Strengthening Endurance Muscles

Dannah Gresh: Before we get started on today’s Revive Our Hearts, I just want to take a moment to let you know about an exciting opportunity. This isn’t for everyone, but it might be for you. It is for you if you can answer “yes” to these questions:

• Do you live in either the United States or Canada?
• Are you a woman with an ability to lead others?
• Have you been connected to Revive Our Hearts for some time?
• Do you feel called to serve other leaders?
• Do you love to work behind the scenes?
• Are you in a season of life where you could give about ten hours per month of your time?
• Have you been asking God where He wants you to plug in next?
• Do you want to give more of yourself to help others in their ministries?

If that sounds like you, you just might qualify to be a Revive Our Hearts Ambassador. For information, check out ReviveOurHearts.com/ambassador. 

Now, here’s today’s episode of Revive Our Hearts.

No matter your stage of life, Colleen Chao recognizes there are challenges unique to that season.

Colleen Chao: Once we embrace one season’s sufferings, it gives us a new set of muscles. Character is being built, and endurance muscles are being built, and an eternal perspective, a paradigm is being shaped.

Dannah: This is the Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Singled Out for Him, for February 25, 2022. I’m Dannah Gresh.

There’s no question that singleness can feel to some like a huge burden to bear. Of course, marriage can feel to others like a burden, too. Someone once jokingly compared marriage to flies on a screen: the ones on the outside want to get in, and the flies on the outside want in.

Well, thankfully, neither singleness nor marriage is completely unbearable—if you’re walking with the Lord and submitting to His plan for your life. In fact, far from that, there can be great joy in singleness or marriage.

That’s what we’re going to learn today, first from the host of Revive Our Hearts, Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, and then from my dear friend, Colleen Chao. Both Nancy and Colleen spent many of their adult years unmarried, and the Lord taught them some important lessons along the way. Then, later, God granted them the gift of marriage.

From the Revive Our Hearts archives, this was the pre-married Nancy Leigh DeMoss, talking about how to receive the gift of singleness.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Now, as a woman, you may or may not have a choice about your marital status. Some of you are single because you have felt that was what God wanted for you, and you’ve made the decision to be single. Some of you are single—many, perhaps—because you haven’t had a choice. You would like to be married, but that’s not been a choice.

I would say, regardless of whether or not you have the choice to be single, that you can choose what you do with your singleness. That’s really what we want to talk about in these sessions: making choices about what we do with our singleness.

I want to share with you several choices that I have made over the years, not perfectly, not flawlessly, and I’ll share with you some out of how I have failed to make these choices sometimes, but choices that, as I look back over these years, choices that have really stood me in good stead and that are reaping great blessings and freedom in my life today.

The first choice, I choose to receive my singleness as a gift from God. That’s a choice I make, to receive my singleness as a gift from God, to thank Him for that gift, and not to demand that He give me the gift of marriage.

I love that response that the virgin Mary had in Luke 1, when the angel came to her and said to this young teenage girl who was engaged to be married, “You’re going to have a baby, and Joseph is not the father. God is the father.”

You just imagine how Mary’s world just went into a whirlwind at that point! But I love her response. In Luke 1:38 she said, “I am the Lord’s servant; may it be unto me as you have said.”

You know, that is a great answer for every circumstance that God brings into our lives. “I am the Lord’s servant; may it be unto me as you have said.” “Lord, I receive Your decision for my life; I receive this gift from my life. I’m not going to resent it; I’m not going to demand that You give me a different gift.”

Now, singleness as a gift may or may not be for a lifetime. I don’t know if I will be single for all of my life. God hasn’t revealed that to me; He probably hasn’t revealed it to you. But the neat thing is, I don’t have to know. What I do need to know is He’s made me single today, and my focus is on pleasing Him today.

That doesn’t mean if I choose to receive my singleness as a gift from God that I won’t have unfulfilled longings. Can I say that it’s okay to have unfulfilled longings? Can I also say that everyone has them? Every married woman has unfulfilled longings, every single woman, every man, old, young—every person has deep inner longings that cannot be filled here on this earth, that cannot be filled by any created thing.

There are times when as singles those unfulfilled longings particularly surface. I can remember not too long ago going to the wedding of the son of my peers. Some of my friends’ children are now starting to have their own children. I went to this wedding; it was a sweet young couple, a really precious wedding. I sat there in that service so thrilled for them, but it was one of those moments when it hits you: I’m probably never going to be married, or I may never be married (depending on what age you are, how you think about that). There was a moment of sadness for me. I was thrilled for them, but there were tears in my eyes and a sense of unfulfilled longings.

I can remember the Mothers’ Day Sunday when the worship leader in our church said, “Everyone who’s not a mother, I want you to stand and read Proverbs 31 together.” Well, I stood with all the men in the church, was kind of what it felt like! Most of the women are sitting listening to this, and there’s that hard moment where it hits you, All these other women are mothers, and here I have the physical capacity to bear children, but God hasn’t given me that privilege to have children of my own, and to realize that likely I never will. There were tears. It was a moment of experiencing unfulfilled longings.

In the midst of that, I can still, through my tears, thank God and surrender to Him affresh, realizing that this unfulfilled longing is material for sacrifice. It gives me something to offer God that costs me something. With that moment of teariness, that moment of longing comes an opportunity for a fresh surrender, a fresh chance to say, “God, I trust You.”

Just last night I bowed my heart before the Lord, and through my tears I gave to the Lord a request. It’s an unfulfilled longing in my heart. I was sad about something that’s not been fulfilled. I asked the Lord, if it would please Him, to fulfill that longing, to fulfill that request. Then I laid it up to Him and in a fresh surrender said, “But Lord, I trust You to do what is best, and I receive whatever Your answer is. Whatever Your will is in this matter, I receive it.” There’s a freedom that comes from that.

First, I choose to receive my singleness as a gift from God, to thank Him for it and not to demand that He give me the gift of marriage, remembering that marriage is not a requirement for my present happiness or fulfillment. 

Did you get that? Marriage is not a requirement for my present happiness or fulfillment, and if I make marriage the ultimate goal in my life, you know what marriage will then become? An idol. Anything I demand that God give me becomes an idol in my life. So I choose to receive my singleness, to thank God for it and not to demand in an idolatrous way that He give me the gift of marriage, even while I may still have those unfulfilled longings.

Number two, I choose to pursue intimacy with God and to allow Him to fulfill my deepest needs. I choose to pursue intimacy with God! God made us for intimacy, and the tendency as singles is to feel that if we don’t have a mate that we can’t experience intimacy. But the fact is, God made us to have the most intimate possible relationship in our spirit with Him.

This says that I’m making a choice not just to drift in my spiritual life, but to make a conscious, deliberate, intentional effort to be spiritually growing, to be spiritually alive; not pining away, as one woman wrote and said to me, 

We as singles should not pine away, but take every opportunity to get to know our Lord. Pining just wastes our time and makes us miserable. My desire and my goal is to focus on Him and His Word, and I am renewing my commitment to Scripture memory and meditation.

One of the choices I have made over the years is to make a conscious, deliberate effort to get to know God, to pursue intimacy with Him, and to allow Him to meet the deepest needs of my heart. I do that by taking advantage of the means of grace that God has provided for all of His children: the Word of God, reading it, studying it, memorizing it, meditating on it, teaching it, sharing it with others. But not just the Word of God; also the Spirit of God, letting Him fill me. Prayer, taking my requests before God, praise and worship and fasting are means of grace in my life. Fellowship within the body of Christ. We’ll talk more about that in the sessions head, about how God uses the body of Christ in our lives to minister His grace to us. I take advantage of all these means that God has provided—the Lord’s Supper. Communion is a means of grace that God has provided to help us grow in our faith.

As I pursue intimacy with God, I want to focus on God’s ability to meet the deepest needs of my heart.

Don’t you love that passage in Psalm 62:5 where the psalmist talks to his own soul and says, “My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from him” (KJV). That suggests to me that the psalmist is saying, “The end of my search, the end of my pursuit, is God Himself.”

Dannah: The only one who can provide us true freedom and fruitfulness and life is Jesus Christ. Marital status has nothing to do with that.

We’ve been listening to Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, who was actually still Nancy Leigh DeMoss when that was recorded. She was speaking about ways we can find that true intimacy we’re craving, how we can find it in Christ.

Yesterday on Revive Our Hearts, we heard the first part of a conversation Michelle Hill and I had with Colleen Chao. Colleen was single until her mid-thirties. If you missed yesterday’s episode, be sure to check it out wherever you listen to the podcast, or on the Revive Our Hearts app, or at ReviveOurHearts.com.

Let’s listen now to part two. Here are Michelle, Colleen, and I talking about some of the ways singles can find joy in the midst of their singleness.

Michelle Hill: What was some encouragement you received in your early thirties when you were at that, “Okay God, I’m ready!” What was some encouragement that you received, either through the Word or from others?

Colleen: So much was from the Word. There were passages like Isaiah 54, where it talks about, “Sing, O barren one who has not borne, stretch out the borders of your tent,” and all these beautiful promises. 

You’re barren, but you can sing because you’re not barren before God, and He’s going to do something beautiful. That doesn’t necessarily mean marriage and kids, but for me, when I read that I thought, Look at all these kids and teenagers and girls that I have almost an adoptive type of relationship, a mom to many. 

I started to see that fruit in my early thirties. I couldn’t see it yet in my twenties, but after so many years of investing, I was seeing some of that fruit, and it was giving me a glimpse of eternal realities, just thinking, If this is what I can see on this side, can I even imagine what God’s doing on the eternal side? That was such a compulsion and inspiration to keep going, because it did get increasingly harder in my thirties.

I had a couple of precious friends and family members who just spoke into me, and they never stopped believing that God could do what I desired Him to do. Even if He didn’t, it was so good to have people say that they still believed He could. They hadn’t just relegated me to a lifelong singleness, which would have been fine too, and they would have been for me if it had been lifelong singleness. But they still knew my desires were there, and they honored me by still desiring it with me, if that makes sense. Even if God wasn’t going to do it, they shared my desire, and that meant the world to me.

Michelle: My closest friend is like, “God would not have given you this longing for this long if He doesn’t mean to fulfill it.”

Colleen: Yes.

Michelle: I love those words. He might choose not to fulfill it, but her words give me hope. They speak life into me.

Colleen: Yes. I love that she does that, because yes, it’s those people with a voice of faith that are so life-giving, right? Instead of treating you as the problem, or, “You’ve made it to thirty; it’s all over.”

Michelle: There’s a longing in many single women’s hearts that’s divisive. They long to be in service to our King and to our God, and they long for marriage, and at times those two fight so hard because the outside world, good-meaning people, as you mentioned a little bit ago, some of the comments that are received. In that fight, there’s shame that starts falling in.

Colleen: Yes!

Michelle: Talk to us about how to fight that shame and those feelings.

Colleen: Yes, that shame is real. I think that’s one of the enemy’s greatest tactics in singleness, is the shame. Again, I never mastered that, but over time . . . I think of the Scripture in the psalm that says, “Those who look to the Lord are radiant; their faces are never covered with shame” (Ps. 34:5 NIV). That looking to Jesus changes our countenance, it changes the way that we see ourselves in relation to others. That’s something I struggled with so much, was fear of man and caring what people thought. I still struggle. God’s freed me from a lot of that, but maybe that’s a struggle I’ll have till the end. 

But that struggle sends me to Jesus, sends me to looking to Jesus and saying, “What do You say about me? What’s real about me?” Even if everyone else in singleness thought I wasn’t quite as mature as the married woman, or I hadn’t arrived yet in life, or I wasn’t seen as put together or something. I can’t quite wrap my arms around it, but it was like I had not started life yet until marriage would come.

The Word says nothing like that.

Michelle: Exactly.

Colleen: God uses single women left and right! It’s amazing. We have living examples of that, right? So, going back to Him and looking to Him changes that shame factor.

Also, finding people who will speak what’s true about us. Maybe it’s just two or three people who are your people. I had those. I was so blessed to have a couple of people who would remind me of who I was. They saw the value in me. It didn’t matter what season I was in, they loved who God made me. That would remind me to spend time with them, getting that eye-to-eye contact does something for our brains. It does something for our hearts to be with someone who lights up and says, “I see who you are. I see who God’s made you.” 

They don’t care about—I mean, of course they care about our desires for marriage and all that, but it doesn’t matter what we look like or where we’re at in life, they just love us. That changes the shame factor too, being reminded through a couple of really amazing people, high joy people who love us.

Michelle: That’s neat.

Colleen: Yes, I love that.

Dannah: So, thirteen years down the road, lots of singleness . . . how’d you finally meet “the one”?

Colleen: It’s a fun but simple story. My brother Jonathan invited me to a church event. We were headed to Los Angeles, and everyone was dividing up into different cars. I saw a couple girlfriends, jumped into the backseat of someone’s car, and that was my future husband.

Dannah: Wow!

Colleen: He was so kind that day. And I was in a place where I was like, No more guy friends!

Dannah: You were done.

Colleen: No more risks! I’m done!

Dannah: Okay.

Colleen: He was just so kind, though, and I was definitely not interested—zero percent. But I remember his kindness. He was a gentleman, and he kept pursuing conversation all day. I kind of pushed him away.

Dannah: What’s his name?

Colleen: Eddy.

Dannah: Pushed him away.

Colleen: I did, poor guy!

Dannah: You tried to push him away.

Colleen: He would not take no for an answer!

Dannah: I’m kind of glad.

Colleen: I’m glad, too.

Dannah: How old were you when you finally got married?

Colleen: Thirty-four years old.

Dannah: Thirty-four years old. You know, Nancy was fifty-six, fifty-seven—I can’t remember—when finally the Lord brought someone into her life.

I want to ask you this question: How did singleness prepare you for marriage, motherhood, and even the things you’re facing now? As we’re interviewing, you’re facing a pretty fierce battle with cancer. How did the self-control, the contentment, everything you learned during those years, prepare you?

Colleen: That’s amazing you ask that, because I was just journaling that yesterday, thinking about how singleness did prepare me. I think, again, going back to that reality that every season has its hardships. Every status—single, married, I don’t know widowed, but just knowing life, every status and season has its own unique sufferings. Once we embrace one season’s sufferings, it gives us almost a new set of muscles to face the next season’s sufferings. That might sound depressing, but I think there’s a beauty in that, because character is being built, and endurance muscles are being built, and an eternal perspective, a paradigm is shaped. 

We miss out on so much. I’ve robbed myself at different times when I did not embrace the sufferings God brought me or it took me a long time to embrace them, I’ve robbed myself of those gifts. There’s nothing as precious as walking with Jesus through suffering. It’s the fellowship of His sufferings. 

Paul says that was his one goal, to know Christ and the fellowship of His sufferings. There is something that nothing else—no sex, no relationship, no children, nothing—can compare to that beautiful experience with Christ. So we rob ourselves when we want to get through the suffering and get to the next place, which is going to have sufferings of its own. We’re in a broken world, and we’re not home yet. So I think there is so much beauty that we miss because we don’t want to hurt, and we don’t want to feel pain. 

Singleness prepared for the hurt and the pain that would come in different ways—having a child who was born with so much illness and so many health complications. I could not have walked through that if I had not already had some endurance muscles. And then my own health journey—so many things that God was preparing me for.

Dannah: In my brief single years (it wasn’t thirteen for me), I would write in my journal every day, “Jesus is enough; God is sovereign.” Because I needed to remind myself. When you soak yourself in things like that, your heart eventually catches up.

Colleen: I love that! That’s well said.

Dannah: You start to believe it. That’s been a really helpful thing for me when my marriage has been difficult, hard, painful. Jesus is still enough; God is still sovereign.

I want to ask you a hard question. First, tell me (this is an easy one), what do you love about your husband?

Colleen: Oh my goodness! His kindness. It’s still kindness, from the beginning of the day to the end. The way he cares for me and loves me is extraordinary. He overlooks so many of my offenses—He overlooks them all! He’s so quick to forgive. I’m slow. I wrestle to get there. He’s quick. He loves me so well.

Dannah: Bob and I have a little plaque in our bathroom—I don’t know why it’s in our bathroom, but that’s where it is. It says, “Marriage is the union between two great forgivers.”

Colleen: Oh, amen!

Dannah: Well, if the Lord doesn’t miraculously heal you, your husband will enter into singleness.

Colleen: Yes.

Dannah: As I’ve been preparing for this interview, I’ve thought of many of my friends who’ve lost their husbands, and one of the questions they have is, “I wish he could tell me what to do with my singleness.”

What would you say to your husband if that question is on his heart?

Colleen: That is one of the hardest parts of this journey, knowing that my husband and son will continue to suffer when my suffering is over. I feel like I don’t have a lot to share. Some people have been single so much longer than I was, and widowhood is a totally different level, the grief and the loss. 

But, simply put, it’s to know Jesus and the fellowship of His sufferings, and to find Him in the grief, because I know He will be there for Eddy. I know He will be sufficient as He’s been sufficient for me. But I feel so inadequate to think of giving advice to someone who’s lost a spouse. But I know that Jesus is there with them. He is so near; He’s near the brokenhearted, and He’s proven that to me in so many different struggles over the years, so I know that that will be true for Eddy, too.

Dannah: I wonder if you’d pray for the widows, the widowers that are listening right now, as well as the single girl whose heart is just lonely in a way that she thinks, I can’t do this anymore. Would you pray?

Colleen: Yes.

God, thank You so much for being a “with us” God. Thank You for inhabiting our sufferings. Thank You that when You allow us to suffer, You are doing extraordinary things that will last for all of eternity. 

So I praise you for that, and I want to ask for my sisters who are hurting and longing and waiting. I think of Isaiah 64:4. God, would You act on behalf of those who wait for You? Be their good. Though their heart and their flesh may fail, You are their portion forever. I pray that they would know that to the marrow of their souls, and they would experience You in a way they could not apart from the suffering, and that that would be their good. 

I ask that You would care for them in ways that would be so unique to them, and that You would write Your story in a way that in the future they could look back and say, “I would not have missed that for anything.” Thank You, Jesus, for being so good to us and for being with us, amen.

Dannah: Colleen Chao has been praying for those who are going through a season of suffering. She knows about suffering, and she’s told us she wants to show joy everywhere she goes. 

You can see a video of Colleen with her family when you find the transcript of this program. There’s a link to that powerful video right there in the transcript.

Don’t forget the resource we’re making available this week as our thank you to you for your donation in support of Revive Our Hearts. It’s the booklet by Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, Singled Out for Him. Unmarried folks often do feel singled out, but Nancy reminds singles how important it is to be intentional about how they use their season of singleness. Ask about Singled Out for Him when you contact us with your donation. You can do that at our website, ReviveOurHearts.com, or call us at 1-800-569-5959. 

In the midst of a shaking, unstable world, how can you and I stay grounded in community? That’s something we’ll explore on Monday. We’re going to learn from the New Testament church and how they related to one another in the closing verses of Acts 2. I hope you can join us for that. Have a wonderful weekend, and then be back for Revive Our Hearts.

Calling you to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ, this is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth.

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