Revive Our Hearts

Dana Grash: The beloved missionary and author Elizabeth Elliot wrote this.

Elizabeth Elliot: Single life may be only a stage of a life's journey, but even a stage is a gift. God may replace it with another gift, but the receiver accepts His gifts with thanksgiving. This gift for this day. The life of faith is lived one day at a time, and it has to be lived, not always looked forward to as though the real living were around the next corner. It is today for which we are responsible. God still owns tomorrow.

Dana Grash: So good. So we have this responsibility to accept with thanksgiving whatever circumstance God has chosen to give us today. And yet at the same time, God gives us freedom to acknowledge, this is hard.

He tells us He sees us when we feel hidden and overlooked. He invites us to bring Him our pain. So, today, we hold these two realities together, acknowledging that singleness can be both a source of real sorrow and a gift. I'm your host, Danna Grash, you're listening to Revive Our Hearts Weekend.

As many of you know, my dear friend Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth was single until age 57. That's when she married the man she affectionately called her DH or dear husband, Robert.

Sadly, Robert went home to be with the Lord in early January. So Nancy has entered into another single season, leaning on the lessons she learned during those earlier years, and learning new lessons too. Back in 2001, she shared about some choices that led to trust and contentment in singleness, even on the hard days.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: The first choice, I choose to receive my singleness as a gift from God. That's a choice I make. To receive my singleness as a gift from God, to thank Him for that gift, and not to demand that He give me the gift of marriage.

I love that response that the Virgin Mary had in Luke chapter 1, when the angel came to her and said to this young teenage girl, who was engaged to be married, "You're going to have a baby, and Joseph is not the father."

God is the Father. And you just imagine how Mary's world just went into a whirlwind at that point. But I love her response, Luke 1:38. She said, "I am the Lord's servant. May it be unto me as You have said."

You know, that is a great answer for every circumstance that God brings into our lives. "I am the Lord's servant. May it be unto me as You have said." Lord, I receive Your decision for my life. I receive this gift for my life. I'm not going to resent it, I'm not going to demand that You give me a different gift.

Now singleness as a gift may or may not be for a lifetime. I don't know if I will be single for all of my life. God hasn't revealed that to me, He probably hasn't revealed it to you. But the neat thing is I don't have to know. What I do need to know is He's made me single today, and my focus is on pleasing Him today.

Now, that doesn't mean if I choose to receive my singleness as a gift from God, that I won't have unfulfilled longings. And can I say that it's okay to have unfulfilled longings?

Can I also say that everyone has them? Every married woman has unfulfilled longings. Every single woman, every man, old, young, every person has deep inner longings that cannot be filled here on this earth, that cannot be filled by any created thing.

There are times when as singles, those unfulfilled longings particularly surface. I can remember not too long ago going to the wedding of the 20-year-old son of some of my peers.

Some of my friends' children are now starting to have their own children. And I went to this wedding, it was a sweet young couple, really precious wedding, but I sat there in that service so thrilled for them. But it was just one of those moments when it hits you, "I'm probably never going to be married."

Or I may never be married, depending on what age you are, how you think about that. And there was a moment of sadness for me. I was thrilled for them, but there were tears in my eyes and a sense of unfulfilled longings.

I can remember the the Mother's Day Sunday when the worship leader in our church said, "Everyone who's not a mother, I want you to stand and read Proverbs 31 together." Well, I stood with all the men in the church. It's kind of what it felt like. You know, most of the women are sitting listening to this, and there's just that kind of at that hard moment where it hits you, "All these other women are mothers."

And here I have the physical capacity to bear children, but God hasn't given me that privilege to have children of my own and to realize that likely I probably never will. And there were tears. It was a moment of experiencing unfulfilled longings.

But in the midst of that, I can still through my tears, thank God and surrender to Him afresh, realizing that this unfulfilled longing is material for sacrifice. It gives me something to offer God that costs me something.

And with that moment of teariness, that moment of longing comes an opportunity for a fresh surrender, a fresh chance to say, "God, I trust You." Just last night, I bowed my heart before the Lord and through my tears, I gave to the Lord a request. It's an unfulfilled longing in my heart.

I was sad about something that's not been fulfilled, and I asked the Lord if it would please Him to fulfill that longing, to fulfill that request. And then I just laid it up to Him and in a fresh surrender said, "But Lord, I trust You to do what is best. And I receive whatever Your answer is. Whatever Your will is in this matter, I receive it." And there's a freedom that comes from that.

Dana Grash: Amen. Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth on offering unfulfilled longings to the Lord. Notice Nancy doesn't say singleness is a breeze. There were real tears during her single years. But by God's grace, she learned to say, "Yes, Lord," and she found freedom in those words.

What might it look like for you to step into that freedom? Would you take a moment right now to ask the Lord that? To say, "This is hard, Father, but I want to offer my singleness to You, to receive this truth that Your way is best, that You are always working for my good."

I want you to hear from another dear friend of mine, Charmaine Porter. She's learned to confess that throughout her own single years. Once upon a time, Charmaine toured with me as a lead True Girl teacher, and today she's the learning community coordinator at a ministry called Impact 360 Fellowship. It's kind of a gap year and she's the female leader. She does a weekend retreat on biblical womanhood and coordinates a lot of other biblical worldview learning that these students undergo for nine months.

Now, she has this real passion for the church to approach the topic of singleness more biblically. And her wisdom on this topic has impassioned my heart to approach singleness differently. Here's Charmaine.

Charmaine Porter: I think it's 1 Corinthians 7:17 says in the message version, it says, "Let God, not your relationship status, define your life." And I started to not only believe that and let that shape how I was living my life, but I started to become a fan of God defining my life.

And so the conversation started with, "Lord, help me in this area of singleness to trust You there," but eventually it went into, "You're a holistic God, You're not just concerned about my relationship status, You're concerned about my relationships with my with my family. You're concerned about my relationships with the people that are around me. You're concerned about what I eat. You're concerned about how I spend my days." And so I started to invite Him into my life, my relationship status included, but I didn't just let that, the relationship status, define me because God doesn't define me just by that.

Dana Grash: Let's stop there in 1 Corinthians 7 because as you as this part of your story was unfolding, your touring with True Girl, I'm listening to that honest declaration to God. Sometimes in our prayer circle, as you would just say, "God, I trust You with this desire."

And I think for me that was the beginning of my rethinking of singleness. And I thought, "I think we're getting this wrong as the church." I think, maybe not everyone in church, but I was guilty of it, and others around me were, we weren't satisfied to just pray for Charmaine to glorify God. We were praying for Charmaine to find a husband.

And my husband confronted me and said, "You need to stop praying for Charmaine's husband. And you need to start praying for Charmaine's worth in Christ." And so between your honesty and his confrontation, my husband has a great passion to approach the topic of singleness with biblical honesty and integrity.

So, I began studying this passage, 1 Corinthians 7, and it's 1 Corinthians 6 and 7 is a lot about how the Corinthian church, the Greek and Roman culture had a lot of lies they were believing about sex, marriage, and singleness. Now, I didn't realize there were things in here about singleness.

I was hyper-focused, as is the problem, on the sex and the marriage stuff. But in 1 Corinthians 7:8, it says, "To the unmarried and the widows, I say that it is good for them to remain single as I am."

And what Paul was addressing there, in part, was the fact that beginning at about 31 BC, Augustus Caesar had widows fined if they weren't married within two years of their husband's death. The value of singleness was so, well, there was no value for it in the culture.

Even the rule of the land was, don't be single. And so Paul's addressing that in here. He's saying, "Wait a minute, wait a minute." And of course, we know that Paul also said, "Hey, if somebody is single or they are a widow, you pay their way." Because that was a very practical need in the day. Women couldn't have a job.

He says like, "We as Christians, value singleness so much that we're going to pay their way." And this confronted me in terms of, oh, we are so guilty, as the church of Corinth was, of not valuing singleness and responding to it differently.

And the passage you just quoted, 1 Corinthians 7:17, in the ESV version, says, "Only let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him and to which God has called him. This is my rule in all the churches." And you just quoted it in the message version, which I think a lot of times we're like, "Oh, change of topic now." But it wasn't.

Charmaine Porter: No.

Dana Grash: So say that again in the message version.

Charmaine Porter: In the message version, it says, "Let God, not your marital status, define your life."

Dana Grash: So, of course that's a loose paraphrase. He's saying, "Hey, listen, this verse is still attached to the topic of singleness. So let each person lead the life the Lord has assigned to him," which is what you were saying you were discovering in a hard way, on the hot pavement of life.

Charmaine Porter: You know, what's funny, Danna, is one thing that over the years that I started to realize that there was a disconnect between what the Bible was saying and what the church was telling me, and God has never made me feel belittled or less than or unqualified because of my singleness. I unfortunately felt like that in the church though.

So that to me was, well then I I need to start redefining how I'm thinking about my singleness. I need to start redefining when people say, "Do you think you have the gift of singleness?" At first, I honestly would be like, "I don't want you to say that about me because I'm not trying to be labeled by that." And I assumed that people were saying because you have the gift now then you're going to have the gift forever.

But as I started to do some research on this and getting back to what the Bible, what Paul was actually saying, getting into the Greek and things like that, started to realize that Paul's saying, "If you're single, you have the gift. If you're single, you have the gift of singleness. But also if you're married, you have the gift of marriage."

I mean, think about receiving a birthday present. You wouldn't just have that gift and set it on your table and just leave it there. Or you wouldn't just like put it in the back of your closet. You would take that gift, you would open it up and see what was inside. See, how do I how do I work this? What can I understand about it? How can I use it in my everyday life? And you know, if it's a good gift.

I think that's what the Lord is waiting for a lot of us to do is realize that whether you have the gift of singleness or the gift of marriage, open that baby up and see what it is. It's a tool for us to use for however long the Lord has us have it to bring Him glory.

Dana Grash: Wow. What a powerful flip of the singleness script. Thank you, Charmaine Porter, for turning our eyes towards God's glory. You know, single or married, that's what it's all about. Charmaine has told me she likes to pray, "Lord, squeeze all the glory possible out of my single years," and I love that.

May it be so, Lord, for sweet Charmaine and for every single sister listening today. Well, last but not least, we're hearing from Portia Collins and Christine Hoover. Many of you know Portia from our days together on the videocast Grounded. She's a dear friend of mine, as well as a wife, mom, author, and speaker.

On Grounded, she sat down with pastor's wife Christine Hoover to talk about her book, You Are Not Forgotten. That's how we want to close today, meditating on the God who always sees, always remembers, always cares. This isn't a message for single women explicitly, but for every woman who worries she's overlooked and unseen. If that's where you're at in your singleness today, I hope this conversation will be a rich encouragement.

Portia Collins: So let's start with the obvious. Have you ever felt forgotten?

Christine Hoover: I have. I have felt forgotten in several ways, in my marriage, in ministry, I've felt forgotten. I think if we were honest, I think everyone at some point has felt forgotten, unseen, disregarded, overlooked. A lot of my questions that were coming up in that time, I was directing toward God.

Because I felt unseen by people, but really I started to question, "Does God see me? Has He forgotten me? Because why why do I feel like I'm languishing, kind of in the desert, in the wilderness? Does He see? Is He going to act on my behalf?" And so I started asking those questions of scripture and going and finding that there were people in scripture asking the same questions that I was asking.

So, thankfully, God showed me some truths about who He is that that helped me kind of come out of that season. But yes, to answer your question, I have felt unseen and forgotten.

Portia Collins: Me too. So you work with a lot of women. What are some of the unhealthy or maybe even unholy ways that we try to get attention, the attention that we crave when we feel overlooked?

Christine Hoover: Yeah, that's a great question because I did, as I was going through this processing with scripture, with the Lord, I I didn't want to see at first that some of this was my own, I was involved in the process of of being unseen and and I was hiding myself in certain ways.

And and I think the way that we can we can determine how we are doing that is to think about how we clamor sometimes. Like, who am I looking to for a sense of being seen, a sense of value, a sense of validation that I am worthy of attention? And we see this all over our culture.

I mean, you look around on the news and you see that there's clamoring to be seen for maybe a a certain issue that that people think are important. We do the same as Christians sometimes, clamoring for others to affirm, you know, for example, our gifts, that we're waiting for somebody to give us permission to do what God has called us to do.

For me, it was clamoring. It was, I'm going to hide myself a little bit, my real self, but I'm going to perform and I'm going to do well externally so that people will pat me on the back. And it really became an idolatry, an idol for me of performance. But I was looking for that sense of validation from people rather than knowing God sees me and I'm doing what I do for Him and that's where I'm going to have a sense of peace rather than a sense of I have to clamor for what what I want and what I desire.

Portia Collins: You sound like me. Everything you're saying are things that I could very well say myself. So I I love where we're headed here. Okay, I want you to take us to the story of Hagar. Who is she and what can she specifically teach us the next time we feel overlooked?

Christine Hoover: Yeah. Well, that's where the Lord took me when I when I started realizing I was in I was in a pit, is what it felt like. The Lord spoke to me, "I see." And I knew immediately that He was taking me to Hagar. So I went and I opened my Bible, Genesis 16, looking at her story and how did God meet her to where she said, "God, I name You, the God who sees." She had an experience with Him.

And what I found was interesting about Hagar is that she was an Egyptian slave. She was a part of Abraham's household. Sarah, before she became pregnant, she sent Hagar away, because Hagar had become pregnant. So it was a whole mess. Everybody was involved in the mess.

And Hagar goes out and she says, "I'm I'm leaving. I'm going to she's going home." So she's in the desert, she sits down and she's in a hopeless place, knowing that she's not going to make it. Her her child, her unborn child, is not going to make it unless somebody intervenes. And so she sits down and that's when God meets her.

And I love God says to her, "Hagar, where have you come from and where are you going?" That question is the question that the Lord asked me through Hagar. Where have you come from? So name the unseeness that you feel, what is the pain that you feel in that? But also where are you going? Are you going to walk down a path of bitterness, hopelessness, despair?

Or God says to her, "I want you to go back. I want you to go back to your life and live your life." And the reason why He says that is not that she's to go back to an abusive situation or whatever. He's saying, "Go back under My protection, under My blessing, this covenant that I've made with Abraham, and this child that he will have through Sarah."

And so I think that that's for me, that's Hagar's story is that we're we're going back, we're doing hard things to kind of come out of that idolatry of clamoring, and to truly walk in seenness. And I what Hagar takes us back to is really Abraham's son with Sarah, Isaac, and through through Isaac's line, comes Jesus.

And so really, He's bringing us back to Jesus to show us that through Christ, God sees us. He's acted for us and He acts for us in specific ways when He sees us in our wilderness.

Portia Collins: Absolutely. So let's dig in a little bit more here, like, how does knowing this, how does knowing that God sees us. Share with our Grounded sisters, how can we find comfort and strength in knowing that God sees us?

Christine Hoover: Yes, that's a great question and I think that when we are sure that God sees everything we do in His name, and including the things that we're doing in our heart to forgive maybe, to obey when it's hard, to reject bitterness, when we know that, there is a peace and a security that we can live in that can come from no other person seeing us.

And so I talk in the book about there's different categories of unseeness that we make experience like disregard, or being misunderstood, or lack of appreciation, and several more. But I think that when we know that God sees us, He kind of meets us in each of those categories. We're not disregarded. We've been regarded. We were regarded at the cross and through the resurrection.

And we're continued to be one of the things that I love that I discovered about Jesus was thinking about, yeah, I thought so much in my Christian life about like God had done for me in the past through the cross and resurrection. But to to think about and to meditate on that Jesus is my intercessor presently, that He He sees and is praying for me, interceding for me, and the Holy Spirit is interceding for me.

And so to know that is such security. And it gives for me, it's changed me in the sense, it's given me courage. It's given me courage to live the life God has asked me to live faithfully, to use the gifts that He's given me faithfully for Him, and not waiting, not doing that to be seen, not for visibility's sake, but but to do it for for the Lord.

And I think about Matthew 6 and how Jesus says, "Don't do these things so that people will see you. Do these things for me privately and I will reward you." Like it makes me smile to think about it, just the joy of of having a relationship with God where we know He sees us and values us and what we do for Him is for Him and for His eyes alone.

And it really just all of that need for approval or validation or permission just kind of slides right off when we know those things.

Portia Collins: I love that. I love that. So, you're a pastor's wife.

Christine Hoover: Yes, ma'am.

Portia Collins: I get it. I get it. Talk to the woman who particularly feels unseen in ministry. I know that and as a woman in ministry, I think there is a misconception that we don't struggle with this, that because we are primarily seen that we don't struggle with this. And so, yeah, talk to the woman in ministry, perhaps she feels like her efforts go unnoticed and that maybe she's not really making much of a difference. What hope and perspective can you offer her?

Christine Hoover: I will give her my favorite verse, which is Hebrews 6:10. And it says this, it says, "For God is not unjust, He will not forget your work and the love you demonstrated for His name by serving the saints and by continuing to serve them."

I go to that verse a lot to remember, "God is because He He is just, He sees everything that we do and that others do sometimes to to wound us or us to wound others." But what we do to serve His saints in His name, He remembers. He sees and remembers and rewards, as I said earlier, Matthew 6.

So I go to that a lot. People may not see, but it kind of doesn't matter. It matters to me that God sees and will reward and not that I get a a sense of appreciation for that. Now, that has come over many years of wrestling with my selfishness, my like I want I want I want to the glory. I want the glory sometimes. And I think when when we want the glory, we want the appreciation.

But if we if we seek God's glory, we can live and just the truth that He sees and He He rewards.

Dana Grash: Dear single woman, God sees you. He really sees you as you offer your singleness to Him, embrace the good work He set before you today, and choose to spend yourself for His glory. Let me repeat Christine's favorite verse as a benediction over you.

"For God is not unjust, He will not forget your work and the love you demonstrated for His name by serving the saints and by continuing to serve them." Again, that's Hebrews chapter 6, verse 10. You may feel hidden during these single years, but God never forgets the woman who pours herself out for His glory. Instead, He honors her, always working for her good.

If you're desiring to say, "Yes, Lord," in this season, to pray like Charmaine, "God, squeeze all the glory possible out of my single years," would you let us join with you? You can submit a prayer request at ReviveOurHearts.com/prayer. We'd love to hear from you and pray alongside you.

One of our prayers for you is that you'd discover God's goodness right where you are. That's why our team created a brand new book, Finding Beauty in Every Season. You'll enjoy 30 days of stunning nature imagery paired with encouragement drawn from Nancy's teaching. It's a gentle daily reminder that in every chapter of your story, God is writing something beautiful. Request yours when you make a donation of any amount to support Revive Our Hearts. You can do that at ReviveOurHearts.com.

Calling all young moms. Next weekend we're focusing on your season of life. If you're feeling weary and in need of some gospel-saturated wisdom for the little years, you'll find that right here. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy sweet fellowship with your local church this weekend. Thanks for listening today. I'm Danna Grash, we'll see you next time 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.