Praying for Revival in Latin America

Leslie Basham: Nancy Leigh DeMoss recently shared a story while visiting the city of SantoDomingo.

Nancy Leigh DeMoss: This is my second time in the Dominican Republic. The first time was fifty-four years ago. Let me explain: I’m only fifty-three years old. My parents got married at the end of 1957. They were young believers in Christ at the time, and they decided they wanted to spend their honeymoon preaching the gospel. So they started in Cuba, and that’s where my mother got pregnant with me the first week of their honeymoon.

And then they spent three months, her first trimester traveling through the Dominican Republic, British West Indies, Haiti. They were sleeping under mosquito netting at night. My dad was preaching services, and my mother was singing, and because I was with them on that trip, my dad used to call me his little gypsy. And little did I know that decades later I would have the chance to come back to the D.R. to share that same gospel of Jesus Christ. Amen.

Leslie Basham: This is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss for Friday, March 23.

If you’ve ever wondered whether God is at work today, you’ll be encouraged by today’s story. Yesterday, Nancy began telling us how God began using Revive Our Hearts resources in the Dominican Republic. We had no strategy in this region, yet God drew hearts to Himself and allowed this ministry to be a part of it.

Nancy explained how Revive Our Hearts began being translated into Spanish two days a week, and she told us how she finally traveled to the Dominican Republic after many requests. Here she is to pick the story back up.

Nancy: Throughout my ten days there in the Dominican Republic and talking with so many different women who were part of this in different ways, it was so encouraging and challenging to hear what I think the apostle Paul experienced with what he called the Macedonian Call: “Come over and help us. Come over and help us. We need these resources. We need this ministry.”

Thinking about the fact that Spanish is the fourth most spoken language in the world, the second most spoken language in the United States, and then, of course, throughout all of Latin America, I just could not ignore this call.

It was so clear to me that the hand of God has been on this group of believers there in the D.R., that they are faithfully seeking the Lord. They are making their lives available. There are numbers of them who are wanting, if they can, to give full time to this ministry. They’re just so eager to serve and to take the resources we have available and teach other women throughout Latin America how they can be women’s ministry leaders in their churches and their countries.

Just think about not having women’s ministries available in local churches. That's why even recently when the True Woman 101: Divine Design curriculum was released (it wasn’t even out yet when I was down in the D.R.) they were saying to me, “Can we translate this into Spanish? Can we use this?”

I said to them, “Have you seen it yet?”

They said, “We’ve looked at the contents, and we know this is what we need.”

I said, “Well, you may want to make sure that it’s culturally contextualized.”

They said, “This is what we want to take into all of Latin America and train women in biblical womanhood because we don’t have teaching like this.”

As I talked with the pastors there, with the couples, the women, those who are really engaged at the heart of this ministry, we heard so many saying, “We want to partner with Aviva Nuestros Corazones, Revive Our Hearts here in Latin America. What can we do?”

There are those who want to give, those who want to support the ministry financially, those who are volunteering to translate the programs into Spanish, which, by the way, is all being done by volunteers at the moment, in a lot of different places.

I shared the need down there with the whole conference. I said, “For $6,000 a year, we could get this editor to be full-time instead of part-time, so we could go to five radio programs a week instead of just two.” And the very next day someone approached one of the leaders and said, “We want to give whatever is needed to get that editor on board full-time.”

So there’s that kind of spirit. They’re not just looking to us to hand them all of these resources. They want to give and partner and serve to help make it possible.

I came back, and I said to our team, “We need to do whatever we can do to lift up their hands, to support them, to encourage them, to make resources available to them so that this message of revival and biblical womanhood, this gospel-centered, biblically-driven message can be made available to our sisters in Spanish-speaking parts of the world.”

They already have a Spanish-language website that they’re promoting throughout Latin America. They’re linking to many of our resources and yet there’s so much more they want to do. Our team is in the process of ongoing dialogue, meeting with the couples who are leading this endeavor, this initiative in the Dominican Republic. So pray for us please as we continue these conversations.

Our goal is—and we’ve shared this with them—is not just for them to take our materials and translate them and use them in Latin America. We’re glad for them to do that. But, as I shared with them, wouldn’t it be wonderful if, in the years to come, God would raise up Latin women, Spanish-speaking women who would take this heart, take this message, and they would become the teachers, the authors, the communicators.

I believe there are some women that God is already targeting for those purposes who, down the road, will be Latin women teaching in their own language, in their own countries, taking these biblical truths and making them relevant and contextualized there within their own cultures.

But we need your prayers. The group we’re working with are such go-getters, and they’re networkers, and they have connections in many Latin American countries. They have so many skills and abilities, but they want the hand of God to be on this ministry.

It gave me a little bit of the feeling that I had when Revive Our Hearts was just being launched in the United States and realizing that God’s hand was on this, that God was up to something, and we wanted to follow His leading. We didn’t want to get ahead of Him. We didn’t want to lag behind Him. I remember those early pioneering days.

That’s what’s going on in the Dominican Republic right now. We want to have wisdom to know how we can best serve them, how we can best facilitate what God has put on their hearts, and then to believe the Lord to take these loaves and fishes—we’re talking about volunteers here and people who have other jobs in many cases—but to take these loaves and fishes that we have to offer and to bless them and multiply them and use them to feed a multitude of women who otherwise perhaps might not have any chance of hearing these truths that we get to hear so freely and so frequently.

Let me share another highlight of the weekend with you. There is a Korean-American woman from New York City whose life has been profoundly touched by the ministry of Revive Our Hearts over the past several years. When we first met her, she was in the midst of a very difficult marriage which, by her own testimony, she had contributed significantly to the breakup of this marriage. But in the course of the whole unfolding of events there, her husband had actually gone to the Dominican Republic on her birthday to get the final paperwork for a divorce.

When this woman heard that we were going to be doing a conference in the Dominican Republic, she said, “I want to go, and I want to invest financially in this ministry because this is a place where I was hurt so deeply by my ex-husband.” So she gave a substantial financial gift, a very sacrificial financial gift, funds she had been saving to be able to support herself after her husband left. She made plans to come to the D.R. for the conference, and she was there throughout the conference praying for these women.

When I spoke on the subject of forgiveness, I told her story. Women began talking about who was she and where was she, and they began asking about her and saying they wanted to know more about her. So toward the end of the conference, I had this sweet woman come up on the stage, introduced her to the women, and asked her if she would pray for these women as the conference came to a close and they were going to be going back to their homes to live out the truths that they had heard that weekend.

I believe God just used this woman’s life message as a powerful object lesson to these women of the power of forgiveness, the power of God’s grace, and how God can bring beauty out of ashes, and how that which the enemy means for evil, God can use to bring about great good.

There are so many personal stories of changed lives that we’re hearing, have been hearing, over these past few years. It’s not just a short fix or a quick flash-in-the-pan type of testimony. These are people whose lives have been deeply impacted over an extended period of time. Our video team, our production team, is working on capturing some of these stories. Some of them are available now on our website, ReviveOurHearts.com. Others will be available at the True Woman conference coming up in September. There’s more about the Dominican Republic story available on video. If you go to our website, you can find that.

We’ll be sharing some of those stories in the days ahead, but I think one that was particularly touching to me was a story I had heard before we got to the D.R., but I hadn’t actually met the people involved. At the close of the conference on Saturday after talking with women for almost two hours who wanted to meet and greet and gets books signed and share with me what God was doing in their lives, I was, as you might imagine, tuckered out by the end of that day.

Then we went to the home of one of the pastors, and they had a really lovely occasion, a cookout, a barbeque, for our team and for the leadership that had put on the event. We were meeting and talking with different people there, and at the end of that evening, I went over to thank the two men who had been grilling the meat that evening to just thank them. They had worked hard and done a great job.

One of the men told me a story, which I had heard, but I hadn’t put a face to the story until that point. He was standing there with his wife next to him, and they were telling the story together. He said,

After the women from our church, my wife included, went to the first True Woman conference, when they came back, God began to work in a really deep way in the hearts of some men in our church. And I was one of those men.

What my wife didn’t know at the time was that three years earlier I had been unfaithful to her. I’d had an affair.

Now, the affair was over by the time of this service, but he had never confessed this to his wife. He had never come clean about it, and as a result, there were still some issues of pride and unbrokenness in his life.

As God began working in the hearts of those women, the men’s hearts became softened and responsive and broken before the Lord. And he was one of those men. He finally came under intense conviction, particularly as he was going through the Seeking Him study that was a part of what God was doing in Santo Domingo there in that church.

As he was going through the study, he said,

I came to the week on grace. It wasn’t the week on clear conscience. It wasn’t the week on holiness. It was the week on God’s grace, and I became overwhelmed with the grace of God and what that meant in my life, and I was broken. I realized that I had to get right with God and right with my wife and right with my church about this unconfessed sin from my past.

And he did. He came clean, and because of the nature of the situation and the nature of responsibilities he’d had in that church as one of the worship leaders, it required some public confession. It was very difficult.

And his wife’s standing there while he’s telling me all this. He said,

But, I did it. I confessed to my wife. And I am a different man today. We have a different marriage. Our marriage is wonderful. God is working in our lives. God’s working in our children.

I talked with his senior pastor afterwards, and he affirmed all this was true. He said, “That man is a totally different man in every respect.”

And so as we were standing by the grill, my intent had been just to thank that man for cooking our dinner that night. He said with the biggest smile,

It is such an honor to prepare this meal for you tonight because of how God has used this ministry in my life, and as a result, our lives, our marriage, our family will never be the same again.

Well, there are so many of these kinds of stories that we could tell, but I think you can catch the sense that God is doing an unusual work among our Spanish-speaking friends there in the Dominican and beyond. And we want to be where God is at work. We want to do everything we can to pray, to encourage, to support, to provide resources, anything we can do to help these dear brothers and sisters spread this revival movement that is taking place in that part of the world.

So pray with us, would you? Ask the Lord to give us wisdom. Ask the Lord to take these seeds that have been sown and to produce in the days ahead a great harvest of righteousness for His glory.

Leslie: And, Nancy, listeners are going to be asking, “How can I help?”

Nancy: Well, this movement in the Spanish-speaking world is in such early stages that we’re just waiting on God. He is the one who has begun this movement, and we’re asking Him, “What do we do next?” So please pray for us.

Leslie: If you share a burden for Latin America and you’re willing to pray, it would encourage us if you’d let us know. Here’s how: Visit ReviveOurHearts.com. Click on today’s program and scroll to the end of today’s transcript. You’ll find the Revival Our Hearts listener blog. There you can tell us how you feel after hearing about what’s going on in the Dominican Republic, and you can encourage us by letting us know that you’ll pray. Again, the listener blog is at ReviveOurHearts.com.

Nancy, I know a lot of our listeners are moved by your stories of how God worked at this conference in the Dominican Republic, speaking to the hearts of women.

Nancy: Let me say, there weren’t just 3,000 women in that place. There was a host of men in that place who were serving in countless ways, many of them praying. They had seen this done at the True Woman conference, and they loved the idea. So they were praying.

There were pastors praying throughout the weekend in a room behind the stage, but men serving in so many different ways, and they were such a source of encouragement. This reminds me of another fun moment that weekend. And, by way of background, if you’ve been to one of the True Woman conferences, you know that we’ve had a little white hanky for the women that says, “Yes, Lord.” And we’ve encouraged the women any time they want to just affirm what God is saying in their hearts to just wave that white hanky as the white flag of surrender.

So these women, seeing that done at the True Woman conference, wanted to have their own white hankies. They had them made. The hankies said, instead of, “Yes, Lord,” it said, “Si, Senõr,” which means, of course, “Yes, Lord.” Throughout the weekend, those women loved those hankies. They were waving them.

And one really fun moment came toward the end of the weekend when I was giving the 30-Day Husband Encouragement Challenge, as I’ve given many times here on Revive Our Hearts. I was challenging those women to take thirty days to encourage their husbands, not to speak negatively of him, but to express appreciation and gratitude. And as I was sharing this, the women were waving their white hankies—they were really getting into this little challenge. But I looked out of the corner of my eye on the right-hand side, and I saw several men who were down doing tech sorts of things.

They were running video and equipment—I’m not sure what all they were doing—but they were technicians. They were waving white flags. I think not all of them had the hankies, so for some of it was just a piece of paper, but they were waving these white flags in the air as husbands, to say, “Yes, this would be a great encouragement to us if our wives would do this 30-day husband encouragement challenge.” I’m sure they know that men can take that challenge as well, but it was fun to see how encouraging it was to them as men to think of women expressing appreciation in that way.

And then another moment that was so special with those white hankies. The message I gave at the close of the conference was on Christ as our bridegroom. It is a message called “Here Comes the Bridegroom.” And I shared again the gospel and talked about how at a wedding when a woman says to her groom, “I do,” she’s saying, “I take you to be my groom, and I receive you, and I give myself to you.” There’s a whole lot that goes with that phrase, “I do.”

Well, in Spanish, the phrase that is used at weddings is “Si, acepto”—“Yes, I accept.” I’d given the gospel throughout the course of the weekend, but I said, “I know God’s been speaking to many of your hearts, and some of you are ready to give your life to Christ. He’s drawing you. He’s bringing you to repentance over your sin and putting faith in your hearts, and you want to receive Christ as your Lord and your Savior right now. And if that’s true of you, I just want you to wave that white hanky in the air and just call out, 'Si, acepto. Si, acepto. I do. I accept.'"

I said to them, “When you go to a wedding, the bride isn’t embarrassed to say, ‘I do.’ This is a celebration, and today is a celebration of many women being born into the kingdom of God.” And what an amazing thing it was to see those white hankies flying all over the room in the air with women calling out, “Si, acepto, yes, Lord, I do. I receive You.” And then to be able to send those women to the apron ladies and to say, “Let these women pray for you and help encourage you as you take this step of surrendering your life to Jesus Christ.”

Only God knows how many women were born into the kingdom throughout the course of the weekend, but I believe we’re going to see many of those women in heaven as a result of what God did in their hearts that weekend.

I know one of the things that many of our friends here in the States were praying about was the whole issue of the translation. Patricia, who was the interpreter for the weekend, had never done this type of interpretation before, side-by-side interpretation. And I had not worked with a side-by-side interpreter for probably twenty-five years myself.

So we were both a little bit nervous and wanting much prayer. But it was a sweet thing to see how, because the message was so deeply implanted in her heart, she was able to be like hand-in-glove with me. I believe the Lord enabled us to be as one voice in communicating His heart to these women. I don’t think it was a distraction at all, but really just a great evidence of God putting sisters’ hearts together and helping us to glorify Him with one accord even though we were from two different countries and speaking two different languages.

What God is doing in the D.R. is the fruit of a lot of prayer. These aren’t just people who are trying to make something happen. In fact, I was told that for years these women had been praying that we would come to the D.R. and bring a conference, a True Woman conference, a Revive Our Hearts conference. In fact, they had asked us, and we had told them, “We just only do a very few conferences a year because of the demands of daily radio, and we just can’t do that.”

Well, they didn’t take no for an answer. Like that persistent widow in Luke chapter 18, they kept knocking, kept knocking at heaven’s door and at our door until the Lord opened the door and made it possible for us to be down there.

And they’re still praying. There are so many things they’re asking the Lord for. They’re not asking for just their church, not just for their city, not just for their country. They’re asking the Lord to give them Latin America for Christ and to bring hundreds of thousands, millions of women into the kingdom as a result.

And, you know what? I believe we have a prayer-hearing, prayer-answering God. After looking into the eyes and hearing the earnestness of the hearts of those women and knowing of our God who loves to draw people to Himself, I just believe in the years ahead we’re going to see much, much fruit as a result of those prayers.

I’m excited that many of those women will be coming to the True Woman conference in September. In fact, we’ll be sharing more by way of video about some of the stories of what God is doing there. I hope you’re planning to be at the True Woman conference in September, and if you are, I know that you’ll be excited to get to go and introduce yourself to some of those precious women and thank them for their faith, for their earnestness, and let them know that you’re praying for what God is doing in that part of the world.

Leslie: Thanks, Nancy.

The True Woman '12 conference is coming to Indianapolis September 20-22. If women from the Dominican Republic find it possible to cross international borders to travel to Indianapolis, you can get there from wherever you are.

The theme of this True Woman event is “Seeking Him Together for Spiritual Awakening.” If you feel dry, if you sense that God could be doing more in your life, if you want to connect with Him in fresh ways, this conference is for you.

Nancy will be speaking along with Joni Eareckson Tada, Priscilla Shirer, Janet Parshall, Mary Kassian, and a whole host of workshop leaders. Dannah Gresh and Erin Davis will be speaking to younger women. Keith and Kristyn Getty will lead us in worship.

For all the details, visit ReviveOurHearts.com. Early registration ends May 1 so make your plans right away and join us for True Woman '12 in Indianapolis. Again, visit ReviveOurHearts.com for all the information.

Well, do you believe that God is all-wise? On Monday, Nancy will explore the depths of the wisdom of God. When you think how wise He is, it will affect your daily life in some significant ways. Please be back for Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss is an outreach of Life Action Ministries.

*Offers available only during the broadcast of the podcast season.