extend that to the rest of the world that desperately needs the grace and the love and the fellowship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

There’s a grandness. There’s a greatness. There’s a sweetness. There’s a majesty about this benediction because it ties us in to the triune Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It makes us recipients of His grace, love, and fellowship. It makes us together in union with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, recipients of His grace, His love, His fellowship. And together we’re sent out into the world to dispense His grace, His love, and His fellowship to the world that desperately needs that.

So I want to take a few moments here just to unpack the three gifts that are promised in this benediction.

First, “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.” That word charis is a word that means “favor, a gift, graciousness, bounty, liberality, the generosity of Christ toward us”—the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ.

So as you go into the year ahead: May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. 

Then we see “the love of God”—agápē—that generous, rich, abundant, lavish love of God expressed to us through the gift of His Son to die for our sin. And the love of God is not dependent on us being lovable, the way we tend to love others. He loves us though we aren’t loveable.

The love of God is the outpouring of His nature toward us. So as you go into the year ahead, my prayer is: “May the love of God be with you all.”

And then thirdly, “the fellowship,” or in some translations, the communion of the Holy Spirit. That’s the Greek word koinōnía. It’s a word that means “partnership, participation.”

We are able to enjoy fellowship with God, communion with God, relationship with God, partnership with God, participation with God through His Holy Spirit who brings us into that relationship with God.

So as you go into the year ahead: “May the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”

The magnitude of the blessing that we receive, individually and collectively, from the triune God is deep and wider than anything we could possibly imagine.

The gifts of God that flow to one of us, flow to all who are in Christ. None gets more. None gets less. You can’t say, “Oh, I’m just not a really good Christian, so I don’t get as much of God’s blessing and as much of His benediction.”

No. If you are in Christ, you get as much blessing and benediction from Him as I do. None gets more. None gets less. I don’t get less than somebody else that I may admire or think, Boy, they’re really in a great place spiritually. No. I get the same. They’re not deserving of it. I’m not deserving of it. You’re not deserving of it. But we get it—blessings He pours out to us.

We can never plumb the depths of this blessing. It is vast enough to meet every need that you have, not only for the year ahead, but also for all time and eternity.

“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.” What more could you possibly desire? What more could you ask for? What more could you need? 

Dannah: Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth will be right back in a moment, but first I want to remind you that our team has designed a free downloadable PDF to go along with this series we’ve been listening to. It’s available to you at our website, ReviveOurHearts.com/benediction.

As Nancy mentioned at the beginning of today’s episode, God has been working in amazing ways through Revive Our Hearts this year. And we want you to be a part of it all. One way you can participate in what God is doing through this ministry is by joining us in reading through the Bible this year.

Friend, we’ve been talking about this for months now, but it begins tomorrow. I can’t believe the day is finally here! We've been praying and anticipating this journey through the Word together, and I can’t wait to get started. To come along with us, visit ReviveOurHearts.com/Bible2026. You’ll find everything you need right there!

When Nancy shared the message you heard in today’s episode, several women took time to share afterward. Here’s what Gladine had to say.

Gladine: I loved how you ended that. “What more could we possibly ask for? What more could we possibly need? What more could we possibly desire?” And the love of Christ, the grace of the Lord Jesus, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit . . . I’ve been reflecting this past month on just past years and people who’ve influenced me, and you’re on the top of the list. I thank God for you and your ministry here, and the overflow of that is here to my daughter and granddaughter as well. Thank you.

Dannah: Oh, I love that! We’re able to minister to women like Gladine, and their daughters and their granddaughters, through the support of our listeners. If you’d like to help us be a part of reaching women with the truth of Christ, would you consider being part of our matching challenge that Nancy mentioned earlier? Today's actually the last day, and we are praying that the Lord would provide above and beyond what we need to continue our outreach around the world

You can give online at ReviveOurHearts.com or call us at 1–800–569–5959.

Now, maybe you’re the kind of person that likes to make your gift by good old snail mail. If you’d like to mail your gift, it’s not too late—but almost. Just make sure that it’s postmarked by tonight. If you need our address, just send it to:

Revive Our Hearts
P.O. Box 2000
Niles, Michigan 49120

And I just want to say to those of you who have already participated—thank you. Thank you so much for your support of this ministry, both financially. I know some of you are praying. So, thanks for that, too.

Now, tomorrow we’ll be starting off the year 2026 with a series called “How to Have a Happy New Year.” Is the answer a social media fast? Eating more vegetables? Running a marathon?! I sure hope it’s not that last one. We’ll find out together tomorrow on Revive Our Hearts. I hope you’ll be here to join us. Now, here’s Nancy with a word of encouragement.

Nancy: Yesterday I had a lengthy call with a sweet friend that I hadn’t spoken to in some time. We don’t live near each other, so we don’t have a lot of contact. We just kind of updated each other on our lives, and we shared some of the challenges that she and her family have faced over the past year. We shared the burdens that are on our hearts.

As we were closing this conversation, kind of not wanting it to end because it was so sweet, I just said, “Could I benedict this conversation?” Now, keep in mind, I’d been soaking in this last paragraph of 2 Corinthians 13 for weeks, so it’s kind of uppermost on my mind right now. And as we closed in prayer, I prayed over this precious friend the prayer from 2 Corinthians 13 that we’ve been looking at this week. 

So I want to “benedict” our time today. (Is benedict a verb? If it’s not, it should be.) I want to give you a benediction in the closing hours of this year, by praying this passage over you, and at the dawn of a new year by sending this passage with you. So wherever you’re listening from, whatever circumstances you may be facing in your personal life, at home, in your marriage, with your children, with your church, with your work, in your neighborhood, this word is for you. 

Finally, brothers and sisters, rejoice. Become mature, be encouraged, comfort one another, be of the same mind, be at peace, and the God of love and peace will be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints send you greetings. [And finally,] The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all [today and all year long.]

Amen? Amen.

This program is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

All Scripture is taken from the CSB.

*Offers available only during the broadcast of the podcast season.