Revive Our Hearts

Dannah Gresh: Well, the USA is officially 250 years old, and that's worth celebrating. Even though most people would say this country has a lot of room for improvement, whatever that might look like, it's still moving to hear of the courage of people like young Nathan Hale.

He was captured by British troops and hanged for spying, and he was reported to have said, "I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country." He was 21 years old. And don't get me started on some of the women of the American Revolution, like Molly Pitcher, who took over firing her husband's cannon in battle after he died.

Or Abigail Adams, who requested that her husband John remember the ladies as he worked on setting up the new government. Women like Phillis Wheatley, the African American slave turned poet, or Deborah Sampson, who disguised herself as a man and fought bravely. Our patriotic feelings rise to the surface at times like these, and they should.

I'm Dannah Gresh. You're listening to Revive Our Hearts Weekend. As stirring as these stories are, I want to remind you it's important to remember that as Christians, our ultimate allegiance is to Christ and His kingdom.

While our country counts its birthday by the day the Declaration of Independence was signed, followers of Jesus look to the time when Christ surrendered the rights and privileges He had. He took on a human body, lived a life of submission and obedience to His heavenly Father, and then gave up His life as a substitute for you and for me.

It's a very different kind of identity because not only did our leader surrender Himself completely, He calls us to do the same thing. Listen to His words in Matthew chapter 16: "If anyone wants to follow after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. And whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life because of me will find it. For what will it benefit someone if he gains the whole world yet loses his life? Or what will anyone give in exchange for his life?"

So, here on a weekend when the USA is remembering its Independence Day, we're going to spend our time on the program today thinking about our dependence, our surrender to Christ. Sound good? All right, let's do it. I want to start with Evelyn Christenson. She went home to be with the Lord in 2011, but nine years before that, she had a wonderful conversation with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, and I think you'll appreciate her sweet perspective on surrender. Here's Nancy talking to Evelyn Christenson.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: One of the things I love and admire about you, Evelyn, is your tenderness of heart. In fact, I remember years ago hearing you say in a conference where you were speaking and I was in the audience—I wrote it down and I came across those notes again recently—where you said that hardly a night goes by that the Lord doesn't wake you in the middle of the night and that you weep and pray for the lost. I heard you say that and I couldn't even, I’ll tell you honestly, I could not begin to relate. This is all part of the writing of that book in your life.

Evelyn Christenson: It’s what God has allowed in my life. I mean, God had to allow those hard things, and I believe He even sends some of them. You go through all the Old Testament—God sent the hail, God sent the drought. I mean, God does these things, but He does it for a reason.

The wonderful part about this is now that I'm 80, and as has been true for quite a few years now, I can look back and I can see Romans 8:28: that God is working out everything for my good because I'm called according to His purpose. Now, when I was 23 and God gave me that verse at my second miscarriage, I had to take it on absolute faith. Absolute faith. There was no track record. I didn't know. I just had to say, "All right, Lord, I believe You, and I will take this on faith." And I have lived that verse. My children, my husband will tell you, I live that verse.

But the wonderful part is, Nancy, as we get older, the joy, this is that unshakable faith. You look back and you say, "He did it, He did it, He did it, He did it." I have one of the most precious gifts from God, and it's an unshakable faith. My mother had it. I watched her through a very difficult life. My father was unfaithful; he was everything that he shouldn't have been until he finally found Jesus. She had unshakable faith in God. She never wavered. I have a gift from my mother. This is a heritage that is a very precious thing to me.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: But you didn't start with unshakable faith. You're saying it developed over the years.

Evelyn Christenson: I started with just that faith, because faith is not knowing what's going to come. You trust God; you have faith in God when you can't see. But when you get my age and you look back, there are some things you know. And this is something I know. I know how He keeps His promises because of who He is.

Getting old is one of the greatest gifts God could ever give to anybody. I am of all women most blessed; I’ve said this many times. I don't deserve it. All He’s wanted was my empty self, saying, "Lord, I want Your will." And it hurts. It’s almost more than I could handle sometimes to lose my life for Christ's sake. But that's what it's been through all these years, losing my life for Christ's sake.

But the great thing is, it sounds like it's all loss. It’s not. One Easter I was trying to lose my life for Christ's sake. Chris missed me upstairs, and I was down weeping at the old green chair. He came down and he said, "What's wrong?" And I said, "I'm writing this book and I'm trying to lose my life for Christ's sake."

And he said, "Well, if you ask me, I think you have already done 99% of it." And I said, "If I have, this 1% with which I'm wrestling is one huge 1%." And I was weeping. It was Easter morning. I never made it that morning. Finally, I was going up to Ottawa, Canada, for a weekend of meetings. The night before up there in the hotel, I said, "Lord, I obviously can't handle this whole thing all at once." And I was in this process of emptying, emptying, emptying myself of what was wrong and surrendering.

But you know, the exciting part about God is He doesn't leave you in the emptying process. He lets us get that done. But the most amazing thing happened. There was a sweetness, and I don't know what it was. It was good. It was just the Lord.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: It's the resurrection side of the cross, isn't it?

Evelyn Christenson: The other is the hard side. But the joy on the other side! I mean, I was so filled with some kind of joy and excitement.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: That makes me think of Jesus, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross. The problem is we're trying to get off the cross.

Evelyn Christenson: Yeah, see, and that isn't it at all.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: And Jesus went through the cross and then the resurrection. I wonder if so many times we don't experience that fullness of joy because we're not willing to go through the cross.

Evelyn Christenson: Oh, I think almost always. And that's what it takes. It has taken in my life going through the hard things, but the joy that comes in the morning is absolutely awesome. But it's a morning after a night of weeping. Oh yes, yes. The joy, the sweetness, the warmth, secure with Him. It was the most awesome experience, and it wasn't my last one. There have been other times when I've given up and He always comes back with more of Him when there's less of me.

Dannah Gresh: If you want to gain your life, you have to lose it. That's what Jesus said, and that's what the late Evelyn Christenson experienced. We're talking about surrendering, giving up everything for Jesus here on the holiday weekend when Americans are celebrating autonomy and independence.

Now, there's a big word to describe this idea of giving up our lives for the Lord. It's the word "consecration." Frances Ridley Havergal wrote a famous hymn—you've probably heard it. It goes, "Take my life and let it be consecrated, Lord, to Thee." Here's Nancy explaining this idea of consecration.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Consecration—it means to declare or set apart as holy, sacred, to dedicate solemnly to a service or a goal, to sanctify. It means to dedicate one's life, one's time, one's possessions, whatever, to a specific purpose. And consecration is not just something you fall into or that happens to us by osmosis. It's an intentional, deliberate, continual act of offering up our lives as a sacrifice to the Lord. We want to be set apart for His kingdom purposes.

Now, I think sometimes we have this image that consecration sounds like such an old, fuddy-duddy word, and that this is just for a few really holy people who are specially consecrated to the Lord. You know, people like me who just teach the Bible and live in their little holy conclave or whatever. But consecration is not just for a select few. It's for every believer. It ought to start at the point of our salvation, at which we say, "Lord, I am Yours. You gave Yourself for me; I give myself to You."

And as we consecrate ourselves and our lives and our stuff and our families and everything to the Lord, we're just giving back to Him what He has given us. It all belongs to Him. It's not ours, and we're just acknowledging, "Lord, I'm Yours. It's all Yours." So consecration is both an obligation, because it all belongs to Him—my money, it's all His, so I consecrate it to Him to be used for His purposes—but it's not just an obligation. It's also a great privilege to give back to God what rightly belongs to Him. So in consecration we see love's demand and we see love's delight. It's required of us, but it's a privilege to give ourselves to God.

And I think in this whole thing of consecration, there's both point and process, as is true with other aspects of the Christian life. Here's how Frances Havergal said it. She said, "Full consecration may be, in one sense, the act of a moment, a point in time." That's what happened to her when she read that book "All for Jesus." She came to a fresh point of consecration of her life to the Lord.

She says, "It may be the act of a moment, and in another sense, consecration may be the work of a lifetime, a process, an ongoing daily process." She says, "It must be complete to be real, and yet, if real, it is always incomplete." We're offering up ourselves completely to the Lord, but there's always more to offer up to the Lord. It's incomplete. It's a point of rest and yet a perpetual progression. Point and process.

Well, I want to take the moments we have together today and walk through with you the lines of this great consecration hymn, and do it by means of asking some questions so that we can make personal these lines of this hymn and, more importantly, make personal our own consecration to the Lord. For example, we take the first line: "Take my life and let it be consecrated, Lord, to Thee." Here are a couple questions to think about. Have you made a volitional, unconditional, lifetime surrender of your life to Christ? That's what it means to be a Christian—to fully, wholly belong to Him. Is that true of you? And are you seeking to live out that surrender on a daily basis, consciously consecrating? "Lord, take my life. Let it be consecrated, Lord, to You. It belongs to You. This is the life You've given me; I give it back to You." Is that your heart?

And then the next line she says, "Take my moments and my days; let them flow in endless praise." You know, it's one thing to say, "I give You my life," but then our life is composed of various parts. And so she goes through and details more specifically what we're consecrating or offering up to the Lord, dedicating to Him. And the first thing is my time. Is your time consecrated to the Lord? "Take my moments and my days; let them flow in ceaseless praise, unending praise."

So here's something to think about. Do you live with the conscious realization that all your time belongs to God? All of it. Or have you merely reserved a portion of your time for the spiritual category of your life? "Yeah, I'll give the Lord an hour on Sunday morning. We'll give the Lord three minutes to pray before meals, or maybe family devotions. But this time, that's mine. I need my time." Now, we wouldn't say it that way, but are you consciously giving up to the Lord, dedicating to Him your time, realizing that it all belongs to Him, your moments and your days? Here's another question: Are you purposeful and intentional in your use of time, seeking to invest your days and your moments in ways that will bring glory to God? Do you even think about that? That's part of living a consecrated life—our time being consecrated to Him.

And then she talks about consecrating to God the members of our body. She says, "Take my hands and let them move at the impulse of Thy love." I thought about that phrase while I was recording this, playing the piano, and my prayer was, "Lord, take my hands and let them move at the impulse of Thy love. This is not for me. This is not about me. This is for You. This is because I love You and want to declare my love for You. Take my hands and let them move at the impulse of Thy love. And take my feet and let them be swift and beautiful for Thee," she says.

Have you yielded the members, the parts of your body to God as instruments of righteousness, as Romans 6 says? Your hands, your feet, your eyes, your every part of you used for God and His purposes. Do you use the members of your body to express the love of Christ to others? "Let them move at the impulse of Thy love." Your hands can be used for serving others or for tender touch for your children. Are you using the members of your body to express the love of Christ to others?

And here's another question: Are there any members of your body—eyes, ears, hands, feet, mouth—that are being used for selfish purposes or even to sin against God? Paul says in Romans, "This should not be! You belong to God. If you are in Christ, let your members be presented, dedicated, consecrated to God as a living sacrifice, as instruments of righteousness."

And then she says, "Take my voice and let me sing always, only for my King." Remember, Frances was a talented musician, and she could have gotten a lot of self-acclaim and self-glory, but she said, "No, I'm going to use my voice only to bring glory to my King. Take my lips and let them be filled with messages from Thee."

Dannah Gresh: That's Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth in a message based on the lyrics of a hymn of consecration. You can hear more when you go to reviveourhearts.com/weekend and select today's program. So, surrender—we know we should surrender everything to God, but what exactly does that look like?

Well, here's what it looked like for Bill and Vonette Bright. They're best known for founding the campus ministry Cru. They spoke with Nancy about surrender some years before they passed away. Here's Dr. Bill Bright describing a moment of surrender that happened just after he and Vonette had a pretty big disagreement early in their marriage in 1951.

Bill Bright: She rightly let me know she was unhappy, and she was justified. So I asked her forgiveness. I explained to her why I'd been so insensitive—my mind was on this problem. But on the way home we prayed, and when we got home we got on our knees and said, "Lord, we want our marriage to be a happy marriage. I'm not a good husband in the sense that I am as sensitive as I ought to be."

And that led to a decision where I suggested we write out a contract to be slaves of Jesus. Now, it didn't just happen in a few minutes; it was something that Vonette and I had been married a couple years and by this time we really had fallen in love with Jesus and, of course, were more in love with each other. And it just made a lot of sense. Jesus Himself, God the Creator, the one who died on the cross for us, Philippians 2:7 says came disguised as a slave. Paul refers to himself as a slave of Jesus Christ in Romans 1:1, and Peter and Timothy and others. So it just made a lot of sense.

And frankly, we hadn't even thought it through to that degree at that point. And we wrote out what we felt should be in the contract. Vonette wrote out her thinking as a wife and her plans for the future, and I wrote more about how my life could be maximized for Christ—not that I was more spiritual than she; it was just that was what was on my heart.

Vonette Bright: I don't know if that was true, but I was concerned. I thought you said, "What do we want out of life? How do we want our lives to count for God?" all of these things. So I took a more materialistic point of view because I think women are the nesters; we're the protectors. We're the ones that are thinking of what the family is going to be like and so on. So I did mention that I wanted us to have, be totally committed to Christ, that we'd have the Holy Spirit to direct our lives, but I had about three things that were spiritual and about five or six things that were more materialistic.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: But you were really surrendering all this to the Lord's control.

Vonette Bright: Yes, we did. And freely meant it. But it was with Bill's encouragement that we did this. Contracts were a very natural kind of thing for him. He'd been in business for several years and signed a lot of contracts. But he talked about being a slave of Jesus as the example of the Apostle Paul. So that was kind of radical language to me.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: It's pretty radical language today.

Vonette Bright: But I wanted to be everything God wanted me to be, and I was going to obviously follow this man wherever he went and that I wanted to make the same commitment that he made. And I wanted to be together with him in his goals. And I realized that if I ended up, in fact I pictured myself as being a little old lady—I could see a button-down dress buttoned down the front that had a little gap—wearing tennis shoes. I just thought I might end up just like that. That was the risk I was taking in signing this piece of paper. I remember just that vision. But if that's where Bill was, that's where I wanted to be. But I had a heart for God at the same time. But it was risky, and yet you don't out-give God, and we've never wanted for anything. God's been—I shouldn't say that, we've had some wants that God has adjusted from time to time—but not anything that...

Bill Bright: But when we came back together, we went into separate rooms in our home in the Hollywood Hills. I wrote out mine and she wrote out hers. Then we came together and we agreed what we both wanted to do and signed the contract to be slaves of Jesus. I'd never heard of that being done, but the Scripture is full of it.

Later, only recently, I'm writing a book on "Slaves by Choice," which is a part of our testimony and the biblical reasons for being a slave. And I'm amazed at what I am seeing that I didn't even see then—that every believer has been purchased out of the slavery of sin and brought into the slavery of Christ. And the only reason everybody who professes to be a Christian doesn't identify themselves as slaves is because of disobedience or ignorance, because we're all supposed to be slaves.

But I didn't know that. So it was about 24 hours later, Vonette and I, after we signed the contract, that I was studying for an exam about midnight with a friend. And suddenly, sovereignly, God just enveloped me with His holy presence in an ecstatic, overwhelming, awesome way. And even though my friend was seated beside me studying, he didn't even know what was going on. And I was just so energized, I was intoxicated. I was not even able to continue my study.

And I said to him, "What if we go for a run?" I had to get rid of all this energy that was just consuming me. Well, he never understood to this day, I'm sure; he's a wonderful Christian, later became a marvelous pastor. But it was kind of like Paul on the road to Damascus—he heard the voice and those who were with him heard, but they didn't see what he saw. So that was the beginning of a great adventure that began in 1951, and it never would have happened, in my opinion, had we not first signed the contract. No contract, no vision.

Dannah Gresh: Dr. Bill Bright and his wife Vonette in conversation years ago with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth. Surrender for them meant literally signing a contract with the Lord. Now if you think about it, God has signed a contract with every believer, and the signature is the blood of Jesus.

Do you think of yourself as a slave to Jesus? I mean, that's strong language, but that's how the Apostle Paul described himself. It's food for thought here on a weekend when our country is celebrating freedom and independence. All the audio clips we heard today were from longer series on Revive Our Hearts. You'll find links to them when you go to reviveourhearts.com/weekend. Select today's program; it's called "Surrendering Your Independence."

Surrender and say "Yes, Lord." They're key elements at the True Woman conference, and I'm excited to let you know that you can already register for True Woman '27, which will be held in the fall of 2027 in Indianapolis. For more information, check out reviveourhearts.com. I hope you'll make plans to come.

Next weekend on this program, we'll explore the lives of some women who were used mightily by God. But get this—they didn't think of themselves as anything remarkable. Ah, the joys of being an unremarkable woman in the hands of our remarkable God. I hope you'll be back. Thanks for listening today. I'm Dannah Gresh. 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.