Teaching Young Ladies to Be Pure in Heart

Leslie Basham: The Bible tells older women to teach younger women. That’s what Claire is learning at the Pure in Heart conference.

Claire: It’s really difficult to stay pure in this age because there are so many temptations in the world, especially when you get older. For my age right now, it’s really hard to stay pure, but for me it’s pretty easy because I have my mom and my dad and God. I’d like to thank Revive Our Hearts for making this conference so special to all the girls that came and their moms.

Leslie: This is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss for Friday, June 12. One of the new words that has popped up in the last few years is "tween." Marketers use the word tween to describe kids between 7 and 12, and they know it’s a crucial time in a girl’s life.

Well, today you’ll learn about exciting developments at Revive Our Hearts that encourage moms to get involved in the lives of their tween. Here’s Nancy describing the Pure in Heart conference.

Nancy Leigh DeMoss: I really believe that as much or maybe more than anything we are doing as a ministry that the Pure In Heart conferences . . . Let me just say two things about them.  One, I think they have as much potential as anything to capture the hearts and the interest of women across this country. Women are begging for this; they are eager for this. They are so burdened about how to help their daughters go against the flow and against the culture and be pure in heart.

That part of our ministry as much as anything holds the future. As we pass the baton of revival and biblical womanhood to the next generation, we’ve got to do that. I’m in my 50s now, and I can’t just care about the women in my demographic—the women who are the demographic that listens to Christian radio, by and large. We have to be reaching the young married women, the young moms, the college age girls, the teenage girls.

The Lies Young Women Believe and the website that goes with that and have been a part of that movement and now this Pure In Heart effort to reach what they call the “tweens”—the pre-teens and the young girls. This is huge because if we don’t plant those seeds of purity in their hearts now, the world is planting its seeds of thinking in their hearts. Everything around them is a siren call to a message that is diametrically opposed to the biblical way of thinking. Not only is it contrary to God’s way of thinking, it’s going to wreak havoc their lives for generations to come.

So we can’t wait until they are in college and thinking about marriage before we start really orienting their lives to what it means to love the Lord God with all their hearts and to keep their hearts for Him, and to engage in dating or courtship. Whatever you call it is not so much the issue, I’m convinced, as how you do it. People can use the courtship model and have impure hearts. They can call it dating and do it with a pure heart. It’s the heart that’s the issue we’re trying to address.

You don’t wait until . . . mom’s thinking, “Oh, when my daughter’s ready to start dating, then we’ll have this conversation with her.”  No, that is years too late. The whole culture is sending its advertising message at little girls in ways that most of us don’t realize because we’re not sitting there watching that stuff and taking it in. But with the music, with the entertainment, with the movies, with the television, with the websites that some of these little girls are on and being exposed to things . . .

This whole teaching in the Song of Solomon about not awakening love until the proper time . . . What’s happening is that the world is awakening things in the hearts of young girls and pre-adolescent and adolescent and teen girls, awakening things in their hearts that God did not intend them to experience now. As a result, things are being stimulated and appetites created, and they are being challenged to feed those appetites.

What’s happening with “girls gone wild” (the extreme version of that) is that they are ending up with heartache and heart break and messed up lives and just being used and devastated. The wreckage is enormous. So we are in a rescue mission here. This Pure in Heart movement is a rescue mission.

If we’ll do it at the Pure in Heart level with the young girls, then there won’t be, Lord willing, quite so much salvage operation going on down the road. Now I think that we’ll always need both, but we can’t just be speaking to the women who are my age or older, or even the women whose children are grown.

We need to speaking to the moms who have the young daughters and saying to them, “We can’t make our daughters pure. We can’t make them love purity or choose purity. But what we can do is create an appetite for purity.”

• We can model purity.
• We can model love for the Lord.
• We can create a spirit in the home by our own example, and with those of us who are single with the young women around us, that makes them say, “I want what you have.”
• We can make purity winsome.
• We can make Christ desirable, so that they’re not allured by the things of this world and what it offers, which is fake.

It’s counterfeit; it’s false.  We can say, “Christ is the real thing. You can have Him.” We can make Him winsome.

We can do it by our example, and we can be intentional about planting seeds in their thinking about teaching and training them in the ways of God. It’s Titus 2—older women teaching younger women to love their husbands. 

You say, “Well, these 8-year-old girls don’t have husbands.” They will one day. So we are teaching them now how to develop lives where they can love their husbands with a pure love in years to come. How they can save their hearts and their bodies and their emotions for the one that God will choose for them down the road. So we can model it.

• We can be intentional about teaching.
• And then we can pray.

We can say, as I’m burdened to do . . . One of my big burdens for next year, Lord willing, in a more visible way in this ministry is to launch a movement of mothers praying for their children—not just individually, but collectively. To say, “Lord, we are not going to let the enemy have this next generation.” The enemy is taking the minds and the hearts, is capturing the minds and the hearts of our children, our teenagers, our young people, and mothers are heartbroken.

I think the Lord is brokenhearted over what He sees. Kids growing up in Christian homes and rejecting the faith, rejecting purity, rejecting God’s ways.  I’d like to see a movement of women coming together to pray together for prodigals, for children who aren’t yet prodigals, to pray that God will protect them from that path. We are talking as a team about what we can do to come together and to just wage an all-out assault on Hell, which is waging an all-out assault on our children. The Pure in Heart movement is one piece of that. It’s shining a light, not just cursing the darkness, but lighting a candle and shining the light of God’s purity.

I’m not so naïve as to think that if these little girls come with their mom to this one-day conference that they will never fall morally, they will make right decisions all their lives.  What I’m hoping is that we can encourage, inspire, and equip their moms to go back into their homes and do the day-after-day, year-after-year work in the home with the power and enabling of the Holy Spirit, so they can be cultivating in their home a climate that is conducive to their children really developing a pure heart for God.

Leslie: Listening to Nancy Leigh DeMoss is a strong reminder. If you have young daughters now, you have a short window of opportunity to invest in their lives. We talked with a group of moms who recently attended Pure in Heart about how the conference affected them.

Mom 1: Well, we came to the conference—I came specifically for my older two daughters and was excited for what they were going to learn, having no clue that I thought it was almost more for me. It wasn’t a superficial, get all excited, kind of spiritual high you often get, but it was just practical and so real. The teaching that they gave was true learning. Things that we could bring home with us. So I’m walking away from here with hope, with encouragement, and with determination to fight for their purity.

Mom 2: I would recommend the conference to moms to really let them know and expose them to what our daughters are really being bombarded with. I was amazed at some of the statistics, and our kids are pretty sheltered. But I was amazed at things that they see, that they’re bombarded with, that even as I’m talking with my daughter, she’s coming up with statements and questions. I say to myself, “I tried to protect you from this. How could this happen?” But it happens and everything that they’re exposed to.

Mom 3: It’s important to me because it helps my daughter and I—kind of opens up the avenues of conversation about making good choices and just having a pure heart in a lot of different areas. It’s something we can do together and grow together in our relationship with Christ.

Mom 4: There’s so many reasons why you should come and attend a conference like this with your child. One is for the closeness that you’ll feel with your child, with your daughter or son. One is that you get renewed and refreshed by the Holy Spirit and with good teaching and the Word of God. One would be that you know you’re not alone.

I looked around and it just got me to realize that there are so many other mothers doing the same thing that I’m doing every day. I’m working hard to raise kids for the Lord. It’s not an easy job. Sometimes you feel like you’re all alone in it. So when I looked around and realized there are thousands of people here today all with the same goal, it makes me feel like more empowered that we can do this. We can take back the next generation.

Leslie: Moms obviously got a lot out of the Pure in Heart conference, so what was the highlight?

Mom 5: I would have to say the blessing part when we got to be with our daughters and bless them and share with them things that we admire in them and then also things that we would like to see them grow in. That was probably my favorite part. That was the most meaningful, but it was all great.

Leslie: Highlights like the blessings ceremony made a big emotional impact on many of the moms at the Pure in Heart conference, including this mother of two.

Mom 6: First of all, just picturing the two of them and just taking in . . . I found myself writing feverishly all the beautiful qualities that God has blessed them with, nothing so much that they’ve done, but truly seeing them for who they are, the princesses that God created. That overwhelmed me with such emotion that that blessing, that package, that princess was entrusted to me. It overwhelmed me again thinking, “Oh my goodness, I need this. I need the Word. I need this empowerment. I need Christ to be my King, to be the princess He created me to be so that I can lead them down that same path.”

Mom 7: Very emotional and just a lot of tears from the standpoint of . . . You love the girls, whether they’re your daughter or someone that you’re discipling or pouring into and just being really intentional with your prayers. That’s where I was convicted from the standpoint of how often do we really believe in the power of prayer to change their life. So it was just a really special time.

Mom 8: Tears, lots of tears. Just the urgency that we have to reach our girls’ hearts and how even sitting next to two very dear friends of mine with their daughters, doing that, just sitting there in prayer over them and how I really felt convicted that we need to join our heads and our hearts together and even pray together over our daughters and hold each other accountable to bringing them up in purity and even just continuing to pour these blessings over them.

Mom 9: Lots of emotions. Just so many times you don’t take the time to really share with them what they mean to you and really share with them . . . It’s so easy to get caught up in the correcting and trying not to be critical or things in their day to day, as you’re instructing. But so many times, it’s easy to forget that with each correction there needs to be two or three praises with that. So it was a good time to just remember to praise her for qualities that I do see in her that are Christ-like and things that she would like to grow in more, that God wants her to grow in more.

Leslie: You’ve heard some of these moms refer to the princess theme that carries through the Pure in Heart conference. Maryanne Loving, one of the conference speakers, explains this theme.

Maryanne Loving: A daughter of the King is focused on her inner beauty. I’m telling my girls all the time, “You were born an original; don’t die a copy.” I think in our society, we tend to compare ourselves with so many other people, and God has made them unique, with special gifts and talents and abilities. A daughter of the King is going to recognize how God made her, and she is going to, number one, understand in her heart that she was created to glorify God.

If that’s not the foundation, then nothing else really will be set in place. She has a heart that wants to glorify Him. She has a heart that is surrendered to the Lord’s will, committed to lead a blameless life and willing to step under the protection of mom and dad until that season that God brings a young man into her life. She’s committed to godly virtue, godly character.

Leslie: That’s so different from the message our girls get from the world. Is there really hope that they can learn to be daughters of the King?

Marlae Gritter: I really believe that the enemy is having a heyday with his lies . . .

Leslie: Here’s speaker, Marlae Gritter.

Marlae: . . . and he knows that if he can get our little godly girls when they’re young . . . This conference starts with girls that are age 7, and I have a 7-year-old granddaughter. I just can’t get over thinking about my little Makayla needing to know this at 7, but I know she needs to know the truth and to understand and grasp who she is in Christ, so definitely there’s great hope.

I love what Pure in Heart’s doing because we need to counteract the culture that says a different message. That’s what they’re seeing out there. That’s what they’re hearing out there. Everywhere they look. Everywhere they turn. I’m excited that we’re the counter-culture to say this is not the truth. This is who you are. I believe God is raising up a generation of bold, strong, godly children. I really do.

Leslie: Maryanne Loving interacts with a lot of moms at the Pure in Heart conference, and she knows one of the fears that affect these women.

Maryanne: I believe Satan feeds us a lie that if we weren’t pure in our pre-marriage days, we cannot pass on that legacy of purity to our children. That is exactly what it is. It’s a lie, and we’ve got to grab a hold of the truth of God’s Word. First, I believe in recognizing forgiveness of our sin through the blood of Christ and then recognizing that He will give us the power and the grace through Himself to then teach our children to walk in purity.

We have a saying in our home that we need to be hot with one another: Honest, Open, and Transparent. It’s so important that we share our failures with our children. With my older girls I have shared that failure that happened in my life with them so that they could see that mom’s not perfect and mom has had to acknowledge her need for God and that there are consequences to sin.

But then as I walk in purity myself, I can then be a role model for them to walk in that purity. For a mother, that no matter how dark her background or how immoral she may have been, you can put a stake in the ground and say, “From this day forward, I’m going to walk in purity, and I’m going to train up my daughters to do the same.”

It’s a legacy of hope that God gives us that in the midst of our self-condemnation and self-loathing and self-guilt we can crawl out from under that by the power of God’s grace and His forgiveness and we can train them up in a way that honors Him and glorifies the Lord.

Leslie: We’ve heard from moms and speakers who are part of the Pure in Heart conference, but everyone can get involved. Brandy Schaeffer attended the conference with a group she mentors in the inner city, and she found it was worth the time.

Brandy Schaeffer: It’s easy to get caught up in your day-to-day life and take things for granted. I can only imagine the busyness of the schedule of a mom. But it’s like a day like this when I was getting to bless those girls, I felt like this is a day that they’re probably going to remember the rest of their life.

Where it was hard for me to schedule out one day, it’s something that might stick with them forever, and isn’t that worth taking a few hours of your day for their lifetime? It was such a special time, an incredible time at this conference. I’m so glad I got over that hump of skepticism, not being a mom, and coming here anyway. It was well worth the time.

Leslie: Brandy Schaeffer has been helping each of us think through priorities. Teaching purity to girls today is worth any time or investment required. Just as God is using Brandy in the lives of young people, He can use you as well. Nancy, I hope a lot of listeners have been inspired to stay involved in these girls’ lives.

Nancy: I agree, Leslie, and whether you’re an older woman or a younger woman, married, single, you have your own children or not, maybe you’re a grandmom; there’s some simple steps you can take to be involved in the lives of the young women in this next generation. First of all, I want to encourage you to get a copy of the storybook for girls called, The Princess and the Kiss.

Reading good books to your children or your grandchildren is always a worthwhile investment, but The Princess and the Kiss has the added value of being a great story for teaching purity, planting seeds of purity in the lives of these young girls. It tells the story of a princess who is being wooed by a whole variety of suitors. This book will help your daughter, your granddaughter, a young girl that you’re ministering to, it will help her to learn discernment as she evaluates the young men who try to win the heart of this princess.

So when you make a donation of any amount to the ministry of Revive Our Hearts, we’ll be glad to send you a copy of The Princess and the Kiss. It’s a great story and one you’ll want to share with the young girls in your life.

Every time we’ve mentioned this book in the past, listeners have written us to say, “What about our sons? What do you have available for them?” Well, Jenny Bishop, who is the author of The Princess and the Kiss, has answered that call with an equally engaging story for boys. It’s called The Squire and the Scroll. The young men you know, your sons, your grandsons, they’ll be captured by the action-packed story in this picture book and will learn crucial truths about being young men of character and purity.

So ask for either The Princess and the Kiss or The Squire and the Scroll when you send a donation of any amount. Just call 1-800-569-5959 or donate online and get all the details at ReviveOurHearts.com. Also on the website you can find information about the companion resource, The Life Lessons book that goes with The Princess and the Kiss or The Squire and the Scroll. This Life Lessons companion book is a great way for you to take the truths that are in these fabulous stories and to explain them and expand them further into the lives of your children.

Let me share with you another important way that you can invest in the lives of your tween girls, ages 7 to 12. If you’re within driving distance of the Dallas/Fort Worth area, I want to encourage you to plan now to come to the Pure in Heart conference taking place in Colleyville, Texas, this coming November. This is a conference for mothers or grandmothers and their daughters or granddaughters, tween girls, ages 7 to 12.

You and the young ladies that you bring will enjoy special times of worship. You’ll learn how you can plant seeds of purity in the lives of your children and the girls will learn how to guard their heart, their eyes, their emotions, and how to make wise, modest, and pure decisions.

So to find out more about the Pure in Heart conference in the Dallas, Texas, area in November, visit our website, ReviveOurHearts.com.

I hope that you’ll be involved in your church this Sunday learning the Word of God and serving the people of God. Join us again on Monday for Revive Our Hearts.

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

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