Keeping God at the Center

Dannah Gresh: Here’s Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: I was talking with a friend the other day who is in her early forties. We were talking about singleness and marriage. She said, "When I was thirty, I watched thirty of my friends get married—some of them to each other. I felt like they were the parade, and I was the audience."

Dannah: This program used to begin, “This is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss.” Then at age fifty-seven, Nancy married Robert Wolgemuth. 

Robert Wolgemuth: In the presence of God and these witnesses, by a holy covenant, I Robert take you, Nancy, to be my wife, as long as we both shall live.

Nancy: In the presence of God and these witnesses, by a holy covenant, I Nancy take you, Robert, to be my husband, as long as we both shall live.

Dannah: So now we say, this is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Singled Out for Him, for August 28, 2024. I’m Dannah Gresh.

Before Nancy married Robert, she devoted her singleness to the Lord. She established a set of choices about how she would live her single years. She shared those choices with other people who were serving the Lord as single adults.

We’re going to hear one of those classic messages. If you’re married, I hope you’ll keep listening. Because deep down, this message is about contentment—about trusting the Lord in every season of life—and we all need that message!

Here’s Nancy, recorded in 2001, about choices that will lead to trust and contentment in singleness.

Nancy: The first choice: I choose to receive my singleness as a gift from God. That's a choice I make, to receive my singleness as a gift from God, to thank Him for that gift, and not to demand that He give me the gift of marriage.

I love that response that the Virgin Mary had in Luke chapter 1 when the angel came to her and said to this young teenage girl who was engaged to be married." You're going to have a baby and Joseph is not the father. God is the Father."

And you can just imagine how Mary's world just went into a whirlwind at that point. But I love her response in Luke chapter 1, verse 38. She said, "I am the Lord's servant. May it be to me as you have said."

You know, that is a great answer for every circumstance that God brings into our lives. "I am the Lord's servant. May it be unto me as you have said."

"Lord, I receive Your decision for my life. I receive this gift for my life. I'm not going to resent it. I'm not going to demand that You give me a different gift."

Now, singleness as a gift may or may not be for a lifetime. I don't know if I will be single for all of my life. God hasn't revealed that to me. He probably hasn't revealed it you. But the neat thing is that I don't have to know. What I do need to know is that He's made me single today, and my focus is on pleasing Him today.

Now, that doesn't mean that if I choose to receive my singleness as a gift from God, that I won't have unfulfilled longings. And can I say that it's okay to have unfulfilled longings? Can I also say that everyone has them? Every married woman has unfulfilled longings. Every single woman, every man, young, old, every person has deep, inner longings that cannot be filled here on this earth, that cannot be filled by any created thing.

There are times, when as singles, those unfulfilled longings particularly surface. I can remember not too long ago going to the wedding of the twenty-year-old son of some of my peers. Some of my friends' children are starting to have their own children. I went to this wedding. It was a sweet, young couple and a really precious wedding. I sat there in that service so thrilled for them. But it was just one of those moments when it hits you, I'm probably never going to be married. Or I may never be married, depending on what age you think about this. And there was a moment of sadness for me. I was thrilled for them. But there were tears in my eyes and a sense of unfulfilled longings.

I can remember the Mother's Day Sunday when the worship leader in our church said, "Everyone who is not a mother, I want you to stand and read Proverbs 31 together." I stood with all the men in the church. It was kind of what it felt like. Most of the women are sitting listening to this. There's that hard moment where it hits you, all of these other women are mothers. Here I have the physical capacity to bear children, but God hasn't given me that privilege to have children of my own . . . and likely, I never will.

There were tears. It was a moment of experiencing unfulfilled longings. But in the midst of that, I can still through my tears thank God and surrender to Him afresh realizing that this "unfulfilled longing is material for sacrifice."¹ It gives me something to offer God that costs me something.

 

And with that moment of teariness, that moment of longing, comes an opportunity for a fresh surrender, a fresh chance to say, "God, I trust You." 

Just last night I bowed my head before the Lord and said through my tears, I gave to the Lord a request. It's an unfulfilled longing in my heart. I was sad about something that was not being fulfilled. I asked the Lord if it would please Him, to fulfill that longing. Then I just laid it up to Him. In a fresh surrender I said, "Lord, I trust You to do what is best, and I receive whatever Your answer is. Whatever Your will is in this matter, I receive it." There is a freedom that comes from that.

So first, I choose to receive my singleness as a gift from God, to thank Him for it and not to demand that He give me the gift of marriage—remembering that marriage is not a requirement for my present happiness or fulfillment.

If I make marriage the ultimate goal in my life, do you know what marriage will then become? An idol. An idol. Anything I demand that God give me becomes an idol in my life. So, I choose to receive my singleness, to thank God for it and not to demand, in an idolatrous way, that He give me the gift of marriage even while I may still have those unfulfilled longings.

And then, number two. I choose to pursue intimacy with God and to allow Him to fulfill my deepest needs.

I choose to pursue intimacy with God. God made us for intimacy and the tendency of singles is to feel that if we don't have a mate then we can't experience intimacy. But the fact is that God made us to have the most intimate possible relationship in our spirit with Him.

So this says that I'm making a choice not just to drift in my spiritual life but to make a conscious, deliberate, intentional effort to be spiritually growing and not pining away. As one woman wrote and said to me, "We, as singles, should not pine away but take every opportunity to get to know our Lord. Pining just wastes our time and makes us miserable. My desire and my goal is to focus on Him and His Word." And she said, "I am renewing my commitment to Scripture memory and meditation."

One of the choices I have made over the years is to make a conscious, deliberate effort to get to know God, to pursue intimacy with Him and to allow Him to meet the deepest needs of my heart.

I do that by taking advantage of the means of grace that God has provided for all His children—the Word of God . . . reading it, studying it, memorizing it, meditating on it, teaching it, sharing it with others.

But not just the Word of God, the Spirit of God . . . letting Him fill me. Prayer . . . taking my requests before God. Praise and worship and fasting are means of grace in my life. Fellowship within the Body of Christ.

I take advantage of all these means that God has provided--the Lord's Supper and communion is a means of grace that God has provided to help us grow in our faith. And as I pursue intimacy with God, I want to focus on God's ability to meet the deepest needs of my heart.

Don't you love that passage in Psalms chapter 62, verse 5 where the psalmist says to his soul (he talks to his own soul) and he says, "My soul, wait thou only upon God. Wait upon God for my expectation is from Him." That suggests to me that the psalmist is saying, "The end of my search, the end of my pursuit is God Himself."

Now, God may bring a husband into the picture. God brings other means of grace into the picture. But ultimately, whether married or single, my whole expectation must be of God.

So I've made a conscious effort. I challenge you to make a conscious effort to pursue God, to get to know Him, to cultivate and intimate, growing, vibrant love relationship with the Lord Jesus. Then you'll find that He really is able to meet the deepest needs of your heart.  

Thank You, Father, for the time we've had in Your presence this evening. It's been good to be with You and Your people. Thank You for Your Word that challenges us about the choices we make.

And, Lord, afresh in this moment we want to just commit ourselves to those choices and to purpose in our hearts that we will accept Your gifts, whatever they may be. And if your gift for us in this season is singleness, we will not demand that You give us a different gift.

We purpose in our hearts to be spiritually growing, to be intentional about our relationship with You, to be seeking You and cultivating an intimate love relationship with You, and letting You meet the deepest needs of our hearts.

Help us, Lord, to make those choices, not just in this place when we're all together and it's easy to do it. But tomorrow morning when we wake up and it's hard, when our emotions come rolling in over us and tell us, This is hard and marriage would be easier. Oh, Lord, in those moments help us to go back to these conscious, deliberate choices. I pray in Jesus' name, amen.

Dannah: That’s Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, who was Nancy Leigh DeMoss at the time, recorded in 2001. Contentment has been an issue the Lord has pressed on Nancy’s heart for a long time. He used singleness to help do that for fifty-seven years before Nancy was married to Robert Wolgemuth in 2015.

Nancy’s helping all of us make choices to be content with God’s plan for our lives. Specifically she’s helping singles make wise choices for this season. Let’s get back to Nancy.

Nancy: I choose to not be controlled by my emotions. I choose as a single woman and, by the way, what we are saying here about single women applies really equally to married women. It's the choice not to be controlled by my emotions and not to indulge my emotions in sinful ways.

Now, emotions are not inherently sinful. At least, most emotions are not. Emotions can be a real gift from God, but they are tricky. They can deceive us.

And the danger is when we start living our lives based on our emotions—doing whatever our emotions tell us to do rather than checking things through the grid of the truth: what is the truth? What God's Word says regardless of how my emotions feel.

My emotions go up and down. Most of us as women, maybe even monthly where our emotions are going up and down. We have seasons where I can't trust my emotions. And the danger is if I let myself entertain or nurse negative or self-centered emotions, I'm going to end up in trouble.

All self-centered emotions are ultimately deadly. They are destructive. It's like quicksand. You let yourself play with these emotions; you let yourself think about these things; you dwell on these thoughts and these emotions, and you find you're sinking deeper and deeper and deeper and ultimately getting pulled down as many women do into deep depression.

 

I have to tell myself day after day after day when these negative thoughts and these negative emotions come into my mind, I can't let myself go there, because if I give it an inch, it's going to take a mile. I don't always succeed at this. But I've found that it is so very important.

Let me just address three particularly dangerous roads to go down as it relates to emotions. These are areas where I feel I need to really be cautious—things that I cannot afford to entertain or nurse or allow to come into my mind. They may come to my mind, but I can't dwell on them. I can't let these things stay there.

The first one is I've got to refuse to wallow in self-pity. Self-pity is so dangerous. It comes, and it is so subtle, and it attacks us through means of things like loneliness. Now what do we do with our loneliness? Well, let me suggest that we don't run from it.

We're not to just medicate or mask it or pretend like it doesn't exist and, oh, just put this happy Christian smile on and pretend that we're not lonely. God's not asking us to do that. He is saying, "When you experience these feelings of aloneness or sadness or things that would make you prone to self-pity, don't run from it. Run right into it and accept the loneliness."

In fact, realize it can become a friend. I know this sound very strange, especially if you are in a period of loneliness. You say, "This does not feel like a friend, or I don't want this kind of friend."

Actually, loneliness can become a friend if I let it press me to God. We heard just before this session a testimony from a woman who said that for a period of months she was struggling with aloneness, with loneliness. She said, "It was hard. But," she said, "it was so good and cleansing because it forced me, it pressed me to go deeper in my relationship with the Lord."

And in those times when I'm tempted to have self-pity, to wallow in self-pity, I need to face that and then deal with it by focusing on others instead of on myself—look for opportunities to serve, to give, to love, to bless, to minister, to get out of myself and into someone else.

That's when I need to counsel my heart according to the Scripture with passages like Psalms 42:5 where David says to himself what I need to say to myself sometimes:

Why are you downcast, O my soul?
   Why so disturbed within me?
Put your hope in God,
   for I will yet praise him,
   my Savior and my God.

He's saying, "Instead of focusing on those self-centered emotions, set your affections on things above. Look up. Set your hope in God."

Now, there's a second emotion to be careful not to give in to, nd that's the whole area of bitterness or anger, bitterness and anger. If I want to be free as a woman of God, I must refuse to give in to bitterness and anger which ultimately is the result of claiming rights. I have a right to be married.

A woman wrote me and she said, "I realized I was bitter toward God [and ultimately all bitterness does go back to God] for not giving me what I felt like I deserved—marriage. As a result, I was tormented with constant thoughts of discontentment."

Refuse to give in to bitterness and to anger. Instead, I've got to yield my expectations to God, yield my rights to God, and receive with gratitude the circumstances that God brings into my life. When those bitter, angry thoughts start to come, I can't go there. I've got to say, "I can't nurse these thoughts. I can't nurse these emotions."

There's a third area of feelings and emotions that I believe is so important we refuse to indulge. And that's the whole area of romantic feelings and desires, as single women, romantic feelings and desires.

There is a verse in the Old Testament, the Song of Solomon, which is a wonderful study on romantic love and marriage. But in that book, the author says, "Don't awaken love until it's time." And when is its time? After you've been to the altar. That's the time to awaken those feelings, those desires.

Now, there are times when your emotions will tell you, "I have to have that man. I can't live without him." I remember a time when I allowed myself to cultivate a romantic attraction and feelings and desires toward a man that I knew was not in God's will for me to marry. I can't tell you how difficult it was when I had to come to the place of realizing, This has to be cut off.

It was so much harder then because my emotions were screaming, You can't live without this. You can't go on. I can't help the way I feel. The fact is, I can help what I do about fueling those feelings. And I had to come to the place—and better sooner than when the fire is raging—to say, "I can't pour fuel on this fire. No fantasizing."

Now what that means is that we need to be careful about the kind of input we take in. I will promise you that, if you make a diet of reading romance novels, you will be fueling something that you'll find you can't deal with as a single woman. And, I believe married women should be reading those. But as single women, that's dangerous. It's fueling desires that can't rightly be fulfilled this side of marriage. Those emotions grow more intense as we feed them, as we fuel them.

And when we make the right choices, as I had to do in that situation to say, "This can't be. This has to stop. I can't continue fueling this." As hard as it was . . . I'll tell you that at the moment I felt like it was cutting off an arm. I mean it just felt like I couldn't live without this.

But in time, God began to replace what had become impure desires, because it wasn't the time for love; God began to replace those, in time, with appropriate and holy and wholesome emotions and righteous desires as I began to feed my love for God, to set my affection on things that are above. I have found that, in time, the hurt and the pain was not what it had been at the moment I felt I couldn't live with this.

The emotions scream out at us. How do we deal with those? Well, be honest about the emotions. Tell God how you feel—the bitterness, the anger, the self-pity, the romantic desires. And then be honest about ways that those emotions have led you to sin—ways that you have indulged those emotions so that you have made choices that are not right choices.

And then determine to stop fueling the negative, the sinful emotions and instead, set your affections on things that are above. You know what that says to me? We can choose what we love. We can choose to some degree what we do with our emotions.

And I find that as I renew my mind in the Word of God, as I fill my mind with the Scripture and the Word of God and get my mind off of the world's input through its magazines and books and movies and music but fill my mind with things that are holy and pure and good and true; then God helps to rein in my emotions.

Paul said to the Corinthians, you need to bring in every thought to the captivity and obedience of Christ (see 2 Cor. 10:5).

So you know what I do with those emotions? Those thoughts that sometimes feel like they are raging out of control? I bundle them all up and I lift them up to the Lord and say, "Lord, I can't handle these feelings. I can't handle these emotions. These are too strong for me. But you are Lord of my life, and I'm giving them to You. I'm asking You, would You take over? I want all these thoughts, every thought to be brought into captivity to the obedience of Christ."

And as I do, I find that He is able to control that which I commit to Him. Now that doesn't mean that I don't ever struggle with it, but it means I'm given by Him the grace not to go down the road further than I should, not to nurture and entertain emotions that ultimately are going to be so deadly and destructive.

Why are you downcast oh, my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God. For I will yet praise Him, my Savior and my God.

Dannah: That’s Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, recorded in 2001, back when she was still Nancy Leigh DeMoss. 

I just want to review three choices Nancy made when she was a single woman. She said:

• “I choose to not engage in self-pity.”
• “I choose to not be bitter in the season of life God’s called me to.”
• “I will surrender romantic feelings and desires to the Lord.”

Those commitments and many more are what Nancy covers in her booklet Singled Out for Him. She wrote it to help single people embrace the gift, the blessings, and—yes—the challenges of singleness. We’d love to send you a copy of Singled Out for Him as our way of saying “thank you” for your donation of any amount to help support Revive Our Hearts. 

You can give when you go to ReviveOurHearts.com and click where you see the word “Donate,” or call us at 1-800-569-5959. Either way, make sure you request the booklet on singleness by Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth.

Tomorrow Nancy will share four more wise choices singles should make as they embrace this time in their lives. I hope you’ll 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.

¹ Elisabeth Elliot, Passion and Purity: Learning to Bring Your Life Under Christ’s Control (Michigan: Revell, 2002), 66.

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