Seeking Him for Heart Revival

Episode Notes:

This episode was taken from the following programs:

"Seeking Him for Revival"

"Update from Ukraine"

"A Meaningful Teaching Opportunity"

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Dannah Gresh: It’s easy for us to spend time chasing after things the world tells us are important—like physical beauty, health, bigger houses, or ways to be happy. But Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth reminds us what is truly worth pursuing.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: God has something better for us. God has something more for us than all those things we seek apart from Him.

Dannah: Today, we’re talking about seeking God for revival on Revive Our Hearts Weekend.

Welcome to Revive Our Hearts Weekend, I’m Dannah Gresh. 

As Resurrection Sunday approaches, I want to ask you, how’s your heart? I don’t just mean, have you prepared it for Easter, although that is important. But more than that, is your heart focused on seeking Jesus more than anything else? 

You know, churches across the world are celebrating Palm Sunday this weekend. That’s when Jesus entered Jerusalem on a donkey, and people paved the road with their cloaks and palm branches. 

What were they after? They were crying out, “Hosanna! Save us, oh Lord! Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!” 

But here’s the thing: the crowds for the most part were really looking for physical deliverance. They wanted to be rescued from evil government leaders.

Jesus hadn’t come for that kind of salvation. Not this time. No, He came to deliver them—and us— from something else. He would not release them from an oppressive government, but wanted to save them from spiritual enslavement—bondage to sin. 

But they didn’t know that’s what they should be asking for . . . seeking after. I wonder, Are we making the same mistake sometimes? Not realizing that what we need to be investing our hearts in is seeking Jesus?

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth is going to explain a little more about the concept of seeking the Lord, as she takes us to Isaiah chapter 55. It’s an invitation from God, an invitation that I think will speak to your heart today. Here’s Nancy.

Nancy: We all know what it means to “seek.” To look for something that we really want, right? I want you to think of a time when you went on an earnest search for something. Maybe it was a lost child.

I remember I was sitting with a dear friend in her house. We were just having some fellowship and conversation when she realized that she hadn’t seen her two-year-old son for quite a while. So she went looking through the house for him. She was calling, “Jordan, Jordan!” She went outside, “Jordan, Jordan! Where are you?” No Jordan. No sight of him. Soon this search became an earnest search.

She couldn’t find him in the house. We couldn’t find him in the yard. And then this became a desperate search throughout the neighborhood. It involved friends and neighbors and the police until they finally found little Jordan asleep on the ground in the woods next to their house. And then—whew! You moms know what that is! Just this huge sigh of relief, this great joy. They found lost Jordan!

You may have spent hours on the Internet, searching, seeking. Maybe looking for a job. Maybe trying to find a house that was better suited to your growing family’s needs. Maybe looking for a dream vacation. Robert and I have done a little bit of that recently, just searching on the Internet. Would we like to go here? Would we like to go here? Or maybe you’ve searched for a retirement cottage on the lake somewhere. You’ve talked to realtors. You’ve searched.

Or maybe you’re looking for a replacement for an antique piece of china that’s really precious. It’s been in your family for generations, and one of your children dropped it and broke it, and you’re trying to find one just like it. You’re searching.

Or maybe you’ve moved to a new city, and you’re in the middle of a church search. So you’re searching for a place for your family to worship.
You may have spent time on Internet dating sites looking to find a husband.
Or maybe you’ve spent time with an adoption agency seeking to adopt a child that God would want to place in your family.
You may have spent months researching online to find your biological parents.

Or something else. You’ve known what it is to search, to seek, to earnestly long for something.

What we seek, what we search for, reveals what matters to us. And the things that matter most to us, those are the things we search for most earnestly. 

We seek solutions to our problems.
We seek escape from pain.
We seek money, stuff.
We seek marriage—we seek to be out of a marriage, in some cases.
We seek youth.
We seek beauty.
We seek healing in relationships.

And all of these things—some of them good things—but all of these things are insufficient to satisfy the deepest longings of our heart. So if we seek for them, we’re going to be left thirsty. We’re going to be left needy. We’re going to be left poverty stricken.

The joyful news in this passage is that God has something better for us. God has something more for us than all those things we seek apart from Him.

So He says in the second part of verse 2, 

Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear, and come to me; [there it is again!] hear, that your soul may live.

Now, here’s what I see when I read that verse: God is not stingy. He’s not offering us some tiny, little paltry blessings. He’s not putting us on a starvation diet, saying, “Come to Me, and I’ll give you just enough crumbs to keep you from dying.” No! God has rich blessings in store for His people—for you! He wants to fill us up with what is good, to delight us with rich food.

But God says, “If you want the good stuff, if you want your heart filled, if you want your heart revived, if you want joy, if you want peace, if you want to know that you’re right with God, if you want to have this delightful, rich food that is good for you, then you’ve got to be willing to listen. Listen diligently to Me. Listen carefully to Me. Incline your ear.” We’ve got to be willing to incline, to lean into Him, sit on the edge of our seats, incline our hearts to Him, to hear what He has to say, and to come to Him, to move toward Him.

So move down to verse 6. He says, 

Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near.

Seek the Lord . . . seek Him. This has got to be what matters most to us, what we most desire, what we long for, what we’re eager to have, what we’re focused on having. Seek the Lord. Seek the Lord now, because He will not always be found.

Call upon Him now, for He will not always be near. “Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near.” He is near now. He is drawing near to us as we draw near to Him, so seek Him now. Seek Him today. Seek Him tomorrow. Seek Him this week. Seek Him over the course of this study. Seek Him every day for the rest of your life.

Now, as we seek Him, we need to remember that He is holy, and those who want to seek Him, those who want to find Him, have to be willing to turn from anything and everything that is not pleasing to Him.

So in verse 7, He says, 

Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts.

He’s saying, “You’ve got to repent. You’ve got to repent. You’ve got to turn. You’ve got to repent of all sinful ways and thoughts. 

And then it says, “He will have compassion on you, and He will forgive your sins.”

Look at the rest of verse 7: “Let him return to the Lord.” So you’re turning from something. You’re turning from your wicked ways. You’re turning from your unrighteous thoughts. And now you’re returning to the Lord. That’s repentance—turning from and turning to. 

Return to the Lord that He may have compassion on him. Who’s God having compassion on? On this wicked, unrighteous person who was willing to turn from his ways and thoughts and return to the Lord. And it says God will have compassion on him. “And return to our God, for he will abundantly pardon” (v. 7).

So are you thirsty? Are you hungry? Are you needy? Have you been seeking for substitutes that can never satisfy the deepest longings and needs of your heart? Things you hoped would satisfy or fill you, but they haven’t. The invitation to you, to me, to us today is to come to Him, to seek Him, to listen to Him, and to return to Him.

Dannah: I think that reminder from Nancy is one we need pretty often—that Jesus is the only One who could ever satisfy us. All those other things we find ourselves chasing will fall short every single time. 

Friend, I don’t know what you’re chasing today, but God is calling you to return to Him. He’s there with open arms, waiting for you to repent, welcoming you with His compassion and grace. When you experience that grace, it’ll change you, and it’ll change what you ask for and pray for.

I cannot help but think of our friend and Christian broadcaster in Ukraine, Olesia Dmytriieva. Her nation is being attacked. Innocent people are at risk. She has no words to describe what is going on in that war zone, but when I asked her how we could pray for her and the people still in Ukraine, well, she had only one thing she was seeking after. Here’s what Olesia asked us to pray for the Christians in Ukraine:

Olesia Dmytriieva: So please pray for us to trust God as I used to trust my father. I loved my father so dearly. 

I hate swimming, okay? I don’t like water. One day I was eight. It was in Russia, by the way, in the Volga river. My dad was standing, and he said, “Swim to me.” I was touching the land with my feet, and then I understood that I cannot touch with my feet anymore. But Dad said, “You swim to me; I'm here.”

I’m forty now. I remember that feeling of choosing, “Should I trust my dad, or should I trust my fear of this horrible Volga water?” I chose to trust my father. I remember when I touched his hand, I was so happy.

This is what I want to feel. I know that Jesus is standing somewhere; I know that He won’t let us be ashamed, right? Those who trust God with all their hearts will not be ashamed. This is all that I have. If I lose my faith, I will lose everything. So please pray for us to trust the Lord, to touch His invisible hand and to know that everything that is visible will disappear, but the invisible things will be forever.

Dannah: Wow! Olesia didn’t ask me to pray for the war to end or for food and water, though supplies that are running thin, or even to be delivered from harm's way. She asked me to pray that she would have less of a desire for the visible things of this world and more of a desire for the invisible eternal things! Oh, to have a heart that is so seeking after God that whatever comes my way, I just want Him—His hand!

Sometimes I think the Lord takes us through hard times precisely to awaken our desire for the invisible things. To see if we believe in the things this world offers or to find out if we believe in Him and His eternal kingdom. That’s why when the headlines grow dark, I actually grow hopeful. These difficult times usher us into just the kind of experiences that make us call on the name of the Lord in a way that revives us! Our faith is bolstered by adversity, and we figure out what we really believe! Circumstances demand that we decide. And sometimes we experience, well, a resurrection of sorts. 

That’s pretty fitting, since next weekend we’ll be celebrating the most important resurrection—that of Jesus Christ. When He overcame death, He made it possible for you and me, as sinners, to be brought from spiritual death to a state of abundant life. I see such a need in our world to have a hunger to seek after Jesus like that! I see it right here in my own hometown. In fact, I see it in my own ministries—the ones God has entrusted my husband Bob and me to lead.

I recently spoke at the school my husband and I founded. My heart was burning that day . . . for us . . . for my little community . . . to truly experience revival. I awoke early in the morning troubled by the headlines, and I wrote a teaching based on the story of Jesus’ resurrection of Lazurus. I shared it with the students, staff, and faculty of Grace Prep. And God did something amazing that day—a mini-resurrection of our hearts. Students were on their faces before God. I got reports that after I left and had dismissed them, for many hours students were talking and praying for God to revive them. 

I want to share a little bit of that with you right now. If you have your Bible handy and want to turn in it with me, I’ll be reading from John chapter 11, verses 17–45.

Dannah (message):

Now when Jesus came, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. Bethany was near Jerusalem, about two miles off, and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them concerning their brother. So when Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, but Mary remained seated in the house.

Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you.” Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” She said to him, “Yes, Lord; I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world.”

When she had said this, she went and called her sister Mary, saying in private, “The Teacher is here and is calling for you.” And when she heard it, she rose quickly and went to him. Now Jesus had not yet come into the village, but was still in the place where Martha had met him. When the Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary rise quickly and go out, they followed her, supposing that she was going to the tomb to weep there.

Now when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet, saying to him, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled. And he said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus wept. So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!” But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man also have kept this man from dying?”

Then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone lay against it. Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days.” Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?” So they took away the stone. And Jesus lifted up his eyes and said, “Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this on account of the people standing around, that they may believe that you sent me.” When he had said these things, he cried out with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out.” The man who had died came out, his hands and feet bound with linen strips, and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.” Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what he did, believed in him;

God let Lazurus die. He could have stopped it . . . He didn't. I believe He allowed Lazarus to die because he wanted Martha and Mary and the others to experience the power of His resurrection. Because when we experience resurrection, we change! Everything changes!

I want to ask a simple question: What needs resurrection? When you look around at our world today, what needs resurrection? Something that's dead, right?Something that's dead needs resurrection.

I've got to tell you something: I think we need resurrection! I don't think we are living like we believe like we know the Resurrection and the Life.

What if everything we’re going through right now, what if all of it was so that you could experience resurrection? As I look at this, I see that Martha wanted Him to be her comfort. She did not expect Him to be her resurrection. She wanted Jesus to comfort her.

She had all the knowledge of the prophets in her head. When she says, "I know that he will rise again on the resurrection day," that's proving that she read the scrolls. She had heard the scrolls read, rather, at that time and age. She's heard the prophecies read; she knows what they say. I was in her head.

Here's the thing: this good church-going (if I could call her that) woman had a form of religion, but she didn't have the fullness of an understanding that she a resurrector for a Savior. She didn't know that yet; she just wanted to be comforted.

He didn't come to comfort her; He came to bring her life. He came to change everything! 

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?”

There’s that question. “Do you believe this!”

I’m asking you today: “Do you believe this?”

Today, we’re plagued by the desire for God to comfort us. We're good; we want comforting. We don't expect God to be involved in the minute details of our everyday life. We are just like Martha.

I'm asking you today, "Do you believe? Or are you treating God as Martha did as if His time is not now?" That's what she was doing. She was treating Him as if His time is not now. 

We treat Him that way, as if we have Him in our back pocket just in case we need Him. He's right there, just in case we need Him. But for now, we live in our trauma, we stay in our pain, we accept whatever it is as reality . . . without calling on the Resurrection and the Life to bring what is dead back into a revived state of power.

“Do you believe this!?”

Some of you are treating Jesus as if His time is not now. You are sinning freely, callously, rebelliously, pridefully. We just keep sinning. And at the end of the day, we have dead hearts, dead souls, dead minds. We're numbed by something we thought would satisfy but at the end of the day, did they, really? "It never worked for me." We're dead.

But Jesus says, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live . . . Do you believe this?”

Dannah: Maybe right now in the pain and hardship you’re experiencing, Jesus is poising your heart for a resurrection. He can resurrect your dead heart and give you full and abundant life in Him—even if your circumstances do not change! And that abundant life is not only for now, here on earth, but for eternity. Eternal life!

Jesus’ resurrection gives us a reason to celebrate. And while we should be shouting hallelujah every day of our lives, Lenten season—the days leading up to Easter Sunday—is a special time for us to consider the significance of both the cross and the resurrection.

How can we make these days before Resurrection Sunday more meaningful? Barbara Rainey and Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth have some ideas to help us get our focus in the right place.

Barbara Rainey: I feel strongly that the resurrection needs to be a grand, glorious, wonderful celebration not with parties, not with gifts like we do at Christmas and all of that. But somehow we have to capture the importance of the resurrection in our own lives and in our families and in our culture as believers instead of just sailing right on by it with a little bit different service on Easter Sunday morning, but that’s all.

To me the Lenten season is a wonderful time as a family to teach your children about the long prophesied Christ who then came and gave His life and rose from the dead on Easter Sunday. It’s a wonderful teaching opportunity. It’s a great time to mark those days and to anticipate what Easter is all about.

Nancy: Yes, in the course of ministry, my own heart can get so easily distracted, focused on just my daily tasks and life and what’s going on. It’s so great to have these seasons and these holy days in our rhythm, in our annual calendar, where we recalibrate, and we remind ourselves who we are and whose we are and who Jesus is and why He came.

That’s actually a concept. The celebration and marking of those holy days is something you find in the Old Testament as a really important part of the Jewish worship.

Barbara: Yes. God gave the Jewish people a season of celebrations that He wanted them to mark every year, year after year after year after year. I think it’s because He knows us. He knows how prone we are to wander. He knows how quickly we forget Him and who He is and what He has done. 

We are no different today. We don’t celebrate the same feasts and the same holidays that the Jewish people did, but we have Christmas and we have Easter. And in America, we have Thanksgiving. We have opportunities to turn our eyes back to the King of the universe and to focus on Him.

Nancy: I’m thinking about the Old Testament Passover. That’s such an important foundational piece for our celebration of Holy Week and Easter. If you go back to the origin of Passover in Exodus 12 and 13, God says to His people, “Remember this day in which you came out from Egypt, out of the house of slavery, for by a strong hand the LORD brought you out from this place” (13:3).

There’s a whole celebration, a whole observance of Passover that God spelled out the symbols and meal and days of observance. 

Then I love this part. This is a family occasion—not only the first Passover but every successive annual celebration. It says when you’re having this meal and you’re doing these symbols and you’re reminding yourselves what happened, when your children say to you, “What do you mean by this service? What’s this all about? You shall say it is a sacrifice of the Lord’s Passover for He passed over the houses of the people of Israel in Egypt when He struck the Egyptians but spared our houses" (see 13:3–16). This becomes a teaching tool.

Barbara: It’s a powerful teaching tool. And what’s so wonderful about that story is that story is all about Christ. And yet, how many children know that the Passover is really about Jesus? In fact, we know that all of the Old Testament is about Jesus. It all points to Jesus. It all points to His coming at Christmas in the incarnation, and it points to His sacrifice on the cross.

That’s what I love about the Lenten season. It’s an opportunity to teach your children who He is and why Easter is important.

Nancy: And an opportunity to teach it in the context of the whole biblical story. Sometimes when we come to Holy Week or Easter, we just read the passages from the Gospels, wonderful as they are, and from the Epistles that relate to the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ. Those are powerful, wonderful passages we need to know. But those all have a backdrop in the Old Testament context of the whole redemptive story that most adults don’t know. Most Christian adults aren’t aware of it, much less our children, and we need to know the whole of the story.

There were stories about Jesus sprinkled all throughout the Old Testament and when we see how all of those link together and how they lead us up to where Christ actually came, it makes the wonder of His story, it makes the wonder of the gospel story that much more amazing that God was orchestrating all of this, and so many didn’t see it, so many didn’t know it. But we can look at that during the Lenten season.

It prepares our hearts to celebrate Easter in a much fuller, a much more enlightened way than we would have previously. It gives us an opportunity to teach our children the truth of the Old Testament which they, many of them, probably don’t know.

As we approach the season of Lent, it’s a wonderful time for families to do something together of meaning, to help prepare their hearts for Easter. What better way to do it than to trace this mystery of who the Messiah would be through the Old Testament. Then when we get to Holy Week (the week that celebrates the Resurrection), we’ve got all this context that leads up to this momentous occasion.

This is exactly the build-up that God intended in the Old Testament. I think we somehow miss the sense of wonder of what it means. 

Barbara: We haven’t lost just the sense of wonder, but the sense of anticipation. 

But if we’ll take those six weeks of Lent and go back and pretend we don’t know the answer to the story, and then as a family we read the verses and we read the story of the Passover and story of building the temple and the story of Abraham and Isaac, when we get to Easter, we’ve built this great sense of anticipation for Holy Week, for Resurrection Sunday.

Therefore, the celebration at Easter is much more important. It’s much more meaningful; it’s much more as it should be. When we’ve taken the time to prepare our hearts and to prepare ourselves to celebrate the Resurrection.

Nancy: When we realize that God sent His Son to die, which is what we observe during Holy Week—the death of Christ, the trial, the accusation, the crucifixion of Christ for our sins (the Scripture tells us He died for our sins)—and then we realize because He is God, death could not keep Him its victim, its prey, so He was raised from the dead.

What a victory! Not only for Christ, but for us! We are raised in newness of life, and that means we can have victory over sin and death and Satan and hell. It’s not even Easter yet, and I’m really getting excited about this! Thank you, Barbara!

Barbara: Me, too! Part of the wonder is that all of that (everything you just said) was prophesied in the Old Testament, and we overlook that too much. But when we know where it is and what it says, it makes the celebration as it was intended to be—the high point of the year, the high point of the Christian calendar. It's the high point of our lives, to celebrate the Resurrection.

Dannah: I’m getting just as excited about Easter as Barbara Rainey and Nancy! Maybe you are, too? 

I hope your heart has been moved today. Perhaps you've known that experience of personal revival, but you’ve grown numb. Maybe you can sense God calling you to turn away from something in your life, to repent and run to Him. 

Can I just encourage you . . . don’t wait! Take some time out of your schedule today and seek the Lord. Take Him up on His invitation to come to Him. 

When we put Jesus in His rightful place in our hearts, suddenly everything else in this world doesn’t seem to matter as much. It’s not that it doesn’t matter. It’s just not first in our hearts and lives. 

If you need to be reminded that God’s kingdom matters more than the kingdoms of this world, I want to invite you to come to a special weekend where you could experience the revival you need. I’m talking about our conference True Woman ’22, September 22–24. The theme is “Heaven Rules.” 

Through powerful messages, breakout sessions, worship, and more, you’ll be reminded that God is always on His throne. Whether you join us in person in Indianapolis or on the livestream, you’ll learn how to let God’s peace and strength rule in your heart. 

Registration is now open, so don’t wait! If you sign up before May 1, you’ll receive your ticket at a discounted price. Just visit our website, ReviveOurHearts.com to sign up or find out more. You can also give us a call at 1-800-569-5959, or go to ReviveOurHearts.com/weekend and click on today’s episode. It’s called "Seeking Him for Heart Revival." 

I hope you have a great weekend celebrating Palm Sunday. Join us next weekend for a special Easter edition of Revive Our Hearts Weekend. 

Thanks for listening today. Thanks to our team: Phil Krause, Micayla Brickner, Blake Bratton, Rebekah Krause, Justin Converse, Michelle Hill, and for Revive Our Hearts Weekend, I’m Dannah Gresh

Revive Our Hearts calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

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