Encouraging the Dad in Your Life

Stephen Kendrick: A marriage should be a beautiful dance . . .

Dannah Gresh: This is film producer and husband, Stephen Kendrick. 

Stephen: . . . where you are working together.

Dannah: The challenge in dancing, as in marriage, is not hurting one another through a lack of unity. The beauty comes with cooperation.

Stephen: You are maximizing one another’s strengths and minimizing one another’s weaknesses; you’re balancing them out. 

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Adorned: Living Out the Beauty of the Gospel Together, for June 16, 2022. I’m Dannah Gresh. 

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Father’s Day is this Sunday, and the moment you start thinking about the various dads and granddads in your life, you might experience a range of emotions. Some of us were blessed to have sweet relationships with our dads; others were sinned against grievously by their fathers. 

But I’ll tell you this, not even the best dad can begin to compare to our perfect, loving heavenly Father. Yesterday on Revive Our Hearts, we heard from Stephen Kendrick. He said that even if your own dad was not a good father, God still is. If you missed that conversation, I’d encourage you to go back and find it at ReviveOurHearts.com or on the Revive Our Hearts app.

If you have children, you’re about to find out how you can encourage their dad. We’ll be focusing a lot today on wives encouraging their husbands, but even if you’re not married or you don’t have children, I think you’ll find a lot you can apply to your own life and relationships.

Stephen Kendrick is best known for his work with Kendrick Brothers Productions, making films that tell powerful stories of redemption and grace. The most recent film is a moving documentary that came out last December. It’s titled, Show Me the Father. If you’ve not had a chance to watch it, I’d really encourage you to do that.

Now here’s my cohost, Dannah Gresh, talking with Stephen Kendrick.

Dannah: Stephen, tell me about your wife. 

Stephen: I’m married to Jill. She is amazing. She’s the love of my life and the answer to ten-thousand prayers! She’s the opposite of me. I’m an extrovert; she’s an introvert. She is a homeschool mom—we have six children. She is still homeschooling four of those six kids right now.

She prays for me, she supports me, she is patient with me as I bounce around like Tigger in our church atrium from person to person and event to event. She speaks truth into my life when I need it; she gives me counsel that I appreciate. So I just thank God for my wife! Everything I do is multiplied in effectiveness and fruitfulness because she is cheering me on.

She’s the other wing, balancing me out and helping me to fly. I just thank God for Jill. I could tell all kinds of amazing stories about her. If you meet her, she’ll be super quiet. She’s very gentle and soft spoken and oftentimes she just wants to sit and listen to you talk and encourage you in who you are. 

She grew up in a home that was not a churchgoing home. She came to Christ as a teenager. It was actually at a youth event. We found out later on I was part of the leadership team in the back of the room praying for the salvation of the lost students in this service. She was one of the ones who walked down and gave her life to Christ that night.

Dannah: Wow! And you didn’t know her at that point?

Stephen: No, I did not know her. I was a senior in high school, and she was a freshman. Even when I was in tenth grade, I began to pray for my future wife. I didn’t know that she was an atheist at the time—in seventh grade. It was that year that she began to believe in God. 

And it was actually a movie, of all things, that God used to awaken her to the concept that there is a God out there.

Dannah: Well, that’s pretty fitting! 

Stephen: That is pretty fitting! Only the Lord could have come up with that!

Dannah: That’s great. I want to ask you a really specific question, and that is . . . I want you to take us to a day or time when she made you a better father.

Stephen: What I tell men in men’s ministry is that they need to realize that when they got married, God gave them an amazing balance to who they are—someone that will fill a lot of gaps. 

Men think on the lines like, if you’re playing a musical instrument, you’ve got notes on the lines and between the lines. Men think on the lines. They can be literal. They can be blunt. They can say, “Here’s what I want!” or “You didn’t ask me for what you want!” 

Women tend to think between the lines. They will put pieces together, and they will hint a lot of times, rather than being just outright: “This is what I want for my birthday.” They will require men to do the math in their heads and to try to figure things out like a CSI detective—put A plus B plus C and you can get exactly what she’s communicating. Look at her body language, look at the context, look at what she’s said in the past, and you figure out what she’s wanting without her having to spell it out.

Dannah: Yes! A lot of times when we say, “Do you like this outfit?” we really don’t want to know if you like the outfit. That’s not the question and answer. We want to be affirmed. We want to be seen and known.

Stephen: Yes. So what I tell men is, “Your wife is like the dashboard on the front of your car. She knows how the kids are doing better than you do. She knows how healthy your marriage is better than you do. She knows whether or not you’re on the brink of burnout before you do.

God has given her those eyes, that heart, that tenderness, that discernment. So you need to sit down and look in her eyes and say, “Sweetheart, what are you seeing? What are you feeling” What are you thinking? What are you observing? What counsel do you have for me?”

Scripture says in 1 Peter 3:7 that a man should live with his wife in an understanding way. It’s because he needs to understand, from her, so much of what is going on. So I regularly . . . When I take my wife out on a date or when we put the kids down and I’m sitting on the couch, we’ll turn off the devices and look at each other. 

I’ll say, “How ya doin’?” And I will say, “How are the kids doing? Walk me through that.” She’s the one that clues me in on when my son needs a spanking, my daughter needs some daddy time, my other son may need some support with his homework, this child is wrestling with this or has been sick lately.

Basically, she is clueing me in as to how everybody’s doing, including herself. I heard years ago that a woman knows everything about her children. She knows the dentist appointments, the romances, the best friends, the birthday parties, the allergies, the favorite foods. A man is vaguely aware of some short people living in his house! (laughter)

He really needs his wife to clue him in! So on a regular basis my wife does that for me, and I realize it is my responsibility then, after I hear her out and communicate that I understand her, that I then over the next few days and weeks need to respond with love and responsibility and step into those situations where I’m needed.

Dannah: Is that ever hard or uncomfortable? I love the visual of the barometer, right? When she says that the needle is not where it needs to be, is that ever hard?

Stephen: Because I’m asking for it, I usually brace for impact. There are many times when she communicates that one of my kids is hurting. I remember her telling me about one of my sons . . . She said, “Stephen, you’ve been so busy working. He needs daddy time with you, and he’s longing for it. You’ve got to carve that out, put that in your schedule and go spend more time with him, because he’s not going to come to you and ask for it. He needs you to take the initiative to step into his world.”

And that burdened me because I’m realizing, “Okay, I am failing in this area of giving extra quality time to this specific son, and I’ve got to step it up.” We can’t take that personally; we have to welcome it and receive it as a loving awakening that we need, so that we can be found faithful over what God gives us.

Dannah: Yes, right. My husband calls me a “knucklehead friend.” (laughter) He says he has five men in his life who are knucklehead friends, and his wife is the only woman on the Board. We have permission to speak into his life when he’s being a knucklehead.

Those are his words, not mine. I would never call my husband a knucklehead! If you met him, you would know he’s a stand-up comedian. But I think that it’s a really healthy thing for a husband and wife to have a conversation that sets the precedent, that there’s space for that.

Stephen: Absolutely! Scripture communicates that we need to be exhorting one another daily (that’s Hebrews 3:13), while it is called today. Exhortation is encouragement, it is comfort, it actually is a picture of somebody coming alongside someone else and walking with them.

It also communicates information and sometimes steps of action like, “Here are the next few things you should do or I want to encourage you to consider doing in this situation.” And so believers, whether they’re in your family or not, we’re challenged to constantly encourage one another, to be one another’s cheerleading section, fan club, those kinds of things. 

It especially needs to be happening in the home. Husbands should be their wives’ number one fan, wives should be their husbands’ number one fan. You can’t wait on your spouse to get their act together. You always have to take the initiative, whoever you are, to step forward and do that.

I think about Jill: she prays for me, she encourages me. Because she does treat me with respect and will say things—even hard words sometimes—in a respectful way, it causes me to lower my guard and receive it from her, and then even to ask for more.

Dannah: Okay, we’ve got to stop here. We’re having a nice road trip, but we’ve got to stop for the scenic view. Respect. We need to talk about that word, I think. I’m hoping that the woman listening right now is going to hear just how important it is that we give our husbands respect, so that they can win at fatherhood. How important do you think that is?

Stephen: The way God has wired men . . . If you didn’t already know this, let me clue you in, respect is like oxygen to a man. He goes to places where he is respected the most, he avoids situations where he is respected the least. 

Men want to respect one another—the way they stand, the way they compete, the way they talk about who they are. There is this value that they want to receive. Women long for love. If you ask a woman, “Would you rather be loved or respected,” she will tend to say, “Loved.” 

If you ask a man, “Would you rather be loved or respected, he will tend to say, “Respected.” To respect, that honor word there means to give them special weight, in a sense. What I tell people is, what if the president of a company asked you to do something, as opposed to the janitor? How would you treat it differently?

What if someone said, “Would you do this for me?” And you’re like, “Eh, I don’t know if I have time.” And then what if they said, “I will give you a million dollars if you will do this for me.” Suddenly, you give their request greater weight; it has more value to you.

I think about my kids. If they are supposed to be in their bed, and they’ve already gotten up and gone to the bathroom three times, and then they say, “Daddy, will you bring me a drink of water?” I’m like, “I’ve told you to go to bed three times already!” How much weight does that have?

Compare that to King David’s men when he said he wanted a drink of water. They crossed the enemy lines, laid their lives down, because they valued—gave full weight to—his request in that situation.

So if you realize women long for their husbands to not only love them, but to speak to them lovingly, to touch them lovingly, to serve them lovingly. Well, think about men. When men are interacting with others, they want you in all the interactions for there to be this fragrance of respect. They long for it.

Here’s what happens when men are not treated with respect, they will do one of two bad things: They will either get angry and go on the attack, or they will disengage and withdraw. Both of those are things that wives don’t want from their husbands!

And so, the Scriptures communicate to husbands, “Love your wives, as Christ loved the church” (Eph. 5:25). Because of God’s love for you, you love her. Receive it from your Father, pour it out on your wife. 

It even communicates in a sense, “Bloom her with your love,” because Scripture says that Jesus cherished and nourished the church to present her to himself, a spotless bride. (see Eph. 5:27) Basically, Jesus is sanctifying us, He’s growing us, “blooming” us with His love, His truth poured out into our lives.

And so, husbands should be doing that for their wives, blooming them with their love. If you flip that around, though, the command of Scripture to wives is, “Treat your husband with respect” (see Eph. 5:33). Basically, men will let the people who love and respect them the most influence them and their decisions. They will resist those who are speaking to them in disrespectful ways.

So when God is saying to a wife, “Speak to your husband with respect, treat him with respect, honor his words with respect,” He’s giving you the key to his heart—where he pulls you in close, and then wants to love on you and take care of you. He wants to be around you. He wants to give greater weight to your requests, when he feels respected in that situation.

Let me give you an illustration of this. I came home late from work one day, walked in, and my wife kind of smirked at me, grunted, really cold-shouldered me and treated me according to what I deserved in this situation.

It caused me to be frustrated with her. “What’s her attitude? What’s her deal?” Then when she has spoken to me with sarcasm or disrespect, just this anger immediately starts rising up in me. Now, it could be pride in me, partially. It could be because we’re made in the image of God, and God wants us to be treated with love and respect, and we feel like an injustice has happened in that situation. So, it has not worked well.

I don’t yell and scream at my wife. I try to treat her with love and respect, but I can feel it inside of me, that anger rise up when she does treat me with disrespect. But there have been so many times—the majority of the time—where now she has learned if I come home, same situation, if I come home and I’ve missed an appointment or come home late and dinner’s cold or whatever . . . She walks over to me, puts her arms around me, looks up to me and very softly says, “Sweetheart, when you tell me you’re going to be home at six, and you come home at seven, it makes it hard for me and the kids to enjoy a dinner with you. It makes it hard for me to trust your word.” There’s so much respect there. And listen, it totally works! I feel like the knife has sliced through my heart, because the respect is there, and she’s speaking loving truth into my life.

Usually, I turn to her and say, “Sweetheart, I am sooo sorry!” I start taking full responsibility, and it makes me want to step up. It makes me want to love her even more, because I realize she’s carrying the weight on my behalf.

So, it absolutely works when wives realize, “I need to do this because the Lord is asking me to, not because my husband deserves it.”

Dannah: It does work, right. I want to actually read the passage where the Lord asks us as wives to respect our husbands. It’s a different word, but the concept is here. It’s Ephesians 5:22–25. It says, 

Wives, submit [it’s a hard word for us sometimes, ladies] to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.

Bob and I were going through some counseling with our pastor (our pastor who is with the Lord now, Paul Graybill). He said, “The primary reason that it’s like this is so that we can reflect the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is a kingdom, it’s not a democracy.”

 

“There is a hierarchy of authority, and we are modeling that in the husband/wife relationship. That’s the most important reason marriage is structured this way. But,” Pastor Graybill said, “one of the reasons, Bob, you’re having trouble loving and, Dannah, you’re having trouble submitting, and one of the reasons Paul wrote about this is because submission and respect don’t come as naturally to women. They do to men. Men don’t have as much trouble when there’s a group of men respecting each other as women do when it’s a group of women.”

And he looked at my husband and he said, “Bob, we guys have a harder time loving.” And so not only is that important order that represents the kingdom of God inherent in the marriage relationship, but God also is calling us to be sanctified in those areas where we need some sanctification. At least I do.

Stephen: Yes, well, and He’s also pushing us toward heaven on earth. If you think about it, all of the commands in Scripture are flowing out of God Himself. Within the Trinity, before He made the universe, you have a perfect, unified, loving, respectful relationship between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. 

And Jesus, in John 17, is communicating that, “Even as You and I are one, Father, I’m praying that they will learn to be one.” All of us are longing for happy, healthy intimate relationships, close friendships. If you were to describe the marriage that you long for, what would it include? Love, respect, patience, kindness, forgiveness, joy, a delight in one another, trust, mutual sacrifice and service. You are comforting one another, you’re rejoicing together. You’re describing the Trinity when you do that. Well, we don’t experience those fruits unless we align with how the Trinity operates. 

So God is telling us and He communicates that Jesus submits to the Father. A man is to submit to Christ in all things. A wife submits to and supports her husband, and children submit to and support the wife, the mom. There is order in God’s universe. He’s not asking us to do anything that Christ isn’t already doing or hasn’t modeled to us in our lives.

But it doesn’t just lead to bringing God glory, it also leads to helping the relationships, because when a wife treats her husband with respect, he wants to love her more. When a husband loves his wife, she wants to treat him with greater respect. It creates this mutual sowing and reaping.

But what we tend to do is, we have a law-based, performance-based love. It requires someone to earn our love or our respect or our good behavior. It’s almost like a financial transaction at Target: “I give you this, and then you give me this.”

In relationships a lot of times, we treat people that way: “If you’re nice to me, I’ll be nice to you. If you’re mean to me, I’ll be mean to you.” Well, Jesus doesn’t operate by the law. The law came through Moses, but John chapter 1 says grace came through Jesus Christ.

Grace is a completely different operating system. Grace says, “I’m giving you what you do not deserve, out of my lovingkindness toward you.” That’s how God treats His children; He gives us salvation, not by earning it but by grace. He treats us daily through His Holy Spirit, not because we deserve it, but by His grace.

And Jesus says to His disciples, “Even the pagans greet those who greet them. If you want to be sons of your heavenly Father, love your enemies.”

“What!? What? You want me to love my enemies?! How can I love my enemies? They don’t deserve that!” 

Because you’re operating by a new system. You’re receiving love from your heavenly Father, and you’re pouring it out on other people. So now, I don’t operate towards my wife based upon how she treats me, but I base my behavior upon how my heavenly Father treats me. That flows into my relationship with Jill. 

If we will move towards modeling heaven and being tapped into the Father, we will begin to taste more heaven on earth in our daily relationships.

Dannah: Yes, and actually, I think that you guys have it harder than we ladies. Bob’s the tiebreaker. If I’m submitting to him, he’s breaking ties, right? He gets the final say when we make a decision. 

But he’s laying his life down for me—that’s like every minute of every day. I think that’s much harder. I do think that we as women really struggle with submission. I want to say that when I use the word “submission,” I’m talking about submitting to a man like Bob Gresh, who’s loving and sacrificial, or a man like Stephen Kendrick. 

You can hear in his voice how much respect he has for his wife, how he’s laying his life down for her, how he listens to her advice. We’re talking about that kind of relationship. If you’re in a relationship where there’s abuse or cruelty—whether it’s physical or verbal—that’s when you go to your pastor or another godly person, and you get help.

That’s not the kind of submission we’re talking about. We’re talking about a holy submission that looks like what we read about in Ephesians 5. But for me, there wasn’t real peace in my relationship with Bob until I really started really practicing, modeling this passage in Ephesians 5.

I was the woman who believed in submission, and so if Bob said, “Baby, we’re moving fifteen hours across the country,” you know, I was the martyr wife that was like, “Of course I’ll leave my friends and my family, because I’m a submissive wife!”

But trying to decide where to park on Sunday morning? Oh, that’s a whole ’nother matter! (laughter) The nagging and the controlling and the fast thinking. 

Once we were on vacation in Australia, and the Holy Spirit had been working on me, working on me, working on me, and showing me the brokenness in my husband’s heart over that.

We were supposed to meet my parents, and I wanted to drive because it made me feel safe and in control. Bob wanted to take the water taxi because he’s the adventure guy. 

“Let’s take the water taxi!” 

I’m like, “We might not be on time!” 

Well, who do you think won? Because this was a small decision, Dannah Gresh won.

And for the first time the Holy Spirit let me see how I was crushing my husband’s heart. Literally, that night, I couldn’t sleep at two o’clock in the morning, partly because of jet lag but partly because the Holy Spirit was working on me. I woke my husband up, and I said, “Baby, we’ve been married almost ten years now, and I have not been submissive. I have not respected you. I have not honored you.”

He had tears flowing down his face as I repented and really got honest. I can’t say that the next morning Dannah wasn’t controlling, but the next morning Dannah was in the hands of the Holy Spirit to be sanctified, to become the kind of a wife that builds her husband up and respects him and submits to him when he needs to make a tie-breaking decision. It was a game changer. Our marriage has not been the same since that night.

Stephen: Hmm, wow. I believe it. And his heart, I’m sure just turned toward you when you had that conversation with him. 

Dannah: Oh, yes!

Stephen: It makes him want to support you more, want to take care of you. A marriage should be a beautiful dance where you are working together and you are maximizing one another’s strengths and minimizing one another’s weaknesses. You’re balancing them out.

But it requires somebody to be . . . You can’t have two steering wheels in a car; it’s a recipe for disaster. Don’t have two remote controls for the same television, it's just a recipe for disaster. It’s a two-headed monster. Jesus said no one can serve two masters.

So, this is interesting to me: God puts men in the driver’s seat of their marriage and their family, and He tells them, “You’re the leader.” Now, he’s not saying, “You’re smarter than your wife, you’re more loving than your wife, you know the future better than your wife.” You’re not always stronger than your wife, mentally or emotionally. But somebody has to be in that position.

As a result of that, men feel a weight of responsibility that they don’t like. They feel a sense of accountability that, “The decisions I make, I’m going to be held accountable for.” As a result of that, it causes a man to delay, oftentimes, his decision making.

You’ll oftentimes see a woman join the choir at church and sign up for things before a man will. You’ll see her commit to things and show up to things and, “Yes, let’s do that!” Because it’s like armchair quarterbacks. I can sit in my living room and tell the quarterback what he needs to do in the situation, but I’m not going to be fired on Monday morning if that decision is wrong.

But because he feels the weight of the game on his shoulders, he’s going to be more guarded and more careful with that decision. So with that in mind, if a husband is driving, and if his wife reaches over and grabs the steering wheel, oftentimes he’ll let go, put the seat back, and go to sleep! 

He’ll become passive. He’ll either attack, or he’ll disengage and let her drive, let her carry weight. Or it will be this big constant debate, because he’s feeling that weight on his shoulders. So, when a wife treats her husband with respect, prays for him . . . God has given you insights into your husband’s sinfulness and need better than anyone on the face of the earth, so you can intercede for him. 

Don’t complain against Him. If you will pray for him and you will encourage him and will be the one person on the planet who will help this insecure man who doesn’t have it together but will be held accountable to God; part of you being a helpmate is for you to help him meet Jesus one day when he stands before God and has to give an account. And part of that is that God has given you unique insights into his life.

And so my wife, many times, has realized that if she’ll start praying for me, sometimes she doesn’t have to say anything. God the Holy Spirit will start working on my heart and challenging me and convicting me and turning my heart in a direction that she’s wanting me to go. She realizes that He’s going to do a better job than she will, because when she tries to play the Holy Spirit in my life, it doesn’t work as well! 

Dannah: Yes, exactly! You know, if you’re listening and feeling some conviction because maybe you haven’t been respecting your husband, or maybe you're like me, and you were submitting in the big things but nagging in the little things; this is your opportunity to really push reset. I just want to challenge you.

I think when it comes down to it, we usually are very inspired when we see this picture lived out in the world. I think about the men in Ukraine who stayed behind in that horrific war. I can see the images and the videos of them hugging their wives and their children as they send them to safety.

We’re inspired by that, because it’s a picture of something holy. it’s a picture of something sacred. Your marriage can be like that to a lost world! That’s what the Bible tells us in Ephesians 5:31 and 32, that your marriage is meant to be a picture of the love of Christ for His Bride, the Church.

If your lack of respect for your husband is getting in the way of painting that picture accurately, today’s your invitation to push reset. You might just do what I did. Just stop, pull your husband aside, and say, “I need to ask your forgiveness.”

Maybe you need help; I did. I needed advice from godly mentors and women who could help me push reset on my behaviors and my responses. I certainly needed the Holy Spirit to help me. But you will find so much peace, and you will find, many times, the things you’re craving from your husband. He will start to give to you naturally when you start to give him what he needs. 

I wonder, Stephen, could you pray for the marriages right now that are maybe struggling? The picture is just a little off. Maybe he’s not loving her well; maybe she’s not respecting and submitting to him. Would you lift them up to the Lord right now?

Stephen: Yes. Father, I thank You that through Your Holy Spirit You can strengthen each of us in so many desperately needed ways. You can enable us to do things that we cannot do on our own. And Lord, You have called us to be like Jesus; You have called us to be like our perfect heavenly Father. You have created us in Your image and then saved us through Christ so that we would be light in this world. 

I lift up every man and woman who is listening to this program. I pray, Father, for every husband and wife, that You would give them a heavenly vision for their marriage. I pray that You would give them hope, for those who are ready to quit because they’re hurting so much they feel like they’re living with an enemy or a stranger, just two ships passing in the night. Lord, I pray that You would bring breakthrough, repentance, confession, forgiveness, humility. 

Lord, You can resurrect any dead marriage if we are just willing to die to ourselves. Lord, I pray that You would give the ladies listening to this program this incredible understanding of the heart of their husbands, that they would realize that they have the rocket fuel to step into his life and influence him like no one else. 

And Lord, I pray they would leverage that influence for good to point him to Christ, to model Christ themselves, even as Jesus respected and submitted to the Father, even as Jesus called us to forgive everyone who has sinned against us.

Lord, Your Word says in 1 Peter 3 that even if a wife has a husband who is not submitting to the Word of God, she can be an instrument of winning him to Christ through her respectful behavior—through her submission to an imperfect, broken man—because she’s representing Christ to him.

Lord, I thank You for Lee Strobel who came to Christ, though an atheist, because of the transformation that the gospel brought in his wife’s life. The respect she showed him is what You used to bring him to Christ. Lord, we pray for every woman who is married to a non-Christian man, that you would give her an evangelistic heart, to see herself as a missionary to her husband, that she can pray for and help win to Jesus, even as my grandmother did my grandfather. 

And Lord, we pray that You would build our marriages to be a picture of the gospel, that when the world sees it, they are drawn like a fragrance, like a magnet, to want to know, “How can I have what you have? How can I enjoy the love that you have?” That we can then point them to Jesus. Lord, we ask these things in the name of Jesus, amen.

Nancy: Amen! Stephen Kendrick has been praying for hurting marriages. He and his brother Alex produced a documentary on the power of fatherhood, for good or for harm. It’s called Show Me the Father. You can find out how to watch it when you click or tap on the link in the transcript of today’s program. You can find that transcript at ReviveOurHearts.com or on the Revive Our Hearts app.

Also, on this Father’s Day weekend Stephen will be a special guest on Revive Our Hearts Weekend, so be sure to tune in. He’ll share the story about how he and Jill adopted their daughter and about how God worked in his heart as a dad. You can find that on the Revive Our Hearts Weekend program.

As we often share with you, Revive Our Hearts is a listener-supported ministry. That means that we rely on the prayers and the financial gifts of friends like you to continue bringing you helpful radio programs, podcasts, and other digital content on the web.

And because folks like you pray and give, we are able to reach out to women like Jackie. Jackie is a pastor’s wife who listens to Revive Our Hearts on Moody radio. She contacted us recently to thank us for the Husband Encouragement Challenge. She said, 

I can’t tell you how timely this is for me! My husband and I have been married for forty years, and he is the most amazing man ever! Still, I find myself trying to be controlling about things at home and other areas where he isn’t always like I think he should be. He’s more on the quiet side, and sometimes it’s hard to get him to share with me.

Jackie heard about the Husband Encouragement Challenge, she ordered a copy, and she’s working hard on encouraging her husband rather than cutting him down. She said, 

I’ve confessed my sinful attitudes to God, and I now have hope! 

She finished her email by saying, 

Be blessed in your amazing ministry! 

So sweet! We love to help good marriages become even better, and if you’ve ever donated to Revive Our Hearts, you’ve played a part in reaching women like Jackie. I know she’d like to say thank you, and I’m sure her husband would like to say thank you as well.

If you’d like to make a donation today, just visit us at ReviveOurHearts.com, or call us at 1-800-569-5959. And by the way, if your marriage could use a dose of encouragement, we’ve placed a link to the Husband Encouragement Challenge on the transcript for today’s program.

Well, speaking of husbands, tomorrow my sweet husband, Robert, and I will reflect on our own fathers and the godly legacies they left for us. Please be back for Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth wants to help you encourage that special man in your life as you discover freedom, fullness and fruitfulness in Christ!

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