Revive Our Hearts

Dannah Gresh: I had a dream last night. I was in a car after speaking at a women's event and Mary Kassian was there too. Mary's one of my closest friends, a prayer warrior really, and a memory maker. She and Nancy and some of our other friends have created the best memories. Anyway, in the car, remember this was a dream, she and I were being interviewed about the event. Suddenly we were both gripped with exhausted laughter, the kind that makes your soul feel connected to one another because all the walls are down. Let me tell you, there was no hope for that poor interviewer.

I woke up from that dream laughing hard. Woke my husband up and I thought, I haven't laughed like that in a really long time. I also thought, I really need to laugh like that. It almost felt like that dream was a bit of an assignment from God to tend to my Christian friendships. I texted Mary right away to tell her. She texted me back, "I am at a conference today and we were told to write down the name of someone who's a good listener. I wrote your name down." Do you have any idea how much I needed that?

Today, friend, I have an assignment for you. I'm not sure if it's from God, but how are you tending to your friendships? I'm your host, Dannah Gresh. You're listening to Revive Our Hearts Weekend. Today's conversation has me reflecting on friendship over the years. There's a sweet conversation that comes to mind. It was a recording day with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, Mary Kassian, and our friends Kim Wagner and Holly Elliff.

We got together to discuss Nancy and Mary's workbook, True Woman 101. We'd all read chapter eight on the power of sisterhood and we were eager to discuss the material together. This was in the early days of the True Woman movement and we couldn't wait to get that message out to all of you. You might have an image in your mind of what our sisterhood looks like. Maybe you're picturing me and the girls sitting in a circle singing "Kumbaya." Not quite.

You're about to hear the truth. We laugh, we tease, we get honest about our issues. We're living proof that substance and silliness can go hand in hand. I think I like it that way. Let me point out this kind of friendship isn't just for women in vocational ministry. It's for everyone. It's for you. To give you a taste of what it sounds like, let's listen to part of this conversation together.

You know what I'm so grateful for is the sisterhood. Don't you feel just so blessed that we have each other to walk it through with and I just have this sense right now that the women that are watching, they've had nacho parties and Chinese food and all the stuff while they look at this and they feel that sisterhood too.

I know that as we're in process this summer, I just felt like my marriage needed tended to, my family needed tended to, and I emailed all of you and I said, I'm taking some time off. I need some accountability, I need to back away from the work. It doesn't matter if your work is writing books or teaching Awana or leading a missions trip. Sometimes a woman has a season where she has to sit back and tend to her needs, whether it's her elderly parents or her high school children or a new baby being born. You all were so loving to just walk me through that in the sisterhood and Nancy sent me a book. It wasn't an email, but it was a book.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: "Dear Dannah."

Dannah Gresh: "Dear Dannah." And it just called me to truth.

Mary Kassian: We've done that for each other. I can't tell you the number of times I've called Holly or Nancy in tears and say, "Speak truth to me right now. Remind me." One of the things that having a group like this—by the way, we're part of a group of women that exchange weekly email updates as to how we can pray for each other—is acknowledging that we need each other.

But it's also realizing, before we jump into the leaving a legacy stuff today, I just want us to maybe put a bow on some of what we've been talking about and some caveats, some reminders. This sisterhood group is a reminder that true womanhood doesn't look the same for everyone.

Guest (Female): Isn't that the truth? There's no cookie cutter true woman here because we're all very different, hugely different. Even planning a meal, how hard was that? I can't have women come to dinner at my house unless they bring their own food. We have one friend in this group who is gluten intolerant. It's a serious medical, physical thing, so we don't want to kill her. We have one who doesn't eat vegetables, anything that grows in the ground.

Dannah Gresh: Only if it's green. If it's all green, I'm okay.

Guest (Female): But then we have a friend who's in this little group sisterhood who only eats vegetables, no meat. At any given time the rest of us are on some kind of diet that prohibits something. Mary and I will eat anything. You and me, we're the sisters who clean it all up.

Mary Kassian: But the point being, there's no cookie cutter true woman. I think sometimes when we talk about biblical womanhood or true womanhood, there's this sense of trying to press everybody into this little mold where everybody looks alike. Not so. We could not be more different. Nancy, you and I collaborated to write this and we could not be more different. Maybe a little bit, but there's such a distinctiveness there.

I can remember vividly one of the first times that I was with Mary, she said, "You and Nancy have had a long time relationship." I said, "Yes." And she said, "You're kind of different personalities." I said, "Well, my role in Nancy's life is to get her off the couch. That's what I do."

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Holly, you make me sound really bad.

Holly Elliff: It's not bad, it's just true. It's not like she sits on the couch watching TV. She's not watching TV, she's at her laptop. She's working.

Dannah Gresh: Dannah's the horse lover. I am. I'm so excited. My childhood dream was to be a missionary who was also a veterinarian full-time. And now I have horses and llamas and my husband just texted me a picture of our brand new baby chicken that just hatched moments ago. Nancy, what would you do with a chicken? She'd probably eat it. Grill it. I'm going to name it.

Guest (Female): Here's something else we want to say about true womanhood. We've said it, but I just think it's really important as we move into this chapter eight. We cannot be the true women that God calls us to be on our own.

Mary Kassian: That's so true. I have a friend that said, "I'm thankful for the True Woman Manifesto. When you were encouraging women to sign this study..." She's a biblical woman. She loves the Lord. She loves doing your studies and your books, but she said, "I will not sign this." Why? She said, "I can't be this." I said, "None of us are this, but this is what we're aiming for. This is what we're asking God's grace for. This is what we're committed to, an intentional calling on God to create in me the true woman You desire for me to be."

Holly Elliff: Apart from the regeneration of the Holy Spirit and a relationship with Jesus Christ, this is just foolishness. Women will strive and try to get the checklist right: "I did this, I did this, I did this." For firstborns, that's the way we do things. Don't you love that the Word says, "Cease striving and know that I am God"?

It's not the message that, even as we talk about a counter-revolution, we're going out into culture and saying, "This is what you need to be doing, get this checklist right." That's not what we're doing here. We're presenting a message that really at its core is, "Get your relationship with Jesus right."

Guest (Female): The vertical.

Holly Elliff: Knowing those truths about biblical womanhood and how God designed us, we can go to God's Word and understand that He provides grace for us to take every step that He calls us to.

Dannah Gresh: That's Holly Elliff and Mary Kassian along with several other beloved members of what we call the sisterhood. These women have my heart. It was a joy to walk with them then, but it's even sweeter now over a decade later. These are my sisters for life. The kind of friendship that lasts decades cannot be the fair weather kind. Scripture calls us to be rain or shine friends, sisters who rejoice with each other and weep too.

A friend that I've done my fair share of weeping with this past year is Erin Davis. She lost her mom this past year and I lost my father-in-law. We were there for each other. Erin is wife to Jason, mom to four boys, editor at Moody Publishers, and she's passionate about helping you become a burden-bearing sister, not just the friend who drops off a lasagna to check it off her to-do list, as wonderful as lasagna is. We need more than that, don't we?

Because sometimes suffering is long. Erin invites you to press in deeper, to be the sister who walks with another all the way to the finish line, long after the lasagna is gone. Let's listen.

Erin Davis: Grab your Bible if you haven't already and turn to the book of Galatians chapter six. As you're doing that, I'd like to volunteer to make myself the poster child for all who are experiencing long suffering today. Long suffering is, as it sounds, it's just suffering that goes on for a long time. It's the trial that doesn't end after a day. It doesn't end after a week or a month. It's the trial that doesn't end after a year or sometimes after decades.

One thing that often happens in the life of the long sufferer is that friends stop asking, "How are you?" They stop dropping by with a hot lasagna. Perhaps they even stop praying. As I'm saying these things out of the outflow of my own life right now, please do not feel sorry for me. The last thing a long sufferer wants is pity. But as we are now many years into my mom's brutal battle with Alzheimer's, I can tell you that a long suffering friend is truly hard to find.

I want us to consider through that lens Paul's words found in Galatians chapter six, verse two. Every text is a part of a context here, and the context here is resisting temptation. That matters. But in Galatians chapter six, verse two, Paul says, "Bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ." One of the reasons that we can know that we were made for people is that the burdens of life are simply too heavy to carry alone. We're supposed to distribute the weight across many shoulders.

By bearing life's burdens together, Paul said that we were pointing to the law of Christ. He was likely referencing that Jesus told us the second greatest commandment, second only to loving God with everything we got. An outflow of that is that we love each other. We care for the needs of each other like they are our own needs. We don't just hope someone helps carry the weight of what we are going through for a little while, but we hope that someone will carry our needs all the way across the finish line.

Paul was saying that when you bear each other's burdens, you fulfill this great commandment that Jesus gave us to love others as we want to be loved. Of course, Jesus is the model for this and all things. He took our greatest burden, sin. He didn't just carry it for a little while. He didn't just carry it until he got tired of carrying it. He didn't just carry it until he could pawn it off on someone else. No, Jesus took our burdens. He bore the burden of sin until his final breath.

He bore the burden of our sin until he could say, "It is finished." All the way. Friendship is messy because life is messy. If we only want friends with sanitized lives that aren't messy and don't require anything of us, then we will never live the kind of interdependent lives that we were created for. There is such beauty in the mess. I don't know why, I can't explain it. By some supernatural reality, there is intimacy, covenant intimacy, in walking the hard road with a friend, especially when that road is long.

I want you to take a moment right now. I want you to ask the Holy Spirit to bring to mind a friend whose burden is long. Maybe she has chronic illness. Maybe she has a spouse who has had an affair or is hard-hearted. Maybe she has a prodigal child and she's been praying for that child to come back to Jesus for a long time. Maybe she has cancer. Maybe she has MS. Maybe like me she's a caregiver. I don't know, but let's take just a minute and pray that God would bring her to mind. Maybe she's facing a very long goodbye.

Lord, I think about the sisterhood spread all over the world in multiple time zones, in multiple nations, and I think about what could happen if each of us reached out to a long suffering friend. So Lord, I pray that You would bring a specific name, a specific life to mind and that we would want to obey in reaching out to her. Thank You Lord. In Your name I pray, amen.

The Holy Spirit doesn't answer to me. I can't put Him on a timeline as much as I sometimes would like to. So He may or may not have responded in that moment. Maybe it'll be tomorrow when you're driving down the road. Maybe it'll be in a couple weeks in church. Listen to that Shepherd's voice as He drops the name of a friend into your heart. Then I want to encourage you to bear her burden. Beyond that, I want to encourage you to keep bearing her burden all the way to the finish line.

In the journey with terminal illness that I'm in with my mom, I don't even know what the finish line is. In some ways the finish line is her death. She's now on hospice and that moment is coming closer and closer to us. That'll be the end of the disease we've been fighting all these years, but then there's a new burden to bear: the grief of the loss of my mom. There haven't been many. They're few and far between, but I do know I have some friends that are going to walk that long road with me.

I do know that's what they were made to do and that I was made to let them carry it because I can't carry it alone. I'm not saying this is easy. We have tugs and pulls on our own lives that can make it so hard for us to be attentive to a friend, especially when something goes on for a long time. It's easy to write the card when the tragedy happens. It's easy to sit with her when the husband leaves, but when it goes on and on for a long time, that is not easy friendship. It will be Christlike. Isn't that what we want our friendships to ultimately be?

Dannah Gresh: Yes, Lord. That is what we want. That was Erin Davis inviting you to embrace a life of sacrificial Christ-exalting friendship and I love the vision she's just given us for what that could look like. So far we've looked at what sisterhood is. It's friendship with depth, light-hearted joy, and endurance. It's a rain or shine, weeping or rejoicing kind of friendship that magnifies the sacrificial heart of Jesus.

What a glorious gift that is. But before we go today, we need to take a look at what friendship isn't because sometimes we're tempted to elevate God's gifts to a position they were never meant to occupy. As wonderful as friendship is, our sisters cannot be God to us. Kelly Needham is a wife, mom, and Bible teacher. She's also the author of a book called Friend-ish: Reclaiming Real Friendship in a Culture of Confusion. She's going to help us put sisterhood in proper perspective. Let's listen.

Kelly Needham: I think the primary reason why our friendships aren't satisfying us is because they weren't meant to and we think they can. We think that friendship can provide us with things that God has said only He can provide for us. So we keep looking to our friends for things that only Jesus has said He can be for us and it breaks. We are trained culturally to do that. Every sitcom, movie, or book that has been set before you as far as what a model for friendship is, is looking to people for things only God can give because the world does not know God.

Our main relational needs are meant to be satisfied with Him. Only God can provide us the stability we long for, the constant sense of companionship, the meaning and significance. He alone can give that to us, but our culture has told us to look to each other. In the past it was looking to marriage for that, but in this newer generation it's looking to friends. Just like marriage, it will also fail because it is not the fountain of living waters. Only Jesus is.

The primary reason our friendships aren't working is we are putting things on them that only God can provide and it won't hold up. We're trying to use a cracked cup as a source of water to quench our thirst when God says, "I'm the fountain." Jeremiah 2:13 says, "You have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and you've gone out to find cisterns that are broken that can't hold water." We do that in our friendships all the time. I have struggled with that all the time.

Now, is it wrong to want that? Is it wrong to want stability or to have someone constantly a companion in your life? Is it wrong to want to matter to somebody, to have significance and meaning in a relationship? No, I don't think so. When God looks at the people in Jeremiah chapter two and He says that, He doesn't say to them, "Stop being thirsty. Stop longing for things so much." He has no problem with our thirst. He has no problem with the deep needs and aches in our hearts. His problem is we're going to the wrong place to be satisfied.

The thirst is not the problem, the longing that you have is not the problem. The problem is we're taking it to a group of people who cannot be that for us. Friendship is not the problem. The problem is what we're expecting out of it. So what I want to do today is talk about three ways we misuse friendship, three ways we tend to look to friendship for things only God can give. These misuses will actually produce a lot of problems and can be very dangerous to us.

Then we're going to look at how the gospel, our access to the fountain of living waters, transforms how we practice friendship. We've got to start with the problem. We have to lay a good foundation and clear away what is bad. Misuse number one: when friendship replaces Jesus. When we look to friendship as a replacement for Jesus. He alone is meant to be the source of the deep ache we have for relational connectedness. We were made for relationship, but primarily made for relationship with Him.

He alone can satisfy the deep ache in our hearts. That's why the New Testament is full of verses that will say things like, "This is eternal life, that they know you, God, and Jesus Christ whom he has sent." Eternal life is to know someone, to know God. Salvation is not just your sins are paid for, salvation is your sins are paid for so that you can go to a person and be in communion and fellowship with him. That is a means to a greater end, a connection with God.

You were made for deep relationship. That's what our souls are all aching for, but a lot of times we refuse to go to Jesus with those things. We don't believe He can satisfy us. We can't see Him with our eyeballs or hear Him with our ears, so how in the world could He be real enough to us to meet that deep ache and longing? He can, if we will go to Him in faith. A lot of us refuse to and take those deep aches and aim them at our friends and it will produce all manner of idolatry, codependency, neediness, conflict, bitterness, strife, and envy.

Friendship is not the problem. The problem is what we're expecting out of it. We take things in our hearts that only Jesus can satisfy and we look at a friend and demand that of them, not with our words, but with our actions. When we misuse friendship that way, it becomes dangerous to us. It is a misuse of the good gift of friendship.

Dannah Gresh: Kelly Needham on the ways we misuse friendship. You just heard her first point, but there are still two to come. So if you'd like to listen to the rest of this convicting message, we'll put a link in the transcript of today's episode. You can find that at reviveourhearts.com/weekend. If you love cultivating meaningful relationships and connecting with like-minded sisters in Christ, well, then I'd love to tell you about the Revive Our Hearts Ambassador Program.

Ambassadors are a group of women who come alongside women's ministry leaders to support, encourage, and equip them. If you're a woman in ministry or a pastor's wife, I know one of them would be overjoyed to connect with you. Visit reviveourhearts.com/ambassadors to search for an ambassador near you. If you're thinking, "You know, I think I'd like to invest in women like that," first of all, that is a wonderful desire and I hope you'll explore that. Second of all, you can apply to become a Revive Our Hearts ambassador at that same web address.

We'd love to help you explore what that might look like for you. Again, that's reviveourhearts.com/ambassadors. Next weekend, come back as we continue covering our March theme, life-on-life relationships. Up next, we're talking about mentoring. You need the wisdom of older women and younger women need you. I hope you'll join us as we talk about that. Thanks for listening today. I'm Dannah Gresh. We'll see you next week for 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.