Freedom Stories to Give You Hope

This episode contains portions from the following programs:

"One of Us Is Gonna Die"

"Ditch the Baggage"

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Dannah Gresh: Ever feel like you’re trapped?

(sound of metal door slamming shut) 

Dannah: Like you can’t escape? You’re in a prison. And the worst part is, you know it is of your own making. Because it was your own decisions and actions that got you here.

You may be desperate to get out, but you can’t. Not on your own.

I’m here to tell you today, that there is hope. If you feel trapped in a prison of sin and guilt and shame because of your past . . . or maybe your present battle with sin, you can find freedom.

You’re listening to Revive Our Hearts Weekend. I’m your host, Dannah Gresh. 

If you listen regularly to this or any of the podcasts in the Revive Our Hearts family, you know we exist to help women experience freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ. We think these are three of the most significant things a woman can experience in her life. We don’t want you to miss them. So, I want to take the next three episodes to explore those three things, starting with freedom!

Let’s get the hard news out of the way. We’re all actually born enslaved to sin. That’s right! We all sin and, left to fester, those sinful behaviors, mindsets, and choices produce a bondage or imprisonment in our lives. Maybe you’ve been there. I sure have. Maybe you are there. Well, my friend, there’s hope. 

Listen to this verse in Romans chapter 6. 

But thanks be to God, that you who were once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching to which you were committed, and, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.

That is good stuff! Today, we’re going to hear from individuals—some people you know like me, Mary Kassian, and Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, the founder of Revive Our Hearts. We have each been set free from slavery to sin. We are now free in Christ. You can be, too!

Marcia Arnel suffered years of abuse in her dysfunctional family. There were addictions to drugs and alcohol. To call it “slavery” would be an understatement. She remembers a particularly dramatic scene.

Marcia Arnel: It was finally in my sophomore year that my dad went to raise his hand at me. I had determined already that something was going to happen between the two of us. As my dad raised his hand, I looked him straight in his face and I said, "Dad, if you ever hit me again, one of us is going to die."

Dannah: In high school, she decided to abandon God and take things into her own hands. While her parents were in the process of getting a divorce, Marcia left home and lived at a friend’s house for four months. Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth spoke with her about that time in her life.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: Were you happy?

Marcia: Was I happy? Happy is temporary, so I guess in a sense there was definitely no--there was still more to life to me. At this next point, everything is going to be okay. At sixteen when I can drive, everything is going to be okay. Well, it wasn't.

Dannah: Marcia found that greater independence just meant more opportunities to sin. And there was always a “next thing.” She graduated from high school and went to college, hoping to find fulfillment there. Again, it just led to more bondage.

Marcia: I had already gone into the lifestyle of immorality, which just increased as I went to college. I began trying to find what it was that would make life okay. At that point, I chose to begin to get involved in drinking and maybe even smoking marijuana very rarely. But my freshman year of college--I was breaking policy even to the point of getting expelled from school.

I went back home to live with my mom, at which point she had moved in with her boyfriend. So I basically had a house to myself, and I would have parties there every weekend.

Nancy: So you had watched your dad ruin his life with drugs and alcohol, and now you're really heading down the same pathway. Did it occur to you that your life might be taking the same direction as his?

Marcia: I remember being scared of that and thinking things were getting out of control. But when I went to college--where my brother went to college--and my brother at that point had never drunk or anything either. I remember going to a party and seeing him drinking, and I thought, Well, it must be okay to do. That was where I entered that--in my mind--making it okay in my mind to do, Maybe this is the way it needed to be.

Nancy: You've shared that at one point you saw your life going downhill, and you started to get scared. What made you have that turn of thinking?

Marcia: I remember a couple of nights just having people in my home--at the house I was"¦after a night of partying, just people getting sick and losing all train of thought and not really being there and passing out and just seeing all of that chaos and stuff around me. I was wondering, Am I going to be the next person to pass out? Am I going to be the next one to do this or that? Those kinds of thoughts started coming into my head.

At that point, I was leaving to go into the army in January, so that was my next goal in my mind. Well, when I get to the army, everything is going to be okay. So I had already determined that I was only going to party for this little season. When I got into the army, that would change.

Nancy: Did you go into the army?

Marcia: Actually, I went to ship out for basic training and actually got discharged because I had acne pretty bad at that time. They said that I might possibly get a staph infection, and they didn't want to take on that responsibility. So I got discharged from that, three months after getting kicked out of college.

So I went ahead and went back to the school I was originally attending. They let me back in. I went to school there for a couple of years, at which time I got more involved with people that were involved in drugs. I didn't personally partake of it as much, but I was around it a lot.

I went on one spring break, after being back for a while, and did experiment with marijuana again. There must have been something in it, and I remember hallucinating and seeing things. I was scared that I was going to die. I really felt like that was going to be the end of my life.

I called my mom from Georgia and told her, "Mom, I'm seeing things. Something is going on here."

I remember my mom saying, "It's okay, Marcia. This will pass. Go to bed. No big deal." I made a conscious choice at that point to never party again.

Nancy: Now your life is in a tailspin. It's really going from bad to worse. You're now living out so much of what you've seen lived out in your own early childhood. But God had a plan for your life, and He began to bring His grace and intervention into your life. Some things started to change.

Marcia: In 1995, I had a girlfriend who was going to church at that time ask me to be in her wedding. She was marrying the pastor's son, so she had asked me if I would come to church just to get to know him and his family. So I went ahead and went to church and thought, Why not? I went ahead and went back to church.

We went to a women's retreat in 1996 after my friend had gotten married. It was during that time that the Lord just brought the truth to my ears like I had never heard it. Especially, I remember them saying that my body was bought at a price and it belonged to the Lord. I was to glorify Him with my life.

As I looked back on my life, I knew that I had made choices that were against my body belonging to Him by neglecting it through the drugs and the alcohol and even the immorality that I was part of. To hear that God wanted to hold me in the palm of His hand and to make me pure and to make me holy and that He loved me--it was the first time I believed that and understood that that was the happiness that I had been looking for for so long.

I wanted that. I wanted to be pure. I wanted to be holy. I wanted to surrender my body and my life to Christ. Whatever I could do to glorify Him became my heart's desire at that point. I received the love that God had for so long been trying to give me. I found a joy that was eternal.

Dannah: That’s Marcia Arnel, and can’t you hear the prison doors opening? For Marcia, freedom in Christ meant freedom from addiction. She had a new passion in life: glorifying God with her life, with her body.

I’m Dannah Gresh, and you’re listening to Revive Our Hearts Weekend. 

Today we’re sharing stories that showcase the grace of God, to bring us out of bondage to sin and self, and into freedom in Christ. 

This is something we get to see a lot at True Girl—that’s the ministry I lead for eight–tweleve year-old girls and their moms. My heart beats for these girls to identify the lies they are believing and to find the truth in God’s Word that will set them free. When we do a live event or online Bible study, we invite the girls to write to us to tell us their freedom stories! And they do. They tell us how studying God’s Word has helped them overcome lies about sin, lies about friendship, lies about . . . well, even difficult topics like gender. Yes, sadly, these sweet young girls are believing what they’re hearing about that. But we believe they can know the truth and it will set them free—and not just for a day or a week but for a lifetime.

I want you to meet Elaiyna Schwarskop! She believed lies about her beauty. And she was on a pathway that increased the likelihood of experiencing an eating disorder by ten-fold! But, God had a better plan! This is Elaiyna’s freedom story told by her and her mom, Jennifer.

Elaiyna: Of course, the dream of every little girl is to become a prima ballerina. I thought the ballerinas were so beautiful with all their lines, their pretty costumes, and of course, the glitter. I wanted to be just like them.

Jennifer: It seems like Elaiyna was always meant for the stage from the time she was little. I remember her being a toddler, and she put her tiny little hands in the air and went, "I danch." (sic)

She spun around in this little circle. She would go and pick her favorite songs and put them in her little CD player. Then she would come out and do little ballets for us all the time. It was the cutest. Performing, singing, dancing, acting has been a part of her life since she could move, speak, sing.

Elaiyna: I wanted to really learn how to dance well, so my parents transferred me to a pre-professional company, and it was intense! We were there for hours every single day with people who were training to become prima ballerinas.

The pressure started, really, as soon as I went to the pre-professional company. The girls there took everything so seriously, and so did the teachers. It was really scary, honestly, as an eleven year old, to know that my friends were making themselves sick or doing awful things to themselves in order to fit this image that the world told them they needed to look like. It scared me as kid. Like, "Does that need to be me too?"

Jennifer: We started noticing those pressures in second grade, third grade—they were little.

Elaiyna: There's not way to really tell people the feeling about being a dancer and constantly looking at yourself in the mirror. You are overanalyzing ever single dance move, every line, every inch of your body. You are comparing it to every other person in that room. There's always pressure to be better. There's pressure to be thinner, to be stronger, to be shorter. It was a lot growing up and having all these things coming at me all at the same time. I didn't know what to do about it. I had to figure out how to be "me" in that kinds of a world.

Jennifer: My sister-in-law is the one who introduced me True Girl. We came up with a plan because we do a lot of things together with our girls since they are the same age and are best friends. We both wanted to raise our daughters in Jesus and show them their worth in Jesus. We knew this event could be the very thing to combat those outside world pressures.

Elaiyna: It was one of my favorite nights in my childhood. There were bright colors and sparkles. They were able to deliver such important messages in such a beautiful, sparkly way, that I couldn't forget about them. Like, every time I saw someone in a sequin jacket or I saw confetti, I thought of True Girl. And when I thought of True Girl, I thought of those messages.

The one that stuck out to me the most was about personal beauty. That one really hit home. I was right in the thick of when all of those things started to overwhelm me. Hearing that God loved me because I was me and I was His—not because of how I looked, not because of the pretty turns I was able to do, not because of how skinny or tall or short. He loved me because I was His.

Dannah: Elaiyna was and is His! That’s one ballerina who was not a statistic to the nightmare of body image issues and eating disorders! Elaiyna was set free from the lies she was believing so that was not her fate! This year, Elaiyna, the one time little girl who found God’s truth at a True Girl event spent the year in the True Girl tour bus passing on the truth of God as a worship leader on my team! 

Do you struggle with body image issues? I want to read you the verse Elaiyna heard all those years ago at our live event. It’s Ephesians 2:10, which reads, “For we are God’s masterpiece. He has created us anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago.” 

You are Christ’s masterpiece. He created you anew in Jesus! Why? So you can do the good things he planned for us long ago. Here’s what I want you to hear in the story Elaiyna shared: people who have been set free, go on to set others free. Long ago, Christ planned for Elaiyna to share the gospel with little girls, but first she had to believe the truth that she was His masterpiece.

If you feel trapped, in the prison of your own temptations or sins, remember, there is hope. There’s a way you and I can receive freedom in Christ. Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, Mary Kassian, and I talked about that not too long ago. Let’s listen. We were talking about Mary’s book The Right Kind of Strong. Oh, and if you have little ones listening in, you might want to busy them elsewhere, because some of what is shared is for adults.

Nancy: I’m just thinking of Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress and how comes out of the City of Destruction and he's heading towards the Celestial City. He's got this burden on his back and he's stooped down, and he's bowed down. He just wants to get rid of it. Until he gets to the cross, until he gets to Christ, this is just something that weighs him down. He can never be free, and when it rolls off at the cross, he is just so free. 

I think that sometimes we think, Well, I became a Christian back in whatever year so I am free from my sin. But then we let sins and the burden of sin pile back up on us when we are supposed to be free from it. This is a really important thing to first realize sin does weigh us down.

Mary Kassian: It does. It’s not just the sin, it’s the guilt and the shame that accompanies the sin. The whole burden of it that’s so dark and so oppressive and so heavy. Those are things that we are to not be carrying around. We’re to rid ourselves of that by running to the cross and dealing with our sin and our shame and our guilt through the discipline of confession.

Nancy: I think that there are physiological and mental and emotional ailments, not all of them by any means, but some of them are just the consequences of not dealing with the burden of sin. Carrying it instead of getting rid of it. So before we can confess it, confess it really implies you acknowledging that you have it. You’re not pretending it’s not there and it doesn’t matter. 

Mary: That’s why it is so important to talk about sin. All of us are sinners. We are forgiving and made righteous when we come to Jesus. So positionally, we are in good standing, we are in right standing with Him, but we deal with sin on an ongoing basis. It does weigh us down, and it does burden us. 

I think of a woman that I met. She came to me, and she began to share some things after a conference. She started to share about a sin that she had never told anyone about. Now, she had confessed it to God. She knew that intellectually she had been forgiven. 

Her story was that she was a pastor’s daughter. Her mom and dad when she went off to college just said be very careful who you date and don’t go out to bars. But she met this guy, and she went out. She thought that she would be able to witness to him and be able to share the gospel. 

Dannah: Missionary dating.

Mary: Missionary dating. She ended up meeting him at a bar and unbeknownst to her, during that evening he slipped a date rape drug in her drink. She woke up the next morning disoriented and didn’t know what had happened. She didn’t even know for sure that anything had happened. She woke up in her own bed, but was just totally disoriented. 

Well, fast-forward a few weeks, and she found out she was pregnant. She thought, How can I even tell my Bible study group of girls that I am discipling? I am a leader in the community here, in the Christian community. How can I even tell them what happened and what I did? So she went quietly and without telling anyone, she had an abortion. 

So when she met me, she said, “I have dealt with being sinned against.” Because that was a terrible thing that she was raped and she was sinned against in a terrible way. She had dealt with that and all the consequences and gone through some counseling. But she still had not told anyone about the abortion because, “That was my choice. The sin against me was out of my control.” 

Dannah: Had she talked to God about that? 

Mary: She had talked to God about that, and she had confessed. She said, “I have confessed every evening, every day for eight years.” 

Dannah: I know that that's where I was every day.

Mary: Heavy. Heavy. Heavy. Every day she was confessing telling God about it all the time. I said, “Let’s just spend some time . . . I know you have confessed, but I want you to confess here with me as I am listening as your witness. I want you to pray and ask the Lord for forgiveness, and I am going to fight with you.” Now, God had forgiven her. I am sure he forgave her the very first time she asked, but she had the guilt and the shame.

Dannah: He wanted to heal her.

Mary: He wanted to heal her. James 5:16 says, “Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective” (NIV). So she had confessed to God, but she had never openly confessed. She had never gone to the community or had people fight with her for the release of that heavy, heavy burden in her life. We began to pray. It was one of those moments when I could just sense the Holy Spirit being present. She prayed. She confessed, and then I took her. When she finished, she was sobbing and looking down at the ground. I took her chin and I lifted it up, and I looked her directly in the eyes. I said, “You have been forgiven." She had been forgiven. But she needed to hear that.

She needed to bring her sin out into the light so that she could be released from the burden and the guilt of it. There's something about that open confession. I was able to pray with her. I prayed the truth of Scripture over her. I must have prayed for at least two–three hours, just praying the truth of the Word of God into her life.

Dannah: It takes time, sometimes, to have the process of repentance and confession.  

Nancy: Also, to realize that there is a vertical and a horizontal dimension in confession. Vertical, that’s roof off—that's with God. And there's horizontal—the walls down with others. I know Dannah, for you as you grappled with the sin of your teenage years some moral sin and failure you had confessed to God, there was the vertical. 

Dannah: Almost every day. 

Nancy: But it was a while into your marriage before you let down the walls to share that with your husband.

Dannah: Yes, in fact, that was the night I heard a session like this. It is what gave me the hope to believe I could stop being weighed down by it every single day, thinking about it every single day.

I went home and I told my husband, who bless his heart, thought he married the driven snow (because my convictions for purity were so strong by the time I met him) . . . He held me. I confessed, and he held me. You know what? I think that felt like the arms of Jesus around me. 

Sometimes we need to be the hands and feet of Jesus for someone. When he said, “I don’t think I need to tell you I forgive you from me, but I think you need to hear it. I think you need to hear that you are forgiven.” 

That was revolutionary in my spiritual life. It was months until I told my mom, but she said what happened? My mom had been praying her whole life for me. She saw the sadness.

Nancy: She saw the change.

Dannah: She saw the heaviness, the burden, and now she saw a lightness and a happiness and the joy.

Nancy: That’s like Christain getting to the cross in Pilgrim’s Progress. I’m just burdened right now for us to stop and pray. Mary, I want you to pray. We’re just going to join hands here with these women. If there is a woman listening right now who is burdened, would you just pray truth over her, that God would just release her for that burden through confession.

Mary: Heavenly Father, I pray for the woman who is listening who is just feeling the weight. Even as we speak, she is feeling the weight of her sin. She is feeling guilt. She is feeling shame. 

Father, there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. You have released us from the necessity to bear our sin. You have borne our sin. The weight and the shame of that You have taken that away. 

I pray for the woman now that she will understand that You forgive our sins. You are faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us, to lift that burden, to lift that weight. So Father, I pray for her that she may have the courage to bring her sin into the light with a trusted brother or sister, with her brother perhaps being her husband or a sister in Christ with whom she is able to confess to, so that she may be prayed for and may experience the freedom—the absolute freedom—that comes from understanding that our sins are gone in the name of Jesus, amen.

Nancy: Amen.

Dannah: Amen! If you’d like to understand more about how Jesus can set you free from your slavery to sin, here’s what I want you to do. Get on your phone or computer, and look up ReviveOurHearts.com/GoodNews. Read through that clear, helpful presentation of the gospel. 

And if Jesus has set you free, would you let me know about it? Go to ReviveOurHearts.com, scroll down to the bottom, and click where it says “Contact Us” You can leave a message there. Let me know what God used to show you your need for a Savior, and how He drew you to Himself. 

I’d love to hear from you. Send me a message through the Contact Us link at ReviveOurHearts.com.

This month is a big deal at Revive Our Hearts, because it’s our big push to end our ministry year financially strong. Donations have been lower than expected, really since last fall. So if this program has ministered to your heart, would you consider making a donation to Revive Our Hearts? We’d love to hear from you, and we have a thank-you gift to share with you, as well. To give, go to ReviveOurHearts.com, and click where it says “Donate.”

Today we heard Freedom stories to give you hope. Next week, we’ll have some fun. We’re going to laugh. The Bible says laughter is good medicine. So our hope is that you’ll experience fullness of joy to give you strength. 

Thanks for listening today. I’m Dannah Gresh. We’ll see you next time for Revive Our Hearts Weekend.

This program is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan, calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

 

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