God Is in the Remodeling Business

Nancy DeMoss Wolgmuth: Hi, it’s Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth here, and I just wanted to say a quick word of thanks to those who’ve already given toward our December matching challenge of $2.1 million dollars.

Now, maybe you’ve been thinking about making a donation, but you haven’t had a chance to do that yet. Well, time’s running out, and we’d love to hear from you by December 31 at ReviveOurHearts.com, or you can call us at 1-800-569-5959. Thanks so much.

Dannah Gresh: Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth says when we look at the wrong thinking all around us, it’s easy to feel not only hopeless . . . but helpless.

Nancy: In anything that we’re doing, individually, in our churches, in our communities, or as a ministry like Revive Our Hearts, is it making a difference? I mean, is it really making a difference?

Dannah: Thankfully we have somewhere other than around us to look.

This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Heaven Rules, for December 29, 2023. I’m Dannah Gresh.

Well, Nancy, here we are. We’re almost to the end of the year. Can you believe it?

Nancy: Wow, it hardly seems possible! It’s been such a full year, such a beautiful year, such a challenging year, such a year. And here we are at the end of it.

Dannah: Well, this year you had a little bit of work going on at your house, didn’t you?

Nancy: We sure did. We live in an older home, and there were some updates and changes we needed to make. I had never done anything like that before, and I just didn’t know what was going to be involved. And in the process, there was some chaos, and no small amount of mess. A lot of things got moved around from their original place.

In fact, when we first got things put back together again, Robert and I were heading out the door one evening for a wedding, and he called out to me, “Honey, I can’t find my socks.” So we found ourselves looking for things that had been misplaced. And with people in and out of the home, it’s just been an interesting several months.

Dannah: Well, not too long ago, you used everything you learned in that process, the idea of remodeling and construction as a word picture for Christians in general, and for Revive OurHearts as a ministry. You were speaking to a gathering of Ministry Partners in San Antonio, Texas. Let’s listen to what you shared.

Nancy: One of the things Robert and I have learned to say when we’re getting stressed about something that really isn’t our responsibility, we’ve been learning to say, “You know what? That’s not my circus. That’s not my monkeys.” (laughter) Like, I don’t need to worry about this particular thing. It’s not my circus. It’s not my monkeys.

Well, one day, not too long ago, there were people just swarming in this house. The doorbell wasn’t working, but people were knocking on the door, coming in, and just . . . We both work out of the house (this is after we had moved back in). I was upstairs where my study is, and I heard Robert on the first floor speaking to himself, not knowing I could hear him. He goes, “This is my circus, and these are my monkeys.” (laughter) I mean, he didn’t know I’d heard him. This is my circus, and these are my monkeys.

Well, this whole process has become, for me, a bit of a metaphor for life. There’s been so many life illustrations, life reflections, and pictures of aspects of the Christian life.

You think about the process of spiritual growth and sanctification, and I say, like the process we’ve just been through: 

• It takes way longer than you ever imagined it could. 
• It’s way messier than you ever imagined it could be. 
• It’s way more work than you imagined it could be. 
• And it costs way more than you ever thought it possibly could.

That’s true of the Christian life, isn’t it? I mean, it can get very messy. Why don’t we just get to spiritual maturity, like, now? And why do we have to go through these ins and outs and these ups and downs and these trials and these turns? It’s messy.

Letting go of things. All that stuff that was piled in the garage. Like every closet, every cabinet had to be emptied. It was just piled up. And we had to say, “Okay. It’s going to be tossed. It’s going to be given away. It’s going to be sold. Or, it’s going back in the house. But if it’s going back in the house, it has to earn its way back into the house.”

So everything had to be determined, “What are you going to do with all this thirty-years’ worth of stuff?” I didn’t think I was a pack rat, but there was just way more stuff that needed to be dealt with than I could imagine.

And some of that stuff has really sentimental value. I mean, like, sweet things that Revive OurHearts’ listeners have sent and letters that they’ve written. I didn’t keep all of that, but there were some really special ones. What do we do with this? Is there a place for this? Should I keep it? Letting go of things is hard. Change is hard, but it’s also good for the soul. Isn’t it?

And here’s something else that was a picture for me of life: the old has to be torn out before the new can be put back in. Sometimes you just get comfortable with the old. You know it needs to change. It needs to go. It’s done its job. It’s time to put something different in there. But you’re comfortable with what you’re familiar with. But it has to go before you can put something new in its place.

Demolition is messy. I enjoyed our kitchen for thirty-some years in the house, and all of a sudden it was a disaster area. But the old had to go before the new could be put back in.

Sometimes when you’re in the middle of that process, at least I find for me, it’s hard to envision the outcome. All I could see was the mess, the chaos.

I had a designer working with me. She could envision all of this. I couldn’t envision it. I’m not an artist in that way. And I’m just going, “This is always going to be awful.”

Sometimes we feel that way in the middle of the crisis of life. This is just always going to be awful. We can’t envision that God is doing something that in the end is going to be far more wonderful, far more beautiful than we could imagine.

Your life, your marriage, your family, your church may be messy right now. I’m looking around the room. I’m seeing precious friends who I know have walked through some very messy life circumstances, some very painful life circumstances. I’ve had conversations with a number of you since we got here. You’ve shared just some of the things that you’ve walked through. It’s messy. Sometimes it feels chaotic.

Now, you may be in a great, sweet place right now. The remodeling is past, and you’re in a sweet place. But I’m telling you, remodeling doesn’t just happen once in life. There are things coming again. Maybe you’re in a sweet spot right now, but tomorrow it may be chaotic again.

I just want to say, whatever stage God has you in, especially if it’s one of those messy, chaotic seasons, we need to be encouraged and know that God is at work and that, in the end, it will be worth whatever He’s having to tear up, tear out, remove, get rid of, change—it will be worth it. And we’re just about at the point of saying that about our house, “This was worth it.”

Robert, he’s got a new perch in our sunroom, and he loves sitting there. We see the river outside our house, and he just looks around, and he says, “This is just so beautiful. Thank you so much for all your work on this.” We’re getting to enjoy what is the result of that several months of mess and chaos.

But it’s true not only for our own lives and our close relationships, but I think it’s also true that for any kind of successful building or remodeling of an organization or a ministry or a project that we need a plan, first of all. Our plan changed several times through the process. I was forever texting the contractor and saying, “But could we just do this?” or “Now that I see this, could we just . . .?” It was kind of a nightmare, although, for them, I think they love us. (laughter) We have tried to bless them, and I think they have been.

But the plan, there has to be one. They have to know, “What do you want us to do? Where is this going?”

Then we needed a general contractor. We needed certain materials, resources to make it happen. We needed contractors who know what they’re doing, sub-contractors who know how to do different specialties.

And in life, in building a life, in building a family, building a business or an organization, we need a plan. We need somebody to mastermind it, to execute it. We need the right materials. We need subcontractors, people who do different parts. We see it in our lives, but we’re seeing it also these days in Revive Our Hearts. That’s where I was headed.

Revive Our Hearts is in a building and remodeling process, and we’re making some changes. We’re refreshing some things. Some changes have been needed for a while, but other things have been . . . There’s so much going on that’s exciting and wonderful, and you can put other things to the side.

A lot of the things that need changed, sometimes they can be infrastructure. We live in an area that needs some major road work. That infrastructure.There are other priorities that kind of take it over, and you don’t always pay attention to some of the things behind the scenes that need work.

We’re refreshing some things organizationally. It’s not bad stuff. It’s just things that need to be done to keep us moving forward in a good direction.

We spent a lot of time this year as a leadership team trying to be sure that we have the right plan, the right materials, the right workers working on the plan. And let me just say parenthetically here that God has blessed this ministry with an incredible team of workers, an incredible leadership team that is seasoned and wise and godly and believes God and walks by faith. It is a joy to serve our King with these men and women.

Robert and I say to each other . . . Often we’ll be on Tuesday morning prayer times, which our whole ministry does together, and we’ll get off of that and he’ll say, or one of us will say, “This is an incredible team of fellow servants!” They love the Lord. They love His Word. They love each other. They’re skilled. They’re dedicated. They’re behind the scenes, many of them, getting no visible credit, not nearly the thanks they deserve because half of us don’t know half of what they’re doing. But they’re doing it and doing it well. I’m so, so grateful.

Well, we’ve been praying during this season and seeking the Lord’s wisdom about the plan for this ministry for, Lord willing, decades to come. Beyond the point where Martin and I and others who are in our season of life would be in the roles that we’re in. We’ve been asking the Lord, for years we’ve been talking about how to lay the right tracks so that those we pass this ministry on to can have it in a good place and can know how to steer it from there.

We believe the Lord has been showing us aspects of this plan for the next season. Now, the Lord loves to surprise us, too. We always give the Lord freedom to change the plan, to shift the things we think we’re supposed to be doing. But we’re very excited to see what the Lord is doing, and you’ll hear more about this through the course of the weekend.

International expansion–we didn’t plan this. It’s been very organic. Now we’re asking the Lord to help us know how to steward it, how to manage it, how to put fuel under it so that these international ministries that are popping up can have what they need to do what they believe God is calling them to do and multiplying the ministry.

We’re seeing God expand this generationally. So it’s not only out, but down to younger women and younger. It’s movement to pass on the ministry to younger voices and younger writers and speakers and leaders. I’m so thankful for how He’s raising those up.

We’re trusting the Lord to confirm His plans in this direction by providing the necessary materials and resources that will be required to carry it out. That’s where so many of you have had a significant part, and continue to have a significant part as we move forward.

Now, the essence of this plan, some of which you’ll be hearing about this weekend . . . There’s not some great, big, single document that’s “the plan,” but it’s pieces and aspects of the plan, as we’ve been thinking about it. Much of this is exactly what we’ve been following for the past twenty-three years.

In fact, it’s just really sweet to look back on those early days and things that we shared together as a board, as an advisory board, and with early partners in the ministry and early team members. We look back on things we shared then and see how the Lord is doing what we had said we were going to ask Him for, what we believed He was leading to.

So, substantively we’re still carrying out the plan that we believed God put into our heart back in the early 2000s. And our core heart, our message, our mission, our distinctive have, by and large, not changed.

In fact, I was talking with one of our guests here just before the session, and we were talking about another ministry that we’re both familiar with. He said, “Have there been changes in the heart of the mission of that ministry?” He knew I was familiar with it, and we were just talking. Sometimes ministries have mission drift. 

I want to say thanks to the Lord’s protection and a good and wise board and good and wise leaders, the core things that should never change are not changing. I love that. Let me just touch on some of those. I won’t say anything that’s new to you.

We’re still ministering, by and large, to women. I’m teaching women. I know we have men here today because you care about and you support this ministry. We’re so thrilled for your heart for this. But my calling is to call women to freedom and fullness and fruitfulness in Christ. We’re pointing them to Christ. That’s never going to change. Women don’t need, or men for that matter, don’t need another program to follow. They don’t need another book to read. They don’t need another influencer to follow. They need Jesus. He is the truth. He is the life. It’s all about Him. That’s what we’re still doing.

We’re still committed to get women into the Word and get the Word into them. I’m committed to it for myself. I’m committed to it for every woman in this room and every woman you know. I committed to challenge women to think biblically about everything, about all of life. We want them not to just know their Bible, but we want them to engage with it with their head, with their heart, and with their hands. Knowing it, believing it, feeling it, loving it, and then doing it and sharing it with others.

We’re committed, as we always have been, to leading women to say, “Yes, Lord,” in every area and every season of their lives.

I don’t have to tell you that our world is on fire. And over the next year, we’re going to hear endless news accounts, endless noise, endless heated debate about the upcoming elections in the United States.

We’re also hearing now, and we’re going to keep hearing probably until Jesus comes, about global crisis, about wars, about crime, about evil being flaunted in a way that . . . I was saying this twenty, thirty, forty years ago the things that were unimaginable to us, not that many years ago, flooding the streets, flooding the campuses. It’s not just out there in our secular world. 

But what I find particularly unnerving and distressing is the compromise, the straying from holiness and from biblical truth in the evangelical world, in many churches and so-called Christian authors and movements in ministries that are adopting unhealth or ungodly or unbiblical thinking about a host of subjects, not the least of which is gender and sexuality.

This is a huge thing and the world is going . . Since Genesis 3, Satan has been trying to lead in a wrong direction on that, but to see so many so-called Christian leaders and influencers steering us in a direction of accommodation and compromise rather than saying, “This is the truth, and the truth is what will set you free.” So afraid of being an offense or creating an offense, that we have no ministry. 

We’re going with the culture, with the stream, the . . . what do you call it? Current! Thank you. I knew there was a “C” word there. (laughter) Rather, like salmon swimming upstream, the world so desperately needs more Christians to lift up high the banner of Christ and His truth. But sometimes we see the churches even moving, drifting away from that truth.

You see all this, and you can feel hopeless. I mean, really, the acceleration of evil and wrong thinking in our day has . . . I could not have imagined it going at this pace. And many of you, I’m telling by your nodding, you’re feeling the same way. You can feel hopeless. It’s like this onslaught, this tidal wave of evil and wrong thinking. You can feel not only hopeless, but helpless. What are we to do against all of this?

You can start to wonder, Is anything that we’re doing, individually, in our churches, in our communities, or as a ministry like Revive Our Hearts, is it making a difference? I mean, is it really making a difference?

Well, as I think about those questions, as I do regularly, I’m reminded, first of all, that the outcome of our ministry and our efforts is not up to us. It’s our responsibility to be faithful, to speak the truth, to be filled with the Holy Spirit, and do it in a way that is loving and wise, but just to be fearless, to be bold, to speak the truth. The outcome is not up to us. It’s up to God.

But it also requires faith to keep doing the same things. I mean, tell me the old, old story of Jesus and His love. Most people today are not interested in this black leather Book or the old, old story of Jesus and His love. They don’t know that they’re interested in it. They don’t think they’re interested in it. Some of them despise it.

It takes faith to believe that when you teach and speak the old, old story of God’s Word, His truth, Christ crucified and risen for our sins, the gospel story; it takes faith to believe it when we lift up that message that God is at work. God is changing lives.

I’m getting ready to teach from Genesis to Revelation, as Robert sometimes says, “Genesis to the maps.” Teaching through the Bible. I’ve been soaking in the early chapters of Genesis recently. You go back to those early verses of chapter 1, and it says, “The earth was formless, empty, darkness covered the face of the deep.” Some translations will talk about chaos or disturbance.

But then it says, “But the Spirit of God was hovering.” I love that verb. The Spirit of God. God wasn’t absent. God had been there all along. God was hovering. And then God said, “Let there be light, and there was light.” No human help. No human effort. No human energy. God is always at work. In the darkness, in the chaos, in the morass and the moral quagmire in which we live today, the Spirit of God is hovering.

He is at work through His people, through ministries like this one, through churches like yours, and wives and husbands, and people in various kinds of business and work environments, just living out the truth of the gospel to make a difference. God is working.

We have asked God from the beginning to give us a ministry that is marked by the supernatural, that’s not explainable, that’s the fruit of dependence on the Holy Spirit.

I believe in the power of the Word.

We believe in the power of the truth.

We believe in the power of Christ.

We believe in the power of the gospel to transform lives, to transform cultures, to heal wounded hearts, to set captives free.

So ultimately, this isn’t just a women’s ministry or a women’s movement. This is a gospel movement, a movement of the Spirit of God where we’re calling women to put the gospel of Christ on display, to show the beauty, the grace, the gospel of Christ, to make Him and His gospel believable in this broken, off-course earth.

We’re challenging women not only to live and enjoy this for themselves, but to be spiritual reproducers. God equipped women with the ability to be life-givers—physically, biologically. Contrary to what you may have heard in some form near you, men can’t have babies. Women can. Women have this life-giving instinct. Now, they can’t do it without men, but they’re made to be life-givers. And spiritually, whether God ever blesses us with physical children or not, God has made us to be givers of life, to be spiritual reproducers.

So, we’re asking God to raise up women who love Christ so much that they talk about Him with each other and with others and with their children until the Word spreads. They’re the marketing system for the truth—women talking to other women, young and old, about what they have found in Christ.

We’re asking God to raise up women who truly know Jesus, who are filled with His Spirit, who are living out the gospel in their sphere of influence, women of prayer, humility, faith, compassion, and wisdom. Just imagine the impact in families, in churches, in communities, in civilizations of an army of that kind of woman.

In fact, if you wonder about the impact of women, just think about two women in the Scripture: Eve in the Old Testament who said, “I’ll have it my way.” And Mary of Nazareth in the opening pages of the New Testament who said, “You have it Your way. I am the Lord’s servant. May it be to me as You have said.”

Think about the influence of Eve on the whole history of the world.

Think about the influence of Mary, a teenage girl willing to carry in her body the Savior. She isn’t the Savior, but she was willing to be used and expended for the sake of Christ and the gospel. And as a result of that Savior coming into the world, being born to a woman, we are here today knowing Christ.

Thank you for joining us in this mission. God is a builder. I was reading this morning some passages in Scripture about this. I won’t mention those now, but God is a builder.

And all the building and remodeling that we’re doing in people’s lives and that we’re involved in, whether it’s raising children or being involved in various kinds of discipleship and ministry, all of that building, that rebuilding, that remodeling, it points to something down the road. It anticipates. It looks forward by faith to a holy city that God is building. The Maker, the Builder is God.

That building, the holy city will come to earth one day because, you see, God made this earth to be His holy, eternal dwelling place where He would dwell with human beings made in His likeness and in His image. The Garden of Eden and everything else that we’ve done since messed that up. But God is a redeeming God who is making all things new.

What we see around us looks more like that mess in our garage or our living room, most of the time. But what God has envisioned is something far more beautiful, more wonderful than eyes have ever seen or ears have heard or we have ever imagined.

We get to be a part of what He is doing in building this dwelling place for God Himself, where He will live forever with His people. A home where there will be no more mess, no more disorder, no more chaos, no more sin, no more sorrow, no more death. Only glory and beauty where Christ will be magnified forever and ever, and the glory of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.

That’s the vision. That’s the passion. That’s the mission. But I just wanted to start our hearts by giving us some perspective and saying, “Yes, we’re living in the middle of the remodeling right now, but it will be worth it. And to thank you for rebuilding and remodeling and building with us.”

Oh, Lord, we’re so grateful for the privilege of being builders, workers with You, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 3. And thank You for the privilege of doing it with these fellow servants. We love You, we bless You, in Jesus’ name, amen.

Dannah: Amen. Oh, what an encouraging word, Nancy. Our God is in the construction and remodeling business.

Nancy: Yes, He is. He’s the Master Contractor. And even though everything around us may seem unstable, or, like everything’s changing, our foundations can be sure. That building is going to be secure if we’ve anchored our lives to Christ and to His Word.

Dannah: Yes. You shared that message with a small gathering of Revive Our Hearts’ Ministry Partners. These are people who believe in what God is doing through the ministry, and they said, “We want to play a special part in meeting the needs of the ministry here at year end.”

Nancy: Yes. I love seeing the way that these friends consider this as an investment. They’re laying up treasures in heaven. And the return on that investment, well, it just can’t be beat.

Those friends have provided a matching challenge, as we’ve been sharing with you throughout this month. If you’re just hearing this for the first time, that means that every dollar donated between now and Sunday night, December 31, will be doubled up to $2.1 million dollars.

Dannah: And so here on the last weekday of the year, we want to invite you to take advantage of this wonderful opportunity.

Nancy: And we really do consider it just that—a wonderful opportunity to reach the lives of women around the world who are eager, hungry, and thirsty to know Christ and to be transformed by His Word.

Well, there’s still time to contact Revive Our Hearts with your donation, and for your gift to be doubled. With just three days left in this months, we have quite a ways to go to reach our goal of $2.1 million dollars. So if the Lord is prompting you to help us meet or even exceed that matching challenge, we need to hear from you today . . . or by Sunday at the latest.

Now, maybe you’ve already given here in December. If that’s the case, I want to say a huge thank you. We’re so grateful. Only eternity will reveal all the fruit that results from your investment.

If you haven’t yet participated in this matching challenge, would you ask Him what He might want you to give today to help support the ministry of Revive Our Hearts? This year, this month is fast drawing to a close, so we’d love to hear from you today.

Dannah: Yes. We would love to hear from you. You can make a spiritual investment into Revive Our Hearts. To contact us, just head to ReviveOurHearts.com, or call us at 1-800-569-5959.

Now, if you’d prefer to mail a check to us, remember that it needs to be postmarked before the new year. Our address is:

PO Box 2000
Niles, Michigan 49120

We are so excited to see how the Lord provides over this weekend, and I just want to thank you in advance for being a part of that.

And now, Friend, have a wonderful New Year’s weekend.

Nancy, is there anything on your heart as we close this year?

Nancy: Yes, Dannah. As we come to the end of each year, I love to just pray a blessing over our friends, our listeners, those who’ve been walking with us through this year as we’ve been seeking the Lord and responding to Him, listening today.

We’re all in different seasons of life. Some are experiencing great joy, great freedom, great blessing, and others are in a hard place, and there’s a world of pain and hurt. Some are really looking forward to the year ahead, anticipating maybe getting married or having a child or graduating from college. But others are looking to the new year with a lot of dread because they know there are some hard mountains to climb ahead.

I want to say wherever you are, whatever you’re facing, whatever you’re experiencing in your heart and your mind at this time, the Lord has a blessing for you. I’ve chosen one from the end of 2 Thessalonians, chapter 3. Here’s what the apostle says, 

May the Lord of peace himself give you peace always in every way. The Lord be with all of you. . . . The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. (vv. 16–18)

That’s a pretty encompassing blessing, isn’t it? He’s the Lord of peace, and we pray that He will give you peace always, in every way. That sounds like enough peace to get us through whatever the year ahead will hold.

And then the Lord be with all of you. If the Lord is with us, what do we have to fear? He will be the victor in all of what we experience.

And then the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.

And, Lord, how I pray for all, for every listener, and for every family member of every listener today. I pray that the Lord of peace, the presence of Christ, and the grace of Jesus would be with each one, today, tomorrow, and through every day of the year ahead. I pray in Jesus’ name, amen.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth is calling you to cherish your freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

All Scripture is taken from the CSB.

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