Leslie Basham: We’re all tempted to blame others when things go wrong; but according to Anne Ortlund, we tend to do the opposite when things go right.
Anne Ortlund: And our ego keeps wanting to take the credit. Well, if we will just take the blame instead and give God the credit, we will be on the way to the sweetest, most powerful life that we could possibly live.
Today is Tuesday, February 24; and this is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss. Today we are going to hear about a book that every woman needs to read. You can get a copy by visiting ReviveOurHearts.com. Here’s Nancy to introduce the book and our guest.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Our guest this week is Anne Ortlund who many of you know as an author and a speaker. God has used her life in a very significant way over many years. She is a wife, the mother of four, she was at one time, well, I was going to say she was my pastor’s wife; she’s still the wife of the man who used to be my pastor. She and Ray Ortlund have been married for 56 years. Anne, welcome back to Revive Our Hearts. Thank You for sharing in this week with us.
Anne Ortlund: Well, thank you for letting me do it, Nancy.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: We’re offering this week, all this week on the program, a book that is really a compilation of three of your best-selling books. The compilation is called The Gentle Ways of the Beautiful Woman: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Beauty.
I’ve been reviewing this book again this morning and it is so practical but it is also so inspirational. In fact, I was reading it in preparation for our conversation more quickly than I would like to. I’m going to go back and read it more carefully because it’s so filled with rich insights about what it means to be a woman of God. It combines the works that you wrote Disciplines of the Beautiful Woman, Disciplines of the Heart, and Disciplines of the Home.
We were talking yesterday about some of the external disciplines: of our schedule, our closets and the clutter in our lives. But really to have a disciplined environment, it needs to begin with a disciplined heart. You talk about having a serene heart. I have to tell you, Anne, that there are days when I think I’m not even sure what that word “serene” means. You challenge us about the danger of becoming what you call “gray Christians.” Tell us what you mean by that.
Anne Ortlund: Blah, dull, mediocre, average. When we say those words, the listener is saying “Oh, I don’t want to be that, surely God made me for more than that.” That’s dead right. I think many times women are so frustrated and upset and stressed because they feel they are not in control. Well whoever said they should be in control? They need to surrender to the Lord and let Him be in control. I think the sovereignty of God is the most comforting doctrine that I know.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: But it’s humbling, too, because it says, “I’m not in control.”
Anne Ortlund: Exactly and if we will deliberately relax and yield and say, “Lord, not my will but Thine be done” for the first time the burden will be off of us. We’re not trying to play God after all and we can let Him be God and to take over what we cannot do. And then His strong hand of power will be on us to work in us and through us and be with us. Oh, it makes all the difference.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: You know I remember a good friend, and it takes a good friend to say something like this, saying to me at one point over some series of circumstances in my life, I can’t even remember what now but at the moment it seemed so overwhelming and I was just ticking off all these things that were stressing me out and she just said very calmly on the phone, “Remember, Nancy, you’re not God.”
You know it took me back for a moment. But I needed to hear that. Of course I know I’m not God, but I was acting for the moment as if I kind of was God. You know I was kind of trying to control this and fix that and change that. And, as a result, I lost my peace; there was no calm or order in my heart. But when I stop and say, “God, You are God and You don’t make mistakes”¦"
Anne Ortlund: The reason it is hard for us to surrender to Him, I think, is this matter of ego. We’ve got to wrestle that to the ground. There is a chapter in here that says that we are both weak and wicked.
Until we realize that"¦let me give you an illustration"¦this little book tells about a woodpecker who was just pecking away on his tree and nothing was happening. Suddenly a bolt of lightning struck that tree; split it straight down the middle to the ground and he discovered that he’d been blown off that tree like 20 feet away.
He picked himself him and he said, “I didn’t know I could do it.” Our ego keeps wanting to take the credit. Well, if we will just take the blame instead and give God the credit, we will be on the way to the sweetest, most powerful life that we could possibly live. That’s really how you define “meekness,” which it was so helpful to me; it’s becoming released from the burden of ego, humbling ourselves. Meekness is not being a wimp. It’s strength under God’s control.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: So you’re saying that first if we are going to have this internally-ordered heart, this serene heart, that we first need to get clean; get rid of the ego; commit ourselves to purity where necessary; repent, confess, grieve over our sin, just get rid of those hindrances to God’s presence and power in our lives.
Then you challenge us to get rested. Now I thought that was really interesting because I don’t know very many young women today certainly who would say that they are living rested lives. But you say it’s really possible.
Anne Ortlund: Well, that’s what Hebrews chapter 4 [:11] says “strive to enter into that rest” which means we don’t naturally do it. Satan is so subtle he even makes us proud of ourselves, that we’re achievers.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: that we are committed.
Anne Orlund: Oh right, and this too is ego. When we take on only what God wants us to take on, we do get rested because He says to us in Matthew 11 [:28] “Come to Me all you that labor and are heavy-ladened and I will give you rest for My yoke is easy, my burden is light.” He does lay a burden on us but it’s nothing like the burden the world lays on us.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: When it’s His burden, He carries it with us and it’s not going to stress us out or overwhelm us because it’s His Spirit energizing, enabling within us. We need to come to Jesus not only to have our sins forgiven but just to lay our burden down on Him. He’s so ready to take it.
Anne Ortlund: He’s the only one that can manage it anyway.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Talk to us about abiding in Christ.
Anne Ortlund: I love that.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: How do you do it?
Anne Ortlund: Well it’s a command for one thing so it’s not something that every Christian automatically does. John 15 tells us to abide. He wouldn’t command it of us if we just automatically did it.
So what it means is, against our own natural impulses, we are to seek to, as you said earlier on a program recently, to live and move and have our being in Him to say, “Lord, I am in You and You are in me” John 14 [:20]-15. “I will do what you want me to do. You do Your works through me.”
Interesting that in John 14 Jesus says “I and my Father are one. He is in me and I am in him” and he says that a number of times. You think well sure that’s the Trinity. That’s the way the Father and the Son operate.
But then He says in verse 20 of John 14 “I am in Him; He is in Me and you are in Me” and He says that our relationship with the Lord is exactly like the relationship within the Trinity, He uses exactly the same words to describe it. That blows my mind.
But if I just nestle under His wings, as the Psalms say, in Him abiding in the place of safety away from the storm, in the place of calm, there is a place of quiet rest near to the heart of God.
I am in Him; He is in me and that is a relationship that He has created as surely as He created the heavens and the earth and it cannot be dissolved.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Anne, are you just naturally a calm, resting, abiding woman?
Anne Ortlund: Are you kidding? I’m not naturally anything good in myself; that is, “in my flesh dwells no good thing” (Romans 7:18)
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Could you be an uptight woman?
Anne Ortlund: Ooh, not only could be, I frequently am. Then I repent of that because I know that’s sin. What I’ve been doing is concentrating on myself. Last night I had so much to do and I was getting all uptight about all I had to do and crossing off my list.
Ray called me on it, God bless him, and I apologized to him because I’d been expecting him to take more of the load than I was carrying and I was doing a Martha thing, Lord, make him help me, and I realized I was concentrating on me.
I wasn’t abiding in Christ deliberately by a conscious act of my will and I went back to him again and there was immediate peace. It’s a continuous process, isn’t it? It’s not a once for all time thing. But oh I know the more I do it, Nancy, the more calm and peaceful and joyous my life is.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Well, here’s the invitation. Jesus said, “Come to me all you who labor and are heavy-ladened, burdened down and I will give you rest for your soul. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me for I am meek and lowly in spirit and you will find rest for your souls (Matthew 11:28, 29).
Do you need that rest today? Are you that uptight woman? Nobody at church knows it because you can control it there, but in the four walls of your own home maybe you are living that frazzled, frustrated and frenzied life.
Anne has said we need to repent and she’s right. I just want to invite you to stop right now; take a deep breath; lift your heart to the Lord and say, “Lord, forgive me for trying so to be in control, for trying to manipulate and control my environment, for not casting my cares upon You.”
Right now I’d just do that–lift up your hands to the Lord and lift up those burdens to the Lord, those concerns and say, “Lord, You are God; You are sovereign. I lift these concerns up to You. I rest in You.”
“Father, how I pray that You would cause our lives as women to reflect to our world the gentleness, the meekness, the graciousness and mercy of Christ and His beauty; that our ordered lives may reveal to the world the greatness and the goodness of who You are. I pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.”
If you just prayed that prayer with Nancy asking God to take hold of your life, would you write to us and let us know because we’d like to pray for you. We have a group of people on staff that pray for our listeners every week.
It would be a privilege to include your prayer requests. Would you pray for us? We can’t provide this program without the prayer support and the financial support of our listeners. You can write to us at Revive Our Hearts.
One of the topics Nancy Leigh DeMoss and Anne Ortlund discussed today was the way our ego resists God’s help. We’ve posted an article from Nancy on our Web site to help you learn to keep your ego in check.
It contrasts proud people vs. broken people. This list has been used in powerful ways in the lives of many women and you can read it by visiting ReviveOurHearts.com. You can also get a copy of Anne Ortlund’s helpful book The Gentle Ways of the Beautiful Woman. It’s three books packaged in one volume. When you read it, you’ll feel like Anne is speaking right to you. Again visit ReviveOurHearts.com or call 1-800-569-5959.
Are you worried about growing old? Well, you don’t need to be fearful. In fact, you can be excited about it. That’s what Anne is going to talk about tomorrow. Please join us on Revive Our Hearts.
Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss is a ministry partnership of Life Action Ministry.
Series: Disciplines of a Beautiful Woman: An Interview with Anne Ortlund
Leslie Basham: God doesn’t ask us to get our act together before we come to Him. In fact, He requires just the opposite. Here’s Anne Ortlund.
Anne Ortlund: It is when I confess my weakness that He can begin to pour in His strength. When I think I can’t do it, I fall on my face. God can start with you when you are willing to say, “Here is my need”¦I need help.”
Leslie Basham: Today is Monday, February 23; and this is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss. A glove can’t do anything without a hand inside of it. Today our guest, Anne Ortlund, will describe to us how we’re kind of like a glove: powerless, without God’s presence inside us. Here’s Nancy.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: I’m so grateful to have a very special guest with us today onRevive Our Hearts. Her name is Anne Ortlund. She’s the best-selling author of over a dozen books for women including, Children are Wet Cement, Fix Your Eyes on Jesus, and My Sacrifice: His Fire.
But the one that I read as a college student that particularly impacted my life, twenty-five years ago, was one of her earlier books called, The Disciplines of a Beautiful Woman. Anne, welcome to Revive Our Hearts. We’re so thankful that you could be with us today.
Anne Ortlund: Oh, Nancy"¦ I’ve loved you for a long time.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: You have. I was in the church that your husband pastored when I was a college student. And you and Ray have had such a sweet impact in my life, even though we’ve had very little connection over those twenty-five years. But for me, much of it has been though your writings.
Now I’m delighted to see that three of your books, including the one that I read all those years ago, The Disciplines of a Beautiful Woman and two others, have been combined into a big, thick, beautiful, hardback book called, The Gentle Ways of the Beautiful Woman.
Anne Ortlund: The three are the trilogy that came out separately. Originally: The Disciplines of the Beautiful Woman, The Disciplines of the Heart and The Disciplines of the Home. And those three touch the hearts of just about every listener that I think is listening to your program at this moment.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Absolutely. And I’m so thankful for this combined version which we are going to encourage our listeners to read. In fact, as I was reading through this book, The Gentle Ways of the Beautiful Woman: A Practical Guide to Spiritual Beauty, is the subtitle, I was thinking, we are never going to cover all that we want to cover this week on the broadcast. And I’m just hoping that every one of our women listeners will order this book.
I have to say, that I wonder why you titled books Discipline? Three books you did, and not just one"¦ when discipline, for a lot of people, is a word that we’re not sure we want to go into a bookstore and ask for a book on discipline.
Anne Ortlund: You know, the publishers, when we were wrestling with the name, wanted to make it, Personal Secrets for Inner Beauty. And it just made me want to throw up. I said, “We want to name them succinctly,” but it’s like Arsenic and Old Lace or it’s like The Velvet-Covered Brick. It says the strength and the softness of the woman–both.
And we wrestled and wrestled. It came out, The Disciplines of the Beautiful Woman, and they said, “Nobody will buy it when you use the word “disciplines.” Well, then after that came, Dare to Discipline and Celebration of Discipline. And it got to be an okay word. We need discipline”¦we know we need it.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: I do. And we hear that from so many of our listeners. In fact, I’m holding here an email that one of our listeners, and this is representative of many, a young wife and mother saying, “My problem is that I am very undisciplined in just about every area of my life.” She talks about her past and growing up where her parents didn’t really teach her some practical life skills.
Now she is married and she says that she has a great husband. “He’s self-disciplined but,” she says, “I, on the other hand, can hardly be consistent about brushing my teeth.” She says, “I’m lazy; I’m disorganized and if you’d walk into my house–you’d think we were total slobs.” She said, “I want to be the best wife and mom that I can be; but I keep failing because of my selfish, undisciplined ways.”
She talks about her weight, how she dresses herself, how she looks physically. She talks about how she can’t get up in the morning to make her husband breakfast, which would mean a great deal to him if she would. She says, “I have no routine for my day and I can’t stay within the budget that we have set up.”
Then she says, and my heart just so went out to her, “I want to change and I pray about these things. I love my family. I want to be the best I can for the them but I’m still struggling.” Then she says, “Can I still gain the skills to become a disciplined and productive part of society? Is there hope for me, a 31-year-old, to change?”
What do you say to this listener and lots of us, who could say that part of that e-mail would be true of us?
Anne Ortlund: God is the God of new beginnings.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Amen.
Anne Ortlund: Isn’t that wonderful? He has (with me) with me over and over. It is when I confess my weakness that He can begin to pour in His strength. When I think I can’t do it, I fall on my face. So the very fact that she has expressed her struggles, that she’s not satisfied with the way she is at this moment"¦congratulations! I hope you are listening, dear lady, because this is wonderful. This is the way God can start with you. When you are willing to say, “Here’s my need; I need help.”
Nancy, at this moment I’m thinking of a glove. And this glove, if I hold it up by the wrist, is just limp. It can’t wave “bye-bye” at you. It can’t pick up anything. It’s just totally without strength. But if I slide my hand into the glove, then you say, “Oh, my goodness. This glove can play the piano or pick up everything.” She needs, first of all, to ask Christ to come in, to be her discipline, her strength, her motivation, her everything she doesn’t have in herself.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: That hand is"¦
Anne Ortlund: The Lord Jesus Christ. He is our only hope of glory, our only hope of putting together a decent house and dressing right and losing weight and fixing husbands’ breakfasts"¦ all the rest. It all begins with Christ in us and letting Him do the work, instead of trying to do it on our own.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: That’s so important because otherwise we are going to strive and struggle and try to perform. We are really going to Mt. Sinai where the law was given and trying to do on our own what we don’t have the power to do apart from Christ.
Now in your book, brought together in this one book, The Gentle Ways of the Beautiful Woman, you talk about some exterior disciplines that are very practical in nature, and then you talk about some disciplines of the heart. Let’s start with some of those exterior disciplines, although I know that the renovation starts in the heart.
But sometimes you just need some help getting started–bringing some order to the clutter of your world and your life and your schedule, for a person who feels like their life is just out of control–not ordered. Help us know how to start.
Anne Ortlund: Well, I think about the closet because it’s kind of a visual picture of a woman’s whole life. If it is stuffed and cluttered, and there are things she has not worn for two years and things that need mending; she can’t wear them until they’re mended and all that baloney in there that maybe is because her life is like that, or her heart is like that.
I love 2 Corinthians 5:17, “If any person is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone.” I understand that the verb there, “is passing away.” It’s not totally gone yet, but it’s in the process of leaving. The new is in the process of coming on, and all this is from God.
So you go through your closet and you pick out all the stuff that you are not wearing. Somebody in this world is much poorer than you and they need it desperately. If she narrows it all down to what she’s wearing at the moment or this season and gives away a lot of that baloney; her closet will start to look better.
She’ll open the door and she’ll know that whatever is in that closet is mended, is cleaned; it’s ready to go. That’s kind of the way our whole lives are. Keep saying to the Lord, “Lord, get rid of the things in my life that have been there too long. Help me to eliminate the clutter so that I can concentrate on what You have for me right now.”
Then, Nancy, suppose somebody says, “Will you teach the Sunday school class?” Before, you might have said, “Oh, I can’t. I’d love to, but I’m just too busy.” The woman who thinks about eliminating and concentrating, she’ll say, “Wonderful! This must be of the Lord. What must go in order that I can take on this new thing?” We have a big back door and a big front door. And we’re taking in the new, always, and we’re letting the old go out the back door deliberately.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Well, I find that so many women today"¦in fact, if there was one word I was going to use to describe many of the women I meet today, it’s the word “stressed.” I think there’s a feeling that, I have to be doing all these things.
Anne Ortlund: They are trying to do it all. The Christian pressures are to have them in a Christian school–that takes a lot of money–to have them taking piano lessons, to have them playing soccer, to have them taking ballet, to do everything that everybody else is doing. We are not looking at the Word of God. We are not on our knees seeking God’s direction. We are doing what our Christian sisters are doing and we’re trying to keep up with Joneses. And no wonder we are pressured and stressed out.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: You know, that reminds me of a passage in John 17 [:4], where at the end of His life, Jesus prayed to His Father. And He said, “Father, I have glorified You on the earth. I have finished the work that You gave me to do.” You think about the requirements in Jesus’ life–talk about a long to-do list. He was sent to earth to accomplish the plan of redemption and given three years to do it.
Talk about a life that could have been stressed out with people and demands, and yet He started each day by seeking the face of His Father, getting God’s agenda (God’s to-do list for His life), eliminating and concentrating. ]
Jesus didn’t do everything that could have been done on this earth while He was here. What He did do, was everything that His Father gave Him to do. I have, as a life goal, Anne, to be able to look at the Lord at the end of my life and also at the end of each day and to say, “Father, I haven’t done everything that could have been done today, but I have glorified You on the earth because I have done the work that You gave me to do.”
Anne Ortlund: If we would just see what the work is, God gives us to do, it would eliminate a lot of stuff right then. If we pray over each thing, “Lord, is this from You? What do you want me to do, Lord?” I think about Luke 5:15-16, when Jesus was at the height of His popularity and the crowds were pressing Him. But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.
That’s where we’ll get our order. When our lives are ordered, when our hearts are ordered with the things that God gives us to do; it’s going to be reflected, pretty soon, in how our desk looks.
It won’t have a thousand papers and we can’t remember what each one is for. It’ll have a pile that’s for this and the pile is getting smaller. And it’ll have something else here; we know what to do with. And it will give a sense of peace in our hearts, if God is helping us to eliminate the visible clutter around us.
Used with Permission. Revive Our Hearts
Series: Disciplines of a Beautiful Woman: An Interview with Anne Ortlund
Anne Ortlund: If we are committed to at least one meal a day together as a family and we don’t start eating until everybody is there, that says “I belong. This is myparticular group.”
Leslie Basham: It’s Monday March 1; and this is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss. When was the last time your family sat down together at the table? It might be hard to pull everyone together, but it could have long-lasting results for your children. Let’s join Nancy and her guest.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: We’ve had the privilege over the last few broadcasts of talking with a beautiful woman. Her name is Anne Ortlund and she’s written numerous books, but the one we’ve been discussing is called The
Gentle Waysof the Beautiful Woman.
Anne, you’re now in the later years of your life as a mom and a grandmom and a great-grandmother and I am so thankful that you have had the discipline to write these books about discipline to help younger women who are still building their homes and their lives to know how to do it in God’s way. Thank you for sharing with us on Revive Our Hearts.
Anne Ortlund: Oh, this is the best time of my life. I wouldn’t go back a day, Nancy.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: And I look at you and I say, “I want to be like this when I grow up!” So, thank you for being a model and a mentor. You’ve discipled many, many women over the years on a one-on-one basis; you’ve invested your life in so many for the sake of Christ’s kingdom and you’ve laid down your life, you and your pastor-husband, Ray, and are now together traveling in ministry, Renewal Ministries.
This book, The Gentle Ways of the Beautiful Woman, is actually a compilation of three of your best-selling books: Disciplines of the Beautiful Woman, Disciplines of the Heart and the one we’re discussing today, Disciplines of the Home. How our families need the grace of God and the wisdom of God! I’ve challenged our listeners in this series that every woman needs a copy of this book, The Gentle Ways of the Beautiful Woman, because whatever season of life you’re in, you’ll find insight here that will help you in your walk with God.
You may be thinking, Well, I’m single. What would I do with a book like this? Well, there’s much in here that applies directly to singles, even this section on Disciplines of the Home is important for those of us who have family members that we love. I have ten nieces and nephews and I want to know how to pray for them and how to invest in their lives and we need to be committed to not only building our own homes but encouraging others who are in those childbearing and nurturing years.
You talked about a number of disciplines, do’s and don’ts, that we need in our homes and I wish we could do a program on each one of these. We talked in the last program about the importance of the parents being there for their children. We talked about watching out for the T.V. viewing and the habits there. And you talk about recouping male and female distinctions and differences and cherishing those rather than doing away with them. You talk about teaching respect to your children, teaching values, believing in God so that your family is not living a life based on fear but on faith.
Today I want us to talk about two of the “do’s” that you say are important for a godly family. The first one is one that you wouldn’t ordinarily expect to find in a book on the home. You say that we need to learn to “cocoon.” What do you mean?
Anne Ortlund: It’s a word that’s just coming back in, really, after being “out of it” for a lot of years because people were just out of the home for everything. A lot of times now you go into a restaurant and they say, “For here or to go?” People are more and more bringing home the food and trying to get reacquainted with each other.
We’re getting so lonely and feeling so isolated and the families are so scattered. I look at Psalm 128, Nancy, and this is exactly what it says: “You will eat the fruit of your labor” says Psalm 128:2 speaking of a godly man. “Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your sons will be like olive shoots around your table” (Psalm 128:3).
I want to camp on that for a minute because it pictures the children around the table and some of us are just rediscovering these days what it means to be “around the table” as a family.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: What a novel idea.
Anne Ortlund: Yeah, what a novel idea. We’ve just sat perched on stools, we’ve each had our own meal whenever we were free, you know with the T.V. dinners and all the rest and gone our separate ways. And we need to sit around the table at least one meal a day. It teaches manners; it teaches care for each other. My parents taught me to pass whatever was sitting in front of me at the table and not to eat until Mother took the first bite and just a lot of things that are so unknown today, so foreign because we don’t know table manners. But really, all they are, are care for one another.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Consideration…it’s love.
Anne Ortlund: And also commitment. If we are committed to at least one meal a day together as a family and we don’t start eating until everybody is there, that says, “I belong. This is my particular group.” Around the table things happen. You can have Bible study and prayer there; you can say, “How did it go today? What can we pray about?” You can laugh and cry.
After a while Ray got so busy pastoring a very, very large church–it was 3,500 then; it’s 5,000 now–it has continued to grow and grow. His life was so full in the evenings that he had many meetings in one evening, often two or three a night. So, we got to having breakfast as our family meal which was a challenge for me. I’m not a morning person. But, we had an hour to an hour and a half every single morning, five days a week that is.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Before your children went to school.
Anne Ortlund: Yes, and they were all junior high and high school then and we talked; we laughed; we sang. It was the big meal of the day. I really cooked and we had all kinds of things. In fact I put a whole bunch of menus into this book, Disciplines of the Home, and we shared our lives and what we needed prayer for. Interesting that this Psalm 128:3 says, “Your sons will be like olive shoots around your table.” Now Psalm 52 describes the full olive tree–that a godly person is like an olive tree flourishing in the house of God. This person trusts in God’s unfailing love forever and ever (Psalm 52:8).
But he’s just a shoot when he’s around the table and you’re picturing what he will later be as you pour your prayer and love and the Word of God into him. He’s a shoot now; he’ll be a tree later, praising God and living for Him.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: You know, Anne, as I look back on my own upbringing, I’m the oldest of seven children, the first six of us born in my parent’s first five years of marriage, so we were all about the same age and mealtimes were a challenge. We were all outgoing, none of us shy, and often all talking at the same time and we did our share of arguing and tousling with each other.
But my parents also made a priority of mealtimes, for us it was breakfast and dinner. Today that’s almost unheard of, but we did have breakfast. It wasn’t an hour or an hour and a half, but a brief time together as a family before we went off to school. And then in the evening we waited to have dinner until 7:00 in the evening because that’s when my dad got home from work.
We thought that was cruel punishment to have to wait that late for dinner when everybody else ate at 5:00 in the afternoon. But as I look back on it, it wasn’t that any particular mealtime was so very important, it was the habit of being together, of hearing adult conversation, of talking with each other, learning to deal with disputes, just being together and knowing the family was and is important.
Now one of the things that for us was a practical outworking of this was a daily time, most days, in family devotions. Is this something that was a practice as you were bringing up your children? Did you feel like this was important?
Anne Ortlund: Yes, and my parents had brought me up this way. My parents were saved when I was six and my brother was nine and immediately Daddy gathered us in the evening and he began reading the Bible to us and praying and Mother got up early mornings and had her quiet time and prayed for us.
We memorized scripture; we prayed for each other. Then when Ray and I were married and our babies came, we did exactly the same thing. Ray says, “Short children, short devotions. Longer children, longer devotions.”
But, through the years, we read out of the Living Bible because that was written for Ken Taylor’s eleven children after his wife died. We read from Dr. Barnhouse’s, Donald Gray Barnhouse’s, Teaching the Word of Truth, with little stick men. His wife died when their four children were young and he braided the girls’ pigtails and raised them and didn’t marry until they were grown. He put his children through spiritual doctrines of the Bible and they knew them when they grew up.
We did the same thing with our children with other Bible story books but mostly the Bible itself. We prayed; we memorized scripture; we sang. It gives a sense of identity, doesn’t it? You knew you were a DeMoss. Our kids knew they were Ortlunds. If sometimes the deacon’s kids were doing something that we didn’t want them to do, we’d say, “Look, we don’t care who else does it, you’re Ortlunds and you don’t do this.”
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: My parent’s line was, “It doesn’t matter who they are or what they do, you belong to the Lord and this is the way we feel that it needs to be for you.”
Anne Ortlund: Oh, that is so important. When kids have family devotions, one thing they learn is that this is what’s important more than flossing their teeth or going to the right school or taking the right vitamins. The most important thing is God and His Word and prayer. They will look back on this when they’re raising their own kids someday and they’ll say, “That’s what my parents considered most important. That’s what’s going to be most important when I raise my kids.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: And you’re really passing the baton of truth that your parents handed to you. You’ve passed it on to your children and now they’re passing it on to their children and on to their children. That’s what God’s Word says is that we should teach our children so they can teach their children so they can teach their children the ways of God.
Anne, I just want to thank you for being a model of a beautiful woman who has taught your children the ways of God. You’ve loved your husband. You’ve been and are a Titus 2 woman and you’ve been teaching us in this series what it means to walk with God and to lead our families to walk with God.
I hope that all our listeners are going to order a copy of your book, The
Gentle Waysof the Beautiful Woman. It's filled with rich and powerful and biblical and practical insights about so many areas of life.
Leslie Basham: Here’s how you can get a copy. You can go on-line atReviveOurHearts.com or call 1-800-569-5959.
Well, this is the final program in a series of interviews Nancy Leigh DeMoss conducted with Anne Ortlund and if you missed any you can get a copy on two CD’s or two cassettes. The suggested donation is $8 for the cassettes and $10 for the CD’s. If you enjoyed our conversation with Anne Ortlund, would you let us know?
Tomorrow Nancy will begin a new series on relationships. We hope you can be here. Now, here’s Nancy with our guest, Anne Ortlund.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Anne, I would just like to ask if you would close our series together by just praying for wives and moms in particular who are listening to Revive Our Hearts, would you?
Anne Ortlund: Oh Father, we thank You so much for each precious woman who is listening right now. You know their situations. Lord, you know the ones with hurting marriages; you know the ones who are divorced and feeling so rejected and so hurt. You know the single moms struggling to put food on the table and yet raise children and we pray, Father, that they may know how much You love them and how full and complete Your care for them is, that they don’t need to think of themselves as the number one care giver–You are. Lord, give them that assurance, that peace and comfort from knowing that You are the head of their home. So we commit each listener into your hands in Jesus’ name, Amen.
Used with Permission. Revive Our Hearts
Anne Ortlund: We don’t have an image of a godly older woman who is an example to others and who walks with Jesus and has joy in her heart.
Leslie Basham: Today we’ll get a picture of what a godly older woman is like.
Today is Wednesday, February 25; and this is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss. Our culture links beauty with youth but God doesn’t. Today we’ll find out how true beauty can grow and deepen with age. Here’s Nancy to introduce our guest.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: The Lord has been so gracious in my life to bring around me women, older women, many of them who have been a little farther down the road spiritually and in life experience than I have been who have been instruments to help teach me the ways of God.
Isn’t that what the Scripture says in Titus chapter 2 that older women should teach younger women–how to love God, how to love their husbands, how to walk with God in practical ways? One such woman in my life at a distance has been Anne Ortlund.
Her husband was my pastor when I was a college student and, Anne, welcome back toRevive Our Hearts. Thank you for sharing in this week with us.
Anne Ortlund: What’s more fun than sharing the Word of God?
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: What an encouragement you have been over many years. I do feel like I know you because you open up your heart in your books and are just very transparent and real. I appreciate that so much about you.
This book The Gentle Ways of the Beautiful Woman is subtitled A Practical Guide to Spiritual Beauty and it’s a book that I hope every one of our women listeners will order. It’s very helpful. It’s rich with spiritual insight. It’s so biblical and it’s one of those books I wish I had written. Someday maybe God will allow me to reproduce these kinds of truths in writing, but this book you have written.
It’s really a compilation of three earlier books that you have written”¦
Anne Ortlund: Disciplines of the Beautiful Woman, Disciplines of the Heart, and Disciplines of the Home.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Discipline sounds to many people like the kind of thing you don’t really want to read about or think about, but you make discipline out to be a beautiful subject.
Anne Ortlund: Oh sure, doesn’t it beat the alternative? If we are not disciplined, then we are just out of control; we are living frantic, harried lives. Who needs it?
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: You know, Anne, I was thinking about you this morning as I was preparing for this recording and thinking that at 79 years of age you are a beautiful woman. It was occurring to me this morning as I was preparing that it’s not just because you are strikingly, physically beautiful, which you are; but it’s something deeper and richer than that–it’s because for so many years you have been committed to living out the truths that you talk about in your books. God’s ways really are a beautifying force in our lives as women, aren’t they?
Anne Ortlund: You know, Nancy, let me just say that I used to have a favorite verse and it’s become my life verse: Proverbs 4:18 “The path of the just is as a shining light that shines more and more to the perfect day.”
You said to me, “Let’s do a program on getting old and dying. I resonate with that because old and death are two words that everybody shies away from, “Let’s not talk about that and let’s not go there.” But this is reality for everybody and, boy, if I were not a believer this would be spooky. This would be definitely scary but if you are with the Lord, then truly the path of the just is as a “shining light that shines more and more to the perfect day.”
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: So it’s not a matter of petering out?
Anne Ortlund: Oh, it’s the opposite. In fact Paul says it because he says, “Forget the outward; it’s the inward that’s important. It’s the invisible that’s important” and he says “our outward man is perishing, but our inward person is being renewed day by day” [ 2 Corinthians 4:16].
I sense this. I have to be careful to put on my makeup every morning and you know I have to do that or, God forbid, that people should see me the way I first get out of bed in the morning. But when we have done the little we can do for the outside, you’re right, it’s the inside that counts.
I think about Proverbs 31[:25] this woman that we all want to be. It says “She can laugh at days to come.”
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: There’s no fear there.
Anne Ortlund: Oh, no fear at all; she is not worried about coming wrinkles or whatever it’s going to be because the inner person is more and more important to her and the joy and the peace that this world longs for and doesn’t have is found in Christ which has nothing to do with age.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: It’s really because the bottom line is that she fears the Lord which is why she doesn’t have to fear getting old.
Anne Ortlund: That’s exactly right. I must say that in those years when she is mothering and a lot of you are single mothers out there and we know you’re listening to this and your lives seem hassled, hey better days are coming. Get through this season; it gets better.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: You know, I have to tell you, Anne, and some of you will laugh at this; but I have had a life goal since I was a little girl and that is to be a godly, old lady.
Anne Ortlund: Oh, I like that!
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: I’ve had an obsession with this since I was a little girl. I have this image in my mind of what a godly, old lady looks like or is like. But I really do believe that God has helped me to look forward to aging because I have this sense of,Everything that’s happening in my life right now is making me more like Jesus, fitting me, preparing me for a life that is richer and fuller and not to be dreaded, though, I’m sure there are physical aspects of aging that are not easy.
Anne Ortlund: Actually there is that part of us that loves life and longs for life to be lived a long time and indeed one of the Ten Commandments is the commandment with promise that your days will be long on the earth.
So God understands that and He’s not making us so despise our present life that all we can do is say, “Oh well, somehow I’m going to grit my teeth and get through it and then heaven is coming.” No, it’s wonderful that heaven is coming but these days even of aging are precious and to be savored more and more.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: I see these older women some of whom are bitter, cantankerous, and ornery.
Anne Ortlund: Which is why little old ladies get kicked around, you know, because we don’t have an image of an godly, older woman who is an example to others and who walks with Jesus and has joy in her heart.
I love the verse in I think it’s the seventy-eighth Psalm that says, “She will not rest until she has taught the younger generations the works of the Lord proclaiming that God is good.” I think we can proclaim if we’ve even become paraplegics, our legs don’t work, our arms don’t work–if we can still speak, we can do that.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: You have a chapter in this book The Gentle Ways of the Beautiful Woman and it’s a chapter about being equally at ease with life and death.
Anne Ortlund: This chapter says that one of the keys to that is getting to know the Lord one-on-one because if everything in your life has been the group, everything is the family, everything is church, everything is multiple, if we are not used to being alone with the Lord, death is a one-on-one thing.
He must be supreme. He’s got to be priority one or it would simply be too, not only too painful to be cut off from the others (I mean it’s going to happen) but it would be more painful but also it will be so unfamiliar to us.
We would not know how to handle one-on-one experiences with the Lord–the way sickness is. No matter who loves you or how much they love you, they cannot take your sickness for you. You realize you are one-on-one with the Lord and what He works in your heart and puts in your mind and how you interact with Him in that, this is what either brings glory to that situation or it’s just a bad news thing. Jesus is the transforming power. He makes all the difference.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: You challenge us to learn how to live in constant readiness. What does that mean and how do you do it?
Anne Ortlund: Well for one thing you do it simply because Jesus may come and He will just come in an instant and snatch up believers to be with Himself and so all of us must be ready for that moment.
If it does not come, if He chooses to wait so that we do experience death, then we need to be in constant readiness for that. We do not control our lives. I’m thinking of Psalm 139 [:16]that says “All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.”
If he has planned for us a long life or a short life, it’s the quality of the life that counts. It’s living it with Him. It’s being in readiness to go or to stay. Paul says, “For me to live is Christ and to die is gain” [Philippians 1:21].
Then he tosses that around. In Philippians chapter 1 he says, “Well, I’d really rather go but I may have to stay for the sake of ministry for awhile” [Philippians 1:23-24]. I kind of feel that way. I am so excited about dying and I think it will be very interesting. Maybe I’ll go so fast I won’t know, it’ll just be from one to the other, but however God has planned for it, if it’s through pain, well, hey, I’m not the first and God will give grace.
Somebody said, “Do you have dying grace?” I think someone asked John Wesley this and he said, “No but I’m not dying yet.” We have the grace that we need for the moment that we are living.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: The fact is for every one of us soon in light of eternity we will face death.
Anne Ortlund: Sooner than we think.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: We need to be living in constant readiness, not just for the dying process or moment but for what comes beyond that. That is the moment when we’ll give account to Christ, when we will face Him and I know, Anne, that you want to face Him with joy.
Anne Ortlund: We’re not going to be here forever. Our unsaved neighbors will not be here forever. We need to say what we need to say now and not later. We need to live as dying men to dying men.
Leslie Basham: Nancy Leigh DeMoss will be right back to pray. As she talked with Anne Ortlund today, have you noticed how different the conversation is from what you usually hear about aging and dying?
Isn’t it refreshing to hear from a woman who knows the Word of God and has been living it for years? You can hear Nancy’s entire conversation with Anne by ordering this series on cassette or CDs. It’s something you will want to hear again and again. You can order two cassettes for a suggested donation of $8 or two CDs for $10. You can also learn more from Anne by reading her book The Gentle Ways of the Beautiful Woman.
For more information call us at 1-800-569-5959. You can also order from our Web site. The address is ReviveOurHearts.com.
If you appreciate conversations like this one as much as I do and would enjoy hearing more of the same, we would appreciate that you think about donating to this ministry. It’s because of listeners like you that we are able to put programs like this on the air. If you would like to send a donation, you can send it to Revive Our Hearts.
The person that you marry changes over time. Is it possible to stay in love? We’ll hear about that tomorrow. Today we have been hearing that we can grow older and face death with peace and joy. If that seems impossible, would you pray now with Nancy?
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Father, I want to pray right now for the person listening today who may not be ready to die, who does not have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and for whom death holds only fear. It should hold fear if we don’t know Christ.
I pray that today would be a day of repentance and faith and true salvation for someone who is listening that they may be ready to face eternity. Lord, for those of us who do know You and are prepared for eternity, I pray that our lives may have brought You glory through every day that You give us here on this earth. For Jesus’ sake we pray it. Amen.
Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss is a ministry partnership of Life Action Ministry.
Used with Permission.
Series: Disciplines of a Beautiful Woman: An Interview with Anne Ortlund
Anne Ortlund: You must keep falling in love with that person your husband becomes. You change; he changes. You just simply say, “Charlie, I take you all over again,” at least in your heart, “to be my lawfully wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward.” You have to keep recommitting yourself to this person who has changed.
This is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss. It’s Thursday, February 26. Here’s Nancy to introduce our guest.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Our guest this week on Revive Our Hearts is my friend and former pastor’s wife, well, she’s still married to the same man but her husband pastored the church I attended when I was a college student.
For over 25 years, Anne, I have been reading your books and hearing the heart of you and your husband, a heart for revival, a heart for the people of God, a heart for God Himself and a heart for the family. I thank you so much for taking time out to join us this week on Revive Our Hearts.
Anne Ortlund: Well I just say, “Hello not only to you, Nancy, but to all your listeners and just ask that God will use these few moments that we have together for His glory.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: We’re just touching on some things this week and one of the more than dozen books you have written. You are a wonderful writer and the one we are focusing on this week is called The Gentle Ways of the Beautiful Woman.
It’s a compilation of three of your best-selling books, one of which I read when it first came out when I was a college student called Disciplines of the Beautiful Woman and then a second one in the series Disciplines of the Heart and then a third one that we want to focus on today and tomorrow, and that’s Disciplines of the Home.
Our families are so needy today but you and Ray have demonstrated that it really is possible to build a godly heritage and really you were the product, as I have been, of a godly legacy. Tell us a little bit about your family growing up.
Anne Ortlund: Well you had wonderful parents, Nancy, and I had wonderful parents. God’s been good to both of us and our parents were good friends to each other. The first part of this book Disciplines of the Home begins with a little sketch of my parents, what they were like.
Daddy was a General in the U.S. Army. So I grew up as an Army brat and my parents had plenty of faults, the way I do and the way everybody does, but I noticed that they were faithful in three crucial disciplines of the home.
Number one–they built strong habit patterns that affirmed their love for each other. They always stood up for each other. They always affirmed each other and after they met the Lord their life direction together became more focused on teaching His Word.
Daddy and mother taught Bible classes on all the Army posts where they were stationed and led hundreds of officers and wives to Christ. It was wonderful. But anyway”¦their love for each other, I got ahead of my story.
And number two–they had the discipline of affirming their love for their children. Daddy hugged us all the time and told everybody else how wonderful we were. Mother was the one who spanked. We needed both.
Thirdly–together they built strong habit patterns that affirmed their love for God. Church-going was as regular as breathing. If we were on vacation, we certainly still went to church, wherever we were. Each night ended with parents and children on their knees in prayer. We had family devotions every day of our lives. We memorized Scripture. It was a strong foundation for us kids.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: And you now have passed the baton on to your children who are rearing their children. You have how many grandchildren?
Anne Ortlund: Well, we have thirteen grandchildren but counting their spouses we have twenty one and we have nine great grandchildren. Our children walk with God, all four of them. Three of them are in the ministry and the other one feels strongly for Jesus. And now their children are in seminary, most of them, preparing for full-time Christian service and teaching their children, our great grandchildren, to walk closely with Jesus.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: I want our listeners to have a vision for how their lives can be part of passing on the baton of faith from one generation to the next. I know your parents did not come to know the Lord until they were adults. My parents did not come to know the Lord until they were young adults. They did not inherit from their parents this great godly heritage, but they started as the first generation of believers and then were committed to passing that on to their children.
Anne Ortlund: That’s so exciting for your listeners Nancy because they may be the first generation.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: That’s right, they can start a whole new line.
Anne Ortlund: Absolutely and there are not only forty that have come from Ray and me who are all walking with the Lord, except the little toddlers that are pre-Christians, but also there are an even hundred now of my parents’ descendants, living descendants and they are all either in ministry or in very active Christian service.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: This is something that we need to be believing God for. I’m single, but I tell you what, I carry such a burden, Anne, for my friends and my sibling’s children and their grandchildren. This is the greatest means we have of evangelizing the world”¦
Anne Ortlund: This is the way to do it.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: "¦to bring up children who have a heart for God, and it really is possible.
Anne Ortlund: Disciplines of the home, that’s where it all begins so we have to have the right dos and the right don’ts.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Let’s talk about what some of those are. We won’t get to cover them all and I am hoping each of our women listeners, as I have been saying this week, will purchase a copy of this book. It’s a beautiful hardback, thick book but it is worth going through every page of it. It’s called The Gentle Ways of the Beautiful Woman and you talk about a couple of drastic don’ts as it relates to building a home for God.
One of those in particular just goes against the whole culture today. You say, “Don’t divorce from now on, whatever your past.”
Anne Ortlund: And this means that there are people listening who have divorced in the past and I just love the thought that God is the God of new beginnings. They can’t go back and fix yesterday so they have to start where they are and ask God to forgive their sins.
This He does when they receive Christ and that shed blood on the cross is ample to take care of all the divorces and all the baloney of past days. But wherever they are right now, especially you who are believers, you must keep falling in love with that person that your husband becomes.
You change; he changes and you fall out of love and you fall out of love and you fall out of love and you fall out of love so what do you do? You just simply say, “Charlie, I take you all over again,” at least in your heart, “to be my lawfully wedded husband, to have and to hold from this day forward.” You have to keep recommitting yourself to this person who has changed.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Even though he may not even be a believer; he may not have a heart for God and there may be a lot of tension and pressure in your home. But the way to deal with it is not take the escape route.
Anne Ortlund: You know this is a very extreme illustration but then there are a lot of extreme situations these days. Ray and I have dear friends. He was a drinking, womanizing no-good for 30 years of their marriage and Mary simply was patient. She just hung in with him.
Sometimes Mary would call Ray, her pastor, and they’d go from bar to bar looking for him and then practically carry him home. After 30 years, he accepted Jesus and from then on, they both lived a long time. Those last years of their marriage he treated her like a queen.
He was so thrilled that she had not given up and divorced him and there wasn’t anything good enough for Mary. I just see how the legacy that they left was not of a divorce but as something that finally turned out good. And the children remember after all was said and done at the end of the day they were a couple in love.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: And yet so many Christian counselors and, even sadly, some pastors today would have said to that woman, and you can sure find books in the bookstore or somebody to tell you, “You shouldn’t stay with that man.”
Anne Ortlund: Yeah, I see nothing about that in the Word of God. I just think that we need to go back to the Scriptures and see what it says. First Corinthians 7 [:15] does say that if he insists on leaving you because you are a believer or because he’s unfaithful, if he will not stay, let him go; but if he will stay, though he is a bum, she should stay with him for the children’s sake because then they have more of a chance to be sanctified, rather than ungodly.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: You know the Mary, the woman you described, is such a marvelous picture of the love and grace of God toward us and the faithfulness of Christ to us.
He is our Bridegroom and we are often a faithless, adulteress bride but His love is consistent. It’s unconditional. He is loyal. He keeps His covenant. He is a covenant-keeping God and the woman who is willing to stay in that marriage against all odds and when her emotions are crying out “I can’t go on” this woman will find the grace of God because she is representing and illustrating the heart of Christ not only to her husband but to a watching world that so desperately needs to see what God is like.
Anne Ortlund: Yes, so if you have that kind of husband, listener, take a look at 1 Peter 3 verses 1-5 that will tell you how to live with this man when he’s not a perfect husband, maybe saved, maybe unsaved but giving you trouble; 1 Peter 3:1-5.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: And what does it say? It goes back to this matter of beauty, talking about a woman having that internal heart beauty of a gentle and a quiet spirit.
Anne Ortlund: And that’s what will change her husband. God will use it. She can’t do it. God does it. But it’s through her being the kind of woman that she needs to be.
I want to encourage you to get a copy of Anne’s book The Gentle Ways of the Beautiful Woman because she has so many more practical helps and insights in this book and we’re just scratching the surface this week.
We are going to come back tomorrow and talk about some do’s in building a home for God, building a family that reflects the heart and spirit of Christ and Anne’s going to have some very practical insights to share with us.
Used with Permission. Revive Our Hearts
Series: Disciplines of a Beautiful Woman: An Interview with Anne Ortlund
Leslie Basham: When you have something valuable, you protect it, right? One of the most valuable things you have is your mind. Are you protecting it? Here’s Anne Ortlund.
Anne Ortlund: Ask the Lord to purify our minds and, as far as we are able, to keep from our minds and our eyes those influences that would degrade us or make us less Christ-like.
It’s Friday, February 27; and this is Revive Our Hearts with Nancy Leigh DeMoss. It’s tough to raise children in a hostile culture, but there are things we can do to protect our kids and ourselves from harmful influences. We’ll hear some of them today from Nancy and our guest.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: “Today’s society is an impending avalanche sliding toward hell.” Well, those are really strong words and they come from the book of my friend, Anne Ortlund. She goes on to say, “Is your family caught in the slide and how can you gather up your loved ones and make a drastic leap to solid ground?”
Anne, welcome back to Revive Our Hearts and thank you for coming and sharing with us insight’s God’s given you about the disciplines of a godly home.
Anne Ortlund: Well, Nancy, may they be God’s insights into His Word because what I say doesn’t mean much, but if it comes from His Word then it’s worth saying, isn’t it?
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: It is. Your life, your marriage and your family has demonstrated such a great role model. I’m sure not perfect, but a great role model of what it means to have a family that is energized by the grace of God and that is based on the principle of God’s Word.
For those of you who don’t know, Anne Ortlund is an author. She has written over a dozen best-selling books, some of which influenced my life 25 years ago when I was a college student.
She’s written a wonderful book called Up With Worship, a book on children calledChildren Are Wet Cement and a book on marriage called Building a Great Marriage.
She’s a speaker, a musician, a hymn writer, a lover of Christ, a lover of her husband, Ray Ortlund, of fifty-six years, the mother of four children, the grandmother of thirteen and great-grandmother of nine.
She’s written a book that we’re talking about this week called, The Gentle Ways of the Beautiful Woman, a practical guide to spiritual beauty.
That book is actually a compilation of three of her best-selling books. The one that I am most familiar with is Disciplines of the Beautiful Woman. She’s written another one called Disciplines of the Heart, and then the one we’re discussing today, Disciplines of the Home. It takes godly, biblical disciplines to make a family survive the avalanche that our whole society seems to be on today, doesn’t it, Anne?
Anne Ortlund: Yes. I really believe in that middle book, Nancy, Disciplines of the Heart, because it says that we can’t just grit our teeth and pull ourselves up by the bootstraps and have this discipline. The middle one tells the source of the strength and it is only through God alone. We’re talking about what kind of home we should have. If God doesn’t put it together, it’s not going to happen. We need to simply go to Him. He’s our source.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Anne, you’re now an older woman. I don’t know at what point you say you became that, but you are. You’re a beautiful, radiant woman. I love the Christ that I see in you and I love your commitment to your family.
But developing a godly family didn’t happen for you or anyone else overnight. It really does involve some basic practical commitment. You talk about ten disciplines that you need to have in place in your home.
Now, we are not going to have time to talk about all ten of those today, but when we come back in our next program, we want to pick out some of those disciplines that help to build a godly home.
One that you talk about is “Do be there.” Be there for your children until the kids are out of the nest, and I suspect you would say even after they are out of the nest there’s still a sense that you really have to be there for your children. What do you mean by “being there?”
Anne Ortlund: Well, I have to say, Nancy, and somebody said this before me, once you have a baby, from then on your heart walks around outside your body. So in that sense, yes, even after they are out of the nest, you are still so tied to them. There’s this invisible thread and you want to tell them what to do and you mustn’t.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: But you pray.
Anne Ortlund: You keep praying for sure, but be there. I realize, Nancy, that we are speaking to single moms who say, “I would love nothing more. I can’t be there. I have to work. I have to put my child into a nursery or with grandmother or something.”
I think God is such a God of grace even if we can’t do it perfectly, He knows our hearts and He will somehow help that child become what we pray he will become and certainly prayer is a key.
But now we’re speaking to those who could be there and aren’t, which are most moms. It just gets kind of boring to stay home all the time with this little one and build blocks or draw with a crayon when you could be talking about exciting things with your peers over lunch or something. Why stay home?
We have a couple, who are dear, dear friends of ours. In fact, they are two that are on our board at Renewal Ministries. Sometimes he works and she stays home with the children. Sometimes she works and he stays home with the children. For several years they will do it one way and then they swap and for several more years they’ll do it the other way. No, I don’t think anytime have they ever both been home, but one has been home all the time.
As we were looking at Deuteronomy 6 [:4-6] which begins, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the Lord is one!” and “Love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.”
Then it says “These commandments that I am giving you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the way, when you lie down and when you get up.”
But the fact is that somebody, one parent must be there to be with them in those “instant” moments when they ask a question or an insight opens for you to share with them or when they fall down and hurt themselves and need instant hugs and prayers.
Jesus will help you. A godly parent talks about God’s Word and teaches them (whatever age they are) how to love the Lord their God with all their heart and soul and strength. Somebody has got to be there. It can’t be the nanny.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: And that may mean a willingness to make sacrifices.
Anne Ortlund: Totally. Our own daughter has never worked.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Outside the home?
Anne Ortlund: Outside the home.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: She works.
Anne Ortlund: She doesn’t get paid for it. Well she does that, too, but not in money. Walt put himself through seminary, house painting. Walt never let Sherry work. It was his idea to simply live on less because they wanted to raise their children to love the Lord more than anybody.
The fact is that the two girls now are married to guys getting their doctorates. They’ve finished seminary and want to teach in seminaries. The third one wants to go into the ministry. He’s just starting into Viola University this year. They all have raised children who are just “all out” for Jesus. They did it by being there and by being available to teach them the Word and to pray with them and love them. You have to be there.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: Now that brings up another discipline that you mention and that is slashing TV watching. It’s possible to be there but still be raising the children by means of electronics and entertainment.
You point out that there are some inherent dangers in letting the television raise your children. I’m so glad you bring this out because I had the blessing of growing up in (what today is hardly comprehensible) a TV-free home.
My parents, both young believers when they started our family, were determined that they did not believe we should have a TV in our home, not because they said it was sinful, but they didn’t want our lives centered around the television.
So as long as we were in the home, there was no television. I can remember some people feeling sorry for us and wanting to give us a TV or loan us a TV or buy us a TV and my dad would just say, “Thanks, but that’s not the way we’re going to bring up our family.”
Anne Ortlund: Thanks, but no thanks. Sherry and Walt have done the same thing. They used to have a television. About ten years ago they threw it out and they have not had one since, for the same reason.
In the evening they sit and read wonderful books and talk. I look at Psalm 101 [:2-3] and I say this with “tongue in cheek” because this was written before television came into being but it says, “I will be careful to live a blameless life. I will walk in my house with a blameless heart. I will set before my eyes no vile thing.”
A lot of stuff on television is vile and we would not speak it or do it but it comes over the screen and it infiltrates our homes with an atmosphere that is so anti-Christian.
It is certainly, often, the enemy’s propaganda and we get desensitized to it; our children even more so because they haven’t lived long enough to get a strong sense of values and so it looks pretty good to them. You know, they look pretty cute and they look like they are having fun. This is really bad propaganda.
Nancy Leigh DeMoss: It’s interesting how even secular studies in recent years have shown some of the educational dangers of having children raised with television, the stifling of creativity and imagination. I think what you pointed out from the Psalms is an even more serious matter and that is the defiling of our spirits and our hearts. It’s one thing to do it to ourselves, but then to do it to children.
Anne Ortlund: Even on a less than spiritual note, the sedentary life that they are living now means that they are fatter not fitter so that, too, physically plays a part but even more the minds–what they are putting into their minds.
Let me just tell you, Nancy, we have a son Ray who is a narcotic’s detective. He’s a police officer but he drives a plain car, wears plain clothes, goes undercover and buys drugs. If they discover who he is, he’s dead.
He says to me, “Mother, I used to confront evil as a police officer; now I mirror evil. I have to be like them.” He says, “Pray for my mind. I want to be Christ- like inside and then pray that they won’t realize that I am different.”
Oh, Satan is subtle. So we need to ask the Lord to purify our minds and, as far as we are able to, keep from our minds and our eyes those influences that would degrade us or make us less Christ- like.
We’re talking with Anne Ortlund about her book, The Gentle Ways of the BeautifulWoman, and what an impact a woman can have if her relationship with God is as it ought to be, on her marriage, her children, her grandchildren and others around her. Anne, I’m looking forward to picking up this conversation in our next time together and looking at a few more of the disciplines of the home.
Used with Permission. Revive Our Hearts.