When God Puts a Burden on Your Heart

Leslie Basham: Here is Laura Gonzales de Chavez.

Laura Gonzales de Chavez: God used Revive Our Hearts, Seeking Him, and True Woman in a way that was so providential and that worked a lot of transformation in families and marriages. So that started happening in our church.

Leslie: This is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss for Monday, December 2.

Nancy Leigh DeMoss: When was last time you knew you were part of something big? Well, over the last few years here at Revive Our Hearts, God has been up to something big. It’s taking place in Latin America and in fact, throughout the Spanish-speaking world. You’re going to hear about it today.

Five years ago when we were getting ready for True Woman ’08, our first national conference that was held in Chicago, we kept hearing about more and more women who were planning to attend from the Dominican Republic. At that event, I was able to meet those women, over a hundred of them. One of them, Laura de Chavez was intrigued by an idea. What if we held a conference like this in Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic?

Laura: I felt this is bigger than what we are seeing here. This is bigger than these thousands of women here. This is bigger than us, and I think it’s something God is going to do.

Nancy: And Laura’s friend, Patricia de Saladin, was intrigued by another thought. What if there was a Spanish language version of Revive Our Hearts on the air in her country?

Patricia de Saladin: We would love to get True Woman and Revive Our Hearts and bring it to our women who are Spanish-speaking women not only in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic but in all Latin America and Spanish-speaking countries.

Nancy: Well, these were really ambitious ideas, and the only way they could possibly be fulfilled is if the Lord was in it. Today and tomorrow we’re going to hear how the Lord has done far beyond what those women could have imagined back in 2008.

As we listen, I hope you’ll think about this. Has God put a burden on your heart, something you’re trusting Him to do even though it seems impossible? I think you’ll be encouraged by this story about what the Lord can do when we lean on Him and wait for His timing.

And then let me just say that so many Revive Our Hearts listeners have been a vital part of the story you’re about to hear. When you support Revive Our Hearts financially you help make it possible for us to launch new ministries like the one you’re going to hear about. Let’s listen to the story.

Leslie: Thanks, Nancy. The story begins a few years ago. Laura Gonzales de Chavez and Patricia de Saladin had been friends for a long time.

Patricia: It’s a long story of friendship. Laura was my best friend in school. So we sat all day together. We traveled together. We were like sisters, really. I have three more sisters and my sisters were jealous of her because we shared so many things. We had so much in common that before one said one thing the other knew. So many times I knew how she thinks and many times she knows how I think.

But then I married very young. I married at nineteen. As soon as we got married, we came to know the Lord, and that separated us even more than how life itself was separating us.

Laura: It was really sad when we parted ways. When she found the Lord, she invited me to the Bible studies, but I never wanted to go because I thought they were going crazy. We felt very distant from them at the time.

Patricia: Well, Fausto and Laura met on one of my birthdays. I think it was my sixteenth birthday.

Fausto Gonzales: I met Laura at Patricia’s house in November ’77. It was on her birthday.

Patricia: Then they got married, and they moved to the States. Many years after that, one day she called me and said, “Patricia, I am converted.” I think those were her words.

Laura: The first person I thought about when I met the Lord was Patricia.

Patricia: That night I was driving, and I can’t even tell you the street I was. I parked to the side because I was very glad, but I wanted to know what did she convert to? Because in the United States you have so many things. We started emailing back and forth, and I really could see that God had done a work in her, and then right after that, in Fausto’s life.

Our friendship that was the icing on the ice cake for all these years, and it bloomed again, and now with the blood of Christ uniting us both it was even better. It was like a precious gift. That Christmas we flew to Orlando.

Fausto: I remember how they came and spent two or three weeks (I don’t remember how long) and they discipled us.

Patricia: We met with them. It was like time had never gone by. It was the same love, the same friendship now with a bond that I tell her, “Now, best friends forever, because now this is forever.” She started talking that God was leading them to come back to the D.R.

Fausto: Everything we did after we met Jesus we really didn’t know why we were doing it. When everybody’s leaving Latin America to move to the U.S., we were doing the opposite. But in reality, we were being led because. Not even we knew why we were doing this, because it was totally opposite to logic and reason.

People in the U.S. were saying, “Are you crazy?” And people in the D.R. were saying, “Are you crazy?” We felt this powerful pull to just leave everything, sell everything, and then go back not knowing what we were going to do, where we were going to go.

Laura: I think it was around 2007 or 2008 I was looking for teaching on the Internet for women. I was just looking, and I heard one program on OnePlace.com. It just was music to my ears because I had to say, “Amen” to everything that I was listening to. And that’s how I met Revive Our Hearts and Nancy.

Patricia: First I started listening very skeptically. Laura, as my friend and a new believer, I wanted to be sure she was exposed to the right teaching. Every day I looked online to listen to Nancy, and all of a sudden I started to expect every day to listen to Nancy and to say, “Amen” to everything.

I really loved the programs. I took the time to sit down, open my Bible, and listen to it like a Bible study. I didn’t listen to it doing something or in the car. No. I just took my time. I sat down with my Bible and went through every program every day.

Laura: Then through the program, I saw that they were talking about a Seeking Him study. I obtained that study to do it for myself. After I got it, I saw that it was for a group, and so I got a group of ladies to do it with me. Our hearts were revived, and we understood that life was not about us.

But the first thing I wanted to do is let all the people in the congregation be exposed to this because it was like a knife cutting through our hearts. At the same time it was healing us, not just exposing our sin but also showing God’s grace at the same time. And we just wanted everybody in the church to do it.

So we asked Moody for permission to translate it, and we had many people in the congregation go through the study in groups. That produced a whole revival in our church and in many marriages. So Revive Our Hearts started influencing our church apart from womanhood first by reviving us.

I had not heard about womanhood up to that point. It was just reviving our hearts, making us want to live for Jesus and live for Christ and live sold-out lives for Christ and in fruitfulness. Having recognized our sin and being repenters, living broken lifestyles, that’s the message that gripped me first through that study. And then came True Woman.

Leslie: These ladies heard about True Woman ’08, the first national women’s conference sponsored by Revive Our Hearts.

Patricia: I said, “Whoa! Yes. That’s a good idea.” But then she said, “Why don’t we bring more women with us. Let’s invite the people, the women in our churches.” To be honest, even to that point, even listening to Nancy every day, I came to the True Woman conference with my doubts. I had been in a women’s conference. But I didn’t know what was going to happen.

It wasn’t that I came with my heart prepared to receive. I was looking forward to it, but at the same time a little skeptical. What’s going to happen with all these thousands of women together in an auditorium? But what happened was far beyond what I expected. I understood God brought us all there.

Laura: Before 2008 I had never thought about womanhood at all.

Patricia: I had all these puzzle pieces like motherhood, being a wife, and I had already some knowledge about biblical womanhood. Those were part of my pieces. When I came to True Woman ’08, those pieces came together.

Laura: Because we are first generation, evangelical, Bible-based Christians, this has not been taught.

Patricia: And my eyes were opened to a reality I hadn’t seen all together, you know, like a picture.

John Piper (conference message): True womanhood is a distinctive calling of God to display the glory of His Son in ways that would not be displayed if there were no womanhood.

Patricia: The content was so strong. It was so solid, so Christ-centered, so on the cross that it was more than my heart could manage. That’s why I had to cry because there wasn’t any other way that my emotions would flow but just the tears from my eyes.

I remember every message was shaping this puzzle, putting all these pieces together but like in an earthquake. You know, it was a shaking inside of me very strong.

John Piper: God’s ultimate purpose for the universe and all of history in your life is to display the glory of God.

Patricia: I remember John Piper’s sermon about how important a sound doctrine is and how this sound doctrine should develop in a strong woman.

John Piper: Wimpy theology makes wimpy women.

Laura: I knew that theology was very important and doctrine and solid doctrine and knowing all that. I came from a church where that was important. So I had that down. But then I had not put together doctrine and womanhood. How am I supposed to live as a woman? So that’s what this conference taught me.

John Piper: God is too great. Christ is too glorious. Womanhood is too strategic. Don’t waste it. Your womanhood, your true womanhood was made for the glory of Christ.

Patricia: I started feeling a burden for other women that I had never felt before. I started to worry how they had been deceived and how even in our churches we could be taking the wrong way and being led astray. I had this urgency that I thought, Where is this coming from?”

The burden that I had was with the Spanish-speaking women. I couldn’t take them out of my head. It was like this needs to be put in Spanish because all these women in your language, in Spanish, need to listen to this message. It opened my eyes to a reality, a spiritual reality that it didn’t make sense before. It all came together.

Leslie: While at the conference, the Lord put a burden on Patricia’s heart. What if there were a ministry like Revive Our Hearts in the Dominican Republic? Here’s Patricia at True Woman ’08.

Patricia: We would love to get True Woman and Revive Our Hearts and bring it to our women, to our Spanish-speaking women, not only in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, but in all Latin America and Spanish-speaking countries.

Leslie: Laura had a burden of her own.

Laura: This was not for United States. This was something God wanted for the whole world, at least for Latin America. So I just saw this movement taking shape and gaining momentum, and I felt so small. I remember the last day that they were asking for prayer.

I just said, “God I feel that You want me to be a part of this, but I have no idea what this means. I know that I’m going to get to my church and start talking about this and teaching young women. That’s what I’m going to do. But I feel this is bigger than what we’re seeing today. This is bigger than this thousands of women here. This is bigger than us. And I think it’s something God is going to do.”

When we got back from the conference, first of all, many of the women had done Seeking Him before. So they got back from the conference and also after the women had done that study, the men had done it as well. So all these women come back, and then the men go to a retreat where they had already been exposed to the Seeking Him material. The women came back from the conference all revived.

And then when the men came back from the retreat, they came confessing many sins. The women were ready to hear those sins and to forgive. It was all a timing in our church. God used Revive Our Hearts, Seeking Him, and True Woman in a way that was so providential and that worked a lot of transformation in families and marriages. So that started happening in our church.

Then we started listening more to the programs now more intentionally. I do a lot of counseling in my church, and I remember part of the things I had the women do was listen to the program in English because we didn’t have it in Spanish. Many women could not hear it because they didn’t know the language. So that was something that we all just said, “We need this in Spanish” because of that.

I translated some transcripts for women that needed to hear a certain program. I would translate the transcript so that they would listen to that teaching or read the teaching. Then we started just living our lives. We had no idea that Revive Our Hearts had any intention of doing anything with that.

We did start translating some resources. We asked for permission to do some things from the page and some materials, and we translated those things for small groups. But never did we think it was going to be more than that. We did have in mind how good it would be to do a radio program, but we never thought it was going to be a possibility.

Leslie: The idea kept growing. Could this become a radio program?

Sarah Hedez: If Revive Our Hearts were translated to Spanish that would be amazing. My name is Sarah Hedez. I am originally from Dominican Republic. Even at our church in those small groups that we have, a lot of times you’re recommending and saying, “Listen to this program.”

And a lot of them were saying, “Why? I don’t understand. It’s just hard for us.” We were like, wow, this material is so rich and just such a blessing. And we just wished they could hear it.

Patricia: My name is Patricia. I’m from the Dominican Republic. We are eager to have Revive Our Hearts in Spanish because there is just so much that the Lord has been giving us through the ministry but English, in the English-speaking language. So we definitely need to pass on all this that we’ve received to other women around us.

Time after time we find the same question. “Is it in Spanish?”

“No it’s not.” So it’s work that we’re doing just to get all these messages translated and we are eager to see it all set up.

Laura: Mostly, the programs in Latin America for women have to do with empowerment. You are just like men. You can be as dominating. You can be as successful, and you can be empowered. So that’s the teaching that most Latin American women are listening to. Not that there’s not good teaching also in some churches, but in the vast majority that’s the teaching they are getting. So that’s why this was so new to many of them.

Leslie: A team from Revive Our Hearts visited Santo Domingo to explore what a Spanish radio program might look like.

Bob Lepine: You can imagine on this side with Martin and the rest of the team, they’re going, “Is it being translated accurately?”

Leslie: Revive Our Hearts board member, Bob Lepine.

Bob: Can these women sustain this? Can they keep it up? Is it going to start and then die? Is this for real? So there was really this exploratory time to say, “Lord, are You in this? Is Patricia right or not?” That’s really what you were saying. You got the green light to translate and go two days a week with the program.

Laura: Right. They said, “Just do a demo.” I think they were trying to entertain us to see if we would go away. And then we did this demo. We waited and waited and waited and nothing. We heard nothing from ROH. So we were saying, “At least if they would just let us air it in the D.R. because people need to hear it here.” And we kept on translating. By the time they said “yes,” we had like sixty programs already recorded. So it was a work of faith from the beginning.

Leslie: Finally this team got the “go ahead” to begin broadcasting two days a week in Santo Domingo.

Patricia: (speaking in Spanish)

Leslie: Aviva Nuestros Corazones, the Spanish version of Revive Our Hearts was finally launched.

Aviva Nuestros Corazones Announcer: (introducing Aviva Nuestros Corazones program in Spanish)

Leslie: Even though the program was limited to two days a week in the Dominican Republic, Spanish-speaking women from around the world were finding it.

Patricia: Chile. Argentina. Belize. Guadalajara. Ecuador. Columbia. Panama. Mexico. Even in Spain and Barcelona they have downloaded the program from the satellite and are listening to it in Spanish.

Betsy Torres: I had no idea about God’s design a biblical God’s design for a woman.

Spanish Woman: I bought a small radio so I can carry it in my bag everywhere I can go so I could listen to Revive Our Hearts more often.

Betsy: A revival started to happen in my house.

Leslie: In early 2012, one of the dreams that had been on Laura’s heart for years finally came about.

Nancy (D.R. Conference): (introduces a Revive Our Hearts conference in the D.R. speaking in Spanish)

Leslie: The team watched the Lord work at that Revive Our Hearts conference in 2012.

Nancy (D.R Conference): In fact, when we landed in the D.R. the other day and there was a sign that said, “Do you have anything to declare?” It was a sign in customs. I said, “Yes. I have come to declare Jesus Christ and Him crucified.”

Leslie: Many women came to saving faith in Christ. Many others left with a passion to take a message of revival and biblical womanhood to their countries throughout Latin America. God had done great things. But everyone had a sense this was just the beginning of what the Lord wanted to do through Revive Our Hearts in Latin America.

Tomorrow we’ll hear about what happened next, hear how this ministry began spreading throughout Latin America through daily radio. Nancy’s here to reflect on the part of the story we’ve heard so far.

Nancy: Well, when you see God at work all you can do is join Him and hold on for the ride. That’s what it feels like as God has accelerated this movement in the Spanish-speaking world.

I’m so thankful for the way that many Revive Our Hearts listeners have joined us in this effort. If you were listening to ROH last December, you may remember that we were praying that the Lord would broaden the reach of Aviva Nuestros Corazones, the Spanish version of Revive Our Hearts.

Our goal was to build and launch a new website, to add more radio station partners across Latin America, and to move to a daily half-hour program. Well, the Lord answered that prayer in 2013. Now we’re asking Him to expand the staff in the Dominican Republic and to provide them with their own broadcast studio and office space.

At the moment they’re borrowing studios and office space at a local radio station. That presents some challenges, and they really need their own space. So when you support Revive Our Hearts, you’re also supporting Aviva Nuestros Corazones.

And the best news is that right now, your gift will be doubled thanks to some generous friends of the ministry who’ve agreed to match every gift through December up to $530,000.

So to support the ministry at this important time, visit us at ReviveOurHearts.com, or you can give us a call at 1–800–569–5959.

Every gift, no matter how large or small is important and will be doubled. So please respond today as the Lord prompts your heart. Call us at 1–800–569–5959, or if you prefer, you can send your check to us at P.O. Box 2000, Niles, MI 49120.

Leslie: Thanks, Nancy. Well, if you feel weak and inadequate, the team in Dominican Republic can relate. Hear how God is working despite the weaknesses they feel. It will inspire you to trust God for big things. That’s tomorrow on Revive Our Hearts.

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