Free from Lies in Your Past

Dannah Gresh: Are you ever tempted to believe the lie: God doesn’t love me? Here’s Robert Wolgemuth.

Robert Wolgemuth: The truth is, God does love me. He went to the cross for me. In spite of the fact that I’m a sinner, I’ve been saved by His grace. Can you imagine? It is so powerful that we should never walk away from the awe that God knows me and loves me. He welcomes me.

Dannah: This is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, wife of Robert Wolgemuth, for Friday, August 19, 2022. I'm Dannah Gresh.

Dannah: Nancy, we are on the third day of some riveting broadcasts on the book Lies Men Believe.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Yes. I’ve been thinking about this subject for a long time, back in 2001 when I wrote Lies Women Believe.

And then you came along in 2006, and you had such a burden for teenage girls because the moms were telling us, “I wish I had learned about these truths and these lies before I fell into them. My life would have been so different.” So you helped me write . . .

Dannah: They felt like those lies were maybe planted or at least already firmly rooting in their teen years.

Nancy: Yes.

Dannah: They were begging us, “Help us help our daughters.”

Nancy: So we wrote Lies Young Women Believe. And you’ve been active in ministering to teens for so many years and brought so much wisdom and insight to that.

And, actually, you’ve realized, “We’ve got to press this down even younger into the girls.”

Dannah: Lies Girls Believe is for seven–twelve year-old girls, and there is a companion guide, A Mom’s Guide to Lies Girls Believe both of those resources came out in 2019.

Nancy: This is a powerful way of moms helping their daughters walk through planting those seeds of truth in their lives so that they don’t grow up into these horrific roots of lies but can grow up in the truth.

We’re adding to that family now—Lies Men Believe. The Lord brought Robert into my life. Honey, welcome to the broadcast.

Robert: To do more than just write a book.

Nancy: That’s right. (laughter)

But for us to walk together and to grow together and to make mistakes together. Really, for both of us, I think so much of what we share . . . You’ve written more books than I have—over twenty. I think both of us would say that a lot of what we write is just the overflow of our own failures.

Robert: No doubt.

Nancy: Inadequacies, weaknesses, need, crying out to the Lord and saying, “Help in this area.” So He writes it in us.

Robert: Yes.

Nancy: And then, through us.

So I’m so thankful that you’ve had the passion and the stick-to-itiveness to persevere in what you and I know, and Dannah, you and your husband Bob, who’s with us in the studio . . .

Bob Gresh: It’s so fun to be here.

Nancy: We all know this is hard, hard work writing a book.

Dannah: Yes.

Nancy: But you persevered. And, Bob, you’re sitting there with a copy of the book, and I know you just read it recently. What are some of the lies addressed in Lies Men Believe that just caught your attention as you were reading through it?

Bob: Well, there are forty in here. The ones I picked out are:

• “I can hide my secret sins since it hurts only me.”
• “What my wife doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”
• “I have the right to be angry when things don’t go my way.”
• “I’m measured by how I compare with other men.”
• “The world is rigged against me,” is one that’s interesting.
• And, “I can’t help how I react to certain people or circumstances.”

But there are, literally, forty of them in here that’ll hit men right in the gut.

Dannah: They’ll hit men in the gut, and they will give women empathy and understanding.

Nancy: And insight.

Dannah: Yes, and insight, which is what we’ve been gaining in these last few days.

If you’ve missed the first two days of the broadcast, we encourage you to go to ReviveOurHearts.com and listen in because I feel like I know and understand my husband better from those two days of broadcast.

But I have to tell you something, honestly, Nancy: your husband Robert sounded pretty perfect on most of those little moments, but I happen to know he’s not entirely perfect.

Robert: Should I leave the room while you talk? (laughter)

Nancy: We’re both very much in process. And we want you here.

Dannah: No. Robert, you are maybe the closest thing I know to a perfect man, but . . .

Robert: It’s not true.

Nancy: I do know of an incident that took place when we were dating. Do you think we should have him tell this?

Dannah: I think we should absolutely. Like, they need to know he’s human.

Nancy: I know, Bob, you’ve heard this, and you still can’t stop laughing.

Bob: I laugh about it all the time.

Dannah: You were on a date. Right?

Robert: Actually, coming home, late at night from dinner with friends in Chicago.

Dannah: Okay. And so you’re still getting to know this Robert. Right?

Nancy: Very much.

Robert: Yes. So we’re late at night, driving to Michigan after dinner with good friends. I was living in Orlando, Florida, at the time. At most of the Florida turnpikes, toll ways, the reader is overhead, and you can just scoot through. You don’t even have to slow down.

Nancy: But you weren’t in Orlando.

Robert: (Sigh) I know. It was late at night. I didn’t realize that.

Nancy: And you’re not a night person.

Robert: I’m not a night person. There were three places you could go through, and there were green lights above each of these lanes, and I’m thinking, This is like Florida, you can just scoot through these guys. Right?

Nancy: And how fast were we going, Honey?

Robert: Oh, speed limit perhaps, maybe. Okay, so I didn’t even begin to slow down.

Dannah: Minimum 55.

Robert: Let’s say. Right. At least 55 miles an hour.

Nancy: And this all happened so fast, because I’m in the passenger seat, and I’m seeing this arm that’s down. The only kind of tolls I know about is you pull up, you stop, you wait for the arm to go up, and then you proceed. But in this split second, I realize, “Robert is not slowing down.”

Robert: At all..So, yes. I hit that gate doing 60 or 65, and what I know is that arm was exploding on my windshield.

Dannah: Oh.

Robert: It didn’t break the windshield, but it was splinters.

Nancy: I didn’t even have time to say, “Honey!” or “Stop!” It just happened so fast.

Robert: I don’t think you were calling me Honey back then.

Nancy: I don’t think I was.

Robert: “Hey, Man, what did you just do?”

Nancy: I had this fleeting thought—it was very brief—but, “This man is crazy!”

Robert: He’s crazy! That’s right. (laughter)

So, anyway, that’s the truth. That’s a true story. That really happened. No harm. No foul.

Dannah: The author of Lies Men Believe, my friends. (laughter)

Robert: That’s right. Exactly.

Dannah: And turning our attention to Lies Men Believe . . .

Robert: . . . and the toll gate that sets you free.

Dannah: The book really is poignant, Robert. There are so many stories and insights that, as a wife, opened my heart to understanding for my husband.

And one of them is a story where you help us to understand that so many times the lies our husbands, our coworkers, maybe even our pastors, are living under were deposited into them by trusted authorities when they were little boys.

Robert: Yes. Because you and Bob are good friends of ours, we know that you’ve got something on your night stand. You’ve told us this. Start there.

Dannah: Well, about a year or so ago as God was growing empathy in me for my own husband, in just being patient and giving him grace . . . The same grace that Jesus has given me, I sometimes have a really hard time extending to my husband.

So God really put it on my heart to take a picture I’d seen of him. He was just a little guy—maybe four years old—and sometimes, as children, we are great observers of life, but not great interpreters about the experiences that we’ve had. And it just helps me to extend empathy and grace to him—the same grace that I receive from Jesus, sometimes I have a hard time giving that to my husband. But when I remember that he was just a little guy one day, that helps me a lot.

Bob tells a story quite often about a time when someone he knew and trusted as a teenager really spoke a lie into his life that really impacted our marriage for a lot of years. Honey, you could tell that story so they could understand why that picture means so much to me.

Bob: Well, I had sort of a spiritual father in my life that was very influential in me. I was a tennis player—I still play tennis—but I was a good tennis player in high school. I was number two on the team. I played in college. I was home playing this guy, and I was beating him really badly, like, in the last set, five to two or something.

He came back and beat me seven to five. And it was kind of a bummer, but when I went up to the net to shake his hand, he shook my hand and said, “I knew I’d beat you because you don’t have the killer instinct, and Greshes never finish.”

Robert: Wow.

Bob: I remember like it was yesterday, and it kind of put a label on me—not just of that I don’t finish, but that I’m weak, and I’m lazy. He didn’t mean to do that, but all of a sudden, being number two on the tennis team wasn’t something I was proud of. It was just that I wasn’t good enough to be number one, so I didn’t finish.

Robert: Oh.

Bob: In my life, one of my struggles that I have to pray through all the time, is rejecting that label of being lazy and not being a finisher. Because my strengths are that I am a hard worker and that I’m an entrepreneur, so I start things and then let other people who are better managers take it from there and finish.

Dannah: So, as a wife, for me to hear that story and to look at that picture of “Little Bob,” it gives me empathy. I encourage women to create a space so that they can hear, “What were the things that were spoken into your heart that created some of the hurt that may be still impacting you today and, therefore, us?”

I think coming to this story in the book that you tell, just reopened that and reminded me how important it is.

Robert: There are actually different metaphors that you can use, like tapes that are playing. As an adult, you’re hearing this tape over and over again, “Greshes don’t finish.” And you fight that. That man may have meant no harm, but that was absorbed by a young man who respected this older man, and he believed it. It was a lie, but he believed it.

It’s—if I can use the word—haunted you all your life.

Bob: It’s like the background music.

Robert: Exactly. “Is that really true?”

When I was a young man, Bill Glass, number 80, Cleveland Browns, was a committed believer. Loved Jesus. I heard him speak as a young man. When he left the NFL, he started a prison ministry.

Here’s what Bill Glass did every time he stood in front of a large group of inmates. He would ask this question, “All right, men. How many of you grew up with a dad who told you, ‘Someday you’re going to wind up in a place like this’?”

And when Bill Glass tells that story, he says, “All the hands go up.”

Nancy: Wow.

Robert: So there’s that four-year old boy, or sixteen-year old boy, and a person he knew, respected perhaps, certainly an adult, a grownup—and grownups, when you’re a little kid always speak the truth. Right? That’s just the way it is. What they say to you impacts you the rest of your life. And so, it could be, if you’re a man, and you’re listening to this, you’re dealing with something—a lie—that somebody told you when you were a little boy.

Years ago, a man worked for me. His first-grade teacher said to him, “You’re never going to amount to anything.” And that haunted him the rest of his life. He did battle with that.

So how important is the cross? How important is Jesus saying to us, “You’re worthy of My death. You’re worthy. I came to earth to redeem you and to give you a new heart, to lay out a plan for you that you can’t even imagine, a wonderful thing that I have for you.” What does that do?

The lie is: “You’re never going to amount to anything.”

The lie is: “You’re going to wind up in a place like this.”

The truth is: “God loves me. He went to the cross for me. In spite of the fact that I’m a sinner, I have been saved by His grace. Can you imagine? We hear that so much—we listen to the Christian radio or we go to church. We hear that, and it’s old hat. “Yes, yes. I know that.”

It is so powerful that we should never walk away from the awe that God knows me and loves me. He welcomes me.

Nancy: This is such a huge thing. It’s not just for men. It’s for women as well. These lies that are planted in our hearts when we’re little, from any number of sources . . .

We sat at lunch today, the four of us, with a friend and listened to a precious testimony of someone who had a life-altering failure, falling into sin, and lost his job, and has been now restored and redeemed. He walked through a process and is in a really good place. But just as he reflected on what led up to that, he talked about how, as a child, there were lies that had been planted in his thinking.

Robert: Yes, and he used that word.

Nancy: “You’re worthless. You’re not worth anything.” You’re not, at the moment, thinking, Is this the truth or is this a lie? You’re just taking it in. You’re just absorbing it.

And every one of us has things that we have believed that others have told us or we’ve picked up around us in our circumstances—things we’ve told ourselves and believed and then acted on and it became our identity, that area of deception.

What we’re talking about in Lies Women Believe, Lies Young Women Believe, Lies Girls Believe, and now Lies Men Believe, is identifying the wrong identities, the deception, the things that aren’t true that have created havoc in various areas of our lives, put us in bondage, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. We’re not free.

We’re going back and reframing who we are and what’s true. We’re going back to God’s Word and rejecting the lies and replacing them with truth.

But it was interesting to hear this man say, “It didn’t happen overnight.” And that’s why reading a book like one of these in the Lies family can be really liberating. But there’s a process, a hard-work process.

Bob: Yes. One of the things that you realize when you read through the book, you don’t know that you’re following these lies. Or you don’t always know the lies you believe.

Robert: That’s right.

Nancy: That’s the nature of deception. It deceives. Right?

Bob: Yes. I study this a lot because it’s one of the things we teach most in our ministry. Many times the lies are a counterfeit of the truth about us.

Nancy: It’s close, but not true.

Bob: Right. So, in other words, I am a hard worker. I’m a good starter. But the lie of the enemy was just the opposite. So many times I can identify a lie in a person’s life by thinking the opposite. Sometimes the smartest person in the room will say that they’re dumb.

I would encourage husbands and wives to ask each other: Think through what happened to them that affected their life, the background music.

Robert: Wow. Remember the story of Gulliver? Here he is on this island with these Lilliputians that he could snuff each one of them out. But together, what did they do? They throw these lines over him. So . . . one line, easily broken. Two, three, easily broken. But they cover him with these lines—these lies.

John 8 is the answer. The only way to get free is Jesus. “If the Son sets you free, then you’re free indeed” (v. 32).

So we can talk about various solutions to all of this, but really, it’s Jesus. It’s our relationship to Him and the cross that sets us free. We can talk about all different kinds of lies and how we’ve kind of maneuvered around them, but it’s really very easy to summarize all of this: Jesus said in John 8, “If the Son sets you free, then—you’re really free—you’re free indeed.”

We can talk about how we got here—our second-grade teacher, our kindergarten teacher, a tennis player when you’re eighteen years old, or whatever it is. That’s all true. That really happened. We were impacted as a kid. So the question is, What are you going to do with that?

Dannah: Yes. Amen.

Robert: And the answer is: Jesus, who sets us free.

Nancy: But I also think that’s a process, too, in the same way it was a process to get to the bondage. This where Paul talks about “renewing your mind” in Romans chapter 12.

Because we’ve listened to that background music for so long, we’ve come to believe it’s true.

Robert: That’s true.

Bob: It’s “casting down imaginations.”

Nancy: It’s “casting down imaginations, every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of Christ.” 2 Corinthians 10.

And layer by layer, line upon line, renewing our minds, counseling our hearts according to the truth.

Dannah and I have a really sweet friend who’s walking through some very deep and difficult waters related to childhood trauma and abuse and some horrific things that kind of wrote the narrative of her life.

She knows Christ. She knows the truth. She’s a precious Christian woman. But so many of those lies have still kept her in bondage.

We’ve walked with her over the last few years as, little by little, those lies are exposed. They’re unraveled. They’re replaced by the truth. But it doesn’t happen overnight—for any of us.

Robert: That’s so true.

Dannah: Robert used the metaphor of a tape playing in your head.

Nancy: For those who remember tapes. (laughter)

Dannah: Yes, for those who remember. I think that it’s important to note that we have dwelled on those lies very frequently.

We have thought about that moment at the tennis net. We have thought about our fathers saying, “You’re going to end up this way,” over and over and over again.

And the way that we replace that lie with truth is taking the Word of God . . .

Nancy: . . . and dwelling on it.

Dannah: Dwelling on it, and changing the tape that’s playing in our head.

Robert: That’s right.

Dannah: For me, that’s been with the lies I have believed, a battle.

When I first began teaching, I had such fear overcome me that I would be almost in a fetal position. Bob could tell you he’d have to comfort me and hold me and say, “No, your testimony is good. Your story is good. It’s redeemed. It’s by God’s grace you have been healed.” But I didn’t believe it.

So I began to quote, “God does not give me a spirit of fear, but of power and love and a sound mind” (2 Tim. 1:7).

I have worn that verse out in my head. If you could see it in my head, it would be tattered and torn fighting the battle to replace the tape that plays in my mind that I should be afraid of my story.

Bob: The verse I go to is Ephesians 2:10, “For we are His workmanship created in Christ Jesus.” It’s easy for me to believe judgmental things, when I read the Bible, about myself. It’s easy for me to read negative things about myself.

But we talk about the Greek word for workmanship, which the root word for poem, and I mean to keep that in my mind because that’s what God says I am.

Nancy: It has the meaning there of masterpiece.

Dannah: The highest work of art.

So, Nancy, really, your heart for Lies Women Believe, and now Lies Men Believe, is that men and women would be equipped, not only to identify the lies . . .

Nancy: But to replace those lies with the truth.

That’s why I love, Robert, for every lie you talk about in Lies Men Believe, you get to the truth. What is the truth that sets us free?

And our hope—those of us sitting around this table—and what God’s doing in our own hearts is that He’s replacing lies with truth. And as those lies have played as background music for years and years, now we want the new background music, the truth of God’s Word, the sweet, beautiful, liberating, life-giving truth of God’s Word to be what we dwell on and meditate on and fill our minds and hearts with.

And my hope is that many women who are listening to this program will read Lies Women Believe, and perhaps Lies Men Believe to better understand the men in their lives, but also that God would use this book in the hearts of thousands and thousands of men so that men and women are talking together. 

Dannah: So here’s the deal. You can receive Lies Men Believe for a donation of any amount. It’s our way of thanking you for your support of Revive Our Hearts. Also, we’ve been talking about the whole family of Lies books, and this month, for a donation of $70 or more, we’ll say "thank you" by sending you the whole set. Just let us know which book or books you’re interested in when you contact us with your donation. To do that, visit ReviveOurHearts.com, or call us at 1-800-569-5959. 

Nancy: And, Honey, I’m just so thankful that you’ve written this. I’m believing that God is going to use it to set a lot of men free.

Robert: Yes.

Nancy: I know that you appreciate it when I recommend books to you that I think will be a blessing and encouragement, so if you think your husband would have an interest in that, feel free to, not give it at him, but recommend it to him as something that would be a blessing for you if he would read that.

I’d love, Dannah, if we could just close this time by praying for our men. Our husbands, dads, sons, fathers, that God would bless them with truth, with courage, with faith. I know this has been a big part of your ministry, so I wonder if you’d just close our time and pray for the men that we care for?

Dannah: Yes. I’d love to, yes.

Lord Jesus, we thank You that You created men and that You declared over them that they are good. And in a culture that often speaks a different message, we want to be women who affirm that truth. Start there, Lord.

We thank You for Robert and Bob and the husbands and brothers and fathers listening right now with women they love. They are good. And we pray, Lord, that You would make us women who cooperate with You in ripping up the lies that have plagued their hearts and planting truth that they are created in the image of God, that they are masterpieces, that they are some of Your highest workmanship.

We pray, Father, that You would truly use this broadcast and this book, Lies Men Believe, to change the tape, the music, the background song in the heads and minds of men so that they can truly live in the truth that sets them free. In Jesus’ name we ask this, amen.

What would it look like for every neighborhood around the world to have homes that functioned as an embassy of the King of heaven? Tomorrow, Barbara Rainey will explain how your family can become a team of ambassadors. Please be back for Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth wants to always remind you: God loves you no matter what. It's part of the freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness you'll discover in Christ.

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