Revive Our Hearts

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: When an unbeliever looks at your life as a Christ-follower, what do they see? I wonder how my reactions and my responses to everyday life and to the crises of life, what am I telling the world about what God is like?

Dana Gresh: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Adorned, for February 10, 2026. I'm Dana Gresh.

As you look at your circumstances, are you tempted to doubt God's goodness? Well, keep listening. Nancy's about to address the real-life challenges that threaten your peace, and she'll show you why you can still trust God. She's in a series called Ruth: The Transforming Power of Redeeming Love.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Well, we come today to the close of Ruth chapter one. We've been following this family from Bethlehem, then to Moab, and now having lost her husband and two sons, Naomi is coming back to her homeland, coming back to Bethlehem, and she's bringing with her her widowed daughter-in-law, Ruth. And so we come to verse 19 of chapter one. So the two women went on until they came to Bethlehem. When they arrived in Bethlehem, the whole town was stirred because of them, and the women exclaimed, "Can this be Naomi?"

"Don't call me Naomi," she told them. "Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter." This is a play on words here. The word Naomi, as some of you know, means pleasant. And she's saying, "Don't call me pleasant anymore, call me Mara, which means bitter, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter. I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi? The Lord has afflicted me. The Almighty has brought misfortune upon me."

Now do you find it interesting that she says "I went away full"? Do you remember why Naomi and her husband and sons left Bethlehem in the first place? Why? There was a famine. They apparently were pretty desperate, in pretty desperate straits, to make them think they needed to leave their homeland and go to Moab. But now in light of what she's experienced since leaving, she's saying, relatively speaking, things were pretty good back then. We thought they were pretty terrible, but since we've experienced some of the consequences of those choices, it looks in retrospect that we were full, though at the time she certainly didn't think so. Now she's come back to nothing, as far as she knows.

She left Bethlehem because of a food famine, and now she comes back to Bethlehem with a famine in her soul. And really that latter famine is the far more serious. She returns to Bethlehem and her family lands have been neglected, apparently they're overgrown, and now as a poverty-stricken widow, she's going to have to sell the family inheritance. There's nothing she can do as far as she knows to regain her lost inheritance.

And as we see the story of Naomi's poverty and what she goes through now as a widow coming back to Bethlehem, I'm reminded that the effects of sin in our lives are irrecoverable apart from the grace of God. If it weren't for God's grace, this story would have only a very sad ending. But it's the grace of God that is going to recover the consequences and the effects that have been caused by the choices that she and her husband made. Oftentimes I find that you and I are not really drawn to the Redeemer until we're desperate. That's why it's a loving God who strips us of the things we thought were so important, the things we thought we couldn't live without, so that in our poverty and our destitution, in our need, we might cry out to Him who is really the only one who can provide fullness for our souls.

Now she says in verse 20 that she feels like both she and God have been misnamed. "Don't call me pleasant, call me bitter. My name doesn't fit me anymore." I can imagine that at one time maybe she really was a pleasant woman, but she certainly isn't now. And she feels that not only has she been misnamed, but God has been misnamed. She uses two different names for God in this paragraph. She talks about the Lord, Jehovah. That's the personal name of God, the covenant God, the God who comes to meet His people in their point of need. And she's saying He doesn't seem like He's done it for me.

And then she says, "the Almighty has made my life very bitter. The Almighty has brought misfortune upon me." That's the name that you may remember as the name El Shaddai, the name that speaks of God as the all-sufficient one, who pours Himself into the lives of His believing children and meets all of their needs. And she's drawing upon these names of God and she's saying it sounds like God hasn't lived up to His name. In my life at least, she's saying, that's what it seems like. You can call Him Almighty, All-sufficient, Jehovah, but He certainly doesn't seem to have been that way for me.

Have you ever found yourself feeling like maybe God had not lived up to His name in your life? I mean, He has for everyone else. He does in the theology books and in the Sunday morning sermons. But as you live in the nitty-gritty of everyday life, do you look at some of your life circumstances and think, it really doesn't seem like He's been all-sufficient? It doesn't seem like He's been the one who acts on behalf of His children. Well, ultimately we see in this passage all bitterness is directed toward God. Naomi says, "My life has become bitter, and it's the Almighty who has made my life bitter. The Lord has afflicted me. The Almighty has brought misfortune upon me."

There's an interesting verse in Proverbs, Proverbs chapter 19, verse 3, that says a man's own folly ruins his life. Another translation says the foolishness of man perverts his way or subverts his way. Man acts foolishly, and then he experiences his catastrophic consequences, and then what happens? His heart rages against the Lord. So man goes his own way, does his own thing, then reaps the consequences, and then says, "It's all God's fault," gets angry at God. We sow seeds of foolishness, then we reap the harvest, and then we get mad at God. Our hearts rage against God. And that's really what's happening with Naomi here.

You see, Naomi has a faulty view of God. And when you have a wrong view of God, it will affect every other area of your life. She doesn't see her circumstances as an expression of God's love. She sees God as her enemy. She says, "The hand of the Lord has gone out against me. The Almighty has brought this misfortune against me. He has made my life very bitter." Now she's right in a sense that God was connected to her circumstances. But God was not her enemy. And God is not your enemy. God does not hate you. God loves you.

If you are His child, He has redeemed you. He loves you, He cherishes you, and when He brings circumstances into your life that are painful, He is seeking to restore and discipline and train and refine you so that your life can be even more fruitful. Naomi didn't see the purposes of God in her suffering. So she blamed God, which led to resentment and bitterness. She mistook God's purpose and His motivation. Centuries ago, John Wesley said that our job is to give the world a right opinion of God. And as I read this passage, I wonder how my reactions and my responses to everyday life and to the crises of life, what am I telling the world about what God is like?

What kind of opinion am I giving the world about God? The people around me, if the only thing they knew about God was how I respond when I'm under pressure, what would they think God is like? You know, as I've been pondering this passage, I've been convicted among other things that many times my responses to ministry and to the challenges and demands of ministry give the world an opinion that serving God is a burden. When it really is an incredible, high calling and blessing. And I know that in my heart, but under pressure a lot of times I will react and respond in such a way that if people were to look at my life, they would think serving God is no fun. Serving God is a headache, it's a burden. That's what my life, that's the opinion of God that I think my life would sometimes give.

As you mother your children, what is your response to mothering tell the world about what kind of God you have? Does it say that having children is a burden? It's a problem? Or does it say that receiving God's gifts and calling is a blessing and a joy? Now that doesn't mean we're supposed to pretend that everything's easy, that there's nothing difficult, that we aren't needy, and we are to bear one another's burdens. But ultimately we need to keep saying to each other, yes, I'm having these circumstances, yes, I'm being stretched in these ways, but the truth is God is still good. And God is faithful. And God is meeting my needs. What do people think that God is like based on your responses to the circumstances and challenges of life?

Now at this point, Naomi has repented. She has returned home, but she has yet to go through the process of restoration. There's still a pathway ahead of her, as there is for all of us. From here till heaven is exactly how long it lasts. A process of being conformed to the image of Christ. So we read in the last verse of this chapter, Naomi returned from Moab, accompanied by Ruth the Moabitess, her daughter-in-law, arriving in Bethlehem as the barley harvest was beginning.

So this chapter that's had so much sorrow, so much grief, so much heaviness, actually ends in hope. It's harvest time. It's a time for fruitfulness. It's a time for in-gathering. It's a time for blessing and thankfulness. Really the story that we're reading is about how the empty becomes full. Naomi and Elimelech were empty when they left Bethlehem because of the famine ten years earlier. They thought they were going to find fullness in Moab. But instead they found more heartache, more sorrow, more loss.

Now having repented, the woman whose heart is truly empty and bereaved. She has a lot of cause to be sorrowful and to be heavy-hearted, but now she's coming back to the place where God can bless her. That doesn't mean God's going to cause all her problems to go away. It doesn't mean she's going to immediately have an easy life. It doesn't mean you're going to immediately have an easy life once you put your life under the lordship of Christ and begin to live as a repenter. But there's this glimmer of hope at the end of this passage.

And we're seeing that though she doesn't know it, God has made provision just around the corner. God has made provision to restore her fortunes, to restore what has been lost. She doesn't see that, she doesn't know that, but back home is one who is her redeemer. One who has been given the opportunity by God to redeem her losses. It's her poverty, it's her need that make her a candidate for this redeemer. And as I read this passage, it says to my heart that I don't have to stay empty. That when I come back to God as an empty, needy, broken sinner, taking responsibility for my own life, for my own choices, that then I become a candidate for God's gracious provision. For the provision of the one who has the right to redeem everything. Close at hand, closer than we realize. There stands one who paid the price to win back all the losses that have been occasioned by our wandering and our sinfulness. He is our Redeemer.

Thank you, Lord, that in the midst of our waywardness and our wandering and our foolishness at times, that you are always drawing our hearts home and that as we return, there is hope. Thank you that in our lives it is harvest time and there is hope and there is a Redeemer. Though we may not know exactly how you're going to resolve our circumstances or our situation, we know that if we are in you, we are safe and that there is the hope that there will be fruitfulness and restoration. So Lord, continue to grant us the gift of repentance, to keep us on the pathway of restoration, of seeking you, of turning to you, and instill faith in our hearts that you are working and moving and that you are accomplishing your purposes. I pray for Jesus' sake. Amen.

Dana Gresh: That's Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth reminding each of us that because of Jesus, we can know and believe that God is good. And that's true even when we're tempted to be bitter about our circumstances. God's goodness is a truth Kristen Clark clung to during a dark season of her own life. She shared about it on an episode of the Women of the Bible podcast produced by Revive Our Hearts. The team recorded a whole season walking through the book of Ruth and we're about to listen to a portion. Here's Kristen Clark talking with Erin Davis and Gail Vialba.

Kristen Clark: Well, my husband and I have been married for nine years and just assumed, you know, "Oh, we're going to have this happy life with kids when we want them" and thought we had it all planned out and, you know, two years in, no children, and then pregnancy, miscarriage, six months later, pregnancy, miscarriage. Six years goes by, nothing, and then around seven and a half years got pregnant out of the blue, seemed like it was out of the blue, and just felt like, "Wow, things are finally looking up. You know, they're finally going to happen. We're going to have this family, we're going to have kids." And then right before my first trimester finished, I thought, you know, I'd made it further than I ever had. Miscarried so late, right before the second trimester. And I just remember after that feeling this, you know, I just like God has dealt bitterly with me. I felt just this darkness, this weight, and I wrestled truly in my heart like I never had before with wondering, you know, is God really good? Does He love me? Does He care for me? And I think I was wrestling in my heart with bitterness towards the Lord.

Erin Davis: I know there are going to be women listening to this podcast that are feeling that on some level. Maybe it's right there on the surface of their heart and they kind of drag themselves to Bible study and they don't want to be there because they feel this, this way that Naomi's feeling, like the Lord has not been good to me. The Lord has dealt bitterly with me. Gail, you work with a lot of pastors' wives. I wonder what it is in their lives that makes them feel like the Lord has not been good to me.

Gail Vialba: Many pastors' wives, I would almost say most pastors' wives, never felt the call to ministry the way their husbands did. And so they find themselves in this role that it really is a role. I mean, it's hard. It's hard work being a pastor's wife. And then people hurt you. It feels like when you're in the pastorate, it feels like the church is taking a vote on you every Sunday.

Erin Davis: Oh, I know. I was married to a youth pastor for several years. I'm still married to him. But back then, every time I would change my haircut, I dreaded going to church because there was lots of commentary about it.

Gail Vialba: You're living in a fishbowl, right? Yes. So what I hear often from pastors' wives is, "I didn't sign up for this. I had no idea it would be this hard." And it's not that God is dealing bitterly with them, it's that people are being mean. And that's just hard to deal with.

Erin Davis: As I was reading this part of the book of Ruth, what jumped out at me is Naomi feels uncomfortable with the people of God. She's come back into the Promised Land. These are the children of Israel she's with, and she's like, she doesn't fit there. She doesn't fit in Moab anymore. She doesn't even know what her identity is in a sense, she's changing her name. And I can relate to that. I love the people of God. I do. They are my family, my brothers and sisters. But there are times when I feel like, "Ugh, I just don't fit here." And sometimes then I translate that to the Lord. I think if I could, if I could rephrase what Naomi is saying, I feel like she's saying, "The Lord's abandoned me. He left me. Where is He?" And so Naomi left physical family when she was in the Promised Land before, but she kind of returns in a spiritual famine. She's empty in her heart, and I think we can all relate to those kinds of feelings.

Kristen Clark: Me too. And we're going to see Naomi's going to move past this moment where she feels abandoned. But I want women to press into that. But also, I think we can relate to Naomi here. And while it's easy to go, "Naomi, get your act together! God's good, why are you doing changing your name?" I think we can all relate to feeling, "I thought we were better friends than this." And I'm so glad Scripture gives us these insights showing us the hard, the heart wrestles and the struggles. It's not a book filled with perfect people walking with God in this wonderful vibrant relationship. They're struggling, they're wrestling, and that's how we all are, right? So it's so relatable and I'm just so glad Scripture gives us this picture of the struggle as the story unfolds to see how God works from this place.

Erin Davis: Me too. And that's why we open our Bibles with eyes wide open going, "Okay, what is really going on here, not the sanitized version." So she changes her name from Naomi to what?

Kristen Clark: To Mara. Which means bitter.

Erin Davis: Bitter. And what do you take from the text by that name change, Gail? Do you think she's saying she's bitter? Do you think she's saying the Lord's bitter? Some combination?

Gail Vialba: I think it's a combination, but I think she's taking that on as her new identity, which is sad.

Erin Davis: I think I've done that sometimes too. Take on grief as my identity. Take on sorrow as my identity. Take on hardship as my identity. And Ruth, our heroine of the story, faces a lot of the same trials, but she doesn't let them mark her in the way that Naomi does.

Kristen Clark: Right. And Ruth faced tremendous loss. I mean, you think about it, she lost her husband. Like this girl, she had a hard life.

Erin Davis: She did have a hard life. And yet we don't hear her saying in the same way Naomi does, "The Lord's been bitter to me" or "I thought we were better friends than this." It's amazing, it truly is. But I thought as we're thinking about Naomi and she's describing herself as bitter and talking about the bitterness the Lord's been bitter towards her, I just wanted us to drill down on that topic together. So, Kristen, will you take us to a passage on bitterness? I think we all need to memorize, which is Hebrews 12:15.

Kristen Clark: It says, "See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God, that no 'root of bitterness' springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled."

Erin Davis: This describes bitterness as a root. You don't have to have a garden to understand the root. You know what a root is. So with bitterness, you can't just hack it off at the surface because the root's still there and it's going to grow back up.

Kristen Clark: And I have a plant like that in my yard. You can't kill it. Every chop it, chop it, drill down, it still grows back.

Erin Davis: Because you're not getting all that root. I can't find the root. It is deep. There's got to be a spiritual analogy for that too. That deep root. Yeah, because that is exactly how bitterness works. But then it gives us this picture that that root springs up and defiles many is what Scripture says. It becomes this plant that impacts many, many people. And we see that in the life of Naomi, right? Her bitterness has implications beyond just Naomi. So a question for us to wrestle with is, what is bitterness? And I think of the word picture of like sucking on a lemon. Just that sour taste in your mouth and it's dry and you can't quite get over it. I wonder do any word pictures or thoughts come to mind from you about defining what bitterness is?

Gail Vialba: Anger turned inside. You're punishing yourself versus anger turned outside.

Kristen Clark: I've heard it put as being harbored hurt or just unforgiveness that you're just, you're not willing to forgive.

Erin Davis: And it's that root, right? It just keeps burrowing and burrowing and burrowing and burrowing because you haven't yanked it up. We've probably all experienced bitterness. I tend to think women gravitate towards bitterness really easily, unfortunately. So when you think of your own lives, can you think of the evidences of bitterness in your lives? How do you know when that anger has turned inward, Gail?

Gail Vialba: Well, I lose my joy and that is horrible. It sucks the life out of you. I, if I'm bitter, I can't function effectively in anything. I'm just the type of person anyhow who shows, I mean, it shows on my face if there's something going on. So and I'm not a very good pretender. It has residual effects. My husband knows right away.

Kristen Clark: If I'm bitter towards someone or towards God, I see it come out as control. So wanting to control the situation, take it into my own hands and become the judge that will now determine what the right punishment is or what the right circumstance needs to be, and so I just become very controlling and I'm not surrendered, I'm not entrusting it to the Lord. I'm trying to make happen what I think should happen.

Erin Davis: So you're protecting that hurt a little bit, you're justifying it. For me, I know I'm bitter when I start replaying the tapes. Rehash that conversation, rehash that conversation, rehash that conversation or that hurt. I replay it and replay it and replay it and replay it. And to me, that is just an indicator, hold up, there's a bitter root there you need to deal with. I wonder have you all seen or experienced the impact of one bitter woman? What can be the impact of just one bitter woman, Gail?

Gail Vialba: I have friends who have gone that road and actually have health issues and have lost friends because it's difficult to be around a person like that. It really is.

Erin Davis: I have a friend who serves communion in nursing homes. And she says she can tell when she walks in the door by their posture, the women who are bitter. Isn't that powerful? Because it is showing up in their health as you mentioned, in their bodies.

Kristen Clark: Yeah, it really affects us from the inside out from, yeah, physically, emotionally, spiritually, like you're saying in our demeanor, just everything about us is there's just a weight that we're carrying and it's heavy and it's visible.

Erin Davis: So she gives some descriptions of God here that are significant. So she, let me read us the verses again, starting in verse 21. "I went away full, and the Lord has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi when the Lord has testified against me and the Almighty has brought calamity upon me?" What I think is so interesting is she's talking about God a lot.

Kristen Clark: Yeah, she hasn't forgotten God. He's in the picture. She doesn't come to the point where she says there is no God. And she's calling Him some of these names like Almighty. He is big, He could take care of me. And then she calls Him Lord. And when we see Lord like this in Scripture with the small caps, it means Yahweh, Jehovah. It's His personal name that meets people at their point of need. So I wonder if she's saying not only change my name, but the Lord isn't living up to His names. This is who He says He is, but He didn't take care of me.

Erin Davis: I've felt that. I felt, "Yeah, you can do this and I've seen you do it for others, but you didn't do it for me." I once heard a Bible teacher say God is good, God is good at being God, and God is good to me. All three. That is powerful. But I think sometimes we think, "Yeah, God is good, God is good at being God, but I'm not sure He's good to me."

Kristen Clark: Yeah, and I remember feeling, I just resonate with this so much. I know so many women can with her feelings and that's again, I love how the Bible shows us this heart wrestle and just, as I shared earlier after the third miscarriage, I felt that. Like "the Lord has testified against me, the Almighty has brought calamity upon me," and that's how I felt. It almost felt cruel. Like "God, why would you allow me to conceive especially because that pregnancy went so much longer?" It went so, the other two were like right around six weeks, so much earlier, you know. I made it through that big hurdle. It felt like a huge leap to get on the other side of six weeks, made it almost to 12 weeks and then went in for an ultrasound and the doctor said, "I'm so sorry, there's no longer a heartbeat." And I mean, that was like a knife in my heart in that moment laying on that table. It was, it was so, so hard and in that moment that's how it felt. "The Lord has brought calamity upon me" and just feeling like, "Lord, are you good? You say you are, but look at what you've done. This feels cruel. This feels like a mean trick. Why would you even allow me to get pregnant to then take me down through this dark, deep valley?" And so I wrestled with who is God? Who does He say He is? Is He really that God? I had to do a study, my heart was struggling so much, I just I knew I needed to do a study on the names and attributes of God. So for the next 30 days, I just had to sit in that, "Who does God say He is? What are His names? What do they mean?" and then asking the Lord to help my heart believe that because in my emotions, in those feelings, in that place of grief, I didn't want to believe that. But as I went back to the Word and saw who God was, my heart was led by that truth and I was able to, you know, finally say, "Yes, you are good and you do good. Blessed be the name of the Lord."

Erin Davis: Maybe as you've been listening to this episode you've identified a bitter root in your own heart and I want you to know the Word of God is the weed killer that goes to work against that bitter root.

Dana Gresh: That's Erin Davis talking with Gail Vialba and Kristen Clark about attacking a root of bitterness. To hear more from the Women of the Bible podcast, visit reviveourhearts.com. And while you're there, consider making a donation of any amount. When you do, you'll receive Ruth: Experiencing a Life Restored. That's the six-week study you've been hearing about throughout this series. And it's a good one. I hope you'll use it yourself or even consider getting a group of women together to learn and grow alongside you. To donate, visit reviveourhearts.com or call us at 1-800-569-5959 and be sure to request your Ruth study when you do. Tomorrow we're continuing this conversation about bitterness. It's such an easy pit to fall into, but we don't have to stay there. 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.