Revive Our Hearts

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: No matter how busy you are, you can make God’s Word part of your life. Whatever season of life you’re in, you need the Word of God to connect to where you are living life. And that’s what meditation does. It takes this Book and plants it and lodges it and causes it to take root in my heart and to produce fruit in my life.

Danica Gress: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of *A Place of Quiet Rest*, for May 22nd, 2026. I’m Danica Gress.

We’ve been talking this week about fullness in Christ. What does it really mean? How do we experience it? Well, Nancy’s going to show you today from the book of Joshua that meditation on Scripture is key. There’s a real heart satisfaction that comes from knowing and loving God’s Word. Here’s Nancy.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Well, as I think you know by now, I believe with all my heart that learning to meditate on God’s Word is crucial for every believer. Yesterday we saw why by looking at the life of Joshua. We’ve been in a series called *Indispensable Ingredients for Life*. If you’ve missed any of it, let me invite you to go to ReviveOurHearts.com. You can listen to the audio or you can read the transcripts of any days that you may have missed.

Now some women have been listening to this series with us, and I wanted you to hear insights that they’ve gained about meditating on God’s Word. Let’s listen.

Guest (Female): The thing that I like most about meditating is that it’s more about the phrase "less is more." Just taking a simple truth versus feeling like you have to take a paragraph or three or four sentences. Sometimes just "Jesus wept." If you’re grieving or you’re going through a time of sorrow or struggle, that has been a great comfort for me.

So I try to follow the pattern of just less is more. A couple of words, even a word—that Jesus is my comforter. And just meditate on the fact that He’s my comforter throughout the day. So that’s what I do.

Guest (Female) (Jill): What I’ve found is that God will give me a passage of Scripture. I remember particularly when you were speaking just now about "When you pass through the waters, I will be with you." It was so on my heart, and it was just those few words, but I had it on my rearview mirror of my car. I had it painted in my bathroom.

Then we had a tragedy in my family, a car accident of a niece that I adored. When I got in the car to go when we got the call, I flipped down that rearview mirror and God spoke to me again what I had been meditating on: "When you pass through the waters, I will be with you." I’ve just found that meditation is needed in those times. Having meditated on that Scripture for months, He gave it to me when I needed it.

Guest (Female): And in that sense, meditating on God’s Word is not only blessing and benefiting you today, but it’s storing up blessings for the future when you’re going to need to have God’s perspective. You may find yourself in a crisis where you can hardly think straight, but what you have been storing away in your heart is what will then walk with you through that crisis or that circumstance.

I just want to follow up with a scripture behind what Jill just said, but in Isaiah chapter 50, verse 4 and 5, it says: "The Lord hath given me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary: he wakeneth me morning by morning, he wakeneth mine ear to hear as the learned. The Lord hath opened mine ear, and I was not rebellious, neither turned away my back."

It’s so important for us to meditate on the Word of God even first thing in the morning, like you said, when you’re less distracted. Sometimes that word is going to be there that’s going to be the word that’s going to be me because I’m weary. But I’ve also found that through that meditation, it may be my husband or my children or maybe a phone call that that very word that God has given me that morning will be the word to the weary of someone else and will be able to be that strength to them.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Susan, I know that you’ve been through some seasons of time in your life where you were very weary—caring for a child with great physical needs, not able to sleep through the night. As you think back on those seasons of your life, can you relate to how the Word of God meditated on was a source of strength and grace for you during that season?

Guest (Female) (Susan): One verse comes to mind. It said, "If thy law had not been my delight, I would have perished in my afflictions." And that is so true. It was my lifeline, it was my strength. It was the only thing I had to cling to because everything had been stripped from me. All my securities and all my idols had been laid aside, and it was those times that the Word of God is the only thing I had to run to and the strength.

I remember one night specifically that my son, who was born with multiple birth defects—one of those was he was born without an esophagus—he began to choke. It was a Sunday night and everybody that I knew was in church. I just remember grabbing him up and grabbing my 15-month-old as well and literally almost throwing him down the steps and running out to the front porch along with both of my two sons and standing on the front porch and saying, "God, help."

I just remember the Lord in His Word just strengthen me, just like you said: "I will be with you, I’ve not abandoned you, I am here." I looked over to my neighbor next door and there was a party going on, and I crashed their party saying, "Help me, help me." But I just know that every time that I was in those desperate places, God’s Word came through and not only His Word came through, but Him saying that "My presence is with you and I’m not going to leave you, I’m not going to forsake you."

Guest (Female): About 14 years ago I went to a coma and when I came out I had to go through a series of tests. One of the tests I had to go through, they put me on a very small narrow table, strapped me in—and I’m real claustrophobic. They brought a machine down and it was so close to my face, I literally could lift my nose and touch it. I had to be still for five shots for 10 minutes each.

I’m just going, "What am I going to do?" It was like God said, "Just remember what I’ve told you in my Word." So I just started quoting scripture in my mind because I had to be still, so I couldn't verbalize it. Before I knew it, it was done and it was almost an hour.

It was just real neat how God brought back those scriptures because I was having trouble with my memory. I was having short-term memory loss and I couldn't remember what I had for breakfast that morning. Here I was that these scriptures I had learned throughout my whole life were coming to mind. It just shows you how when you meditate, they come back. So that was neat.

Guest (Female): You compare scripture with scripture and sometimes I’m reading in why God said that you’re only supposed to eat animals that chew the cud. Then I got to thinking, you know, if you put the Word in your body as food, more than necessary food, it’s there for cud to chew when you have extra time and you need it.

It’s back there; you’ve got it to mull over again. I was just thinking about how God has used His Word. If it permeates us, if it comes into us, it’s got to come out and it will be there when we need it. We can just count on Him to give us what we need at the moment of time. We can just count on that.

Guest (Female): Last June I had something happen in my family and I had been reading through the Psalms already. That particular day I was at Psalm 89. It is a Psalm that speaks of, of course, who God is and it was just very appropriate for what was taking place.

I clung to it. In all the different translations of the Bible that I do have, I marked it in all of them and they all had a different way of saying the same thing. But what it said and it’s just rich, it says: "Righteousness and justice are the foundation of your throne. Steadfast love and faithfulness go before you. Blessed are the people who know the festal shout, who walk, O Lord, in the light of your face, who exult in your name all the day and in your righteousness are exalted. For you are the glory of their strength, and by your favor our horn is exalted. For our shield belongs to the Lord, our king of the Holy One of Israel." Talking about meditating, there’s so many pieces of that that I chewed on for days. Even just being here today reminds me that that was a piece of meditation for me at that time.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: So the meditation on the Word of God connects up to real life—real-life circumstances and situations. You may not be in crisis—it’s okay not to be in crisis—but whatever season of life you’re in, you need the Word of God to connect to where you are living life. And that’s what meditation does. It takes this Book and plants it and lodges it and causes it to take root in my heart and to produce fruit in my life.

Guest (Female): Who was it—John Bunyan, I think, who said that he wanted to be so filled with the Word of God that when you pierced him, the blood that would come out would be bibline? I like that word picture. I want to be so filled with the Word of God that when I get squeezed, when I get in trouble, when frustrated situations in life over which I have no control—that what comes out in my responses, in my reactions, in what I say to other people.

Or when other people have issues and they come to me and say, "What do I do about this?" I want to be so filled with the Word of God that I can pour forth the Word of God, that I can respond in ways that are according to the Word of God.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: It's meditation—there are no shortcuts to meditation. It’s over the long haul. It’s the faithful day-in and day-out of the Word into our lives. From childhood, I might add, ideally—that is what brings us to that place of being filled with the Word of God.

Which is why it’s so important, moms, for you to be helping your children to develop habits of being exposed to the Word of God. Playing CDs of Scripture as they go to sleep at night, perhaps, or just making sure that the Word of God is part of the fabric of how they live. It’s on the walls of your home, it’s in your mouth, it’s in the music that’s being played in your home, that they are being surrounded and saturated by the Word of God.

Otherwise, they’re going to be growing up in the counsel of the ungodly. If you’re not intentional and proactive about getting the Word of God into the hearts and the lives and the minds of your children, the world will quickly fill up that place in their hearts, and then they will not flourish. They will not be like that tree planted by the rivers of water that yields its fruit in its season.

Guest (Female): Last night I was teaching a group of women at our church and we were actually doing a Bible study, but some of them didn't have Bibles. I decided I would run downstairs to the praise team room because I knew there were Bibles in there. I got to the praise team room, but there were no lights. It was pitch black dark.

I guess I'd never been in there before needing to turn on lights and I groped my way around the room and thought, "I am totally blind in here. I can't find anything." I knew they were in there, but I could not find them. I had to run across the worship center, turn the lights on, come back, find the Bibles, and take them upstairs to the girls.

As I was walking back up the steps, I thought, "What an incredible picture of the very thing that we're talking about tonight and the thing Nancy's been sharing about today. Because apart from the Word of God, I am clueless. I am blind. I don't know how to walk. I can't find what I'm looking for. I don't know which direction to go." The Lord just used that as a reminder to me in such a practical way about the fact that I dare not try to walk through my day apart from His Word and the direction that He's there ready to give me if I'm going to look for it.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: The entrance of your Word gives light, so Psalm 119 tells us. Kim?

Guest (Female) (Kim): I am thankful that the Word of God at critical times in my life has brought conviction. Recently, 1 Corinthians 13 has so come alive in my life. That’s something I memorized as a young woman, have taught on, have dissected, have meditated on, and the Lord keeps deepening me in that passage. I know there’s so much I still need to learn in it.

But over and over through my Christian pilgrimage, He has used the Word to bring conviction. If I’ll be faithful to surrender to that that He’s teaching me, then I’ll grow. If I grow, then I’ll reflect Christ. If I reflect Christ, people will see what He’s worth. If I do that, then He’ll be glorified, and that is my desire and that’s His desire, and He places that desire on my heart.

So my encouragement to women is: we hear a lot of people say, "I want to grow, I just want to grow spiritually. I’m going to this conference, I’m going to this Bible study." But no matter how many conferences we go to, how many church services we attend, if we’re not willing to put the Word in our lives—and it’s the daily application of the Word—I believe it’s that picture of the daily manna. The bread that we’re to take daily, God provided the manna daily. He desires for us to live by His Word daily. If people want spiritual growth, I believe that’s the only way it’ll come.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: And as we meditate on the Word of God, our lives become living epistles, seen and read by others in our world. People who may never crack open their Bible or may not even own a Bible begin to see the Word of God incarnated, lived out in us. And then they are drawn to want to know the Word of Life and to get into the written Word themselves. So this is not just for us. This is a means by which we begin to make Christianity real and vital and something to be considered in our world.

Guest (Female): I became certified in scuba diving years ago. One of the things that we had to learn then was to buddy breathe. You would take three breaths and then you had to take your regulator out of your mouth and put it in your buddy’s mouth and they took three breaths.

Meditating on God’s Word has been like that in my life. It’s life. I breathe it in and then I find that I take my regulator out, particularly like on an airplane, and put it in a small child next to me’s mouth. It’s life to each other. Our meditation is important to the whole body, not just to us.

Guest (Female): Don’t expect as a mom to have resources and a reservoir of life to give to your family if you haven’t been taking in the Word of God yourself. You’ve got to breathe in, you’ve got to be taking in food. They talk with nursing moms about how important is what you’re eating. What’s getting into your system is what you’re putting into your child.

Well, women, God put us here on this earth to be bearers and nurturers of life. And some of us are so anemic spiritually, so malnourished spiritually, that we have nothing left to give to those around us in our own families or elsewhere who need spiritual food. So you’re doing this for yourself, but you’re also doing it so that you have resources out of which to minister grace and help and life to others who are hungry and need to be fed.

Guest (Female): I just returned from Thailand and also a trip into a communist country. When I am with these believers in Thailand, many of them are first-generation Christians. And the hunger for the Word of God so is convicting in my own life—not just their hunger, but also for the life that they live out and the sacrifice that they make for not just believing in Christ, but living for Christ.

Because many of these believers are persecuted for their faith in Christ and many of them are rejected by their families. While we were there, we heard the testimony of two women that had come to Christ and how they were going to their neighbors and sharing their faith and eventually they were put in jail for sharing their faith. They were given only a handful of rice for the whole day. That’s all they had.

They only had the clothes on their backs. They slept on the ground. They continued to share their faith while they were even in jail. They were told that if they continued to share their faith while they were in jail, then they would never ever get out of jail. These two women stood up and said, "We will never recant our faith and we will not stop sharing our faith."

Eventually, there were so many people getting saved in the jail that the people decided the best thing that they could do is to release them. I sat with these dear women and the stories that they shared and the suffering that they faced underneath that persecution, it just brought such conviction into my own life. How much are we willing to really live out the truth of God’s Word in reality? When they gather, you don’t have to do an announcement, you don’t have to make up flyers, you don’t have to do a radio broadcast announcement that you’re going to have a special meeting. It just spreads and people show up because they’re so hungry to want to be taught the Word of God.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Makes me think, Susan, of that verse in Proverbs that says, "The full soul loathes a honeycomb, but to the hungry man every bitter thing is sweet." There’s something about—I think we’re so stuffed, "Gospel stuffed" in a sense, if you will, in this country, with something that we have not really appreciated or digested or lived out or internalized or personalized. And we’re sick and tired of something we haven’t really experienced for ourselves.

The full soul loathes a honeycomb: "Don’t give me, I’m stuffed, don’t give me anything else to eat." But to the hungry man, if you’ve got a hungry heart, even the bitter things in God’s Word become sweet to you because you know how much we need that conviction and what a blessing that can be to us.

So as we close this time, let me just pray that the Lord will give us hungry hearts for His Word. Lord, we do thank You for the riches, the incredible riches of Your Word. It is worth more than any amount of gold or silver, anything that could be precious to us—the Word of God is more valuable than that.

Thank You for giving Your Word to us. Thank You for the Holy Spirit who makes it alive in us and applies it to our lives, personalizes the Word in us, and enables us to live out Your Word. I pray, Lord, that You would give us hungry hearts, that we would be hungry souls longing for the food and the meat of Your Word.

And then that we would be givers of life to others. As we are fed ourselves on Your Word, may we become a source of life and grace and truth and of sharing the Living Word, Christ, with others around us. Bless these women, Lord, and make us women who live and love and reflect Your Word in every way throughout our lives, I pray in Jesus’ name, amen.

Danica Gress: Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth has been encouraging you to live by the presence and the Word of God. Don’t you love how practical today’s conversation was?

We don’t meditate on God’s Word for meditation’s sake. We meditate because we need God’s Word to fill us and to spill out of us when hard days come. You know, our team has said before that Revive Our Hearts is a ministry for the suffering woman. The message of freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ is for her.

Would you do a little exercise with me? I want you to ponder for a moment what group of women do you have a particular heart for? Those enduring chronic illness? Those navigating marriage challenges? Those in seasons of grief? The list could go on. I’m sure for many of you, another group is coming to mind.

Whoever is on your heart, I want you to know Revive Our Hearts exists to reach her with hope. She might feel empty today, but Christ wants to be her fullness. He offers her abundant life in His Word today. Our heart is to tell her that she can thrive in Christ, but some of these women live on the other side of the globe. Some are members of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. In order to package this message for them, we need your help.

Our ministry year closes at the end of the month, and we’re navigating a budget shortfall. In order to keep moving toward the woman on your heart, we’re asking God to provide $1.4 million by May 31st. This is a huge number. Let’s be honest—it feels too huge.

But in 25 years as a ministry, we’ve seen that nothing is impossible for the Lord. We’re trusting Him, and we’re inviting you to partner with us in that. The woman you thought of a moment ago, would you consider making a donation in her honor? Every dollar will go toward calling her to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ. One resource, one conference, one new language translation at a time.

To help you get to know our heart for her, we’d love to send you *Called to Thrive* as our thanks for your gift of any amount. This is our newest resource from Nancy and your freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness handbook. To donate and request your copy, visit ReviveOurHearts.com or call us at 1-800-569-5959.

Well, we’ve had a week on freedom and a week on fullness. You can visit ReviveOurHearts.com if you’ve missed any of those episodes. You know what’s coming next: a week on fruitfulness. We’re kicking that off with Laura Perry Smalts. She’s sharing about the joy and the fruit of embracing biblical womanhood. 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.