God Is at Work around the World

Ed Cannon: Kyrgyzstan is an entirely Muslim country . . . well, 88 percent. We have seven FM stations in Kyrgyzstan. We're only experimenting at the moment with putting Nancy's content on there, but we're finding an unbelievably high reception rate from the people. The culture in Kyrgyzstan is so . . . I'll just use the word bizarre. It's still legal to kidnap women to find a wife. It happens frequently where a man will just kidnap a woman and keep her for three months. After three months, they're married, and they stay together. It's unthinkable by U.S. standards.

But it's a very unusual place, a very ripe place for a message that God loves women and men, and you're not just a servant to your husband, but yet you're an equal partner, especially in God's eyes.

Dannah: This is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Lies Women Believe and the Truth That Sets Them Free for Monday, December 16, 2024. I’m Dannah Gresh.

All right, I have at least three reasons why I’m excited to share today’s program with you.

Number one: It’s always exciting to see how God is at work and to discover how the gospel is reaching people around the world, and that includes places where governments are trying to stop the spread of the gospel.

Secondly, today you’re going to learn how to pray more effectively that God’s Word will spread around the world.

And thirdly, God has called you to get involved in sharing His Word.

On this episode, you will hear about many women, and some men, who were called by God to take some steps of obedience. They were aware of their weaknesses, but they moved forward in faith, and they said, “Yes.” When you hear the stories, you are going to be encouraged to say, “Yes,” just like them.

Let’s start with the host of Revive Our Hearts. On December 4, 1965, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth wrote her parents a letter.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Dear Mommy and Daddy . . .

Dannah: Nancy was seven years old when she wrote. 

Nancy: God has spoken to me and told me to be a missionary for Him. It’s just as if God’s saying this to me, “Go, Nancy! Go, Nancy! You can do it! You can do it! Be a missionary for Me. Go, Nancy! Go, Nancy!”

Dannah: By 2001, Nancy had written two books, and the Revive Our Hearts radio program and podcast began.

Nancy: And little did I ever imagine that the day would come that through publishing and radio, and the internet, God would give me a chance to be a part of a ministry that is reaching people in many, many countries of the world.

Dannah: One of those countries was the Dominican Republic. That’s where Patricia de Saladin first heard Revive Our Hearts in English in 2007.

Patricia de Saladin: I started to love the message. 

Dannah: On the Revive Our Hearts podcast, Patricia heard about the conference True Woman ’08.

Patricia: I had never experienced the energy of such a great thing from the Holy Spirit that I couldn’t hold it. I mean, there were tears in my eyes. I was crying almost all the time that the singing was going on. There started in me a very strong desire to put this in Spanish, not only to the one hundred women that came from the D.R. to every Spanish-speaking woman in the world. That grew every day because when I went back home, every time that I listened to the program, I said, “Lord, this has to come out in Spanish.”

Dannah: Patricia helped launch Aviva Nuestros Corazones, the Spanish version of Revive Our Hearts. They released the first radio episodes in 2011.

Patricia: I told somebody of the staff of Revive Our Hearts that Nancy DeMoss was a gift, not only to the English-speaking world or to one hundred Dominicans that could travel to Chicago, but to the Church as a whole, and that the message of Revive Our Hearts had to go to everywhere there was woman that was being called by God to salvation, to freedom, then to fullness, and to fruitfulness in Christ.

Dannah: Retha de Villiers attended the True Woman ’14 conference, saw how God was using the Spanish ministry of Revive Our Hearts, and prayed the Lord would do the same in her home country of South Africa.

Retha de Villiers: The Lord put it on my heart when I came to the conference that afterwards I had to bring back the baton.

Dannah: A team began to grow, and Revive Our Hearts South Africa was launched in 2017.

Retha: I think the Lord is taking us, especially now, into a new season where He is giving us resources and funding to expand the influence and footprint in South Africa with this message.

Dannah: Sabrina Aslan also attended True Woman ’14 and caught a vision for translating Revive Our Hearts materials into Farsi. The first podcasts were released in 2020 for women in countries like Iran, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan.

Sabrina Aslan: These Farsi podcasts have created a very deep desire in their hearts to know the Word of God, to know Christ in a very profound way.

Dannah: Yadira Gorek first heard material from Revive Our Hearts in Spanish, and she wanted to share it with her neighbors in Germany, where she’s lived for twenty-seven years.

Yadira Gorek: My mind was, like, “Amazing! What a message!”

Dannah: Now the team is translating the Seeking Him podcast in German, along with resources like the 30-Day Husband Encouragement Challenge.

Yadira: That transformed my marriage, and I just really wanted it to be in German because I know women that need exactly this but are in the same position that I was in.

Dannah: The Revive Our Hearts German team connected with a woman in Italy who is now heading up ministry there. Dorcas has been translating Seeking Him into Italian.

Karine Baerts traveled with nine other European women to one of the True Woman conferences in Indianapolis. Before this, Karine felt alone while living out her faith in Belgium.

Karine Baerts: But now I have so many women gathering all over the world.

Dannah: She began translating Revive Our Hearts resources into Dutch.

Karine: I’m praying for God’s saving grace in the hearts and the lives of many and many, many women in Belgium and the Netherlands as well.

Dannah: In 2001, Hisano Richeson started listening to Revive Our Hearts on the radio in the United States.

Hisano Richeson: I was far away from everybody, and Revive Our Hearts became like a Christian sisters.

Dannah: She wanted to share this message with the women of Japan.

Hisano: Japanese people’s hearts are so hard.

Dannah: Revive Our Hearts is also getting into southeast Asian countries where Bible teaching is prohibited. We’re partnering with a ministry called Far East Broadcasting Company.

Ed Cannon: It’s an international Christian radio operation, serving in fifty countries, broadcasting in 154 languages. There’s very little programming that’s targeted toward women, so the hunger for Nancy’s message of biblical womanhood is spreading. It’s spreading like wildfire.

Dannah: Far East Broadcasting discovered the best way to distribute material in the Ukraine is YouTube and social media.

Ed: So once we discovered this explosion of social media, we said, “This is a great place for us to do Revive Our Hearts content” . . . and then the war started.

Dannah: Translators in the Ukraine are releasing videos adapted from Nancy’s Seeking Him podcast.

Ed: We’ve just dipped our foot in the water of taking Nancy’s message around the world.

Patricia: I mean, the Lord is coming soon, and we are all going to be in heaven—women from every tribe, tongue and nation will be there. PS: “Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel.” It is a God story, from the beginning ’til the end.

Dannah: You’re listening to Revive Our Hearts. I’m Dannah Gresh. Today we are hearing stories from around the world about ways women have heard God’s call to spread His Word in their languages. They’ve said, “Yes,” to that call. By hearing those stories, I think we can all be inspired to share God’s Word with the people around us.

Ed: We’ve translated quite a number of Nancy’s short messages. And in the Ukraine, the technology that seems to work is like a YouTube or Facebook Live broadcast. So we put her message with a video in the background.

Now, it’s not a face talking. It’s usually scenes, peaceful and quiet creeks in the mountains, or trees with birds singing, but her message playing over the video. And, literally, in the Ukraine, we’re getting hundreds of thousands of downloads of that content to the point where we haven’t gotten enough recorded yet because it takes a little time with the videos. Our people in the Ukraine are kind of busy right now. There’s a lot of stuff going on there.

So, we know that people are listening. We’re getting lots of downloads. We get SMS texts, but very few phone calls, telling us, “We’re actually listening, and here’s the message.” So we know it’s working. It’s fairly new. We started about the same time as the war started. However, the thing that triggered our wanting to start it in Ukraine was COVID, because so many people were locked down.

We transitioned from primarily an FM media platform to social media at the beginning of COVID, and we saw this explosion of people listening on social media in Ukraine. So obviously, they’re adept at using Facebook Live and some other programs, even TikTok in Ukraine. We’re getting quite a few listeners.

So once we discovered this explosion of social media, we said, “This is a great place for us to put Revive Our Hearts content” . . . and then the war started. So it’s kind of at the same time, but for two different reasons. God doesn’t have any accidents, and I think God was prompting us all along.

There’s so many things in our Ukraine ministry that feel like that. When COVID hit and the churches all shut down in Ukraine, they had a very hard shutdown in the country of Ukraine, so churches weren’t able to meet. People weren’t able to access the sermons online because they didn’t have that technology.

Here in America every pastor in every church is streaming their Sunday sermons live, and maybe Wednesday night. That didn’t happen in Ukraine. So our technical staff working in the radio ministry understood technology to the point where they went to the local churches and said, “Can we help you build a web page so you can stream your sermons live and the people will be able to listen at home?” Well, of course they’re going to say, “Yes.”

Over a hundred churches took us up on that. And the value of that was not only streaming the local sermon live, but then on that web page, we even put all of FEBC’s content. So they could listen to the sermon on Sunday, but they could listen to our programs all the time.

So the church won because now their sermon is streamed. FEBC won because now we have another outlet for our programming. But the real winners were the people. They had an outlet to hear Christian messaging when they couldn’t get out of their homes. 

It provided a great help, so it stimulated a lot of people going to the social media. So when the war started, they had an additional place where they could seek some hope and some peace and some good messages.

Our staff are doing the translation and the production work in Kiev. If you’ve been reading in the news lately, Kiev has received quite a number of missile attacks. We’ve had staff a mile away from a recent bomb attack. We have a number of people whose children are just so upset by listening to the bombing and the airplanes and the air raid sirens that they have to take them out of the country. We have staff living in Ukraine, doing the work in Kiev, who have taken their wife and their children to Moldova or Poland in order to be safe and away from the war, but they turn right around and go back in.

A real story is one of our pastors, Pastor Sergei, he took his seven-year old son and his wife out of the country and dropped them off in a refugee camp in Moldova. His little son was saying, “Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Don’t go back! Stay here with us!” And he had to look at his son in the eyes and say, “Son, I’ve got to go back in because the people need me. I need to do these broadcasts.”

If you think about making that kind of sacrifice . . . Yes, they’re doing quite a lot for the proclamation of the Word and the partnership with Revive Our Hearts.

We have a young lady who’s a single, young lady who just turned thirty years old. She frequently does her broadcast, her social media broadcast, on her cell phone in a bomb shelter. She’ll go out to be among the people. The bomb shelters are in train stations or shopping malls where there’s a safe place. She’ll be surrounded by a hundred people doing a live broadcast on social media, with the idea that not only the people on the radio are listening, but the people in the bomb shelter are listening.

When they see somebody who’s amongst them, who’s with them, who’s willing to take the same risks that they are by being in a place that could blow up in five minutes, they’ve got great confidence in that person. She’s very outgoing, very dynamic. The instant the broadcast is over, of course you can imagine she’s surrounded by people. “How do you get to know this man Jesus that you talk so powerfully about? Can you pray with me? How do I come to know Him? When is your broadcast on? How can I get it to my son who’s in Damaska” or one of the war regions.

So it’s that kind of commitment, and it’s those kinds of people who are going to be advocating for the Revive Our Hearts message in the Ukraine.

Kyrgyzstan is an entirely Muslim country . . . well, 88 percent. We have seven FM stations in Kyrgyzstan. We're only experimenting at the moment with putting Nancy's content on there, but we're finding an unbelievably high reception rate from the people. The culture in Kyrgyzstan is so . . . I'll just use the word bizarre. It's still legal to kidnap women to find a wife. It happens frequently where a man will just kidnap a woman and keep her for three months. After three months, they're married, and they stay together. It's unthinkable by U.S. standards.

But it's a very unusual place, a very ripe place for a message that God loves women and men, and you're not just a servant to your husband, but yet you're an equal partner, especially in God's eyes. So we've experimented there. We haven't launched it yet, but it is our plan. 

We've launched Nancy's message in Cambodia, an entirely Buddhist country. It’s a very unusual culture, once again, where women are very quiet. They've only opened up the possibility in recent decades of women becoming Buddhist monks. But yet, they're still separated. It's still a difference. I could go on for hours talking about the culture in Cambodia.

In the last three months, we've started Nancy's programming on our FM radio station, which covers about two-thirds of the population of Cambodia. So we're looking forward to the response from the Khmer people there in that country. 

Our broadcast in Russia has been very compromised in the recent years because we had two very large AM stations—one in Moscow, one in St Petersburg—that we've been broadcasting on for thirty or forty years. It covered the bulk of the population of the country. It didn't get up into Siberia, but of course there's not many people there. So it covered the lion's share of the population of Russia.

Just recently, the Russian government came to us and said, you can no longer have those licenses; they're going to use those radio stations for propaganda. Perhaps they knew what they were about to do and wanted some big outlets, so they pulled our license, and we were devastated. But what we found was that we've immediately switched over to social media. We’ve advertised for the last month we were on the AM stations, "If you want to listen to this kind of programming, you can listen on your cell phone. You can listen on social media. You can listen to our website,” etc.—various platforms they could go to. It's all picked up on social media now. So we're still new in that field in Russia. 

We do think because of the war, lots more people have come seeking the message that we have, in other words, Seeking Him. We do have some of Nancy's content in Russia, not much, not nearly as much as we've had in Ukraine, because our operation there has been kind of in flux. We're just kind of getting our feet back on the ground and seeing what we can do there. But it is an important country. 

We think about the pity we have for the people of Ukraine, but the situation in Russia, I would say, is worse than it is in Ukraine. They've lost more lives because the soldiers are all being killed. They have family in Ukraine, so they're devastated by that. The draft in Russia is very oppressive. The men can't leave the country, and they're drafting men now as old as fifty-six years old. 

So that country is desperately in need of some good news, and it's our hope that we can revive our radio ministry through the social media platforms in that country. And once again, I think Revive Our Hearts would be a perfect new outlet for people to hear God's Word.

Revive Our Hearts is very fair in the way they say, "If we're going to put our content in a country, we don't want it to be at your expense." So obviously, one of the bigger expenses that FEBC broadcasting has is translating English content into the local language. And while it's not a lot of money, because a great salary for a staff in Phnom Penh Cambodia is $300 a month, that's a high end salary for that country . . . Yet Revive Our Hearts compensates FEBC for the time we spend translating, and then they share with us expenses to cover broadcasting costs, much like the United States that you pay to be on a radio station. Revive Our Hearts compensates FEBC for the time we put on the radios. 

It's very effective because it's not very expensive. But the other side of the effectiveness is that we have very little competition for Christian radio in a place like Phnom Penh Cambodia or Bishkek Kyrgyzstan. So, lots and lots and lots of people listen very inexpensively—excellent message, cost effective. That's a good partnership.

We now have Nancy's message in Mandarin in China—only on the web page, which has been shut down recently by the Chinese government. We're walking very cautiously in China about distributing that content. I think because of the fact that we're using a woman's voice, the Chinese government suspects that it's a Western program. They don't mind programming that's put together in China by Chinese for Chinese people. But what they don't want is Western influence. 

Even though we have some female voices on our program and have for a long time, the suspicion is rather high by the Chinese government that we're partnering with some Western organizations to use Revive Our Hearts messages. So we're cautiously bringing that up. But we do think that in China, that is probably the most effective place—not to mention the fact that they have 1.3 billion people. Christianity is prohibited other than within your local church . . . when it's an approved church. This means there's a Communist pastor in charge of the church. 

But the government is trusting of FEBC, because we've been there for eighty years. We do think that by using Revive Our Hearts message on that platform, that could probably be our most effective partnership anywhere in the world. 

Of course, we've just dipped our foot in the water of taking Nancy's message around the world. We’re in only a handful of countries that we've actually translated and put the Revive Our Hearts message on. We have 154 languages, so there's a lot of opportunity. Because we're seeing the uptake on that message being so high, because it's biblical, and because it's targeted to women, we're seeing that that's a great opportunity for us to grow. It's something new. It's something different. It's something clearly aligned with our vision to take the gospel to every tribe and tongue and nation . . . and that includes men and women. 

As everybody knows, it's not only women that listen to these programs. We get a lot of responses from men too. So anything that's different and biblical are the kind of things that we think are real opportunities for growth in the future. It's a perfect opportunity for us to partner with Nancy and Revive Our Hearts.

I cannot describe the joy that I have by seeing what people around the world are willing to do to communicate the gospel. It's just heart medicine to see. People in countries like Indonesia, the largest Muslim country in the world, and how much they work in order to get the gospel to the people. 

Traveling out to visit with donors, we were just in India recently visiting radio listeners. One of the lines I use is: I haven't sweat as much in my entire life as I did during that one week when I was in India. But our staff live that way, sacrificially, living so that they can meet with listeners. They can communicate at a deeper level with what they've heard on the radio and how they've responded. When you see people that are willing to do that much to give that much of their life for the Great Commission, it inspires you, and it encourages me. Honestly, I would pay FEBC for the privilege to have the job that I have today.

Dannah: That's Ed Cannon from Far East Broadcasting. He's been telling us how God's Word is spreading in Ukraine, Russia, and places in Southeast Asia that are hostile to the gospel. Would you pray that women in these places continue to hear solid biblical teaching, the teaching they need, and that this message will spread to even more women?

The reason we're able to partner with Far East Broadcasting is thanks to listeners like you who support Revive Our Hearts. If the Lord’s used Nancy's teaching to help you grow, would you consider passing that gift on to someone else? And that means passing the message on to some women in places where solid teaching is hardly heard. It means passing the message along to places torn apart by war and in places where the government tries to stop the spread of the gospel. Your support is helping Revive Our Hearts get into places like this, offering women their freedom, fullness and fruitfulness in Christ.

Now, typically close to half the donations this ministry counts on for the whole year arrive in December. So your gift will help us continue spreading biblical teaching around the world. This month, some friends of this ministry are doubling every gift up to a matching challenge amount of two million dollars. We're praying that God will put it on the hearts of listeners to give. 

Would you pray about getting involved to help us meet and then go beyond this challenge? Visit, ReviveOurHearts.com, or call us at 1-800-569-5959

Maybe you speak one of the languages mentioned today, or you know someone who does. You can hear Revive Our Hearts in multiple languages when you visit this website, ReviveOurHearts.com/international. You can explore the programs of all of our partners around the world and share a link to this page with other women. 

Tomorrow, we will get to know an unsung hero in the Christmas story. She interacted with the baby Jesus way before the wise men. Nancy will tell you about her next time on 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 Jesus.

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