Glorify God in the Storm

Dannah Gresh: Here’s Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth with a question.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Have you come to a place in your life where you are more concerned about God being magnified through your problems than you are about getting relief from your problems? Which really means more to you?

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Surrender: The Heart God Controls, for September 25, 2025. I’m Dannah Gresh.

What’s weighing on your heart today? Do you know that thing provides you a chance to give God glory? Nancy’s about to show you how, as she continues in a series called, “Storm Shelter.” It’s based on Psalm 57, and Nancy’s going to read the whole chapter.

Nancy: David says:

Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy on me.
   for in you my soul takes refuge.
I will take refuge in the shadow of your wings
   until the disaster has passed. (v. 1)

We saw a few days ago that David consciously took refuge in God.

And then we see in verse 2, where he says:

I cry out to God Most High.
[He cried out to the Lord:]
   to God, who fulfills his purpose for me.
He sends from heaven and saves me,
   rebuking those who hotly pursue me—
   God sends His love and His faithfulness.
I am in the midst of lions;
   I lie among ravenous beasts—
men whose teeth are spears and arrows,
  whose tongues are sharp swords.

And sometimes, the tongues—the words of other people—can cut through and hurt us even more deeply than physical swords can. David is saying: "I know what that's like." Then he prays in verse 5. (This is the first time we see this chorus.)

Be exalted, O God, above the heavens;
   let your glory be over all the earth.
[Then he goes back to talking about the storm.]
They spread a net for my feet—
   I was bowed down in distress.
They dug a pit in my path—
   but they have fallen into it themselves.

And then he describes the condition of his heart as he finds refuge in the eye of the storm. He says:

My heart is steadfast, O God,
   my heart is steadfast;
   I will sing and make music.
Awake, my soul!
   Awake, harp and lyre!
   I will awaken the dawn. (vv. 7–8)

When I think of this passage, I think of Paul and Silas, lying in the middle of the night in that Philippian jail—persecuted for their faith, physically having been harmed, separated from those they loved. And what are they doing in the middle of the night? Singing hymns to God! What an incredible picture! Through their pain, singing to the Lord. David says:

I will awaken the dawn.
I will praise you, O Lord, among the nations;
   I will sing of you among the peoples.
For great is your love, reaching to the heavens;
  your faithfulness reaches to the skies.
[Then he repeats that chorus once again.]
Be exalted, O God, above the heavens;
   let your glory be over all the earth.

I believe that here we have the key to how David survived the storms of life, and the key to how you and I can survive the storms of life. "Be exalted, O God, above the heavens; let your glory be over all the earth." David is saying: "Whatever becomes of me, whether I make it alive through this storm or not, whether I ever make it on to the throne, whether King Saul outlives me or I outlive him, whatever happens to me, there's one supreme driving motive in my life. And that is that God will be exalted."

Because, you see, David recognized that ultimately, it's not about us. It's not about me. It's not about my circumstances. It's not about whether I survive. Ultimately, it's all about Him. It's about the glory of God and His purposes being fulfilled in this world.

I am so thankful that Jesus, when He came to this earth, lived with that same goal in mind. Remember in John 12:27, where Jesus was praying. He was praying to the Father in anticipation of having to go to the cross to bear our sins. And Jesus said, "And what shall I say? 'Father, save me from this hour?'" And isn't that the natural thing to pray? "O God, don't make me go through this."

Now I don't think it's wrong to tell God, as Jesus made His request in the Garden of Gethsemane: "If it is possible, let this cup pass from Me" (see Luke 22:42). But in John 12:27, Jesus goes on to say, "Why should I pray, "Father save me from this hour, because it was for this cause that I came to this hour." He is saying: "This is why I was born. This is why I am here—not just to live a good life, not just to teach good things—but to die for the sins of men."

Jesus says: "God's redemptive purposes matter to Me more than my own life, more than My health, more than My safety, more than My pleasure; what matters to me is that God be glorified." And so He goes on to pray: "Father, glorify Your name. That's all that matters, that You are pleased. It's that Your purposes are fulfilled."

Now when you pray that prayer, the wonderful thing you can be sure of is that God not only hears but is going to answer that prayer because God's Word tells us that He will be exalted.

And that's why in Psalm 46:10 we read, "Be still, and know that I am God." Let go; cease striving; relax and know that He is God. And then God says, "I will be exalted among the nations. I will be exalted in the earth." You see, the day is coming when every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. He will be exalted.

The question is this:"Is your drive in life to see God glorified or to see your circumstances made easier?" Have you come to the place in your life where you're more concerned about God being magnified through your problems than you are about getting relief from your problems? Which really matters more to you?

Now, naturally, what matters most to us is getting relief, getting out of the problem, solving the problem. We live in a quick-fix-everything society. You know, take two aspirin or put a quick fix on it, as in TV, where every problem is solved in twenty-eight or fifty-seven minutes. But life just isn't like that.

Our natural instinct is to want to get out of the problem, to fix it quickly. We have to come to the place where what matters even more to us is that God would be glorified through our problems, through our circumstances.

So let me encourage you, as you think about what storm you may be walking through right now, to ask, "How could my current challenges, how could my current circumstances—the ones I'm in right now—become a means of God receiving greater glory? How can I reflect the heart and ways of God in the midst of this circumstance?" 

John MacArthur has said that a truly godly person wants God's glory to be exhibited more than he wants his own personal problems to be solved.

The three Hebrew young men said to that pagan king: "You can throw us in that fiery furnace. You can do whatever you want to us. But we're not going to bow the knee because what matters is that we worship and exalt and glorify the living God. And our God may save us from this danger. He may save us from your furnace. He may not! We may die in this, but if we do, that's okay. We want God to be glorified" (see Dan. 3).

The apostle Paul tells us that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that will be revealed in us (see Rom 8:18). You see, those sufferings are working for us, Paul says, "an exceeding and eternal weight of glory" ( 2 Cor. 4:17).

And so Paul says that we need to be reminded that those afflictions are momentary and they're light. You say, "It doesn't seem very momentary to me. It doesn't seem very light to me." It doesn't seem that way right now. But in the light of eternity, we will see that God was using these afflictions to bring great glory to Himself and to mold us into the image of Christ.

And that's why Paul could say in Acts chapter 20: "When I go from town to town, city to city preaching the gospel, there's only one thing I know for sure. And that is that 'm going to face persecution. I don't know if we're going to have any new converts. I don't know if we're going to have any great results. But I do know, because the Holy Spirit has told me, that in every city I will be persecuted."

How would you like that calling in life? But Paul goes on to say: "None of these things move me. My heart is steadfast because I don't count my life dear to myself. All that matters to me is that I may finish my course with joy and the task that I've been assigned by the Lord Jesus, to take the gospel to these different cities."

All that matters is that the gospel gets out. All that matters is that God is glorified. And if I die while I'm doing it, that's okay. All that matters is that God be glorified.

And so, would you cry out as you think about your circumstances, your home, your workplace, your problems, your pressures, the circumstances you're facing when you leave this place and go back into your world today; would you cry out with David on the chorus of this Psalm?

"Be exalted, O God, above the heavens; let your glory be over all the earth." O God, it's not about me. It's not about my comfort. It's not about my happiness. It's not about my convenience. It's all about You. How can You be glorified through this circumstance? And to that end, I surrender myself.

 

John Piper has reminded us that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him. Regardless of the circumstance that you may find yourself in right now, are you satisfied in Christ? Have you said to Him with all your heart, "God, You are enough. If I never get out of this lion's den, I'll still be satisfied with You." When you are satisfied in Him, then God will be glorified in you and God's purposes will be fulfilled.

Dannah: That’s Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth reminding you that God has a purpose for everything you’re going through today. 

Nancy recorded that program with an audience of women. And one of them, Kathy Helvey, had just been through a year of storms. She and her husband, Bob, worked for FamilyLife, a ministry that partnered with Revive Our Hearts in the early days of this program. After listening to Nancy speak, Kathy told us this story.

Kathy Helvey: We had a FamilyLife conference up in Minneapolis. And that is where I am from, so we look forward to going every year with our kids, playing in the snow and being with my mom and dad. We'd had a wonderful week with them over spring break as we did the FamilyLife conference.

We drove back, and no sooner did we walk into the house than there was a phone call or message saying, "Kathy, your mom and dad have been in an accident. Call this hospital number."

What had happened was my mom had been driving and she missed a red light, did a turn, and had a terrible accident. And my dad went home to be with the Lord immediately. My mom was in critical care for about three weeks. So, my bags weren't even unpacked, they weren't even out of the car. I just added a couple of things and flew back.

The beginning of that year I had done a Bible study on trusting God even when life hurts. And life hadn't hurt a whole lot until that point, but God has a way of preparing you. I remember as I flew I thought about trusting God even when life hurts—and it was hurting.

And yet Scriptures about God's sovereignty that He wove all throughout His Word helped me be so much stronger than I could have been by myself. Because when I got there I had to plan the funeral and pick out everything and do everything because my mom was unconscious in the hospital.

Yet (in the next three weeks) as I went back and forth to the hospital, I knew more than I had ever known in my life before the peace of God, the assurance of God. He was closer to me than He'd ever been before. And I just praised Him for that.

So three weeks back and forth with my mother in the hospital and just knowing that God was sovereign, that God chose that very day to take my dear dad home to be with Him in heaven, that there is nothing that could have prevented that accident, that it wasn't an accident, that it was God's sovereignty, that it was my dad's time to go and be with the God that he loved all his life.

So, we got through that and I knew that God was more real than ever before in my life. And within the next month my husband started having heart pain. He'd had a quadruple bypass ten years earlier at a very young age because of some hereditary things in his background, but now it was happening again.

We went in to do a check and I thought, Oh please, not open-heart surgery again. It was so awful the first time. I remember the cardiologist saying, "Well you see this and this, we're going to have to do it again. And the second time around, Kathy, to be honest with you, is more risky. And you just need to know that." I remember just thinking, Okay, God is sovereign, if I lose my husband . . . Ever since that first heart failure, I'd always thought, I'm gonna lose Bob, I'm gonna lose Bob. That's always in the back of my mind, He's going to die one of these days from his heart. And now here we're going through it again.

I didn't have that peace, it's interesting, the peace that surrounded me during my dad's funeral and that ordeal . . . But I was nervous, I was fearful, I could not sleep that night. This is my husband; this is my life. And yet it was like He said, "Kathy, if I choose to take him you know I'm going to be there. I'll be there as I've never been there before, and I will carry you."

Dannah: That’s Kathy Helvey, recorded in 2001. The Lord did carry the Helvey family and the surgery went well. But more storms were on the way, and Kathy will be back to share with us tomorrow. No one knew it at the time, but Kathy was about to face another big storm. She went to be home with the Lord in 2010 after a four-year battle with leukemia. She spent those years encouraging and pointing others to the Lord. Then, she experienced God as her ultimate storm shelter as she went into His presence.

On that day in 2001, after Kathy shared part of her story, Nancy offered this follow-up.

Nancy: I thought of two passages as Kathy was sharing, one of them in the Psalms, Psalm 66. It's really a Psalm of praise, but it's also a Psalm of the reality of life in this fallen world.

He starts by praising God for His awesome works. He says, 

Make a joyful shout to God, all the earth!
Sing out the honor of His name;
Make His praise glorious.
Say to God,
"How awesome are Your works!
Through the greatness of Your power
Your enemies shall submit themselves to You.
All the earth shall worship You
And sing praises to You;
They shall sing praises to Your name. (vv. 1–4 NKJV)

This sounds like a man whose world is in pretty good order, but wait. It says in verse 5,

Come and see the works of God;
He is awesome in His doing toward the sons of men.
He turned the sea into dry land;
They went through the river on foot.
There we will rejoice in Him.
He rules by His power forever. (vv. 5–7 NKJV)

That's sovereignty.

By the way, before you come to the crisis, make sure you've got your theology straight. Make sure you know God because if you don't know God when the crisis comes, when the fire comes, when the flood comes (we are going to read about it in just a moment), you will not have any place to stand.

So make sure that you know God, that you know who God is. Every day you and I need to be opening this book and saying, "God show me who You are, show me what You are like, teach me Your ways." I pray that prayer almost every morning.

Show me your ways, O LORD,
   teach me your paths.
Guide me in your truth and teach me,
   for you are God my Savior,
   and my hope is in you all day long. (Psalm 25:4–6)

He rules by His power forever;
His eyes observe the nations;
[That's wisdom; He knows it all.]
Do not let the rebellious exalt themselves.

Oh, bless our God, you peoples!
And make the voice of His praise to be heard,
Who keeps our soul among the living,
And does not allow our feet to be moved.
[He's our protector. He's our sustainer. He's our preserver.]

For You, O God, have tested us;
You have refined us as silver is refined. (Psalm 66:7–10 NKJV)

How is silver refined? In heat! Impurities have to be burned off! There's pain involved in heat, there's destruction involved in heat—destruction of the flesh, destruction of the impurities, destruction of anything that keeps my life from reflecting the character and heart of Jesus.

It's God who does this. It's God who tests us. He says, "You have refined us as silver is refined." Now, this next verse doesn't quite fit with some of our theology, but it needs to be part of our theology. He says in verse 11,

You [God] brought us into the net;
You laid affliction on our backs. (v. 11 NKJV)

We don't like that part of God. We're not comfortable with thinking of God in those terms.

So when hardship, adversity, and affliction come—snares, nets—we're quick to blame Satan, we're quick to blame our parents or our neighbors or our pastor or the youth director or someone, but we're not comfortable with the thought that God would be the one behind this. If we come to that conclusion then our next logical thought would be, I'm not sure I like that kind of God.

Now that sounds blasphemous and, in fact, it is. And most of us wouldn't say it out loud, but a lot of us have thought it. If God is so great and so powerful and so loving, so sovereign and so wise, why would that kind of God bring us into a net and put affliction on our backs? Because He is sovereign and wise and loving. He's preparing, fitting, and equipping us for life beyond this moment.

So many illustrations come to mind from Scripture. You think of the Israelites for four hundred years in Egypt; talk about affliction on their backs under the hand of Pharaoh! Now Pharaoh was the obvious,  immediate source of that affliction, but ultimately who laid that affliction on the backs of those Jews?

It was God! Because God had a purpose in mind and a plan that was bigger than what those Jews could see at the moment. He was refining; He was purifying; He was sanctifying; He was purging; He was accomplishing the plan of redemption; He was fitting His people to be His people, to be submissive to Him, to learn to worship Him.

He wanted to bring them to a place where they were ready to throw off the old yoke and to want to leave the world, represented by Egypt, and follow God out into the wilderness where they couldn't see where they were going and they couldn't see what was ahead and where they would have to trust God for their daily bread. And God had plans beyond that!

God was planning to bring a Redeemer to this world! And God is right now writing, well He's not writing, He wrote it in eternity past, we're living out right now in this world a history that God's already written.

He's got a plan, He's got a purpose, it has an ending. And the ending is His triumph over all of creation, all things. All people will bow and worship and love Him, that's what it was all created for. God uses affliction, He uses pain, He uses that burning fire process, even the times we're in a net.

I read some of the morning prayer cards from a conference we had. My heart just breaks as I read these requests that women have shared with us.

Many of them are in a net. They're surrounded by circumstances that are trapping them, circumstances from which they cannot get extricated. And if only we could see that it's God at times who brings us into the net because He has purposes for our good and for His glory. How do we get peace? Through surrender, through acceptance.

"You brought us into the net, you laid affliction on our backs." Psalm 66:12:

You have caused men to ride over our heads;
We went through fire and through water;
But [praise God for the but] You brought us out to rich fulfillment. (NKJV)

God has an end, He has a purpose in mind. Keep in mind, that storm, that fire, that water will not last one minute longer, it will not be one degree hotter than what God knows is absolutely necessary to accomplish His purposes in your life in this world.

So, when you are in the midst of the fire, when you are in the midst of the flood, when you think you're drowning . . . I've been there this year a few times where emotionally I felt, I am not going to survive. This is a flood. I'm going to drown. And I'm not going to be able to come back up. To be able to, in the midst of the flood, say, "Oh God, You are sovereign, You are wise, You are loving." And to trust that in His time and in His way He will bring us out to rich fulfillment.

Dannah: That’s Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth encouraging you to view the storm as an opportunity to glorify God. If you’ve missed any of our episodes this week from the series “Storm Shelter,” you can find those at ReviveOurHearts.com or on the Revive Our Hearts app.

We want to encourage you to keep your eyes on Jesus during your storm. So we’d like to send you Endure: 40 Days of Fortitude. This booklet is designed to help you glorify God in hard circumstances by inviting you to depend on Him for strength. We’ll send you a copy when you make a donation of any amount at ReviveOurHearts.com. Just be sure to request it. You can also give by calling 1-800-569-5959. 

Also, I want to remind you that we’ve got a new challenge coming up called The Quiet Rest Challenge. It’s an opportunity to spend thirty days in God’s Word, meditating on truth sent straight to your inbox. It’s going live on October 6. You can sign up then or anytime! The goal is to develop a habit of daily time in the Word as we gear up to read the whole Bible together in 2026. Visit ReviveOurHearts.com/challenges to sign up. 

Tomorrow, we’ll listen to what Kathy Helvey shared about God’s presence in her own storm. Please be back for Revive Our Hearts.

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 NIV unless otherwise noted.

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