Revive Our Hearts

Dana Gresh: Did you know that we're in our 25th year of ministry here at Revive Our Hearts? Yes, it's true. Cue the cheers! And the confetti! And how about a kazoo or two? Oh, I wish I had time to give you 25 reasons I love this ministry so much because I really could.

But for right now, I think I can sum them all up in one sentence. I love Revive Our Hearts because its core message is Jesus Christ. Everything we do is aimed at helping women thrive in Christ. This was our message on day one, and it's still our message today. In fact, it's what I want us to focus on for the next half hour we have together. I'm your host, Dana Gresh. You're listening to Revive Our Hearts Weekend.

Today's program is all about the saving power of Jesus, the gospel. Because sometimes we need to get back to the basics, remember the main thing, and spend some time just looking at Jesus. Here's a little roadmap for you.

First up, Mary Kassian is reminding us how understanding what Jesus has done for us shapes our womanhood, and how our womanhood displays the image of God and the love of Christ. Then, Rosario Butterfield's going to illustrate how the gospel transforms our stories by telling a story of her own. Last but not least, our beloved Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth is reminding us that we all need Jesus in all areas of all of our lives. It truly changes everything. He truly changes everything.

To kick us off, we've got the lovely Mary Kassian. Mary's a dear friend of Revive Our Hearts and a co-founder of the True Woman movement. She's also a wife, a mother, and a grandmother. She loves to write and speak about God's good design for women. She's going to take you to Scripture to show you the powerful, purposeful correlation between the gospel and your womanhood. Let's listen.

Mary Kassian: First Corinthians 11 verse 3 says, "But I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God." There's a mystery there, obviously. We don't fully understand the Trinity and how God is one, and yet how there are different functions within the Godhead in terms of how God interacts with God. There's a lot of mystery there, and yet there's a parallel drawn between the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God.

In Ephesians chapter 5, the relationship between a husband and wife, there's a parallel drawn between the relationship between Christ and the church. It says, "Wives, submit to your own husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is head of the wife, even as Christ is head of the church, his body, and is himself its savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word."

In the same way, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. And Paul goes on, "This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church." So the mystery of marriage, the mystery of husband and wife, the mystery by extension of manhood and womanhood, is a profound mystery, but it has something to do with Christ and the church. It has something to do with the way Christ loves the church, dies for the church, gives himself for the church, and is united to the church, and in the same way, the church respects Christ and is one with Christ. So that is to be reflected in who we are as male and female and to be reflected in the marriage relationship.

History opened up with the creation of man and woman and a marriage because it will end with a man and a woman and a marriage. Marriage as we know it, the relationship between man and woman as we know it, will end. And we will all, when we see Jesus, we are actually going to a marriage. Who's getting married? We're getting married. The church is getting married to Christ. Christ is the bridegroom, the church is the bride. Men and women, so to speak, are going to be the female part of that relationship in the way that we interact and in our union.

So it started with a marriage, ends with a marriage. Marriage is temporary, and that's why 1 Corinthians says that don't worry if you don't get married, don't worry if you remain single. That's also a blessing because you can still tell the story of Christ and the church, the story to which every earthly marriage is to point. So our marriages, my relationship to my husband, is to tell the story of Jesus Christ and the church. It tells the story of the gospel. It points to something bigger. It's just momentary. Our marriage is momentary. The marriage of Christ to the church is eternal, and that's the story that we're telling.

Dana Gresh: Wow, this view of gender, sexuality, and marriage puts it all into a grander, more glorious, and more beautiful perspective, doesn't it? We're listening to Mary Kassian in an interview with our friends at American Family Radio. They asked her to comment on what it means to be a man and not a woman, or a woman and not a man.

Mary Kassian: It's a really good question because I don't think that culture has an answer to that question. They would say that the only difference is a physiological one, and that can be changed, that we can even change our physiology and our biology. But Scripture has a different answer to that question. It says that manhood and womanhood, male and female, were created in the image of God to bear witness to the story of God.

So in our maleness, in our femaleness, we glorify God and we uphold the story of the gospel. As a woman, I have a responsibility to glorify God and to tell the story of the gospel as a woman. And I do that differently than a man. Now we're telling the same story, we're both telling the story of the gospel, we're telling the story of Jesus and the church, but it's like we've got two different camera angles going on the same story.

I tell the story from a woman's camera angle, and my husband or a man tells the same story from a camera angle that is a male camera angle. Same story, same God, same gospel, and yet we tell it in different ways. So I bring glory to God, I bring glory to God as a woman by being who God wants me to be as a woman and nurturing those character qualities in my life that God says are particularly important for women in terms of who God created me to be as a relational being, as a woman who has an amenability to relate to men as men.

He is a man, I am a woman, and that glorifies God. My womanhood in and of itself glorifies God. I glorify God by becoming more holy, by becoming more righteous, by becoming more kind, more loving, all of those things that God wants me to be, but I also glorify him by stepping into who I am as a woman.

So Genesis chapter 1, we see the equality of male and female. Genesis chapter 2, we see that there are differences between male and female, that there are functional differences between male and female, differences really ontological differences is what I'll say, a difference in the essence of who we are. And the differences are fascinating.

And I think that in order to understand the differences between male and female, we need to understand, put it through the New Testament grid of the mystery that male and female, manhood, womanhood, marriage, has to do with the story of Christ and the church and the gospel story. So if we take that grid, if we take that story of the New Testament when we look back through the story of creation, then we can understand why there are differences between male and female and what those differences mean.

Dana Gresh: Mary Kassian on how our womanhood displays the gospel. There's more to this message, and the whole thing is so fascinating. We'll link to the rest at ReviveOurHearts.com/weekend, just select today's episode. Now I don't know about you, but learning from Mary has me so excited about being a woman. You feel that too? We get to tell the gospel story in a unique and special way as women, and there's no better story to tell.

Speaking of storytelling, that's something we love doing here at Revive Our Hearts, especially when those stories reflect God's larger narrative of redemption. Turns out our testimonies can put the gospel on display as well. Dr. Rosario Butterfield exemplifies this so beautifully. She's an author, a speaker, a pastor's wife, a homeschool mom, and the author of The Gospel Comes with a House Key. She and Nancy met up at Ligonier Ministries' National Conference to talk about how God can use our hospitality to reach others with his life-changing grace.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: You were as you talk about in another book an unlikely convert. And God used hospitality to reach out to you to bridge to Christ. And this is something you had the joy of being a part of in relation to your own mother. You call it deathbed hospitality. And I know there are points of crisis and points where you've had a family member or somebody that you're close to that for years and years it just seems like they are the most unlikely possibility to become a convert. But God moved in an extraordinary way. Robert and I were hearing the story as it was unfolding. You've shared it in this book. Can you give us a nutshell version of what God did there?

Rosario Butterfield: Oh, that was amazing. So my mother was, she was hurt as a child, very much so. And she was not treated well, and she grew up with a high suspicion of men, and she also had absolutely no use for the church. She lived with us for 16 months and during that time she mocked our faith. She challenged Kent when he would try to do family devotions. I mean it was really awful. She would tell our children that this was wrong, that intelligent people don't believe in these supernatural things and she was highly resistant. Oh, it was really rough.

And you know, I was writing books and at a certain point after the second book, Openness Unhindered came out, so there were two books that sort of are tied together. One is Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert and the other is Openness Unhindered: Further Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert about sexual identity and union with Christ. And my mom read both of those books. And she came to me after reading both of those books and she said, "Rosario, I've read both of your books, and I'm not weak like you. Maybe if I were weak like you, I would want to know this Jesus, want to have a life like you have, but I'm not weak like you. But I do want to tell you, I'm dying. I was just diagnosed with lung cancer, and I want to die my way, and I don't want you or your religion interfering with me and how I'm going to die."

And so that was probably the biggest faith crisis of my life because the hardest people to witness to are your family, because they know your sin better than you do. You know there's no faking it. They've been sinned against by you. Well, in God's providence I was able to spend the last 10 days of my mother's life with her in hospice. Kent took care of everything so that I literally just sat at her bedside the whole time. And at a certain point my mother said, she just sat up and she looked at me and she said, "Well, I guess I'm weak like you now. Why don't you tell me about this gospel? But why don't I believe? If I'm weak like you, why don't I believe?"

And I said, "Well mom, I don't think it's the gospel that you don't know, I think it's the shepherd you don't know. You seem to have the big strokes, but it's the person that you don't know." And my mother in her very practical way said, "Fine, okay, I'm dying. Tell me about this. Tell me about him." That began a fascinating time in my relationship with my mother. It only lasted for two days because she died very quickly after that. But Kent and I started to read every Bible passage we knew of that told us about Jesus the shepherd and Jesus shepherding. And my mother had this immediate and totally opposite response where she couldn't hear enough of it. She'd say "Read me more, tell me more."

And then at a certain point she sat up in bed. You know it's funny people who are dying they can't move their mouth but all of a sudden they're looking like they're going to walk out of the room. She sat up in bed, she said, "Well but wait a second! What am I going to do about my sin? I don't want to talk to a priest! What am I going to do about my sin?" And I said, "Well you have to talk to the priest, the priest Jesus. You need to confess your sin and have confidence that he will forgive you." She said, "But I don't have to talk to you about it? No, I'm not your priest. Great, good."

And it was very rough. My mother was a rough around the edges woman. She had worked hard and had had a hard life. But two days before she died I had the amazing privilege of seeing her commit her life to Jesus. And that was amazing. My mother died and I had no regrets. And that was the moment that I realized that God is merciful and he hears your prayers. I went to my homeschool co-op which was a few days later and one of my friends said, "Oh Rosario, what happened? Did your mother ever come to faith?"

I looked at her and I said, "Well you know I don't know, I mean maybe it was the morphine talking. I mean she said all the right things." And this friend, you know homeschool moms just give you the smackdown, she just turned to me and she said, "You know what sister? When you came to faith there were a lot of people who didn't believe it either. So guess what? Jesus saves sinners just like you, just like me. Praise God for what he did in your mother's life and quit worrying about morphine." Praise God for friends who can do that because it's terrifying.

But as you said in your book it changed her future but it changed our past as well. It changed our past. I don't have any of those regrets. I don't have any of those what ifs, those childhood losses, because salvation in the forward motion of salvation, that resolves the backward glance of history. Jesus rewrites history. And the gospel changes individuals, but it also changes community. It changes the body. And that was one of the most powerful Christian lessons of my life.

Dana Gresh: What a story. That's Rosario Butterfield testifying to the gospel's transforming power. We need it. We need it to save us and we also need it to change us. The gospel isn't just for getting us going in the Christian life, it's for every day. We can't be true women on our own. Here's Nancy to expand on that. She's reading a statement from the True Woman Manifesto to begin.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: We affirm that as redeemed sinners, we cannot live out the beauty of biblical womanhood apart from the sanctifying work of the gospel and the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit. First of all, we affirm that as redeemed sinners. This talks about who we are. And that little phrase "redeemed sinners" has in it bad news and good news. It tells us two important things about ourselves. First of all, it tells us that we are sinners, and that takes us back to Genesis chapter 3 which describes what theologians call the fall of man. It was the great rebellion.

And what happened as a result of that great rebellion is that man and woman from the time of Adam and Eve to this day have been in a fallen condition. The fall of man, the great rebellion, deadened our spirits. It separated us from the life that is in God. And it resulted in us having this utter inability to please God. The impotence of human effort, human flesh, human ability. We cannot obey God in our fallen condition. We cannot please God. That's what it means to be depraved. That's what it means to be a sinner. We must be regenerated by the Spirit of God, given a new heart, a new nature, the life of God placed within us.

And so we say in this affirmation, we are redeemed sinners. That's the good news. We are sinners who have been redeemed by Jesus Christ. We are a new creation, alive in Christ. That is those of us who've repented of our sin and placed our faith in Jesus Christ to save us by what he did for us on the cross through no merit of our own. He has come and made us alive, we who were spiritually dead. And as redeemed sinners, the image of God has been restored in us. It's redemption that enables us to be fully human as we were created to be, connected to the life of God. We now have capacity to obey God, to please him, to live as his true redeemed women.

Now the question is, if that's the case, if we've been redeemed and we now have this capacity to obey God, why do we still sin? Why do we find ourselves still giving in to temptation? Why do we struggle to obey God? Why do we struggle to be the women that he has designed us to be? Well Romans chapter 7 talks with us about this battle. It's a battle with our flesh. It's a battle with indwelling sin. The Apostle Paul experienced this, this thing that inclines us, pulls us away from God and his law, that is bent on going its own way. That's our sinful flesh, the indwelling sin.

And that's why Paul says in Romans 7 verse 18, the Apostle Paul says, "I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out." Do you relate? Yes you do, yes I do. We have to come to the critical realization that left to ourselves, on our own, we cannot live out the beauty of biblical womanhood. Have you consciously acknowledged it? I want to tell you ladies, this is one of the most important and liberating discoveries that you will ever make. Now it sounds defeating to say "I cannot live this Christian woman life." But it's the starting place of a wonderful joyful discovery of how you can live it.

On my own I cannot be the woman God wants me to be. But here's the good news. God has given us resources to enable us to fulfill his calling to be true women. And I want to focus over these next few moments on what some of those resources are. Second Peter chapter 1 tells us that his divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence. And by the way, that's what it means to be a true woman, a woman who reflects the glory and excellence of God. And through the knowledge of him who has called us to that, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature.

Now this affirmation that we're looking at says that we cannot live out the beauty of biblical womanhood apart from the sanctifying work of the gospel and the power of the indwelling Holy Spirit. Let's talk about those two things. The sanctifying work of the gospel. When we say sanctifying, we're talking about a process of sanctification, a process of being conformed to the image of Christ. And we need to remember that when you find yourself in the middle of the day acting like this woman who's never known Jesus Christ and you get defeated and discouraged, remember that you are in a process of being conformed to the image of Christ.

There's no magical wand poof, you are this godly true woman. It doesn't happen overnight. There's an ongoing work of the Spirit as he applies the gospel of Christ to our hearts and conforms us to the image of Christ. Now we all know that it's necessary to believe the gospel in order to get saved. But I find that most Christians don't realize that we need to keep on believing the gospel, the gospel of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, in order to live the Christian life once we've been saved.

It's not like I needed the gospel 46 years ago when I got saved as a four-year-old and now I live some other way. We still live by the gospel of Christ as we're being sanctified. The fact is you will fail. And every time you blow it, every time I blow it, that becomes an opportunity to preach the gospel to ourselves again. Not to struggle and strive and try harder. "I'll be a good Christian woman, a true woman if it kills me." It may kill you. But to look to Christ, Christ crucified, buried, and raised for our justification and for our sanctification. Every time we blow it, it's a chance to recognize our utter hopelessness and helplessness apart from Christ, to repent, to cast ourselves afresh on Christ and his mercy and what he did for us at the cross. Every time we blow it, it's an opportunity to demonstrate the gospel to those around us, to your children who heard you scream at the top of your lungs. It's a chance to demonstrate the gospel.

Dana Gresh: Amen. Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth on our need for the gospel in every area of our lives. It's a simple truth and yet it changes everything. Sometimes we get so busy and distracted by our calendars, to-do lists, and phone screens that we forget the miracle of Jesus Christ in our hearts and in our lives. Oh, I'm so grateful we took some time today to remember and marvel. This weekend I hope you'll spend some quiet time with him and continue to wonder at the message of the cross. And then show up to church, soak in it some more. We simply can't have too much gospel, my friend.

We've been sharing it for 25 years here at Revive Our Hearts and we're nowhere near tired of shouting it from the rooftops. Somewhere there's a woman aching to experience the freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness that we've found in Christ. Would you help us reach her? This month we're wrapping up a ministry year and we're navigating a financial deficit. In light of that, we're trusting God to provide 1.4 million dollars by May 31st. It's a big need, a lofty goal, but we believe this mission is worth it. The women waiting on the other side of this ministry are more desperate for the gospel message than ever and we don't want to pull back, not from one single initiative that might reach them.

If God is prompting you to give, there's no better time. Every donation helps close the gap and anything above our need goes directly toward expanding this ministry's reach. When you give, we'll send you Called to Thrive, a new booklet from Nancy that invites you to step deeper into the freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness Christ offers. To make a donation and request your copy, visit ReviveOurHearts.com/donate. With every dollar you're helping give another woman the chance to thrive in Christ. We can't wait to see the transforming work God will do through his gospel in the ministry year to come. Again, you can give at ReviveOurHearts.com/donate.

Next Sunday is Mother's Day. Please come back, join us as we celebrate and honor the women we call Mom. Thanks for listening today. I'm Dana Gresh. We'll see you next time on Revive Our Hearts Weekend. This program is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.