Freedom, Fullness, and Fruitfulness in Latin America

Dannah Gresh: On March 31 of this year, more than 8,000 women gathered in Guadalajara, Mexico for Mujer Verdadera—that’s True Woman—’23.

Women in attendance cheer and count down: Cinco, cuatro, tres, dos, uno! Yay!!!!!

Dannah: The excitement in the air was palpable! Laura and Fausto Gonzales open by welcoming the women.

Laura and Fausto Gonzalez: Bienvenidas a Mujer Verdadera!

Dannah: Women arrived from as far away as Afghanistan and Mozambique, thirty-five countries in all. Emcee Fausto Gonzalez read through the list while groups of women waved their nations’ flags!

Fausto: Afghanistan, Argentina, Aruba, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, El Salvador . . . Paraguay, Puerto Rico, Switzerland, Chile, United States . . .and MEXICO! (ladies erupt in cheering). 

Dannah: They came to learn, to encourage and be encouraged, and to worship.

Sara Jerez Song:

Me aferro a Él, Jesús es mi esperanza,
Vivo en Él, por siempre suyo soy,
Asombroso es cantar, mio es en verdad, 
No soy yo, sino Cristo en mi.

(To this I hold, my hope is only Jesus
For my life is wholly bound to His
Oh how strange and divine, I can sing, "All is mine"
Yet not I, but through Christ in me )

Dannah: This is Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Heaven Rules, for May 1, 2023. I’m Dannah Gresh. 

Sara Jerez Song:

Tinieblas hay, mas no soy olvidado,
Pues junto a mi el Salvador está.¹

(The night is dark but I am not forsaken
For by my side, the Saviour He will stay. )

Nancy, we’re recording this not long after you got back from the conference in Guadalajara.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: We are, Dannah, and my heart is still so full! It’s really hard to put into words all that we saw God do during those days! In fact, if a picture’s worth a thousand words, we have a lot of pictures of this event.

The Aviva Nuestros Corazones team put together a short video retrospective that we played during the final session of the conference, and we’ve linked to it (MV23 retrospective video) in the transcript of today’s program at ReviveOurHearts.com.

I hope you’ll take a look at that, because it just gives you an idea of the scope of what we were looking at during this conference. I wish you could have been there to feel and to see and to experience the precious, sacred moments that the Lord gave us in His presence throughout those two days.

Today we want to see if we can capture just a little bit of that for you, and so our team has put together for you just clips of some of the different messages, some of the music, some conversations with speakers and with women who were at the conference to give you a sense of what God did during those couple of days.

Dannah: I’m not going to take the time to introduce each person, but we did list all of their names in the transcript of this program at ReviveOurHearts.com. Let’s listen together to just a few of the highlights from the recent Mujer Verdadera conference in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Patricia de Saladín: The conference has been a great blessing! We have had years praying for this, especially Mujer de Verdadera ’23, and I think that the Lord has answered more abundantly than we have ever asked—not only for the 8,000 women but also because of the spirit that we could have here!

Gabriela Estupinian: We’re very excited to have the conference specifically in Guadalajara. I’m from Guadalajara, so it’s amazing to hear the impact this conference and all these resources have. And there are so many different women and so many different situations that even though we’re very different, at the end of the day we are women that want to be just in love with God and His Word.

We want to glorify Him in different contexts—as a mom, as a young mom, as a young pastor’s wife. We are just very excited to be part of this and are very blessed!

Elba de Reyes: This has been an amazing, amazing time for me, seeing more than 8,000 women here, who have come thirsty. 

Nancy: These women were so eager, so hungry, so thirsty. In fact, the onsite registration for the conference began two days before the conference started, and then the Friday morning that the conference was to start at 9 a.m., at 5:00 in the morning there were women lined up down the street, down the sidewalk!

Elba de Reyes: From my window at the hotel I saw the lines of the women at 5 a.m. waiting to enter into the conference!

Nancy: We had a drone actually taking pictures of what it was like, just like little ants down there, so eager to get into that facility and to start the conference!

Kathy Mercado: The Lord had been at work even before getting to Guadalajara—first in our hearts and the challenges that we had to come here, but mostly in His faithfulness to get us here! Now, it is a matter of enjoying His blessing, just watching Him work in my heart, in people’s heart.

Vicky Ramírez Fraga: People in here are happy. You can see joy! We’re not perfect, but when we were singing the first day . . . We started singing and I had chills, and it was really beautiful —especially the first song—because we were talking about being rooted in God, in the Word. 

Sara Jerez Song:

Mantenme firme y arraigado en ti, Jesús, en tu amor

Vicky: Maybe we can be hurt, we can be sad, but we have hope!

Nikki Lorimer: A conference like this, it’s just so important, because as we live our lives, it feels as if we’re like “ETs” in this world. But to come together with over 8,000 women who are clapping and smiling and praising together, and loving the message that we’re hearing, it’s just so encouraging to know that we’re not on our own, but that there are thousands of women out there that think the same thing. There is a remnant. It’s alive and kicking, this remnant, and it’s growing! So praise God for that!

Vicky Ramírez Fraga: There are a lot of types of women. We have elder people, we have young people, and we’ve all come together. We’re in the same heart and the same spirit and looking for the Word. 

You can feel not alone. You remember that God is so good. He gave us community, and He gave us one another, and we can lean onto others, and it’s just beautiful to see!

Erika VanHaitsma: You can feel the passion; you can feel the excitement. The women want to be here, they want to hear, they want to learn, they want to grow. It just breaks my heart for my own country. Yeah, we have True Woman events, we do this, but I feel like we’re not as excited. We’re not like, “Lord, we need you!” like they are here!

Nancy: I’ve got to say this: most of the chairs were small, hard, metal seats. Most of us would not sit in church for an hour on chairs like that, but these women sat for fourteen hours over the course of two days on these uncomfortable little chairs, but I never heard a word of complaining. They were just so thankful to be a part of what God was doing here!

And by the way, it wasn’t just in that Expo convention center in Guadalajara, it was thousands of Spanish-speaking women around the world who were joining by livestream! One of the great joys was to see, after the conference, some photos and some video of women in Cuba who were participating with us through the entire weekend!

They were praying like crazy that their internet wouldn’t go out, because for them it’s hard to get an internet connection to last all day long. But the Lord answered their prayers and they were able not just to watch but to participate.

You can see in that video them singing and raising their hands to the Lord and waving their white “Si, Senor!” hankies as a sign of saying, “Yes, Lord!” 

Nancy (conference with interpretation): I hope you didn’t come just to be a spectator. I hope your heart is responding and saying, “Yes, Lord!” In fact, you can feel free to wave that white flag any time you want. 

Nancy: These precious women in Cuba, we heard from them and some pastors saying, “We want to get these messages so we can share them with women and churches throughout the country of Cuba!”

We heard it from Venezuela and Peru and Chile and Ecuador and Europe and Spain, and other places where people were watching and participating.

Albelina de Hinojosa: What I liked the most was to see all the women of different countries together and to see how they worship the same God. It was like one people, the people of God together. That was beautiful! 

Jeannie Vogel: My first reaction when I saw the women coming in holding flags from all the countries, was it just made me so teary, thinking about these women being together with us in heaven. That was really a beautiful scene to me!

Renata Santos: It’s been amazing to see what God is doing all over the world and seeing what God is doing in Brazil and all the countries that speak Spanish, and Italy and France and Germany, all over the world!

Robyn Bush: This is family, and this is the kingdom of heaven coming alive. In these little moments where we get to see, “Wow! This is what glory is going to look like!”

Yamell de Jaramillo: I think that for us as Latin women, we need this kind of message because of our history.

Margarita de Hinojosa: This world is driving us to a very different path from what God designed for us as women. So it is difficult because we don’t realize how much all these thoughts are already in our minds and in our hearts.

Yamell de Jaramillo: We’ve been living for many years in a history of violence, painful and abandoned, unforgiven. And I think we hear the message of “freedom and fruitfulness and fullness,” I think that opens your eyes to a whole different way of living!

Anita Bautista: I see women in bondage everywhere! Young women, older women, even now children, are in bondage. I’m a teacher in the school, and my husband and I are teaching sexuality the way the Lord looks at it. I want to fight the battle for the next generations with the truth of God. 

Yamell de Jaramillo: We can see there is hope. We can see that even though we’ve been hurt and there’s many things from our past, we know there’s a purpose. We know that God can use them first of all to bring glory to His name, but also to help us to bring others to Him and to proclaim there’s hope in Christ, that it’s not the end, and you are more than just an event that happened in your life.

Nancy: It was such a joy to see women embracing the message of “Freedom, Fullness, and Fruitfulness in Christ.”

Nancy (conference with interpretation): So I want to ask, “Are you flourishing spiritually? Are you experiencing freedom and fullness and fruitfulness in Christ today?”

Maybe you experienced that in the past, but today there are burdens, there are obstacles that are keeping you from being close to Christ. Maybe you’re not experiencing the freedom you once did. Maybe you’ve become a prisoner to fear. Maybe you’re a prisoner to some addiction.

Maybe you’re a prisoner to resentment or guilt or shame. If you are being truthful today maybe you would say, “I’m not full, I am empty. I’m not fruitful, I am spiritually barren.” Maybe there was a time in the past when you had joy in the Lord. Now you wonder, Will I ever have that joy again?

Maybe you’ve listened to these speakers and you’ve thought, I wish I could have what they have! Listen to me carefully, you can have what they have. If you have Jesus, you can have freedom and fullness and fruitfulness because all of that is found in Christ! What you need today is to be revived! 

Patricia de Saladín: It was made clear that women can have freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness wherever they are, in the place where God is calling them, and that without freedom there is no fullness, there is no fruitfulness.

Dannah: One of the speakers was Joselo Mercado. He pastors a Hispanic church in Maryland. 

Pastor Joselo Mercado: Well, first of all, it’s just amazing to see what God is doing with so many ladies and seeing so many countries, and being aware that in the culture that seems to be so hostile, to see so many ladies from different places (you don’t see this on the news) embracing the call of God to be free so then they can be fruitful for the Lord. I used the book of Romans to bring the reality that we are free in Christ. 

Pastor Mercado (conference with interpretation): We owe nothing, Christ paid it all completely on the cross of Calvary! (applause) We’re free of all judgment, free from the wrath of God that we deserve, and we’re His beloved children!

Pastor Mercado: I mean, not only freedom from our past sin, it’s freedom to live a free life that will lead to fruitfulness. We cannot be fruitful until we experience the freedom that we have in Jesus Christ.

Wendy Bello: My name is Wendy Bello and I am Cuban, but I have been living in Miami for twenty-some years. We’ve been talking a lot about freedom, and I think it’s such a necessary topic, because even in the Christian community we still have a lot of people living under different kinds of bondage. 

Having women realize that the answer to all of that is Jesus Christ, looking to Him, looking to His Word to be free! So that to me has been really special. What I did was kind of like a survey of the 1st and 2nd chapters of the book of Colossians, and seeing how the apostle Paul develops the topic of freedom, fruitfulness, and abundance in those chapters.

Wendy (conference with interpretation): Do you know what the problem is? It’s that sometimes you and I think that the gospel is some kind of ticket that guarantees me eternity . . . and nothing more. 

We can think that once we receive salvation we don’t have to remember the gospel anymore. Nevertheless, sister, the gospel is for every day, and every day we need to remind ourselves of it! Why? Because it’s so easy for you and for me to return to live in bondage, in slavery.

Yamel de Cardoza: I loved how Wendy Bello said that we have everything that we need in Christ. Because sometimes as moms, sometimes we think having children is going to make us feel full and have that fullness that we want . . . or maybe marriage. But we have everything we need in Christ. 

As a woman, I know that sometimes we’re tied into doing many things all at once every day, and we forget the gospel ourselves. That’s why we need this message of being full in Christ . . . and we’re free!

Mary Kassian: The topic of my message was, “Live Free!” It started off with that march to kind of reflect a little bit of what was happening in Mexico with the women’s marches. There has been a real feminist surge—a feminist revival, really—that’s taken place throughout Latin America.

The women here are all very familiar with that, and very familiar with that happening. It struck me as I was looking at all of the video footage of what was going on in Latin America in the women’s movement, in the feminist movement here, the theme of freedom was so strong: “We want to live free! We want to be free of fear. We want to be free of abuse. We want to be free of all these things that bring us so much pain and that really are such a threat to our well-being.”

Mary Kassian (conference with interpretation): Feminists are quite right to cry out for justice! But sadly, they have misdiagnosed the problem. Therefore, the solution will be ineffective, and in the end may backfire to hurt women more than it helps women.

Mary Kassian: So I just spoke on what true freedom is in Christ based on 1 Peter chapters 1, 2, and 3. Freedom in Christ is that instead of putting our confidence in ourselves, we put our confidence in the Lord.

Instead of finding our strength in ourselves, we find our strength in the Lord, and then the Lord makes us beautiful in terms of who He created us to be as women.

Mary (conference with interpretation): What Christ offers you is not an elusive freedom based on wishful thinking about things being different. Freedom in Christ is based on one thing, and one thing alone: if you place your confidence in Him, sister, your freedom begins the moment you pull on His jersey and join His team! 

Mary: The response was incredible! I just challenged women at the end to stand if they felt as though there was something binding them that they needed to be free from, and probably eighty-five percent of the women in the room stood up. It was the vast majority!

Yamel de Cardoza: I went to the prayer room, and I saw women sobbing. It was just a reminder of how we should be broken before God, and that when we are broken, He visits us. One woman just came to me right now and asked me to pray for her daughter, that she’s in an abusive relationship with her husband, and she has two little kids.

I was able to pray for her daughter over the phone, and for me, what a great honor for me to pray for that woman that I don’t even know.

Mary: It was a real sweet and tender moment, because what we were declaring was that Christ has set us free! We need to live out that freedom on a daily basis, because we start believing what the world tells us, and we start letting these things bind up our hearts.

If we rely on Christ, put our confidence in Him and get our strength from Him, draw our identity from Him, then we are set free from that. So, it was a real sweet time of ministry and a lot of women prayed for each other.

We prayed for their sisters throughout Latin America because these are real issues. Women here face a lot of danger. They face abuse and face violence in ways that are probably much more profound even than what you see in the United States. It was a sweet moment, and I think the Lord just really ministered to a lot of the women.

Damaris Carbaugh: It was so overwhelming that I felt I needed to be taken out on a stretcher! It was just so amazing to hear Mary speak about true freedom for women, and then to hear Laura’s testimony of God’s transforming power!

Laura Perry Smalts (conference with interpretation): I wish I had heard this truth many years ago—the truth that I had value as a woman, that I was valued because Christ made me.

As the Lord began working on my heart, He began to pursue me when I didn’t want to be pursued. I was angry with God! I didn't want God, but God wanted me!

Damaris: I’m overwhelmed with the power of the gospel! You know, it’s the power of God unto salvation. The gospel is amazing! So it’s been an amazing couple of days here, and I’m just happy that I belong to Him!

Nancy: Well, I hope this gives you just a taste of what we experienced with thousands of women in Guadalajara several weeks ago.

We’re airing this program on May 1, and that’s significant because it was ten years ago today—May 1, 2013—when Aviva Nuestros Corazones first began broadcasting and podcasting five days each week! So this is the ten-year anniversary of that milestone. 

I’m so thrilled, thanking the Lord for how He is using ANC, the Spanish Revive Our Hearts, to reach women in Mexico, Central America, South America, Europe and Spanish-speaking women here in the U.S. as well. 

Patricia de Saladín: Ten years of ANC seem like more than a dream come true. We never dreamed how big this dream was!

Dannah: Patricia de Saladin is “Nancy’s voice” in Spanish. 

Patricia: I couldn’t be more excited and happy to see what God has done! I’m still expecting to see what He will keep on doing, because this is a movement, and it will not stop with us. God’s Word cannot be held back! I cannot hold back God’s Word. I just release it, and it will do the work. 

His Word is living and active, and His Word will accomplish the purpose for which He is sending it. So, we are praying for more women to embrace this truth and to share this truth with other women! 

Nancy: As I spoke to the women at the end of the conference from Ezekiel 47, about that river of life that flows first as a trickle and eventually as a raging river . . .

Nancy (conference with interpretation): All of this begins in the presence of God and near the altar it symbolizes the sacrificial work of Christ on the cross.

That’s the starting place for everything God wants to do in you and through you. The presence of God and the work of Christ on your behalf. Now at first the water was just a trickle, but it didn’t stay that way. 

Nancy: I could envision those women, thousands of them, going back to their homes, their churches, their communities, their countries and the River of Life flowing through them to others!

Nancy (conference with interpretation): Can you imagine if the river of God were to flow throughout Latin America through the women who are filled with the Spirit of God!? (applause) What would happen? What would be different? What would change? 

Nancy: That’s what the Spirit of God is doing in our world. He’s multiplying, He’s deepening, He’s expanding the outreach of the gospel. And we get to be a part of that until that great day when the glory of the Lord will cover the entire earth as the waters cover the sea!

Angie Gutiérrez: The thing that I learned was that in Christ I have all I need. And when we know Christ, we have everything through His Spirit to live the life that He wants to live and share with others, with the river in us to go through others and bless others and call others to follow Him! 

Nancy: How thankful we are to have a little part of what God is doing in that river of life flowing throughout the world!

Well, if you’ve ever made a donation to Revive Our Hearts, you’ve played a part in helping to support the ministry of Aviva Nuestros Corazones. Thank you so much! Your giving is helping us reach Spanish-speaking women all around the world.

God is doing something I believe that is unusual, maybe unprecedented, historic among Spanish-speaking women in our world. So that’s why we want to pour fuel on what God is about. We want to encourage it, support it, and do anything we can to help see that river flow deeper and wider and fuller.

This month, we’re trusting the Lord to provide the funds we need to finish up this year of ministry strong and to launch us into the next year of ministry. May 31 is the end of our fiscal year, so that means we close the books on one year. We’ve already been hard at work planning our budget for the coming year.

We’ve got an ambitious goal before us this month: $828,000. That’s a huge month for us, but not too big for God. So, would you consider making a donation to help us reach that goal this month? Every little bit will help. Whatever God puts on your heart, that’s what we’d ask you to give.

We’re so excited about the ways that God is extending the reach of Revive Our Hearts—not only into the Spanish-speakingworld, but in other languages, as well, even as I just heard in a recent board meeting, in Vietnamese, and in Mandarin in China through a partnership with a sister ministry.

Thanks be to God! And you can be a part of helping us call women around the world to “Freedom, Fullness, and Fruitfulness in Christ.” Or as our Spanish-speaking sisters would say, “Libertad, Plenitud, y Abundancia en Cristo.”

Dannah: Hey, Nancy, that’s not bad at all, mmm, not bad at all. Okay, to make a donation, just visit ReviveOurHearts.com, or call us at 1-800-569-5959. 

Well, could God use you to minister to people from a country halfway around the world? Does that seem impossible? Tomorrow we’ll hear how one woman in Texas made herself available to God. He gave her a unique way to be a missionary to people from Afghanistan without ever leaving Texas! Hear about it tomorrow on Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth wants to help you—no matter where you live—find libertad, plenitud, y abundancia en Cristo!

^1"Yet Not I but Through Christ in Me," City Alight, ℗ 2018 City Alight.

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