The Legacies of Two Godly Fathers

Dannah Gresh: Robert and Nancy Wolgemuth reflect on the spiritual legacies their fathers left behind.

Robert Wolgemuth: So I can hear him downstairs, the timbre of his voice, just walking through the house . . . my daddy praying.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: He has encouraged me to love the Lord with all my heart. He didn’t care if we got rich. He didn’t care if we had impressive jobs. He just wanted us to know and love and serve Jesus.

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, coauthor of You Can Trust God to Write Your Story, for June 17, 2022. I’m Dannah Gresh.

Did you call him “Daddy,” “Dad,” “Papa”? What comes to your mind when you think about your father? Now, I realize not everyone has fond memories of their fathers. Your mind’s eye might recall painful snapshots of your dad, or maybe your father was just plain missing from your life.

Many of us did have daddies who loved us and did their best to care for us. Whether your relationship with your father is strained or stable, pained or nearly perfect, all of us have a God-given responsibility to honor our fathers, just as Scripture says in Exodus chapter 20.

Not too long ago, Michelle Hill, who serves on the Revive Our Hearts production team, sat down with the host of this program, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth and her husband Robert. They reflected on the legacies their fathers left behind.

As you listen, think through how you can do a better job of honoring your father this Sunday on Father’s Day—and beyond, too. Here’s Michelle Hill in conversation with Robert and Nancy Wolgemuth.

Michelle Hill: As we’re honoring our dads, I just want to hear from you guys, little snippets into who your fathers were and what they did to help build your character. But let’s start off with, what’s your first memory of your dad?

Robert: My first memories of my dad were in an auto parts store that he owned. This is a long, wonderful story, because my dad didn’t look like it, but he was highly entrepreneurial. He was the pastor of a church. He went to get a part for his car, the part hadn’t come in, and so he said to the manager, “Can I buy this business from you?” And the manager said, “Yeah.”

So here’s this little pastor in a town in Pennsylvania who buys an auto parts store, and that store funded his whole family, all of our college, everything. My dad was in ministry, never took a salary, because of the auto parts store.

It’s kind of a surprise, because you’ve met entrepreneurs who are like car salesmen, upbeat. But he was very thoughtful and very sober, but he knew what he wanted to do. So he built this auto parts store into four auto parts stores. I can just see him working the counter, being absolutely in his element, because he was a car guy. So that’s an early memory.

Michelle: Wow! That’s such a neat memory. Nancy, what about you?

Nancy: You know, you get to a certain age and the memories aren’t what they once were. I couldn’t tell you what my earliest memory is. But I do know that something really important in our family was (which is almost unheard of today) . . .

This was a large family. My parents had six children in their first five years of marriage, and then a seventh a number of years later. So our family meals were disorderly. There was a lot of conversation—it’s a pretty verbal family. 

Every day we had breakfast together at 8 a.m. and dinner together at 7 p.m. When we were kids, we thought that was torture! All our friends got to eat at 5:00, but we waited until Daddy got home from work. But we were together for meals.

Now, as we got older and things came into our lives, we weren’t all there for every meal, but this was a really important thing in our family. It wasn’t highly structured; we had family devotions hit-and-miss, but there was conversation about fun things, about interesting things. My family loved to talk about politics or current events, but also about the Lord and about the things that mattered most to my dad. As a businessman, he loved talking about opportunities he’d had that day at work to share the gospel with somebody, or he would read a letter we got from a missionary our family was supporting.

So I can’t say there was a particular family gathering that was like some great, big story. But I think looking back over the tapestry of our growing up, those meals together—with my dad at the head of the table, literally and figuratively—were really important.

Michelle: Ah, some great memories. So as your dads taught you about God, about their Father, what do you remember some of those conversations looking like?

Nancy: It was woven into the warp and woof of our lives. Dad was not a preacher, although he had opportunities to speak to businessmen, etc. He would always talk about the Lord. He would say, “I’m probably not going to get invited back anyway!”

He would give his testimony about how he came to faith in Christ as a young man. He would always give people an opportunity if they wanted to receive Christ. He was very outspoken about his faith, but he was also very natural about it.

We grew up thinking that was just natural, normal conversation. It’s not like we talk about life and then we talk about Jesus. Jesus is our life! My parents had a lot of ministry going on in and through our home. 

We would see people coming to know Jesus in our home. We would see our parents reaching out and ministering to a couple whose marriage was in trouble, and the family was all a part of this. 

We would be praying for people. We would be saying, “Does so-and-so . . .” You know, Daddy would tell us about some person he had met. “Does that person know Jesus?” That just became . . . I know it sounds maybe unbelievable to some whose upbringing was so very different, but it was such a natural part of everyday life.

It wasn’t overbearing or, “Uhh! Are we still talking about God?!” It wasn’t that at all. My dad loved the Lord, and he loved God’s Word. So it was more caught than taught. We knew that his time in the Word every morning was sacrosanct, but it wasn’t like, “Okay, you have to do this, you have to have daily devotions.” This was his life, this is what he loved.

He loved learning wisdom from God’s Word. He loved us; He loved listening to us; he loved letting us talk. I remember one meal time where everybody around the table was talking loudly at the same time. I looked around and I thought, There is absolutely nobody listening! Everybody’s talking!

And so, sometimes that was chaos. My dad didn’t love chaos, but he would settle us down. It wasn’t about him; it was about the Lord, and it was about us. He wanted us to develop our gifts and our strengths. He was an encourager.

He used to call me his “favorite oldest daughter.” Well, I’m the firstborn child, so . . . But what was interesting was, when my dad died suddenly at the age of fifty-three of a heart attack (over forty years ago, now) . . . I never knew my dad during my adult life; this was the weekend of my twenty-first birthday. 

After my dad was suddenly taken to be with the Lord, the seven kids, we compared notes. We realized we all thought we were his favorite child! (Of course I really was!) No, we all thought that! And that’s a sweet thing for a dad to be able to accomplish.

I’ll tell you a huge key to that. My dad was a very busy man. He had built a successful business, he had a lot of responsibilities and obligations and appointments and not a lot of just hang-out time. But he had an incredible woman in my mother who supported him, encouraged him, affirmed him, and made it her goal to make that home run smoothly so that when we had time with him, he wasn’t having to deal with some of the practical things of running a household. She managed a busy home and affirmed my dad. 

So, thinking about sitting around those meal tables, my dad had a very peculiar, shall I say, diet. He didn’t eat any spices, any sauces. He was Greek, but he couldn’t eat anything stronger than salt.

So, no casseroles. He had a very meat and potatoes diet, period, with nothing on them, just very bland. I didn’t know until my dad died that my mother loved hot, spicy foods. She loved tabasco sauce! She started using it when my dad died. All those years, he didn’t say she couldn’t, but she just adapted her life and her lifestyle to my dad’s preferences, not because he made her. 

They really loved each other and adored each other and supported each other. But my dad could not have been, probably, as close to all of us kids given his time limitations as he was able to be unless he had a supportive wife there, making it possible for him to fill that dad space and do what only a dad could do.

Michelle: You know, as you’re talking, Nancy, and sharing about your dad, and as I’m hearing this incredible legacy, your face just lit up as you were talking about your dad! And that is such a neat thing to see, for a young woman to go, “One day I need to be that excited about my dad, because I want to honor him.”

Nancy: That doesn’t come overnight. That comes as we grow and realize. I think I took a lot of that for granted as a young woman. As I’ve gotten older, I know other women who don’t have anything close to the experience I had with my dad.

But I’ll tell you one of the reasons my face lights up when I talk about my dad, it’s that my dad’s face lit up (I’m going to cry) when he saw us! He wasn’t perfect; he had a rebellious, wild upbringing, youth. He was far away from the Lord, far away from home. 

He brought baggage with his life. He and my mother didn’t start their family until some years later; he was older when they got married. He had grown in his faith, but he still had remnants of . . . He had a temper before he knew Jesus, and that didn’t all go away overnight.

He could be irritable, especially when he got tired. In fact, the morning that he died, I was home for that weekend for my twenty-first birthday, and he was a little bit out of sorts. He was really tired. We didn’t know he was probably having a heart attack as this was going on. So it wasn’t like he was always like this great, joyful, amazing Christian.

But he was also humble. He would come back and he would make it right. He wasn’t trying to make us believe that he was something more than he was. In fact, he never got over the wonder of the fact that God would have saved him. It never ceased to amaze him!

I actually only saw my Dad cry in two types of conversations. One was when he would talk about how the Lord had saved him. He never got over that; it just amazed him that God would have redeemed him.

But he would also cry when he would talk about his dad who was, apparently (I never knew his dad), a gentleman, a lovely man, but he probably didn’t know the Lord. When my dad would talk about his dad, who may not have been a believer—probably wasn’t, didn’t have a relationship with Christ—that would make my dad really tender.

And that’s one of the reasons my dad had such a passion for telling people about Jesus, because he knew his dad didn’t have that. He knew that God had rescued him from a very lost, rough background. He knew that every person without Jesus, churched or not churched, is lost for eternity. That had a grip on him.

So, more important than giving us stuff . . . He was very concerned that we not get spoiled. We had friends whose parents made a lot less income than my dad did in his business. But my dad was the one making sure we turned out the lights, making sure my brothers would use those tennis balls until they were worn naked. He was frugal.

He didn’t want us to be addicted to stuff, but he did want to use whatever God gave us—including a lovely home—for the purpose of helping others know Jesus. He taught us values. He taught us what matters is eternity—people’s souls matter more than our happiness. And, we find our greatest happiness through loving what God loves and loving God. He was a man who loved holiness.

Robert, we’ve talked about how in the background you grew up in, holiness was more a kind of dour, negative concept, but I think the reason I grew up loving the concept of holiness was my dad believed there was nothing more joyful than to have a pure heart and to choose the pathway of holiness.

It wasn’t a list of things you can’t do, it was “this is the pathway to joy.” And again, I don’t remember a lot of my dad talking about these things, it was more the air we breathed, that we grew up in, that was caught in ways that . . .

My dad, for example, before he was a Christian, really had an issue with alcohol. He had a pretty addictive personality. He had been a gambler before he got saved. He loved risk. He had kind of a compulsive sort of personality. Some people tend more toward addictive behavior than others.

Well, he knew that about himself, so he made choices for himself after he came to know Jesus. If I told you what some of those were you might think, Well, that’s legalistic. It really wasn’t. He never touched alcohol again.

Michelle: He just loved God.

Nancy: He just loved God, and he didn’t want anything that might trip him or his children up in their later years. He had seen the ravages that alcohol had taken in his own life and in other people’s lives and families that we knew.

So it wasn’t, “Thou shalt not drink.” It was (I’m just saying how he felt about it), “Why would you? How would this be helpful?” People may land other places on that, but I can’t thank the Lord enough. Now, this is going to sound like we grew up in another whole era or planet.

We didn’t go to movies as a family. In that era, a lot of churches or Christians thought that wasn’t a good thing to do, so that wasn’t all that uncommon, but the reasoning for it was so . . . We didn’t have a TV in our home. The more I say, the more people are thinking like, Wow! This was so negative! It was not negative; it was a joy.

Because he said, “If you have TV, you’re sitting there watching that late at night, you’re filling your mind with things that don’t really matter.” We had fun; we had family nights; we had game nights. We would sometimes rent a 16 mm film to show for a family night (for those who even remember what that might be).

We had fun; we laughed; we talked about lots of things; we read books; we went to interesting places. But we did more talking and reading and enjoying each other than mindless entertainment. And now that I look at peers and friends who’ve grown up where the culture is what was their upbringing, and they struggle to have a heart for God . . . They got hooked as children on things that were of this world, values, philosophies. I’m not saying these things in and of themselves are wrong, but what a joy to get your children hooked on Christ, on the Word, on relationships, on family!

My dad would have been the first to say, “We’ve made a lot of mistakes as parents. There are a lot of things we wish we’d done differently.” They were doing it before there were books and seminars and workshops and conferences to help you do it as parents.

So, he got in God’s Word. Every day of his Christian life he read two chapters of the Old Testament, one chapter of the New Testament, five chapters of Psalms and one chapter of Proverbs. 

Michelle: Wow . . . every day.

Nancy: Every day. From the year he got saved until he went to heaven twenty-eight years later, he didn’t miss a day. So, the book of Proverbs, for example, was shaping his life every single day. 

That wisdom helped him to grow as a man of God, but also helped him to create an environment that was conducive to his children growing up to see God in their dad and to want to know our Father in heaven, of whom the best dad is just a dim reflection.

Michelle: Now, Robert, what about you? As you have grown up, been married, had kids, had grandchildren, how has your dad impacted your life as you look back?

Robert: Very much like Nancy. In fact, there’s a lot of similarity between Art DeMoss and Sam Wolgemuth—sober men, men of the Word, strict men, men with lots of personal discipline. They both outkicked their coverage in their marriages.

Nancy DeMoss, Nancy’s mom, and Grace Wolgemuth, my mom, really changed the face of our family because of their spirit and because of their love for our dads. When my dad would come home . . . and this is a traditional family, where my mom stayed home and my dad worked.

I can remember so clearly my daddy walking in the back door and my mother would stop whatever she was doing, literally, throwing her arms around his neck and kissing him on the face, on the lips, in front of all of us without any apprehension at all, which back in that day was not all that common. 

So, I believe that my dad believed in himself and what he could do with his life because my mother told him that he could. She was an unbelievable encouragement to him. He didn’t have a mother that encouraged him.

Way late in his life, in his eighties, I asked him if his mother ever said to him, “I’m proud of you.” He took a deep breath and said, “No, never.” So he lived his whole life without that coming from his parents, but he got it from my mother, this lady named Grace.

To put maybe a different look at my dad, in addition to what Nancy has said about her daddy, my dad was an indoor guy, studying, writing, reading. But he would, I think, force himself. If I could talk to him today, I would say, “That was kind of out of your comfort zone.” 

He would say, “Yes,” because he would say, “Let’s go outside and play.”

My dad played baseball in college. With a baseball bat and a big league hardball, he could hit pretty well, pretty consistently. So he’d throw the ball up to himself and hit fly balls to my brothers and me. I mean, I’m going to say, hour after hour.

He’d call out. We would drop an easy fly. He would say, “A good fielder would have gotten that one.” Or we’d dive for something and get grass stains on knees, and he’d say, “Stay on your feet! Your mother has to clean your jeans!”

But I remember my daddy in that setting. I do remember watching him preach, and again study, stay inside, all that stuff. I think he kind of forced himself to play outside. If ever there was a principal that works now . . . It’s so easy to let our kids be entertained with stuff in their hands and not say, “Come on, let’s put that down and go outside.”

That was a gift to me, because I know the temptation of just staying put, staying inside, staying where the weather is comfortable. My dad was a real encouragement to me to just put that down and go outside and play.

I mean, there’s something magical that happens, I think, when children play outside. It’s the air; it’s the smell of the grass; it’s the beauty of the trees and flowers and whatever. I’m glad that my dad pushed through, probably, his apprehension about going outside, and doing it and going outside or playing catch with me by the hour. That was a gift to me I’ll never forget. 

How kind the Lord was to me, to show me what a daddy was like who stepped out of his comfort zone and did that for me and for my family, my siblings. And so, that would be a really fun memory for me.

Michelle: If you had a chance to talk to him today, what would you say?

Robert: Well, I’d thank him. I’d thank him for his discipline. I’d thank him that every morning he would pray, like Nancy’s daddy. Again, so many similarities. My dad would pray out loud. It’s an interesting thing about praying out loud: your mind gets less distracted if you’re actually speaking.

So, right now I’m talking to you, and I’m not thinking about anything else. But if we were sitting here looking at each other and not speaking, all kinds of things would come into my mind—the schedule this afternoon, I’m going to do this weekend. But speaking changes that, it focuses you. And so, my daddy knew that about himself. I could hear him downstairs. I couldn’t hear the words, but I could hear the timbre of his voice, his walking through the house while my daddy prayed.

We knew he was praying for us, praying for the world. My daddy was a world Christian. If you travel the world today, there are many nationals who remember Sam Wolgemuth. So, all that is really good stuff: throwing a baseball, catching flies, then listening to my daddy pray, and really realizing the respect that so many people had for him. It helped me when I was a kid and I didn’t think he was that cool. The older I’ve gotten, the more I realize what a special man this was.

Michelle: Nancy, if you had a chance to say something to your dad today, what would it be?

Nancy: I’d have to just express how grateful I am for how much of who I am today and how much of how I see God today was shaped by my dad. Also, how much of the ministry we’re doing—Revive Our Hearts—has a huge footprint in Latin America.

My dad had a burden for Latin America. He couldn’t speak Spanish, but he went to Latin America many times. He would share his testimony, would preach the gospel through translation. He learned about three words and that was his Spanish vocabulary! But he had a heart . . .

In fact, he and my mother, on their honeymoon, my dad was in-between businesses at that point. They took three months and went and traveled and did ministry in Latin America, in Cuba, Dominican Republic, British West Indies, Haiti. This was his heart. He saw God at work. He would take us on a mission trip to Mexico. 

We’re talking not big stuff, not impressive stuff, but little village churches with animals running through the street and the aisles in the church while he’s up there sharing the gospel, inviting people to come to know Jesus.

Well, I think now, decades later, of how much God is doing through the ministry of Aviva Nuestros Corazones that began as a vision in my dad’s heart. He would be so thrilled! Maybe he does see it, maybe he does know it. He would be so thrilled to see that.

He just encouraged me, and I thank him for this, to love the Lord with all my heart. He didn’t care if we got rich. He didn’t care if we had impressive jobs. He just wanted us to know and love and serve Jesus—whatever that looked like, whatever that meant. I would thank him for that.

He was a successful businessman, but he didn’t push us as children at all into the business world, though he knew you could probably make more money there. He said, “Business is a demanding taskmaster, and you have to know that’s God’s calling.”

But he would have been thrilled to see the choice that God has put in my heart over these years to serve the Lord, to be in vocational ministry. He would not have discouraged the fact that I didn’t marry until I was in my fifties, if that’s what God wanted.

He wouldn’t have been like, “When are you getting married?” I didn’t know him as an adult, so we didn’t have these conversations, but had he been around when Robert came into my life, he would have celebrated that. He just wanted to know that we were seeking and doing the will of God; that’s all that mattered to him, so I would thank him for that.

I would thank him for a letter I got on my sixteenth birthday, when I was just starting my first year in Bible college. You understand, he dictated letters with an old-fashioned Lanier dictaphone, so his secretary typed this. 

Michelle: Oh, yes! (laughter)

Nancy: He signed it and put it in the mail, and I received it on my sixteenth birthday, telling me how proud he was of me, how thankful he was for me and affirming what he had seen of my heart for the Lord and for ministry. I don’t remember if it was in that letter or another (I just have a few of these) where he quoted that little refrain that he had sitting in a marble piece on his desk: “Only one life, ‘twill soon be past; only what’s done for Christ will last.” So I would thank him for giving me that belief deep in the core of my being, that what truly matters is Christ and eternity.

So, really, who I am today, everything I’m doing . . . My mom would have to be part of getting that honor and credit, because it was them together. My mom has lived now as a widow for over forty years and has continued that legacy in the lives of her children and grandchildren. So “thank you” would be big on my heart. Thank you . . . thank you!

Dannah: That’s our host, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, sharing words of honor for her dad, Arthur DeMoss, along with her mom as well. She was joined by her husband, Robert Wolgemuth, and Michelle Hill. 

Whether honoring your father sounds difficult or easy, the Scriptures make it clear that it’s not optional. So think through how you can express your thoughts about your dad in a way that puts him in the best light possible.

You might want to write down your thoughts and formally read them to him, if he’s still alive. But even if he isn’t, you can still honor Him for the things he did well. Nancy and Robert did that today as they reflected on the godly legacies that their fathers left behind.

Today’s program is made possible in part by members of the Revive Our Hearts Monthly Partner Team. These are friends who help support this ministry through their prayers, through spreading the word about Revive Our Hearts, and through their regular financial gifts.

There are a lot of perks for being on our Monthly Partner team, not the least of which is that your registration to one Revive Our Hearts conference per year is covered by us! You’ll see many more details when you visit ReviveOurHearts.com/partner. If you’d rather call, our number is 1-800-569-5959. Have a wonderful Father’s Day weekend, and give that special man in your life a gift of words!

Do you ever feel like asking God, “What in the world are You doing!?” The Old Testament prophet, Habakkuk, not only felt like asking that of God, he actually did ask that of God! Next week Nancy will begin taking us verse by verse through that powerful book. I hope you’ll join us again for Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts, with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth is calling you to speak words of honor and find freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

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