Women of the Word

Leslie Basham: Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth says the Bible is more than just an add-on to your life.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: My faith cannot survive without substantial, consistent infusion of the Word into my heart, and neither can your faith survive without that kind of infusion of the Word.

Leslie: This is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of A Place of Quiet Rest, for Thursday, June 14, 2018.

At the True Woman conferences over the years, Nancy has led the gathering in affirming important statements in the True Woman Manifesto.

Nancy: We will be women of the Word, seeking to grow in our knowledge of the Scripture and to live in accord with sound doctrine in every area of our lives. (Women responded with, “Yes, Lord!”)

Leslie: Nancy will show us what it means to be the women of the Word described in that statement. It’s part of the series, "The True Woman Manifesto: Declarations, Part 1."

Nancy: One of the great things about the Internet is that it enables us to send this message of Revive Our Hearts and True Woman in places all around the world where they could never get the radio program and might not have any of our books. It’s exciting to hear from some of those women who are connecting via the Internet.

Not long ago we heard from a woman who’s living in another country. She’s actually an American, but she began interacting with one of our bloggers at TrueWoman.com, the True Woman blog. Through the course of the next several weeks, God opened this woman’s eyes and heart and granted her repentance and faith. About a year ago, she gave her heart to Christ and was just beautifully converted.

Several weeks later, after she’d just been saved, she sent an email to the woman on our team that she’d been corresponding with. She said,

I’ve just been reading the Bible online and printing out certain sections, but I’d really like to have a whole copy that I can actually hold in my hands. I went online to find one to purchase and found that the selection and variety of Bibles is more overwhelming than standing in the cereal aisle of a U.S. grocery store. So many choices.

So the woman who had been communicating with her sent her a Bible, and this lady’s response was:

What a thrill it is to have a Bible!!! I stayed up way too late last night reading mine. It’s a whole different thing when you get to hold a whole copy of it in your hands and read continuously (without Internet lapses, slow connections, etc). Thank you so much.

Now, fast forward eight months from the time she received her first Bible, which was just weeks after she’d been saved. More recently she was asked by a group of unbelievers in her community to lead a study so that they could learn more about her faith.

She wrote to ask for prayer for that, and she said,

I am not a public speaker. I am so not equipped for something like this. [And then the line that struck me.] I’ve only read the Bible through twice, and have never even been to a church that believes the Bible.

So here’s a baby Christian who has in the first eight months of her Christian life (the first part of that with online), has read through the Bible twice.

As we’re looking at the True Woman Manifesto, we are affirming things we believe and then declaring our desire and intent to live lives that reflect those beliefs. We’ve looked at the importance of loving the Lord God with all our hearts. We looked at the last session at being women who yield control to Christ as Lord. We say, “Yes, Lord.”

Today we come to the third, “We will” statement in the True Woman Manifesto:

We will be women of the Word, seeking to grow in our knowledge of Scripture and to live in accord with sound doctrine in every area of our lives.

Women of the Word . . . growing in our knowledge of Scripture . . . and living in accordance with the Scripture in every area of our lives. I think that for some it might be easy to hear this and other statements in this Manifesto and think, “Oh, this is one more thing I have to do.”

You wouldn’t say that out loud, but sometimes it goes through your mind, “This is one more thing. My life is so busy I hardly have time to sleep at night, and now you tell me there’s one more thing: I’ve got to be this woman who’s living in the Word; I’m growing in my knowledge of the Word; I've got to read it through twice every eight months.”

I didn’t say that, but you do notice when you’re hungry for something, you’ll find a way to get it.

But let me just remind us that being women of the Word is far more than a duty. Think about what the Word is and what it’s likened to in the Scriptures . . . some of the metaphors for God’s Word that you find in the Word of God. For example, we read that:

• The Word of God is food, and it is drink. It’s bread; it’s water; it’s milk; it’s meat. What does food do? It sustains life. It nourishes. It satisfies. It brings refreshment.
• The Word of God is the source of our life. You will starve without the Word of God.
• The Word of God is likened unto a light. You will be lost without the Word of God. Psalm 119: “Your Word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” (v. 105).
• “The entrance of Your words give light; it gives understanding to the simple” (Ps. 119:130 NKJV). God’s Word as light gives us direction; it gives us wisdom, discernment, perspective. It’s a blueprint for life as a true woman of God.
• It’s a guide book. It will give you direction.

If you don’t know the Word of God, you won’t know what to say “Yes, Lord” to. In fact, you may be saying “yes” to some things that are not God’s will for your life if you don’t know the Word of God.

The Word of God is how you get to know God. Let me say that you will never know God any better than how well you know His Word. If you want to know God, you have to get to know His Word. It is light.

God’s Word will protect you from sin. Not only will you starve without it and get lost without it, you will sin without God’s Word. You can count on it. It’s a protection. It sanctifies. It cleanses. It washes our hearts.

Many mornings as I open God's Word, I pray from the psalms, "Open my eyes that I may behold wonderful things in your law. Give me understanding and I will keep your law and obey it with all my heart. Show me your ways oh Lord, teach me your paths. Guide me in your truth and teach me. You are God my Savior and my hope is in you all day long. That which I see not, teach thou me. If I've done iniquity, I will do no more. Would you wash me with your Word. Keep me from sin. Cleanse me from sin."

God’s Word guards our hearts and our minds. You will be vulnerable without the Word of God. You will be like a city without walls, a city without defense, without protection from rogue emotions and wrong ways of thinking if your life is not being guarded and directed and protected by the Word of God.

The Word of God renews your mind. You will be foolish without its input in your life.

The bottom line is that my faith cannot survive without substantial, consistent infusion of the Word into my heart, and neither can your faith survive without that kind of infusion of the Word.

If we’re not women of the Word, we’re going to be women of the world.

If we’re women of the Word, we will be wise women. If we’re women of the world, we will be foolish, wild women.

Do you want to be a woman of the Word? Or do you want to be a woman of the world?

What is shaping your worldview? What shapes your perspective on life? What shapes your responses to life? Is it television? Movies? Magazines? Novels? Friends?

I am astounded over and over again when I see how familiar with contemporary entertainment so many Christians are. They know the names of popular songs. They watch popular TV shows—don’t miss a week of ______ (I won’t say what they are). I’m not saying necessarily that there’s anything wrong with some of those shows and songs, though you may want to evaluate it through the grid of Scripture.

My bigger concern is that they’re more tapped into, more connected to the world’s way of thinking than they are to the Bible. They can’t name the Ten Commandments or the twelve apostles or the Beatitudes, but they know all the popular heroes and celebrities and stars and models. They know People magazine better than they know the people in God’s Word.

What’s going to be the result of that? Essentially, they’re going to live secular lives, not true lives based on the truth of God’s Word.

A Christian leader in Britain said that,

More than 200 million people have no access to spiritual food, with no Scriptures in their own language. [That’s a tragedy if you think about that.] Yet we in the West, despite owning more Bibles per household than we will ever use, are slowly starving to death because we have lost our appetite for Scripture. (Krish Kandiah, director at the Evangelical Alliance, UK)

We’re a generation that is perpetually plugged into Facebook, X-Box, 3-D movies. You open the Word and begin to read it, and your eyes glaze over because it’s not entertaining enough. It doesn’t stimulate us and scintillate us the way that these things of the world do. We don’t think that the Word is really satisfying, really filling, rejuvenating, replenishing. That’s why we turn to other things, trying to fill those empty places in our lives.

So we fill our lives with entertainment, and in the process we lose our appetite for substantive food—like your kids eating candy before eating dinner. You spoil your appetite. It’s not that the candy is better for you than the dinner, it’s just that it dulls your hunger so you’re not really hungry for the good stuff.

We need to cultivate hunger by eating the Word of God. Sometimes we need to disconnect from the things of this world that are filling us that we think are so satisfying. They really aren’t—like cotton candy. You’re satisfied for about thirty seconds, and then you’re hungry again. But you start to fill your heart with God’s Word, and you’ll find it really does truly satisfy.

We want to be women who are growing in our knowledge of Scripture, it says at this point of the True Woman Manifesto. That suggests that knowing God’s Word is not a static thing, but that we’re always increasing, making progress in our knowledge of God’s Word.

I’ve been reading the Bible for more than forty-five years now, since I could first read. I don’t know how many times I’ve read it through from cover to cover, many, many times, scores of times. But it’s amazing how often I would come to a passage and think, I don’t remember ever reading that before. Now, I have, but it hits me in a new way, or I had just never stopped to think about it before.

Then I come to passages that are extremely familiar, passages I’ve memorized, I’ve taught on, but I come to them with a fresh heart, fresh eyes, fresh longing for God, meditating on them, and God opens up whole new aspects of His Word even in those very familiar passages.

So I want to be, until I face the Lord, a woman who is continually growing in my knowledge of His Word.

In fact, when I was eighteen years old, I was with my family on a missions trip in Haiti. We were sitting in the back of a little, black churches in Haiti, on hard, wood benches. My dad leaned over to me and whispered, as only Art DeMoss might do, "Honey, what are your fifty year goals?"

I confess that at the age of eighteen, I had not given a whole lot of thought to my fifty year goals. But I did at that point over the next weeks sit down and wrote out, "If the Lord gives me until I'm sixty-eight, what things do I want to be true of my life."

One of those goals was that I would be able to teach any part of the Bible in a way that would be pleasing to the Lord. 

Now, at that point, I could not have taught much of it. Even parts I have taught since then I'd like to go back and re-teach because I've learned more. But it's been neat to have that as a guiding goal for my life. I want to know God's Word—not just so I could teach it, but so I can know God.

So are you growing in the knowledge of God's Word?

My vocation, which is teaching the Word, gives me a lot of opportunities to do that. But listen, growing in your knowledge of God’s Word is not just for Bible teachers. It’s for every believer. This is God’s Word, and we want to be growing in our knowledge and our understanding of Scripture.

How well do you know the Word? What are you doing to grow in your knowledge of God’s Word? Do you read it, for starters? Do you study it? Do you meditate on it? Do you memorize it? Are you too busy to spend a lot of time in God's Word?

The fact is, we have time for DVDs. We have time for computer games. We have time for Facebook. We have time to exercise. We have time to socialize. We have time for the things that matter to us. If growing in your knowledge of God’s Word matters to you, then you will find a way to do it, although it will likely mean saying “no” to some other things that are less important.

I think of Mary and Martha there with Jesus visiting in their home. Martha is frantically preparing the meal—not a bad thing to be preparing the meal—but her sister has carved out time to sit at the feet of Jesus and listen to His Word. It takes sacrifices. You say, “Okay, family, you’re not going to eat anymore. Nancy DeMoss said I need to sit and listen to Jesus speak His Word.” (Laughter)

Listen, priorities and the will of God never conflict. If you will use the time you have to study God’s Word, He will help other priorities fall into place.

We want to not only be growing in our understanding and knowledge of God’s Word, but as true women we also want to live in accordance with God’s Word in every area of our lives. It’s not enough to know it. We need to live it, because all of God’s Word, all doctrine has implications for life. This is true; therefore, this is what it should look like in your life.

The book of 2 Timothy was written by the apostle Paul to his young friend Timothy who was serving at the time as the pastor of the church in Ephesus. As you go through 2 Timothy, there are two themes that are recurring. One is the challenge that Paul gives Timothy to study and to live out the Word of God that he had received from Paul, who was his mentor, and from his mother and his grandmother.

So Paul says in chapter 1, verse 13, “Follow the pattern of the sound words that you have heard from me.”

Chapter 2, verse 15: “Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth.”

Chapter 3, verse 14: “Continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work” (vv. 14–17).

So one of the themes through the book of 2 Timothy, Paul says, “Get the Word into your life. Dwell on it. Continue in it. Grow in it. Listen to it. Learn it, and live it.”

It’s not enough to let others feed you the Word of God—your pastor, Christian radio. Thank God for those, but your pastor grows by studying the Word of God so he can feed it to someone else, and that’s how you will grow. Don’t let your pastor spoon feed you. Don’t let this program spoon feed you. You need to get into God’s Word for yourself.

There’s a young woman on our team who is a graduate of a Bible college. As we were talking about this program, she said,

When I was a student, I had the Word coming at me from all directions, but I wish I had spent more time just alone with God, getting to know Him, cultivating a personal relationship with Him, and learning to trust Him, letting His Word get worked into the warp and woof of my daily life.

So Paul says to Timothy, “Get the Word into you and live it out.” And here’s the second thread: “Not only get it into you and into your life, but you also have a responsibility to share with others what you’ve received from your mother, your grandmother, and from the apostle Paul.”

So he says in chapter 2, verse 2: “What you have heard from me, in the presence of many witnesses, entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.”

I would say to some of you who’ve been mentored by Revive Our Hearts over the years . . . I’ve often had women come up to me and say, “You were my spiritual mother. You have mentored me.” Some of those women are older than I am; some are younger than I am. But it’s a privilege to be involved day after day in sharing with you what God is doing in my life, teaching me through His Word.

But don’t let it stop at you. You need to be sharing with others the stewardship, the investment, the deposit that others have placed in your life, the deposit I’ve given you, the deposit your pastor has given you, your parents, Christian education. As you take the Word into your own heart, then you become responsible to share it with others.

Paul says, “I charge you . . . preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching,” chapter 4 of 2 Timothy, verses 1 and 2.

Now, we can read those instructions and tend to think that those just apply to pastors—“After all, I’m not called to preach the Word.” Or we can think that these instructions just apply to Christian leaders or Bible teachers. Let me tell you, there’s a sense in which these instructions apply to every child of God, every servant of Christ. It applies to you. It applies to me. We are to be reproducing in the lives of others the Word of God that has been entrusted to us. Each of us is to pursue serious study of God’s Word and then to pass along what we have learned to others.

So let me make it personal here: Are you taking time to dig deep and to grow in your understanding of God’s Word?

Listen, twelve minutes of Christian radio on your way to work will not do it for you. Thank the Lord for Christian radio, but I sometimes think it’s a little strange that I’m often challenging women on the radio to turn off their radios. (Laughter) But you know what I mean. There has to be times in your life when you do turn everything off and just you and God and His Word, and get to know Him.

And then, are you passing along what you have learned to someone else? Are you pouring into someone else’s life? If not, ask God to open a door. Even in this next week, no matter how old or young you may be, ask Him to open a door where you can share some of what you have learned.

Now, let me just keep reminding us that the only way we can live out these commitments we’re talking about in the True Woman Manifesto is by God’s grace and in humble dependence on the power of His Holy Spirit.

If you don’t remember that, then you will hear a session like this, and you will make all new kinds of resolutions, and you go out and try and do it on your own, and you’ll come up with so many lists about what it looks like to be a woman of the Word.

Listen: devotional life, Bible study—it may not always look the same for you in different seasons of life. You need to fit this concept of becoming a woman of the Word within your framework or season of life. It’s easy to get under the pile and to get on a guilt trip.

For example, it’s great if you can be involved in Bible study with other women, if your church offers that, or through other Bible studies offered in your community, or coming to a recording session like this. But there may be seasons of your life when for a period of time you can’t be in a group study on a regular basis.

If you notice, we don’t have a lot of young moms in these recording sessions because many of those women cannot take a day like this to come and sit under this kind of teaching. So if you’re a mom with small children, Bible study for you may look different than it will for someone else in a different season of life.

If you go to ReviveOurHearts.com, we’ve prepared a list for you of just some practical, creative ways that you can get the Word into your system at different seasons of life: CDs of the Bible, singing or listening to Scripture that has been set to music. We’ve come up with several of those creative and practical ways you can get the Word into you. I would encourage you to go to ReviveOurHearts.com and get that list. 

Then let me just encourage you, as you fellowship with other believers, as you’re engaging with other women, with family members, to talk about what God is doing in your life through His Word. I’m amazed at how many times Christians get together and talk about everything except the Lord, everything except the Word of God.

If you will interact with other believers about what you’re reading in God’s Word, what He’s saying to you, what He’s teaching you, it will increase your hunger and your desire to be in God’s Word on a regular basis.

I was on the phone with a friend last week, and she said to me, “What are you reading in God's Word? We haven’t talked for several weeks. What are you memorizing?”

I got an email from another friend this past week who said, “Do you want to memorize the book of Philippians together?”

My point is: We need to encourage one another to be in God’s Word. “What are you reading? What are you studying? What is God saying to you?”

Jeremiah chapter 9, verse 20: “Hear, O women, the Word of the LORD, and let your ear receive the word of his mouth.”

Oh, Lord, I pray that You would make us women of the Word who are growing in our knowledge and our understanding of Your Word and who are living in accord with sound doctrine in every area of our lives. I pray it in Jesus’ name, amen.

Leslie: “We will be women of the Word.” That statement appears in the True Woman Manifesto, a document you can read at ReviveOurHearts.com.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth has been showing us what being women of the Word is all about. We’d like to help you get to know today’s topic better along with all the topics in our current series, "The True Woman Manifesto: Declarations, Part 1." This week, when you support the ministry of Revive Our Hearts with a gift of any size, we’d like to send you a booklet called A 30-Day Journey Through the True Woman Manifesto.

Let me read you Day 19 of this study as an example of what you’ll experience. It encourages you to “nurture my fellowship and communion with God through prayer—in praise, thanksgiving, confession, intercession, and supplication.” You’ll read several Bible passages that speak to that topic: Psalm 5:2, Philippians 4:6, and 1 Timothy 2:1–2. Then you’ll be invited to make this topic personal by answering these questions: “Am I a woman of prayer? Do I respond to the circumstances and challenges of each day by expressing gratitude for the greatness and mercy of God?” You’ll have room to write your answers and think through these important questions.

Imagine doing this for thirty days. I think your understanding and passion will grow as you seek the Lord through this study. When you support Revive Our Hearts with a gift of any size, you can ask for A 30-Day Journey Through the True Woman Manifesto. The number is 1–800–569–5959, or visit ReviveOurHearts.com.

Do you feel like a great prayer warrior? If not, you’re in great company. Learn how to pray from someone who doesn’t find it very easy. That’s on the next Revive Our Hearts.

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth wants to help you become a woman of the Word. The program is an outreach of Life Action Ministries.

All Scripture is taken from the English Standard Version unless otherwise noted.

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