Soaking in God’s Word

Dannah Gresh: Sometimes when you’re mentally depleted and emotionally empty, it could be because you have too much going on. Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth says it could also be that there’s unconfessed sin in your life.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: When we don’t have a clear conscience, when we have a guilty conscience, it affects us not only spiritually, but it affects us mentally and emotionally as well. You know, people are desperate for forgiveness. They’re desperate to find a way to be free from the guilt, to have a clear conscience, to be able to sleep at night and know that there’s nothing between them and God and nothing between them and other people.

Dannah: Today, we’ll hear about the vital role God’s Word plays in bringing about that kind of peace. You’re listening to the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Brokenness: The Heart God Revives, for December 10, 2021. I’m Dannah Gresh.

Are you running on empty mentally, emotionally? Is depression or anxiety knocking on your door? It could be that you need a good vacation, but it’s also possible there’s more at play. Maybe God is trying to get your attention so you can truly understand and repent of sin in your life.

Now, when I say “repentance” you may think of a fiery preacher calling people to the front of a church. But repentance can be as simple as this: you read something in God’s Word, and it softens your heart. You realize you’re not living out the truth of God’s Word, and by His grace you surrender to His plan.

That’s what happened to my friend Monica. She was reading a psalm, and she experienced the joy that comes from true repentance. When Nancy heard that story, she wanted to share it with you.

But first, Nancy’s going to lay some biblical groundwork for this concept of repentance and how important it is to have a clear conscience.

Nancy: Karl Menninger was a famous psychiatrist of the mid-1900s. He said that if he could convince the patients in his psychiatric hospitals that their sins were forgiven, 75 percent of those patients could walk out the next day. He said that guilt was such a huge thing; it put such bondage on these people. He said the issue is not so much mental disease as the fact that their conscience isn’t clear, that they’re carrying this weight of guilt that they don’t know how to deal with.

Let me ask you to turn in your Bible to Psalm 32. This is a familiar passage where David has committed a great sin with Bathsheba—adultery and he has murdered her husband. This was weighing heavily on his conscience. For some period of time, he held this inside. He describes in verses 3 and 4 of Psalm 32 what it was like when he was being tormented by this guilty conscience.

He says in verse 3,

When I kept silent [when I refused to confess my sin, when I didn’t have God’s forgiveness] my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me. [That’s God’s hand of conviction.] My strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.

He’s saying, “Spiritually, I felt this intense conviction. But it’s like my tongue got parched; my bones were dried. Emotionally and physically I felt the weight; I felt the effect of this guilty conscience.”

Have you ever been there? You know what it’s like, when God is piercing, convicting your conscience about something? Nobody else can see it by looking at you. It may be happening to somebody in this room as we’re talking here about this issue of guilt and forgiveness. But we know that there’s something we’ve done, that something isn’t right between us and God.

Is there something you’ve never been able to get off your chest, something you’ve done, maybe some deep regret, some past failure?

Maybe it’s not past. Maybe it’s something in the present. It’s some private sin, but you’ve never told anyone else; you’ve never really dealt with it. Maybe it’s a besetting sin. It’s something that you’ve confessed, but you keep committing it. And there’s this guilt in your conscience. We cannot approach a holy God if our conscience is guilty. Forgiveness is what allows us to approach God debt-free, with a clear conscience.

You know, so much of modern psychotherapy tries to help us deal with guilt by convincing us that we’re really not guilty, that somebody else did this to you. You feel this way, you are this way, you’ve done this because of what a parent did to you when you were a child, because of a traumatic experience you had, because you’ve been treated unjustly, or because your husband is dealing with you this way. Now, those things happen, and those things affect our lives.

But I’ll tell you, a really liberating truth is when we come to realize that we feel guilty because we are guilty. That’s not to say that we have to take responsibility for what others have done to us. We’re not responsible for that. But if we want to be forgiven, to have a clear conscience, we do have to take responsibility for our sins.

Dannah: Isn’t it true? When we’re hiding sin, our emotions—our conscience—is trying to get our attention. That’s our host, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, putting into words what we’ve all felt, because, well, we’ve all sinned!

Sometimes, you keep being tempted by the same thing—that battle is fierce. Or you just haven’t felt God’s forgiveness—the shame is deep.

That feeling is a good thing. God kindly gives us a guilty conscience in order to lead us to repentance. He often uses His Word, the Bible, to do it. 

I want to introduce Revive Our Hearts staff member Monica Vaught. She recently made a stronger connection between the role of God’s Word in our lives and how it can shape our responses and expose our sin.

Monica was invited by the organization Women at Work to share her thoughts with a daily online prayer group. Women at Work is based in the Republic of South Africa, and they got to know Monica through her role as international liaison here at Revive Our Hearts.

So not too long ago, Monica joined their prayer time via a video call and shared her sweet testimony. We wanted you to hear it, too. Here’s Monica.

Monica Vaught: A couple years ago I found myself in a season, having served in ministry for a long time, where I was really depleted and distracted and feeling really far from the Lord, which is a dangerous place to be. I had an opportunity to sit down with a sister, an older woman, and share some of those concerns on my heart and some of those burdens I had been carrying.

She very gently and very lovingly said, “I think you need to get some time away. You need to get some rest.”

Dannah: Now, what would you say if a friend advised you to step away from your responsibilities and rest? If you’re like Monica, you’d probably say, “How? I’m so busy!”

Thankfully, Monica decided to schedule some time off to focus on her relationship with the Lord. She wanted to draw away from the busyness and just be with Him.

Monica: That sounds great to a lot of people, but honestly, that’s really hard for me. I needed to put down my phone; I needed to shut off email; I needed to get out of social media. I needed to just be with the Lord, and that’s just hard. Honestly, it took me probably three or four—probably five days into this season of quiet and alone with the Lord before I really felt my heart and spirit start to get unhurried.

I went into those days and I was asking the Lord two things. One, I wanted Him to purify my heart, mind, and emotions. And, I wanted a deep sense of joy. That was something I had prayed about for several years. You know those people who just have a deep joy inside of them. I didn’t feel like I had that, so I had been asking the Lord for that.

Dannah: Monica used her time off to read what she calls “mega-doses” of Scripture. She would read her Bible for hours on end. But she didn’t randomly open it, hunting and pecking for something to bring her comfort. Instead, she stayed on her regular Bible reading plan, trusting God to direct her to what she most needed.

As her heart began to unplug from her to-do list and screens, she began to feel more connected to the Lord. That is when God used something quite common to get her attention.

Monica: One morning as I woke up, I was heading to sit with the Lord. I got my Bible out, and I had left those dishes in the sink. There they were; they were dirty. I stopped by the sink, and I was going to wash those dishes. As I started washing, the food was dried on, and it was crusty, and it was hard. I had to get the water and soap, and I had to scrub. I had to take my fingernail and scratch the edge of that plate. But you want that plate to be clean and smooth and so clean and pure.

So, I washed the dishes and I put them aside and went to sit down with the Lord. Suddenly, I realized, Monica, if you had put water on those dishes last night and let them soak overnight, that hard, crusty food would have just wiped right off. It would have just fallen right off.

Dannah: Monica was still thinking about those dishes when she opened her Bible the next morning. She’d just arrived at Psalm 32.

Monica: I had been reading out of another translation, the New Living Translation. It was a different translation, and I think that is good on occasion because it gives you a different perspective and lens.

So, I opened up to Psalm 32, and the first two verses out of Psalm 32 read:

Joy is for those whose disobedience is forgiven, whose sin is out of sight. Yes, joy is for those whose record the Lord has cleared of guilt, whose lives are lived in complete honesty.

Well, the Lord had my attention, no doubt, because I had been praying for joy in this season. So, we sat down and started going to work in Psalm 32. The presence of the Lord was so incredible. I felt like He was saying to me, “Your heart is ready. You’ve been soaking for four or five days in the water of the Word. We’re going to sit down and walk through Psalm 32, and it’s going to be gentle, and it’s going to be sweet, and it’s going to be between you and I.”

He could scrub, and He could pick, and He could scratch, but that water of the Word on my heart—my heart was ready to receive what He wanted to show me out of Psalm 32 that morning. The washing of the water of the Word . . .

He began to unfold that passage. The word “guilt” jumped off the page in the first couple of verses that I was reading.

Dannah: Now, years earlier, Monica had been through a season where she was not walking closely with the Lord. God did some incredible things to draw her to Himself, and she learned of His grace and forgiveness. But she was just beginning to see that her recent battle with mental and emotional exhaustion was an invitation to a more complete experience of God’s forgiveness and grace as she studied Psalm 32. Just like water on dirty dishes, God’s Word was helping soften some things that had hardened in her heart.

Monica: I moved into verse 5 that morning, and it says:

Finally, I confessed all my sins to You and I stopped trying to hide my guilt. I said to myself, ‘I will confess my rebellion to the Lord.’ And You forgave me! All my guilt is gone.

The Lord started to unfold that verse. Another version says, “You forgave my iniquity.” We use those words, “iniquity” and “sin” interchangeably sometimes. There’s a little bit of difference between sin and iniquity. I started to study that out a little bit.

I found that iniquity is not just the act of the sin, but it is the willfulness with which we go into sin. It’s almost finding delight in that sin. And that produces guilt in our life because we know we shouldn’t be doing it. In its simplistic format, I know I shouldn’t take the cookies from the cookie jar. But the iniquity of that would be, in a very simplistic way, is: I’m enjoying knowing that I shouldn’t take a cookie, but I’m going to take it, and I’m not going to get caught, and I’m going to love eating it. That’s the iniquity of the sin, not just the act that I took the cookie. That’s really simplistic, but that’s what the Lord was unfolding.

There was something in the guilt from this past season that I hadn’t really worked through with the Lord, so we started to unfold that. We started to work through that. He just showed me that He had forgiven those sins of the past, but what I was living in, I hadn’t gotten rid of all the guilt of that. I hadn’t let Him forgive the iniquity of that sin in that season.

He just unfolded that in some beautiful ways. It was tender. It was sweet. It was soft. It wasn’t harsh and difficult to go through. I wanted to enter into that season. I think it was because my heart was ready to receive. I’d been washed in the water of the Word.

Having come through that and realizing that He forgave that sin so long ago. But the greater freedom I found that morning was He forgave the iniquity of that sin. That produced an amazing amount of freedom in my heart.

Dannah: As Monica allowed God to use the truth of Psalm 32 to wash her heart, her emotions began to shift. 

Monica: I continued to read through that psalm and work with the Lord on it. Then I got to Psalm 32:11. This is the way that chapter ends.

So rejoice in the Lord and be glad, all you who obey Him! Shout for joy, all you whose hearts are pure!

Dannah: Do you remember the two things Monica had been asking God to do in her life? One, she wanted Him to purify her heart, mind, and emotions; and two, she was asking Him for a deep sense of joy! 

Monica: He purified my heart that morning through His Word and it was gentle. It was sweet. He forgave the iniquity of that sin that I had been carrying for a long time. The guilt was gone, and there was this sense of freedom and joy. He began to restore that deep sense of joy that comes from that intimacy with Him. He did it tenderly. He did it gently. He did it carefully.

I started singing that morning the old hymn: “Sin had left a crimson stain, He washed it white as snow.”

Dannah: Monica experienced joy as the water of God’s Word washed away sin and shame. She says she wishes she had soaked her heart—and those sins and iniquities—in the water of God’s Word much earlier!

Monica: It would have been so much easier. 

Dannah: Her encouragement to you if you’re feeling depleted, discouraged or depressed?

Monica: I know it seems impossible to get some time in your schedule just to be with the Lord, to be in His presence. You don’t have to do anything. Just open His Word, just let it begin to wash that heart of yours. Just don’t stop reading the Word. Stay in the Word, and let it do what only it can do. If you do leave dishes in the sink at night, you might want to be sure to put some water on them because it will be a lot easier the next morning for you.

Music: 

Jesus paid it all, all to Him I owe;
Sin had left a crimson stain;
He washed it white as snow. ¹

Dannah: Well, Monica Vaught would encourage you: Set aside some time to soak your heart in the water of God’s Word so He can soften your heart and wash you. 

And can I suggest a good place to begin? Psalm 32! In fact, let’s start soaking in it right now. Here’s Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth again with a few more insights from that passage. Remember, this chapter is written by King David, who was lamenting and confessing his sin to God. Nancy starts with what David wrote in verse 1:

Nancy: “Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.” Who’s going to cover that sin? We’re going to see in this passage if we cover the sin, we’re not blessed. But if we bring it out into the light, then God will cover it. There’s a difference between God covering my sin and me covering my sin.

So he says the one whose sin God covers, that person is blessed. The one whose transgression is forgiven. It’s wiped out. It’s covered over. “Blessed is the man against whom the LORD counts no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit” (v. 2). No double-mindedness. No pretending. No playacting. No hypocrisy. That person is blessed.

Then what happened in verse 5? “I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity.” I said, “I’m coming clean. I’m getting honest. I acknowledged my sin to You.” Look how many times you see this concept. “I did not cover my iniquity; I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the LORD.’”

That’s what confession is—acknowledging the truth, agreeing with God. No more hiding, no more covering, no pretending, no faking, no trying to leave a better impression on others or on God. Isn’t that a foolish thing to think that we could leave a better impression on God than is honestly true. He sees it all. He knows it all. But truthfulness about our sin, truthfulness about our spiritual condition requires confession. Saying about our sin what God says about it: "I did it." No more hiding; no more covering.

You see, God will cover with the blood of Christ and with His mercy and His forgiveness everything that we are willing to uncover. But everything that we cover, God will be forced to uncover and expose. Now would you rather uncover it and let God cover it up, or would you rather hold onto it covered up and force God to uncover and expose it?

Dannah: Wow, those are some very helpful thoughts from Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, looking at Psalm 32. 

I hope you’ll uncover anything God’s prompting you to confess today. There really is joy and freedom and blessing in that process. And I think you may have heard that in Monica’s voice when she shared her experience of being washed in the water of God’s Word as she studied Psalm 32.

Nancy: Yeah, Dannah, I heard that. It really was a beautiful thing to sense how the truth of God’s Word working in her heart was so liberating. And let me say how much I love Monica Vaught. She has been with Revive Our Hearts longer than any other team member! In fact, she’s in her twenty-seventh year with this ministry. Before there was a Revive Our Hearts, we were serving together. And today, Monica is the leader of international advancement for this ministry. She’s helping to nurture all the wonderful work our team is doing to bring this teaching to women all around the world. And as you can see, God is reviving the hearts of our staff, too, even as He’s reviving your heart.

We all need our hearts to be revived because as that hymn says that you hear at the opening of each day’s episode, we are “prone to wander.” I’m so glad we can dig into God’s Word together and be revived by His truth.

It’s listeners like you who help us continue bringing timeless truths day after day here on Revive Our Hearts.

You know, I often talk about listeners like you. I’m reminded that this really is a community. You’re not just listening to Dannah or me. You are part of what we do day after day. So when I say listeners make this possible through your prayers and through your financial support, I like to remind you, that means you! The listeners who make this ministry possible are mostly women (but also some men) from all walks of life and in all kinds of financial situations. And what matters is that they get involved. They join in the story of how God is at work through the ministry of Revive Our Hearts.

This is a great time to join that story! Every year the donations that we receive during the month of December make up close to half of what we need for the entire year.

So to keep all our existing outreaches going as normal, and to respond to new opportunities like the ones we’re hearing about in Brazil, South Africa, Germany, and in different parts of Asia, we need listeners like you to get involved here during the month of December.

Dannah: Some friends of this ministry know how important year-end giving is, so they’ve set up a matching challenge as a way to encourage you to give. They’re agreeing to match every donation given this month, dollar for dollar, up to a total of 1.4 million dollars. But Nancy, we do need to hear from our listeners this month in order for that money to be available to us.

Nancy: To finish up this year and enter 2022 in a healthy place, we really need to max out that challenge. We don’t want to leave any of those dollars sitting on the table. So we’re asking the Lord to put it on the hearts of listeners to give over these next couple of weeks.

Listeners like you.

Dannah: I love that! Here’s how you can get in touch with us. Online, just head over to ReviveOurHearts.com. On the phone, call us at 1–800–569–5959. If you’d prefer to mail us your donation, you can send it to this address: P.O. Box 2000, Niles, Michigan, 49120. 

Thank you for your donation! Now, here’s Monica Vaught to pray for us as we end our time together today.

Monica: Lord, thank You so much that You are so gentle, and You are so kind. You are so loving, and Your Word speaks to our hearts. Thank You that it ministers deeply into our souls and reaches those places that no one else can touch and speak to. Thank You for the freedom that comes. Thank You for the joy that can be restored.

Lord, I pray for the sisters who are on this call, that You would keep us in Your Word. May it dwell deep in our hearts. May we run to it first for our place of rescue. May You use it deeply to purify our hearts and minds and emotions. For Your name and for Your glory, amen.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth wants you to be washed in the water of God’s Word so you can experience freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

All Scripture is taken from the ESV unless otherwise noted.

¹ “Jesus Paid It All,” Fernando Ortega, Storm ℗ 2002 Word Entertainment.