Revive Our Hearts

Carla: Hi, I'm Carla from Michigan. One way God has used Revive Our Hearts in my life has been revealing that I was actually going the way of the feminist world 25 years ago. That's why I'm so thankful to support Revive Our Hearts on a monthly basis as a Revive Partner. Now, let's listen to today's episode of Revive Our Hearts. It's brought to you in part by the members of Revive Partner Team. Here's Dana.

Dana Gresh: Robert Wolgemuth never forgot one special sound from his childhood.

Robert Wolgemuth: I can hear him downstairs, the timbre of his voice just wafting through the house, my daddy praying.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: It just encouraged me to love the Lord with all my heart. He didn't care if we got rich. He didn't care if we had impressive jobs. He just wanted us to know, love, and serve Jesus.

Dana Gresh: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, co-author of *You Can Trust God to Write Your Story*, for June 19th. I'm Dana Gresh.

Did you call him daddy, dad, papa? What comes to your mind when you think about your father? I realize not everyone has fond memories of their fathers. Your mind's eye might recall painful snapshots of your dad, or maybe your father was just plain missing from your life.

Many of us did have daddies who loved us, and they did their best to care for us. Whether your relationship with your father is strained or stable, pained or nearly perfect, all of us have a God-given responsibility to honor our fathers.

The scriptures say in Exodus chapter 20, verse 12, "Honor your father and your mother so that you may have a long life in the land that the Lord your God is giving you."

A while back, our friend Michelle Hill sat down with the host of this program, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, and her husband Robert, who is now with the Lord. They took time to reflect on the legacies their fathers left behind. As you listen, think through how you can do a better job of honoring your father this Sunday on Father's Day and beyond. Here's Michelle Hill in conversation with Robert and Nancy Wolgemuth.

Michelle Hill: As we're honoring our dads, I just want to hear from you guys. Little snippets into who your fathers were and into what they did to help build your character. Let's start off with what's your first memory of your dad.

Robert Wolgemuth: My first memories of my dad were in an auto parts store that he owned. This is a long, wonderful story because my dad didn't look like it, but he was highly entrepreneurial. He's a pastor of a church, he goes to get a part for his car, the part doesn't come in, and so he says to the manager, "Can I buy this business from you?" and he said yes.

So here's this little pastor in a town in Pennsylvania who buys an auto parts store, and that store funded his whole family, all of our college, everything. My dad was in ministry, never took a salary because of the auto parts store.

So he was again kind of a surprise because he wasn't like entrepreneurs you've met who are like car salesmen, upbeat. He was very thoughtful and very sober, but he knew what he wanted to do. And so he built this auto parts store into four auto parts stores, and I can just see him working the counter, being absolute in his element because he was a car guy. So yeah, that's an early memory.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: When you get to a certain age, the memories aren't what they once were. I couldn't tell you what my earliest memory is, but I do know that something really important in our family, which is almost unheard of today, is that this was a large family. My parents had six children in their first five years of marriage, and then a seventh a number of years later.

So our family meals were disorderly, a lot of conversation. It's a pretty verbal family. But we had every day breakfast together at 8:00 a.m. and dinner together at 7:00 p.m. When we were kids, we thought that was torture because all our friends got to eat at 5:00, but we waited until Daddy got home from work. But we were together for meals.

As we got older and things came into our lives, we weren't all there for every meal, but this was a really important thing in our family. It wasn't highly structured. We had family devotions hit and miss, but there was conversation about fun things, about interesting things. My family loved to talk about politics or current events, but also about the Lord and about the things that mattered most.

As a businessman, he loved talking about opportunities he'd had that day at work to share the gospel with somebody or to read a letter we got from a missionary that our family was supporting. So I can't say there was a particular family gathering that was like some great big story, but I think looking back over the tapestry of our growing up, that those meals together with my dad at the head of the table, literally and figuratively, were really important.

Michelle Hill: So as your dad's talking about God, about his father, what do you remember some of those conversations looking like?

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: It was woven into the warp and woof of our lives. My dad was not a preacher, although when he had opportunities to speak to businessmen, he would always talk about the Lord. He would say, "I'm probably not going to get invited back anyway," so he would give his testimony about how he came to faith in Christ as a young man.

He would always give people an opportunity if they wanted to receive Christ, so he was very outspoken about his faith. But he was also very natural about it. So we grew up thinking that's just natural, normal conversation. It's not like we talk about life and then we talk about Jesus. Jesus is our life.

And so my parents had a lot of ministry going on in and through our home, so we would see people coming to know Jesus in our home. We'd see my parents reaching out and ministering to a couple whose marriage was in trouble, and the family was all a part of this. So we would be praying for people.

We would be saying, Daddy would tell us about some person he met, "Does that person know Jesus?" That just became, I know it sounds maybe unbelievable to some whose upbringing was so very different, but it was such a natural part of everyday life. It wasn't overbearing or like, "Oh, we're still talking about God." It wasn't that at all.

My dad loved the Lord and he loved God's word, and so it was more caught than taught. We knew that his time in the word every morning was sacrosanct, but it wasn't like, "Okay, you have to do this, you have to have daily devotions." This was his life. This was what he loved. He loved learning wisdom from God's word.

He loved us. He loved listening to us. He loved letting us talk. And there were times I remember one mealtime where everybody around the table was talking loudly at the same time, and I looked around and I thought there is absolutely nobody listening. Everybody is talking. So sometimes that was chaos.

My dad didn't love chaos, but he would settle us down. It wasn't about him. It was about the Lord and it was about us. So he wanted us to develop our gifts and our strengths. He was an encourager. He used to call me his favorite oldest daughter, well, I'm the firstborn child, so.

But what was interesting was when my dad died suddenly at the age of 53 of a heart attack over 40 years ago now, so I never knew my dad during my adult life. This was the weekend of my 21st birthday. After my dad suddenly was taken to be with the Lord, the seven kids, we compared notes and we realized we all thought we were his favorite child.

Of course, I really was, but we all thought that. And that's a sweet thing for a dad to be able to accomplish. I'll tell you a huge key to that, because my dad was a very busy man. He had built a successful business. He had a lot of responsibilities and obligations and appointments, and not a lot of just hangout time.

But he had an incredible woman in my mother who supported him, encouraged him, affirmed him, and made it her goal to make that home run smoothly so that when we had time with him, he wasn't having to deal with some of the practical things of running a household. She managed a busy home and affirmed my dad.

So thinking about sitting around those meal tables, my dad had a very peculiar diet. He didn't eat any spices, any sauces. He was Greek, but couldn't eat nothing stronger than salt. So no casseroles. He had meat and potatoes period, with nothing on it, just very bland.

I didn't know until my dad died that my mother loved hot spicy foods. She loved Tabasco sauce. She started using it when my dad died. All those years, he didn't say she couldn't, but she just adapted her life and her lifestyle to my dad's preferences, not because he made her. They really loved each other and adored each other and supported each other.

But my dad could not have probably been as close to all of us kids, given his time limitations, as he was able to be because he had a supportive wife there making it possible for him to fill that dad space and do what only a dad could do.

Michelle Hill: You know, as you're talking, Nancy, and sharing about your dad, and as I'm hearing this incredible legacy, your face just lights up as you are talking about your dad. And that is such a neat thing to see. For a young woman to go, one day I need to be that excited about my dad because I want to honor him.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: And that doesn't come overnight. That comes as we grow and we realize, I think I took a lot of that for granted as a young woman. But as I've gotten older, I know other women who don't have anything close to the experience I had with my dad.

But I'll tell you something that makes one of the reasons my face lights up when I talk about my dad is that my dad's face lit up when he saw us. He wasn't perfect. He had a rebellious, wild upbringing youth. He was far away from the Lord, far away from home, and he brought baggage into his life. He and my mother didn't start their family until some years later.

He was older when they got married, and so he had grown in his faith, but he still had remnants. He had a temper before he knew Jesus, and that didn't all go away overnight. He could get irritated. He could be irritable, especially when he got tired. In fact, the morning that he died, I was home for that weekend for my 21st birthday, and he was a little bit out of sorts.

He was really tired. We didn't know he was probably having a heart attack as this was going on. So it wasn't like he was always this great joyful, amazing Christian, but he was also humble and he would come back and he would make it right. He wasn't trying to make us believe something that he was something more than he was.

In fact, he never got over the wonder of the fact that God would have saved him. It never ceased to amaze him. I actually only saw my dad cry in two types of conversations. One was when he would talk about how the Lord had saved him. He never got over that. It just amazed him that God would have redeemed him.

But he would also cry when he would talk about his dad who was apparently, I never knew his dad, but he was a gentleman, a lovely man, but he probably didn't know the Lord. And my dad, when he would talk about his dad who may not have been a believer or probably wasn't, didn't have a relationship with Christ, that would make my dad really tender.

And that's one of the reasons my dad had such a passion for telling people about Jesus, because he knew his dad didn't have that. He knew that God had rescued him from a very lost, rough background, and he knew that every person without Jesus, churched or not churched, is lost for eternity. And that had a grip on him.

So more important than giving us stuff, which he was very concerned that we not get spoiled. We had friends whose parents made a lot less income than my dad did in his business, but my dad was the one making sure we turned out the lights, making sure my brothers would use those tennis balls until they were worn naked. He was frugal.

He didn't want us to be addicted to stuff, but he did want to use whatever God gave us, including a lovely home, for the purpose of helping others know Jesus. So he taught us values. He taught us what matters is eternity. People's souls matter more than our happiness, and we find our greatest happiness through loving what God loves and loving God.

So he was a man who loved holiness, which, Robert, I know we've talked about how the background you grew up in, holiness was more a kind of dour, negative concept. But I think the reason I grew up loving the concept of holiness was my dad believed there was nothing more joyful than to have a pure heart and to choose the pathway of holiness.

So it wasn't a list of things you can't do. It was a pathway to joy. And again, I don't remember a lot of my dad talking about these things. It was more the air we breathed that we grew up in, that caught in ways that my dad, for example, before he was a Christian, had really had an issue with alcohol.

And he had a pretty addictive personality. He had been a gambler before he got saved. He loved risk. He had kind of been a compulsive sort of person. Some people tend more toward addictiveness or addictive behavior than others. Well, he knew that about himself.

So he made choices for himself after he came to know Jesus, and if I told you what some of those were, you might think, "Well, that's legalistic." It really wasn't. He never touched alcohol again. He just loved God and he didn't want anything that might trip him or his children up in their later years.

And he had seen the ravages that alcohol had taken in his own life and in other people's lives and in families that we knew. So it wasn't "thou shalt not drink." It was just how he felt about it was, why would you? How would this be helpful?

Now people may land other places on that, but I can't thank the Lord enough. We didn't, and this is going to sound like we grew up in another whole era or planet, we didn't go to movies as a family. In that era, a lot of churches or Christians thought that that wasn't a good thing to do.

So that wasn't all that uncommon, but the reasoning for it was so important. We didn't have a TV in our home. This sounds like the more I say, the more people will think, "Wow, this was so negative." It was not negative. It was a joy because he said, "You know, if you have TV, you're sitting there watching that late at night and you're filling your mind with things that don't really matter."

Things that, we had fun, we had family nights, we had game nights, so we would sometimes rent a 16-millimeter film to show for even those who remember what that might be for a family night. We had fun, we laughed, we talked about lots of things. We read books, we went interesting places.

But we did more talking and reading and enjoying of each other than mindless entertainment. And now that I look at peers and friends who've grown up where the culture is what was their upbringing, and they struggle to have a heart for God, they got hooked as children on things that were of this world, values, philosophies.

I'm not saying these things in and of themselves are wrong, but how what a joy to get your children hooked on Christ, on the Word, on relationships, on family. So my dad would have been the first to say we've made a lot of mistakes as parents, a lot of things we wish we'd done differently.

They were doing it before there were books and seminars and workshops and conferences to help you do it as parents. And so he got in God's word. Every day of his Christian life, he read two chapters of the Old Testament, one chapter of the New, five chapters of Psalms and one chapter of Proverbs. For 28 years every day.

Never missed a day from the year he got saved until he went to heaven 28 years later. He didn't miss a day. So the book of Proverbs, for example, was shaping his life every single day. And that wisdom helped him to grow as a man of God, but also helped him to create an environment that was conducive to his children growing up to see God in their dad and to want to know our Father in heaven, of whom the best dad is just a dim reflection.

Michelle Hill: Now, Robert, what about you as you have grown up, been married, had kids, had grandchildren, how has your dad impacted your life as you look back?

Robert Wolgemuth: Well, very much like Nancy. In fact, there's a lot of similarity between Art DeMoss and Sam Wolgemuth. Sober men, men of the Word, strict men, men with lots of personal discipline. They both outkicked their coverage in their marriages. Nancy DeMoss, Nancy's mom, Grace Wolgemuth, my mom, really changed the face of our family because of their spirit and because of their love for our dads.

When my dad would come home, and this is traditional family where my mom stayed home and my dad worked, I can remember so clearly my daddy walking in the back door and my mother stopping whatever she was doing, literally, and throwing her arms around his neck and kissing him on the face, on the lips, in front of all of us without any apprehension at all. Which back in that day was not all that common.

So I believe that my dad believed in himself and what he could do with his life because my mother told him that he could. She was an unbelievable encouragement to him. He didn't have a mother that encouraged him. Way late in his life, in his 80s, I asked him if his mother ever said to him, "I'm proud of you." He took a deep breath and he said no, never.

So he lived his whole life without that coming from his parents, but he got it from my mother, this lady named Grace. To put a different look at my dad in addition to what Nancy has said about her daddy, my dad was an indoor guy, studying, writing, reading.

But he would, I think, force himself. If I could talk to him today, I would say that was kind of out of your comfort zone, and he would say yes. Because he would say, "Let's go outside and play." So my dad played baseball in college, and with a baseball bat and a big league hardball, he could hit it pretty well, pretty consistently.

So he'd throw the ball up to himself and hit fly balls to my brothers and me. I mean, I'm going to say hour after hour. You know, and he'd call out, we'd drop an easy fly and he'd say, "A good fielder would have gotten that one," or we'd dive for something and get grass stains on our knees and he'd say, "Stay on your feet, your mother has to clean your jeans."

But I remember my daddy in that setting. I do remember watching him preach and again, study, stay inside, all that stuff. But I think he kind of forced himself to play outside. And if ever there was a principle that works now, it's so easy to let our kids be entertained with stuff in their hands and not say, "Come on, let's put that down and go outside."

And that was a gift to me because I know the temptation of just staying put, staying inside, staying where the weather is comfortable. And my dad was a real encouragement to me to just put that down and go outside and play.

I mean, there's something magical that happens, I think, when children play outside. It's the air, it's the smell of the grass, it's the beauty of the trees and flowers and whatever. I'm glad that my dad pushed through probably his apprehension about going outside and doing it, going outside or playing catch with me. I mean, by the hour.

And that was a gift to me. I'll never forget how kind the Lord was to me to show me what a daddy who stepped out of his comfort zone and did that for me and for my family, my siblings. So that would be a really fun memory for me.

Michelle Hill: If you had a chance to talk to him today, what would you say?

Robert Wolgemuth: I'd thank him. I'd thank him for his discipline. I'd thank him for every morning he would pray, like Nancy's daddy again, so many similarities. And my dad would pray, but pray out loud. It's an interesting thing about praying out loud. Your mind gets less distracted if you're actually speaking.

So right now I'm talking to you and I'm not thinking about anything else. But if we were sitting here looking at each other and not speaking, all kinds of things would come into my mind, the schedule this afternoon and what I'm going to do this weekend. But speaking changes that. It focuses you.

And so my daddy knew that about himself. So I can hear him downstairs. I couldn't hear the words, but I could hear kind of the timbre of his voice just wafting through the house, my daddy praying. And we knew he was praying for us, praying for the world. My daddy was a world Christian. If you travel the world today, there are many nationals who remember Sam Wolgemuth.

So all that is really good stuff. Throwing a baseball, catching flies, and then listening to my daddy pray. And really realizing the respect that so many people had for him helped me when I was a kid and I didn't think he was that cool. And the older I've gotten, the more I realize what a special man this was.

Michelle Hill: Nancy, if you had a chance to say something to your dad today, what would it be?

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: I'd have to just express how grateful I am for how much of who I am today and how much of how I see God today was shaped by my dad. And how much even the ministry we're doing, Revive Our Hearts, has a huge footprint in Latin America. My dad had a burden for Latin America.

He couldn't speak Spanish, but he went there to Latin America many times and shared his testimony and would preach the gospel through translation. He learned about three words and that was his Spanish vocabulary, but he had a heart.

In fact, he and my mother on their honeymoon took, my dad was in between businesses at that point, they took three months and went and traveled and did ministry in Latin America, in Cuba, Dominican Republic, British West Indies, Haiti. This was his heart.

And so he saw God at work and he would take us on a mission trip to Mexico. And we're talking not big stuff, not impressive stuff, but little village churches with animals running through the street and the aisles in the church, and he's up there sharing the gospel, inviting people to come to know Jesus.

Well, I think now, decades later, of how much of what God is doing through the ministry of *Aviva Nuestros Corazones* began as a vision in my dad's heart that he would be so thrilled. Maybe he does see it, maybe he does know it, but he'd be so thrilled to see that.

He just encouraged me, and I'd thank him for this, to love the Lord with all my heart. He didn't care if we got rich, he didn't care if we had impressive jobs. He just wanted us to know and love and serve Jesus, whatever that looked like, whatever that meant.

And I would thank him for that. He was a successful businessman, but he didn't push us as children at all into the business world, though he knew you could probably make more money there. He said business is a demanding taskmaster and you have to know that's God's call.

But he would have been thrilled to see the choice that God has put in my heart over these years to serve the Lord, to be in vocational ministry. He would not have discouraged the fact that I didn't marry until I was in my 50s. If that's what God wanted, he wouldn't have been like, "When are you getting married?" or I mean, I didn't know him as an adult, so we didn't have these conversations.

But had he been around when Robert came into my life, he would have celebrated that. He just wanted to know that we were seeking and doing the will of God. That's all that mattered to him. So I would thank him for that. I would thank him for a letter I got on my 16th birthday when I was just starting my first year in Bible college.

And you understand he dictated letters with an old-fashioned Lanier dictaphone, so his secretary typed this and he signed it and put it in the mail. And I received it on my 16th birthday telling me how proud he was of me, how thankful he was for me, and affirming what he had seen of my heart for the Lord and for ministry.

And then I don't remember if it was in that letter or another, I just have a few of these, where he quoted that little refrain that he had sitting in a marble piece on his desk: "Only one life, 'twill soon be past. Only what's done for Christ will last."

So I would thank him for giving me that belief deep in the core of my being that what truly matters is Christ and eternity. So really who I am today, everything I'm doing, my mom would have to be part of getting that honor and credit because it was them together. And my mom who's lived now as a widow for over 40 years, who's continued that legacy in the lives of her children and grandchildren. So "thank you" would be big on my heart. Thank you, thank you.

Dana Gresh: That's our host, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, sharing words of honor about her mom and her dad, Arthur DeMoss. She was joined by her late husband, Robert Wolgemuth, and producer Michelle Hill.

Now, whether honoring your father sounds difficult or easy, the scriptures make it clear it's not optional. So think through how you can express your thoughts about your dad in a way that puts him in the best light possible.

Now, you might want to write down your thoughts and formally read them to him if he's still alive, but even if he isn't, you can still honor him for the things he did well. Nancy and Robert did that today as they reflected on the godly legacies that their fathers left behind.

Today's program was made possible in part by members of the Revive Partner Team. Those are friends who help support this ministry through their prayers, through spreading the word about Revive Our Hearts, and through their monthly financial gifts.

There are a lot of perks for being on our Revive Partner Team, not the least of which is that your registration to the upcoming True Woman '26 conference is covered by us. You'll see more details when you visit reviveourhearts.com/partner.

And remember, you can receive Nancy's classic devotional, *Dwell*, when you make a donation of any amount to support Revive Our Hearts. Just visit reviveourhearts.com or call us at 1-800-569-5959, and when you do, be sure to request *Dwell: 30 Days with God in the Psalms*.

"Summer in the Psalms" isn't over yet. Monday, we are diving back in, and Nancy will be teaching on Psalm 90. In the meantime, have a wonderful Father's Day weekend and give that special man in your life a gift of words. Then 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.