Crying Out with Clean Hands

Dannah Gresh: There’s a verse in Jeremiah (9:17) that tells readers to call for the professional mourners. Here’s Blair Linne doing the same thing.

Blair Linne: Where are the women!? Call for the wailing women to come and cry out! Where are you?! It is time to pray! It is time to weep!!

Dannah: We’re going to cry out today on the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth. She’s the author of Brokenness: The Heart God Revives. It’s April 14, 2023, and I’m Dannah Gresh.

This week and, well, really the rest of this month, we’re focusing on the topic of prayer—urgent prayer, fervent prayer, prayer that grabs hold of the throne of God in absolute desperation! And I want to mention, if you have an urgent request that you’d like to have our prayer team lift up to the Lord, go to ReviveOurHearts.com/prayer. You can submit your request there.

This week Nancy has been reminding us: desperate times call for desperate prayers! At our True Woman ’22 conference last fall we spent a whole evening pouring our hearts out in desperation, in desperate prayer to God on behalf of ourselves as individuals, our families, our communities, our nation, and our world. We were asking God to move in revival!

Today we’re going to hear some highlights from that time back in September. Here’s the host of Revive Our Hearts, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, to start us off. 

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: We come to You tonight, Lord, to cry out! We’re gathered here in Indianapolis—thousands of us—others gathered around the world (some in the middle of the night) to cry out to You, because we have nowhere else to turn!

There is no government that can help us. There is no politician that can help us. There is no money that can help us. There are no new laws that can help us. There is no new Congress that can help us. There is no new President that can help us. There is no wisdom of our own that can help us. 

Our friends who love us cannot help us at the deepest points of need and distress that we face in our lives and in our world tonight. So we come to You because we are weak, but You are strong. We come to you because we are sinful, but You are holy! We come to you because we do not know what to do! But our hope is in You! 

So, O Lord, as we your women (and a few men joining with us and helping to lead us) cry out to You, thank You that You are listening as we humble ourselves. You have said that You will draw near, You will answer, and You will do far and above anything that we could imagine. So listen O Lord as we, your daughters, cry out to You tonight! We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.

Amen. Please be seated. Thank you for joining us for this very special time. We knew early on, when we planned this True Woman conference that we needed to set aside some time to just pray, to seek the Lord.

Mothers know how to listen to the cry of their child, and mothers know how to pray when their child is in trouble. And all around us our world is in deep distress, greater in some ways than what we have seen in our lifetime. 

And our burden is that God would raise up thousands and thousands of praying women all around the world to storm the courts of heaven, come in the name of Jesus and cry out to God to do what only He can do!

So tonight, we’re going to be reading Scripture. We’re going to be singing together. We’re going to be praying prayers together, and we’re going to be believing that God is hearing and answering. 

And Lord, come and visit with us, hear the cries of Your children as we cry out now to our amazing Father in heaven! 

I think of the hymn writer, John Newton, who said: 

Thou art coming to a King,
Large petitions with thee bring,
For His grace and power are such
None can ever ask too much. 

Dannah: Our evening was punctuated with songs of praise, responsive readings from Scripture. Rather than introducing each piece here, we’re going to just let it flow from segment to segment. My invitation to you is that you would use this time to pray and to worship the Lord. 

And if you’re curious about whose voice you’re hearing, just check out the transcript of this program at ReviveOurHearts.com. We’ve included the names there. I’ll explain that the livestream that night was hosted by Erin Davis and Betsy Gomez. You’ll hear Erin lead us in prayer in a moment.

Portia Collins: Before we cry out to the Lord tonight about our needs, we want to bring our praise and worship before Him. So we are going to begin with a psalm of praise. . .

“Sing a new song to the Lord; let the whole earth sing to the Lord. Sing to the Lord, bless his name; proclaim his salvation from day to day. Declare his glory among the nations, his wondrous works among all peoples.” 

Kathryn Butler: “For the Lord is great and is highly praised; he is feared above all gods. For all the gods of the peoples are worthless idols, but the Lord made the heavens. Splendor and majesty are before him; strength and beauty are in his sanctuary.” 

Asheritah Ciuciu: “Worship the Lord in the splendor of his holiness; let the whole earth tremble before him. Say among the nations, ‘The Lord reigns . . .’”

Melissa Kruger: Let the heavens be glad and the earth rejoice . . . Let the fields and everything in them celebrate. Then all the trees of the forest will shout for joy before the Lord, for he is coming . . . for he is coming to judge the earth.” 

“He will judge the world with righteousness and the peoples with his faithfulness.” (Psalm 96:1–13 CSB)

Erin Davis: Jesus, You’re King, and what a King You are! You are on a throne surrounded by strange creatures on a sea of glass, Lord. Those creatures are declaring Your holiness. You’re a Warrior King; the day is coming when you will ride in and rescue us. On Your robe and on Your thigh you have this Name written: King of Kings and Lord of Lords (see Rev. 19:16).

You have a sword for a tongue (see Rev. 1:16), Lord, that You might strike down the nations. We know no leader like You. We’ve seen no leader like You. And we have been failed by every leader other than You, God. But we give You glory!

God, as this prayer time started, I’ve had a sense of Your glory, of Your presence! You want us to reach for You. You want us to dwell with You. You want us to love You. And so we just celebrate who You are as we continue to pray. We love You!

Dr. Karen Ellis: We’re going to invite you to remain standing, as you’re able. Before we can bring our petitions to Him, we need to have clean hands and pure hearts. In Psalm 51, David humbly confesses his sin to God. So, we invite you to make this your prayer tonight:

“Be gracious to me, God, according to your faithful love; according to your abundant compassion, blot out my rebellion. Completely wash away my guilt and cleanse me from my sin.”

Amanda Kassian: “For I am conscious of my rebellion, and my sin is always before me.” 

Jani Ortlund: “Against you—you alone—I have sinned and done this evil in your sight.” 

Laura Smalts: “So you are right when you pass sentence; you are blameless when you judge. Indeed, I was guilty when I was born; I was sinful when my mother conceived me.” 

Karen: “Surely you desire integrity in the inner self, and you teach me wisdom deep within.” (Psalm 51:1–6)

Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against You. (Make this your prayer to God right now.) 

Jani: We confess that we have sinned against You in our thoughts. (Make this your prayer to God now.)

Laura: We confess that we have sinned against You with our words. 

Amanda: We confess that we have sinned against you by our deeds, by things we have done. 

Jani: We confess that we have sinned against You by things we have left undone.

Laura: We confess that we have not loved you with our whole heart! 

Amanda: We confess that we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. 

Jani: We are truly sorry for the ways we have sinned against You, and we humbly repent. 

Karen: For the sake of Your Son, Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and forgive us. 

And now let us pray with the psalmist 

“Purify me . . . and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow. Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones you have crushed rejoice. Turn your face away from my sins and blot out all my guilt.”

Laura: “God, create a clean heart for me and renew a steadfast spirit within me. . . .” 

Amanda: “Restore the joy of your salvation to me, and sustain me by giving me a willing spirit. Then I will teach the rebellious your ways, and sinners will return to you. Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise.” 

Jani: “You do not want a sacrifice, or I would give it; you are not pleased with a burnt offering. The sacrifice pleasing to God is a broken spirit. You will not despise a broken and humbled heart, God.” (Psalm 51:7–17)

This is the Word of the Lord!

Blair Linne: 

Where are the wailing women?
Call for the wailing women to come and cry out
Since our nation lay in a casket
Tell them to come and mourn over her

America is a mother without a pulse
She lay in a casket she built with her bare hands
Stars and stripes draped over her shoulders
Cosmetics she applies
We thought that would mean the last nail in the coffin
But she had to stop to take a selfie
Though lifeless, she live streams her funeral
To haunt us every night
Lures us with her hashtags in our American dreams 

So tell me, where are the praying women
Call for the wailing women to come and cry out
Women, who love Jesus more than their temptation toward indifference
Realize a retweet does not equate to spiritual action.
Refuse to muzzle their mouth with fear or doubt
Will not sit back and watch a deceased world
Hop on a rollercoaster connected to a hell-bound
Track to trap

Since hell has no exits and heaven no back entrances.
Women who fight against Satan’s deceptive theme-parked in America’s heart
Who sees depravity beyond the Disney
Knows one day material will dissolve
When light meets water
Billowing beneath His feet
Jesus will test our motives against fire
Every mask will fall to the ground like a June fruit drop
The make-up will peel off our faces like a nicked scab
He will expose us beyond our shaded flesh.

So, where are the women?
The wailing women who will not be ashamed at His coming?
Have oil in their lamp
Contentment in their bones
Courage in their blood
Conviction in the back of their throat
Canon between their teeth
Ready to cut and cure

Who will cry out in faith?
Demand America come out of her tomb
Who will intercede?
Believe. God can transform us . . . our nation . . .
We live in a world that tries to convince us
A baby is not a baby because it’s in the womb

But the secrets America houses in her belly turned morgue
In an attempt to deny Imago Dei
Will come back to haunt her on Judgment Day
When God demands an account for the treatment of the helpless
And America argues that the 63 million abortions since '73
In the name of “women's freedom”
No longer requires the sixth commandment to stand

Who will cry out and stand
For the murders of those who can no longer stand
Captured on smart phone cameras?
Stand for the melanin and blood mixing in our streets
Who will do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God?
Rather than stand in the way of sinners 

America is a double-minded woman
They say-don’t call her woman
Bind her barely developed breasts, they say
They say, give her an identity based upon her feelings, they say
Sign her up for surgery, they say
He say, she say,
But what does God say!?
 

Where are the women who refuse to base their life on their feelings
Women rooted in blood
Standing on a Rock more firm than the planet they think holds us suspended in space

Who will cry out?
Who will labor over our nations leadership
Rather than take these candidates to twitter
Take these candidates to prayer!
Look more to the church house than the white house

Where are they?
The prayers for our witness
Women who will cry out and lay prostrate for the church?
Cry out over the need for true doctrine in our pulpits
Who will be burdened for God being rightly proclaimed and the gospel preserved?
Stand on the inspiration of our Holy Book
When people laugh and call it fiction
Women who weep over the irony of sinners who laugh at crucifixion

Women, who cry out because our Savior did
Who pray and still away because our Savior did
Praying for a heaven, the sin of our earth has hid

Where are the women
Call for the wailing women to come and cry out
Women, where are you? Stop whatever you are doing
It is time to pray!
It is time to weep and cry out to The Way

Dannah: Let it not be asked today, “Where are the wailing women?” We’re here, we’re crying out! And I know we have some men listening and praying with us today, too. That’s great. We can be a company of wailing men and women, crying out to the Lord on behalf of all our families, our churches, our communities and even our country.

We’ve been listening to a portion of our Cry Out! evening of prayer and worship at last fall’s True Woman ’22conference in Indianapolis. That Spoken Word piece we just heard is by Blair Linne, and Nancy will be back to close our time in just a moment.

But I want to ask, did you notice a pattern today? Someone read from the Bible, and then the words of Scripture helped shape the prayers that followed. Using God’s Word as a guide is just a beautiful way to pray; it’s a helpful way to pray.

And the Revive Our Hearts team put together a book of different Scripture passages to help you form your own prayers. It’s titled Finding the Words to Pray, and this month as a thank you for your donation of any amount, we’ll send you this book.

Revive Our Hearts is a listener supported program, and that means we can’t continue bringing it to you without your help. God is at work in some amazing ways all around the world through the ministry of Revive Our Hearts. Again, it’s all thanks to the giving of people just like you.

Be sure to ask about the book on prayer when you contact us with your gift. To give, simply visit ReviveOurHearts.com, or call us at 1-800-569-5959. If you have a prayer request you’d like the Revive Our Hearts prayer team to bring before the Lord, let us know at ReviveOurHearts.com/prayer.

Now let me ask, did you know that prayer is an important weapon? It is, it truly is! Nancy will take us to Ephesians chapter 6 next week to talk about how we can have spiritual strength for an evil day. I hope you’ll join us again on Monday.

Now here’s Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth once again from that Cry Out! evening at True Woman ’22.

Nancy: Now, let’s take a few moments to lift up to the Lord that great prayer for revival that we find in Isaiah 64. 

“Oh that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains might quake at your presence . . . to make your name known to your adversaries, and that the nations might tremble at your presence!”

“When you did awesome things that we did not look for, you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence.” 

Leslie Bennett: “From of old no one has heard or perceived by the ear, no eye has seen a God besides you, who acts for those who wait for him. You meet him who joyfully works righteousness, those who remember you in your ways. 

Janet Mylin: “Behold . . . we have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. 

Mary Kassian: There is no one who calls upon your name, who rouses himself to take hold of you; for you have hidden your face from us, and have made us melt in the hand of our iniquities.”

“But now, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand.” (vv. 1–8)

Leslie: “Restore us, O Lord God of hosts. Let Your face shine, that we may be saved!” (Psalm 80:19)

“Will you not revive us again, [so] that your people may rejoice in you?” (Psalm 85:6)

Nancy: And could we just say that last couplet one more time, from Psalm 85, verse 6, “Will you not revive us again, [so] that your people may rejoice in you?”

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth wants you to experience greater freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

All Scripture is taken from the CSB.

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