Revive Our Hearts

Dannah Gresh: When Isaiah foretold the birth of Jesus, he prophesied that Christ would be called the Prince of Peace. Here's Barbara Rainey.

Barbara Rainey: I think that's very significant. And I think it's because God knows how desperately we need peace. He knows far better than we do how broken we are, how desperate we are, how lonely we are, and how much we need his peace.

Dannah Gresh: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of The Wonder of His Name. For November 12th, 2026, I'm Dannah Gresh. I want to ask you something. Where do you search for peace? I mean, as we approach the holidays. I once thought the perfectly decorated house was the key to feeling the Christmas peace. So I'd stress myself like crazy in one weekend decorating like my life depended on it. Each year had to be bigger, brighter, better. But it was just distracting me from true peace. So now I spend a little time on my heart filling it with thoughts of Jesus's birth.

Then I decorate for maybe an hour day by day, a little at a time, with the focus on my heart first. My house isn't quite as grandly decorated as it used to be. But true peace just evaded me when I thought it was all about getting everything organized and obsessing about the condition of my house without considering the state of my heart. Today Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth and Barbara Rainey are wrapping up a conversation. Wrapping. Did you see what I just did there? Wrapping Christmas Anyway. The conversation is about cultivating Christ-centered holidays. They're going to talk about how knowing Jesus as the Prince of Peace impacts your day-to-day life, especially in these particularly busy seasons like the holidays.

I hope this series has been encouraging to you as you consider how to put Christ as the focus of your holidays. You know, we're able to bring you messages like these through the help of friends just like you. Revive Our Hearts is a listener-supported ministry, which means that with every donation you give, you're partnering with us to help women thrive in Christ. You can be a part of offering hope to women who need to experience the freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ. If you'd like to join us in that mission, you can give online or over the phone today.

Plus, this month with your donation of any amount, we'll send you the brand new 2027 Revive Our Hearts wall calendar. And I am really excited about this. It's both a beautiful piece of art and a declaration of truth that you can hang in your home. Our team designed this calendar as a reminder to stay grounded in God's promises in every season. And this is also a perfect idea for a holiday gift giving or a way to express your gratitude to your Thanksgiving hostess. These calendars make great gifts. Visit reviveourhearts.com to give or call us at 1-800-569-5959 and request your calendar today.

You'll also find a place there where you can purchase more if you'd like to buy some for gift giving. Again, that number is 1-800-569-5959. Now here's Nancy.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Our guest this week has been my friend Barbara Rainey. She and her husband Dennis are the co-founders of Family Life. Uh it's a joy, Barbara, to have you with us here on Revive Our Hearts today. Thanks so much for joining us.

Barbara Rainey: Oh thanks. I'm glad to be here.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: And we've been talking about holidays

Barbara Rainey: We have.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: making them holy days and not getting caught up in all the trappings and the chaos that goes really pretty much from now for the next month or so

Barbara Rainey: That's right.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: in our Western culture for sure. And then everybody kind of, you know, drops dead at the end of December and depressed and in debt and distressed and boy, we want to help our listeners. And I want to I kind of several years ago said I'm I'm declaring war on the stressed out holidays and I haven't conquered it, but I've been very intentional in recent years about dropping some things that just aren't essential and saying I I I just want to simplify, simplify, simplify. Maybe we're getting older. We are getting older. I have to. Mhm. Well, that is part of it, but I do think it's also some acquired wisdom that helps us see that it's just not all that important.

Think without realizing we too often take our cues from the world and because the pressure of the world to get to do the shopping and all of that stuff and without thinking we take our cues from the world. And so to not do that, it takes a concerted effort to stop and say, okay, who am I listening to? Who should I be listening to? And what do I want the holiday celebration, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and others? What do I want that to look like in my home? Because I have control over that. I don't have to do everything that everybody else is doing.

I don't have to have a gazillion parties and send gifts to everybody that I know. I mean, we all spend a lot of money on cards and postage for something that is going to go in the trash. And when you stop and look at it that way, it's like really why am I doing this then? And so it's good for us to pull back and look objectively and pause and say, who am I listening to? Who am I getting my cues from? What is most important and what does God want me to focus on? And that's the whole purpose for for what we're talking about here.

We're talking about making the holidays meaningful. And when we say making them meaningful, we say making them spiritually meaningful. It's not making them meaningful with Santa Claus and elf on a shelf and all the the secular things that are available because those don't really bring meaning. What brings meaning is the story of Christ because that's what Christmas is all about.

Barbara Rainey: And other centeredness uh Christ centeredness first, but also giving. I'm as we're talking, Barbara, I'm thinking back. My dad has been with the Lord now for years, but I'm remembering on Thanksgiving mornings and maybe Christmas too. I'm not sure, but I know on Thanksgiving he would make phone calls to some widows

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Mhm.

Barbara Rainey: and would just let them know that we were thinking about them as a family and to just, you know, encourage them. And I I don't do that every year, but I've picked that up and try and make some calls uh the day before the day of Thanksgiving to people who may have experienced a loss that year uh or people who have who may be suffering in some way, just to pray for them, to maybe read a scripture to them. And um I don't spend hours doing that, but just some way to be thinking of somebody other than myself on that holiday.

And um do I remember you sharing with me something about at Christmas, how you handled gifts and giving with your kids? Didn't you do something special with that?

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Well, we did. And it's nothing really fancy, but I knew as a child growing up my brothers and I would get the catalogs that came in the mail, the Sears Robot catalog, which was about 3 in thick in those days. And we would pour over that catalog as kids and look at all of the things that we wanted and we would

Barbara Rainey: And of course it's not just a Sears catalog now. It's a gazillion other catalogs.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: There isn't a Sears catalog anymore, but there are multiples in its place. And we would focus for hours on what we wanted to get for Christmas. And when I became a parent and I had my own kids, I thought I don't want my kids spending hours thinking about what they want to get, thinking about what can mom and dad give me, what can Santa Claus give me or whomever. Um I want them to think about giving because the truth about Christmas is that it 's a season of giving.

Barbara Rainey: God so loved the world

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: I was just thinking that verse exactly. It's not a verse we typically associate with Christmas, but it is about Christmas. We celebrate Christmas because of the gift of Christ. And so we give gifts to one another to remember the gift of Christ. And so in our family Dennis and I made a conscious decision that we wanted to teach our children to focus on giving, not on getting. And so for the whole month of December as we helped them when they were little or even when they were teenagers, the focus was what are they going to buy for one another?

What are they going to get for their grandparents? What are they going to? Who do they want to give to that is a good friend at school perhaps? But what do you want to give? What do you want to say in that gift? And so we so the way it worked in our family practically is that on Christmas morning instead of it being a free-for-all where everybody runs into the room, finds all the gifts with their name on it, tears into all the presents to find out what I got, we would come into the living room and everyone would gather from under the tree the gifts that they purchased for everyone else.

So each of us, Dennis and me and our six children were sitting around the living room and around our feet or next to us in a pile were the gifts that we bought for everyone else in the family. And we would take turns one by one. So whoever went first say I went first and I would give you my gift. You would open my gift and then it was your turn to give. And you would look at your pile and our kids really got excited about this. They'd look at their pile and they knew what was in all those boxes and they were thinking do I want to give Benjamin his present or do I want to give Ashley her present?

And they would they would wrestle over that and they would pick out the one they wanted to give that they couldn't wait to give. And they would walk across the room to that sibling and they would say, this is what I got for you. And that sibling, that brother or sister would open the gift and then it was their turn to do the same. And they would look at their pile. They would think through what do I want to give? Who do I want to give to? And so our Christmas gift giving celebration often lasted until 1:00 in the afternoon because we focused on the giver and on who that person wanted to give to because those gifts were purchased or made uh with a lot of thought and a lot of intentionality for that person.

And so when you have a free-for-all, all of that is lost. All the meaning goes out the window. But when we focused on giving and the active giving and the process of giving, then the focus became much more intentional. There were there were It was focusing on the relationship and the love that we had for one another. And we often would stop at 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning and go have breakfast and then go back and finish. And it made the day so much more meaningful for us as a family because we focused on the giving of gifts to one another rather than on what we were getting.

Barbara Rainey: I love that. Just a shift in focus and shift in perspective.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Yeah, it didn't cost any money. It didn't take a whole lot of effort. It just was being intentional to help our children think about what Christmas is really about as opposed to having a self focus for the Christmas holiday.

Barbara Rainey: I love that. And how like God whose focus was on giving to us the best gift that he had and could possibly give, which is Jesus.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Yeah. And I know it's not even Thanksgiving yet, uh but you know, our attention is turning quickly to what we can do and uh how we can be intentional about keeping a Christ-centered focus throughout this holiday season, making it a holy season as we anticipate the advent, the coming of Jesus to this earth. And uh it's not too early to be thinking about this. As we've said, the world's been thinking about it all year long. For months they've had stuff up and at it. And this is the time when I start playing Christmas music in my home.

And boy, I surely wouldn't legislate this for anybody else. But for me personally, I want Christmas music that is Christ-centered. I love the carols. Um I don't personally want to hear Frosty the Snowman or Jingle Bells or I'm not saying there's anything wrong with those, but there's so many rich and beautiful of all different styles carols. So I have them on my iPhone and uh playing through speakers in my house almost continuously for the next month, just trying to focus my heart on who Christ is, to worship him. And that music is one way that I do that in my home.

But you've helped us to focus on the names of Jesus. Seven names of Jesus that relate to his birth and to Christmas. I want to focus today on one particular name, the Prince of Peace. I love this name. I love them all. But the Prince of Peace, you think about peace, that's something that for for one thing the world is in short supply of. Um we think of all the wars going on in the world and the conflicts, but our families need peace. Our hearts need peace. And if there's any time of year we seem to be lacking peace, it might be the busyness of this next month.

So what is knowing Jesus as the Prince of Peace? How does that bring us peace? And why is that a name that we really want to focus on at this time of year? I think it 's very interesting that when God foretold the birth of his son, he listed four names in the book of Isaiah. And one of them is Prince of Peace. And I think of all the names that we know about Christ that he this would be one of the four that he would choose to identify him as and to let us know this is who is coming.

I think that's very significant. And I think it's because God knows how desperately we need peace. He knows far better than we do how broken we are, how desperate we are, how lonely we are, and how much we need his peace. And so that is the title of Jesus. He came to earth to be our Prince of Peace. And it's not even just us adults who need his peace, but even our children need his peace. Our children experience You know, as a mom I just hated it when my kids had difficult things in their lives or when someone at school was mean or something bad happened at school or even when my kids I remember one of my our daughters she would anytime she would catch the news she was a particularly sensitive child.

She would see something about a car accident or a war or something on the news and she would start crying. And that child, my daughter, needed to know the Prince of Peace. And so it's wonderful for us during the Christmas season to be able to focus on these names of Jesus that were spoken of him in the Luke 2 story about his birth and from Isaiah in the foretelling of his coming because those names are very significant to us and they help us know him. And when we know him, not only do we worship him, but we can experience some of what he came to offer by understanding what he offers us.

Barbara Rainey: And we look for peace in so many other places.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Oh we do. We look for it in relationships. We look for it in stuff. We look for it in um parties and food and shopping and um the more we look for those inner needs of our souls to be satisfied in this world, the more distressed and dissatisfied we become. So part of the message of Christmas is Christ came to redeem us from ourselves and from this world and to give to us that deep sense of soul rest and satisfaction and fullness that we can't find anywhere else. So he's not just a nice option for our lives.

He's the prince

Barbara Rainey: That 's right. Mhm. That's right. Right.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: of peace, the supreme and only giver of true peace. Exactly. Exactly. And I think even those who don't know Christ long for the Prince of Peace at Christmas because even at Christmas um you can hear Christmas carols being played in stores that are not Christian stores and not Christian bookstores or And And I think it's because intuitively we all know we're broken. We all know we're lost even though millions of people would never admit it. But we long for the Prince of Peace because we know how desperate our need is for that. And I think we feel it more acutely at Christmas perhaps than any other time of the year because we know that's what Christmas offers.

We know that's why Christ came, but we're so unable to find it on our own. So when we learn about his name and we learn about who he is and what he offers, we can learn more about how to experience that peace that only he can give us.

Barbara Rainey: And I thought it was interesting on the Prince of Peace that you told that wonderful story about the background of the writing of the hymn It is well with my soul. And I know a lot of us have heard that story, but I never get tired of hearing it. Just remind us how that hymn was written and how it points us to Christ the Prince of Peace.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: I don't either. Yeah. Well, I included that story in there because well, for several reasons. One is that it's my favorite hymn of all times. Um it was my father's favorite hymn too and he died and we sang it at his memorial service. And it's the it's the kind of hymn. It's the words that we all need to hear. And the story is that

Barbara Rainey: And for those who are it is well with my soul, that's the one that starts out when peace like a river attendeth my way when sorrows like sea billows roll

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: So and some are experiencing some of whoever our listeners right now are experiencing those sorrows rolling like the the the waves of the sea. And the background of this story Oh my goodness, yes. That's right. The waves of the sea. The background of the story I actually learned when I was homeschooling my children. We discovered this story and it was just very life changing for me because the story is about a man named Horatio Spafford who was from Chicago and he and his wife and his daughters were making a trip to England. And for some reason at the last minute he was not able to join them.

So he sent them by ship, which was their means of transportation in those days across the Atlantic. There were no planes. And so the the wife, his wife and four daughters boarded the ship and went on ahead of him. He attended to some business details and then he was going to follow on the next ship. And as they were nearing the coast of England, they encountered a bad storm and the ship broke apart and sank very very quickly. And his daughters drowned and his wife was only saved at the at sort of a last minute thing.

And it obviously was the sovereignty of God, but she managed to be on a plank of wood that supported her weight and she was rescued. And so it was telegram was sent back to him uh announcing that all of his daughters had perished in the sea and she alone survived. And so when he did get on that next ship and he crossed the Atlantic Ocean when the ship got to that spot in the ocean where the other one had had gone down, he stood on the deck at the rail. And he ended up writing the words to this song.

It came to him. And you just to put yourself as a parent, as a mom or as a dad in his shoes and to think what must that have felt like to be on the deck of that ship, to be looking in the water and knowing that your four beautiful beloved daughters were entombed there. What grief, what anguish, what sorrow. And as he wrote, sorrow like sea billows roll. He must have been overwhelmed. And yet he wrote these words when peace like a river attendeth my way. That kind of peace can only come from the Prince of Peace.

That kind of peace is not human. It's not natural. We can't work it up on our own. It is a gift that is only given by the grace of God from the Prince of Peace. And so I

Barbara Rainey: And to be able to time like that to say it is well with my soul. That's astonishing.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Yes. Yes. It is astonishing. I think it speaks to all of us that all of us know that peace is unattainable on our own power. Uh we try, as you said earlier, in lots of different ways, but ultimately we all know we can't find peace any other way. And so when we learn about Jesus as the Prince of Peace and we remember that name in particular during the Christmas season when it life is so busy and so crazy and we're frazzled and we're stressed and we're tired, but we pull back and remember this is about Jesus.

This is about the Prince of Peace. And he came to offer me this peace. I need to partake of his peace. I need to welcome that gift that he came to give me into my life. And I can be peaceful through the season of Christmas if I will focus on him and receive that peace that he alone can offer.

Barbara Rainey: And your family can have peace. That doesn't mean everything will go well. It doesn't mean that there won't be any heartache or sorrow. Uh this man Horatio Spafford had sorrow galore in his life.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: That's right. Absolutely. But he had peace. And if he can have peace in the midst of losing his four children all at once, then I can have peace as well.

Barbara Rainey: But if we're not focusing on Christ, we're going to be subject to those storms and those waves they're going to take us under. And I know during the holidays they do take a lot of people under. There's a lot of sorrow. There are broken families. There are broken relationships. There financial challenges and stresses and um just in the best of circumstances it's a stressful and busy time. A lot of things you got to go to, things you got to do and um my prayer for our listeners is that these next weeks between now and Christmas Day

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Absolutely. That's right. Mhm. Mhm.

Barbara Rainey: will be joyful. They'll be faith filled. They'll be Christ-centered and they'll be full of peace because our eyes are not on anything or anyone other than Jesus. And my prayer is that those of who do have families, those who have children or grandchildren will take advantage of this opportunity to point their families to Jesus, fix our eyes on Jesus, consider him. Thank you so much, Barbara, for helping us get our hearts tuned and our eyes fixed on Jesus as we head into this holiday season. And uh I know, Barbara, your heart and mine for our listeners is is that this will be a holy season filled with the peace of Jesus Christ.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: I agree. I totally agree. That's the that the goal. That's why God wants us to celebrate these holidays is that we would step out of our crazy lives and focus on him.

Dannah Gresh: How will you fix your eyes on Jesus this holiday season? Barbara Rainey and Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth have been giving us some inspiring and practical ways to remember our Prince of Peace even when times get crazy. If you've missed any of their conversation over the last few days, you can find it all on reviveourhearts.com or the Revive Our Hearts app. Also on our website you'll see the 2027 Revive Our Hearts wall calendar I mentioned at the beginning of today's episode. This month we'd love to send you that when you give a gift of any amount to support this ministry, visit reviveourhearts.com to give or call us at 1-800-569-5959 and ask for the wall calendar.

And can I ask you to pray for Nancy? Earlier this week she announced some health challenges she's having. She explained in a video that she had surgery in late September to remove what turned out to be a cancerous tumor in her abdomen. Thankfully it was caught early and her doctors believe they were able to remove it completely. Even still she and her team of medical advisors decided it would be wise for Nancy to undergo chemotherapy just as a preventative measure to try to keep the cancer from returning. Her first treatment was on Monday. Please pray that the treatments would be effective, the side effects manageable, and that the Lord would encourage Nancy's heart during this difficult season.

Of course she is approaching the first anniversary of Robert's hospitalization and home going too. Nancy's desire is to continue studying over these next weeks as she feels up to it and to resume recording as soon as she's able. We don't expect any major new developments at this point, but as we have updates our team will communicate those on reviveourhearts.com. Tomorrow join us to consider what it means to have an attitude of gratitude. There are hundreds of things to be thankful for all around you. Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth will help you recognize them and show you how being thankful will have a huge effect on your life.

Please be back for Revive Our Hearts. This program is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.