Opportunities Ahead

Leslie Basham:  Nancy Leigh DeMoss says you could have a huge effect on the women you know.

Nancy Leigh DeMoss: The kind of discipleship women need best takes place in the context of the local church where they are doing life with people, older women teaching younger women.

Leslie: This is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss for Friday, December 2.

Yesterday we heard part one of a message Nancy delivered to some friends of this ministry. In 2011, we’ve been celebrating ten years of God’s faithfulness. Yesterday Nancy walked us through the past, remembering the beginning of Revive Our Hearts.  Today, we’ll evaluate the present and imagine the future. Here’s Nancy.

Nancy Leigh DeMoss: I get the joy of reading these emails that come in to the ministry. I want to read several of these that I think will just encourage your hearts.

One woman wrote about Seeking Him:

The Seeking Him book brought me into a true revival in the midst of my husband’s meth abuse. It truly changed my life, showing me that I am commanded and have been given God’s power to love as Jesus loved me, unconditionally, with agapé love in spite of how I’m treated. It opened my eyes to love, repentance, and forgiveness. The best part is that because of my own revival, my husband got radically saved and has been clean, sober, and walking with the Lord for almost 2½ years now.

The influence of God’s truth and God’s Word through a woman.

Here’s one we got just recently from a husband. He said,

I’d like to thank you for saving my marriage. For many years I was caught up in a nasty addiction, hiding and lying. I kept it mostly from my wife. God began a work in my life a year ago that led to a day of truth. That’s where you came in. Unlike any other Christian leader or teacher today [I know there are others, but he wasn’t aware of others] you talked about allowing God to work in a woman’s life and that marriage is not to be given away easily, to work through problems with the help of God if possible.

My wife believed that what you taught was truly God’s plan, and so we are working through the escape from and recovery of this addiction together. It’s not easy, but since I surrendered it all to God, I have more hope than ever that I will make it. I doubt that I would have tried without the help of my wife.
[Did God make the wife to be a helper?]

I want to thank you for your part. The truth and encouragement your radio program gave my wife saved our thirty-seven-year marriage and me. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

LB: Nancy Leigh DeMoss has been sharing some of what’s on her heart for the days ahead. We’re praying for God to lead Revive Our Hearts into new areas of effectiveness. She shared that message with some friends of this ministry who believe in the mission. And Nancy, how did they respond? NLD: Many who were at that gathering did catch a God-sized vision. They recognize that Revive Our Hearts is poised for greater Kingdom impact over the next few years. This isn’t growth for growth’s sake. We aim to be more effective at building God’s Kingdom. That means embracing new opportunities -- in broadcasting, in foreign-language ministry, in social media and other new forms of communication. Some friends of this ministry have caught a God-sized vision for Revive Our Hearts. They’ve offered to match each gift given through December 31, up to a matching challenge amount of $600,000. That’s the largest challenge we’ve ever taken on, but because of the opportunities ahead, now is the time! Will you help us meet and exceed this challenge? Call with your donation at 1-800-569-5959. That’s 1-800-569-5959. Or visit Revive Our Hearts.com. LB: When you open up your home, you have the chance to put the gospel on display. Gain an in-depth understanding of hospitality -- starting Monday, on Revive Our Hearts! _______ Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss is an outreach of Life Action Ministries. _______

See the influence of a Christian woman being a true woman of God?

Through this ministry we are calling women to discover and embrace God’s created design and mission for their lives, to reflect the beauty and the heart of Christ to our world, and to be intentional about passing on the baton of truth to the next generation, and then to join together in praying earnestly for an outpouring of God’s Spirit in our homes, our churches, our nation, and this world.

So through these past ten years, we’ve been laying a foundation through the various means available to us—through publishing, through events, through media—of launching these different outreaches—and through them, there have been seeds now that have been planted in hundreds of thousands of women’s hearts.

Now we’re praying and seeking the Lord, and have been over the past year or so, “Lord, moving forward"—we plan to continue all the things He has started and launched—"how do you want us to build upon that foundation to see this become a movement of women of God?”

To believe God for a grass-roots movement of Christian women who are living out the implications of the gospel, not only keeping it to themselves, but by virtue of their lives and their passion for Christ, influencing others. 

Some of you may remember this advertising campaign in the seventies—I pulled it up on Google today—it was a commercial with a young woman who cheerfully chirped that she told two friends about Frabreģe Organic Shampoo who told two friends who told two friends, and so on and so on. Her image was multiplying again and again on the screen. It’s just a cute little picture of what can be a reality. If you get women who believe something, they’re going to tell somebody else, right?

Many ones of you are taking what God has done in your heart, with the resources that have helped your walk become more vital with Christ, and are sharing them with others. The potential for exponentially spreading a message from one woman to another is huge.

I love that verse in Psalm 68:11 that says, “The Lord gives the word; the women who announce the news are a great host.”

Now, I don’t think that’s promoting a host of women preachers. I think it’s promoting a host of women who hear the Word of the Lord, who take it to heart and can’t help sharing it with other women. Those are announcing the news and are a great host, and we’re seeing that happen in just little anecdotal ways—I mean, they’re not little in the light of eternity—they’re significant—but in just little ways.

Let me give you just a couple of examples here: We got a call on our call center just recently from a woman named Judy who leads a Bible study in Soldotna, Alaska. Am I pronouncing that correctly? She leads a Bible study for twelve - fifteen women in that community. They record their sessions, and then she sends the audio to a friend in Yakutat, which is a Native-American Eskimo village who teaches the same truths and resources to the ladies there.

So they went through the Habakkuk series we had this past spring, and she was calling our call center to order the Ruth study for this fall—she said they need something to do during the winter up there. So it’s spreading from Soldotna, Alaska, to this Native-American Eskimo village where I don’t think we probably have a radio outlet out there—but they are taking these resources and spreading them.

We got an email just within recent weeks from a publisher in Egypt that has printed and distributed Lies Women Believe in Arabic and was calling now to let us know they are now shipping that book to Lebanon. This publisher has a sister organization that produces programs for Christian satellite TV in that region of the world, and they’re wanting to produce a TV program in the Arabic world for women to address the challenges and issues that women face, and they want to use Lies Women Believe as the basis for this Christian TV show—the themes, the topics. They said, “Maybe we’ll even call it, Lies Women Believe,” and they were wanting to know from us how they could get approval to proceed—taking that message, grassroots, to the uttermost parts of the world.

Around the week of our 10th anniversary in early September I got two tweets from the same woman, back-to-back. The first one said,

Hi, Miss Nancy. I thank God for you and Revive Our Hearts. Been listening to it every day here in Saudi Arabia. Life changing.

Then she followed it with a second one:

I just want to thank you because my life was changed through your ministry. Every day I listen to it and share it with some friends.

She told two, who told two, who told two, and so on. And many, many illustrations of how that is happening in the United States and Canada and abroad, North America and beyond. A grassroots movement of women who are—it’s not just me that’s influencing their life through my teaching, but they’re taking it to heart, and they’re reproducing God’s truth in others’ lives.

Then for those women to become a widespread movement of women who are praying fervently, individually and corporately, for genuine revival in the church.

Then as part of this grassroots movement, I envision thousands of local church women’s ministry, structured, equipped, and resourced to do in the context of the local church the discipling of women in the ways of God.

I got an email just within the last couple of weeks from a woman who said,

I want to tell you about a revival in the hearts of women of my church. Our women’s ministry leader, Kelly Bledsoe, told me about ROH at the beginning of the summer. She has now told all of our small group leaders and everyone I come in contact with at the church is buzzing about ROH.

This year our church started a women’s small group Bible study. We had over 225 ladies sign up. This next year it looks like we’ll be using Seeking Him or the Brokenness Trilogy in our small groups. We often laugh and say, "God is up to something." He is using Kelly to lead the ladies in one of the largest churches in our city [this is Alexandria, Louisiana, I think, where this came from] and she is only in her early thirties.

Please continue working through the podcast. I love them. Please keep our women’s ministry in your prayers.

The kind of discipleship that women need best takes place in the context of the local church where they’re doing life with people—older women are teaching younger women.

That is a huge part of this next ten-year vision—to see this more intentional Titus 2 type of ministry developed through these local churches where older women are teaching the younger women what is good. That’s easier said than done.

One woman’s ministry leader said to me recently, “These women, as their children are leading the nest, the moms are going back to the marketplace, and they’re not available. They don’t have time to teach the younger women. The younger women are desperate. They’re taking up the mantle. They say, ‘We’ll lead something.’ Within two years they burn out because it’s not the right season of life with them with little children to be providing the leadership.”

We want to be promoting this Titus 2 movement. In fact, my next major book I’ll be working on next year is a book on Titus 2, what it looks like for older women to be nurturing and discipling younger women, the next generation.

We’re asking the Lord over these next years to also help us develop an integrated effort of biblically grounded women speakers and authors who will be on the same page getting the message out.

A number of those women right now are writing books, one on motherhood, one on marriage—books I can’t write—but they are true women of God who are now in a season of life where they’ve lived it out, they’re writing this message of revival and biblical womanhood—just to get the message out in every way possible.

We want to believe God for a more active presence as He does the work in other languages, countries, and cultures. We’re believing God, both in the US and abroad in Latin America. Our second largest spoken language in this country is Spanish, fourth largest most spoken language in the world in Spanish.

We have many other opportunities. Our books are currently, I think, in eighteen languages, last I heard, but focusing on the Hispanic world in the US and abroad, to get that message of biblical womanhood.

Then we want to believe God to raise up women who not only are experiencing the freedom and fullness in Christ, but who are fruitful, not only by discipling other women, but who have a heart for reaching out to oppressed women, to women who are needy in domestic and international issues. I believe over these next few years, God is going to give a few causes to Revive Our Hearts to partner with that women can engage in.

I think the women’s prison ministry is going to be one of those. For the first time in our nation’s history, we have more than 1% of the population incarcerated, and many of those are women. Many, many of the moms we’re ministering to have sons or daughters who are incarcerated. And women reaching out, as Proverbs 31 says, “she reaches out her hands to the poor.” I believe there are some issues, domestically and internationally, that the Lord is going to allow us to have women who have been touched by the gospel then reach out and make a difference in other women’s lives.

Leslie: Nancy Leigh DeMoss has been reminding us of some of the serious needs of our day. She’s also been describing how God is using Revive Our Hearts to meet some of these needs. She delivered that message to some friends of the ministry, thanking them for their prayers and support over ten years and casting a vision for the future.

She talked with this group about some big opportunities Revive Our Hearts is facing. She began by describing the newly-designed website, ReviveOurHearts.com. It’s a mobile-friendly website.  And it’s just the beginning of the ways we’d like to speak to new generations using new ministry channels.

Nancy: Mobile aps, just so many things that will make the message more accessible, particularly to the younger generation, and we have got to reach these younger women who know no truth other than personal truth and who need to have their lives brought under the authority of God’s Word.

We want to expand and develop in that area, and then in targeting women’s ministry leaders to resource, train, equip, mobilize, and encourage them, to mobilize an army of volunteers and ambassadors. Now, there are a lot of those around the country, but I believe there are tens of thousands, perhaps someday hundreds of thousands of women who want to be a part of what God is doing through this movement and will, right in their community, as revival ambassadors.

We want to develop and distribute resources delivered in every way—print, Internet, video. The True Woman Manifesto is a great piece to help women understand what we’re talking about

Mary Kassian and I just finished co-authoring True Woman 101, an eight-week Bible study on biblical womanhood that we’ll be releasing under Moody Publishers in the spring. We’re very excited about that resource. Pray for us a week from Monday. We’ll be doing a 2½-day video shoot with eight women to do eight video sessions to go with that book.

Early on in the ministry we began talking about the fact that Oprah has had such an amazingly pervasive influence on our culture. Some of you may have watched the final, her goodbye series. Somebody just sent me a clip of just one part of that, that’s all I got to see, but there was a group of women led by some famous singer or movie star, I forget who it was. She stood up on the platform, a young woman, with two or three dozen young women and said to Oprah basically, “We are your children. We are the product of your life work.” They were thanking her for the influence she’d had on their lives. You could see that Oprah, who is in her mid-fifties, has had such a huge influence on the next generation.

The fact is, the women in most of our churches have been more influenced in their thinking by Oprah than they have by their pastor. Now, that’s no offense to the pastor. I’m just saying she has been, and others who hold to this philosophy of personal truth being your authority, they have been pumping their philosophy wholesale into women’s minds and hearts through every conceivable means—publishing, events, internet, media. Everywhere you turn they have infiltrated and permeated the culture.

We kind of talk in-house about how we want to believe God to use all the means we have. We’re not a radio ministry. We’re a message ministry, a mission ministry. We want to use every resource available to us to pump the gospel, the absolute truth of God’s Word into the lives of women so that way of thinking becomes as pervasive in those women’s lives as Oprah’s influence has been in our culture.

Now, when I think about the scope of what God has put on our hearts and what it will take to accomplish all that, I just get scared. In the human realm, this is not possible. It’s so much bigger than we are, but as I look to the Lord, I realize His resources are not limited, His power is great. That’s the whole nature of revival—God doing the impossible against all human odds.

As a board, we’ve been envisioning how the foundation that has been laid over these past ten years could expand exponentially over this next decade, if God is pleased to provide various kinds of resources—people, connections, the partnership with Moody Publishing is a great illustration of that, and with Moody Radio, and with other partnerships that we have that can help to multiply the message. We’re just saying, “Lord, if You’re in this, then would You just supply what is needed to make it happen over these next years?”

I am so conscious that the movement we’re believing God to accomplish will only happen by the power of His Spirit. It’s not by might; it’s not by power; it’s not because I am any gifted or capable author or speaker. I just know that, but I also know that we have a very, very great God, and that we have friends like you, not only in this room but around this country and in other parts of the world who share this vision, who want to partner with us and have partnered with us.

We can’t do it alone, and thankfully we have not had to do it alone. You’ve been a part of the community of faith that has stood with us, and I just want to say for all of us, in whatever ways, it means laying down a piece of our lives. Christ really is worthy of all that and more.

I’ve been thinking about that last scene in Schindler’s List, if any of you have seen that movie or are familiar with it, where Schindler has, through all those years, sold off possessions so that he could buy Jews and save them from being killed by the Nazis.

There’s a very powerful scene at the end. It’s the very last hours of World War II, and Schindler is surrounded by this group of people that he’s worked so hard to save, and they are immensely grateful for all that he has done, but Schindler is conflicted. There’s actually a sense of remorse and shame because he looks around at these people—I think it was around 1,100 whose lives he had saved by his sacrificial giving and courage. But he looks around, and he starts to think of how many more he could have saved if he had made some different decisions in his life.

He says, just kind of under his breath, “I could have got more out. I could have got more out.” He says, “I threw away so much money. I didn’t do enough.”

His friends there, kind of consoling, say, “But there are 1,100 people here. There are generations who will thank you.”

But that’s not good enough for Schindler. He looks over at his car, and he says, “This car—I could have sold this car. Why did I keep this car? I could have saved ten more Jews if I’d sold this car.” Then he takes off his gold Nazi lapel pin. He holds it up, and he says, “This is gold. I could have got two or at least one more out if I hadn’t held on to this pin.”

He weeps. He starts sobbing. He breaks down, and he says, “I could have got one more out, and I didn’t.”

Now, I don’t believe at all in shame-based giving, but I’ve been inspired as I think about that scene—not just in terms of the giving financial resources, but in terms of the laying down of our lives for the sake of Christ and His gospel; to realize that whatever God may ask of us here and now in this life—and I’m not just talking about Revive Our Hearts. I’m talking wherever He has you putting your resources and life and time and efforts and heart and energy, whatever He asks—do you think there’s a chance that when we get to heaven we’re going to say, “I wish I hadn’t given so much time, heart, effort, money?” Not a chance!

I know I’m going to be saying, as we look at those nail-scarred hands, “I wish I had given Him more. I wish I had given Him more—one more word, one more family, one more marriage.”

That is not in any sense an attempt on my part to say, “You guys should do more.” God’s speaking to my own heart and saying, “Time is short. Eternity is long. And the opportunities before us are so significant to influence and impact a generation, to take it back.” We’ve got Eves and Marys in this world—Eves who live by their own personal truth, and Marys who say, “I am the Lord’s servant. May it be to me as You have said.”

I just want to believe God to raise up a whole new generation of Marys who will be God’s handmaidens, who will be instruments of bringing the redeeming life and truth of Christ our Savior into this world.

Leslie: Nancy Leigh DeMoss has been sharing some of what’s on her heart for the days ahead. We’re praying for God to lead Revive Our Hearts into new areas of effectiveness.  She shared that message with some friends of this ministry who believe in the mission.  And Nancy, how did they respond?

Nancy: It was so encouraging to see that many who were at that gathering did catch a God-sized vision. They recognize that Revive Our Hearts is poised for even greater Kingdom impact over the next few years.

And when we talk about growth and impact, we're not talking about that for its own sake. Our goal is to serve and contribute to the advancing of God's kingdom. That means embracing new opportunities—in broadcasting, in foreign-language ministry, in social media and other new forms of communication, some of which are vital in reaching the next generation of women with God's truth.

Some friends who are excited about what God is doing through Revive Our Hearts at this time have offered to match each gift given through December 31, up to a matching challenge amount of $600,000. That’s the largest challenge by far that we’ve ever taken on. We'll only receive those funds if friends like you will help us match them. Because of the opportunities for increased fruitfulness, now is the time! Will you help us meet this challenge, and Lord willing, even exceed it?

To make a donation toward this challenge give us a call at 1-800-569-5959, or visit ReviveOurHearts.com and let us know that you want to be a part of helping to reach more women by partnering with us in this matching challenge.

Leslie: When you open up your home, you have the chance to put the gospel on display. Gain an in-depth understanding of hospitality starting Monday, on Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss is an outreach of Life Action Ministries.

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