Heaven Rules | Nancy Demoss Wolgemuth

And in the end, what does Daniel tell us in Chapter 12? That those who trust in heaven's rule will be like the stars of the sky that shine forever and ever. There is beauty. There is glory after the pain and the loss and the suffering. And that's possible.

It's true because heaven rules. Welcome to Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman, author of the New York Times bestseller, "The 5 Love Languages" . Today, beloved author and radio host Nancy DeMoss Wongemann gives help and hope amidst some of today's pressing problems.

It's a biblical two-word equation that will help you no matter what struggle you might be facing. What is the most difficult problem in your life right now? Is it relational heartbreak?

Maybe a job loss? Church hurt? Don't miss the help and hope that is straight ahead. Our featured resource is Nancy's new book, Heaven Rules.

You can find out more about it at buildingrelationships.us. Dr. Chapman, one of the reasons people tune into this program each week is to get help and hope for their marriage struggles. They're looking for real answers and real hope. Well, and I'm glad, Chris, that we have so many people who do listen, looking for help in their marriage. And the reality is, in marriages, there are always going to be struggles because we're human, we have differences of opinion on many things, and things happen to all of us that we don't anticipate. So our topic today fits with marriage or any other relationship.

But it also is going to be very helpful to individuals who are going through a really hard time. Our guest is Nancy DeMoss Walgamuth. She's the founder and lead Bible teacher for Revive Our Hearts, a ministry dedicated to calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ. Nancy's love for Christ and passion for His Word are evident through her writing, digital and conference outreaches, and her two daily audio teachings, Revive Our Hearts and Seeking Him. Her books have sold millions of copies, and are reaching the hearts of women around the world. She and her husband, Robert, live in Michigan.

Our featured resource is her latest. Listen to this title, Heaven Rules. Take courage, take comfort.

Our God is in control. You can find out more at buildingrelationships.us. Well, Nancy, welcome back to Building Relationships. Thank you, Gary.

Always good to be with you and Chris. As I understand it, one of the reasons you wrote this book was the short life of a baby named Samuel. His story touched your heart. And the background for that story, which inspired me so in the writing of this book, baby Samuel's parents, Nathan and Katie Bollinger, have served on the staff of Revive Our Hearts for many years. And last year, while I was working on this book, I was recording for Revive Our Hearts a series titled Heaven Rules, a study through the book of Daniel. And Nathan is our videographer.

And so he was sitting in the back recording that whole series program after program after program on the theme Heaven Rules. Right about that time, Nathan's wife Katie was expecting their fourth child. I've known this couple since before they were married. Watched them have three precious children. And then God gave this fourth child the pregnancy. And they were so excited and so looking forward to God blessing their family with this new little boy. They knew it was a boy.

They had already named him Samuel Ethan. And long story short, just a day or two before Katie was due to give birth to baby Samuel, as far as she knew, everything was going fine in the pregnancy. She ended up in the hospital, found out that baby Samuel, his heart was not beating. And they had to go through the whole process of not only grieving, but also then delivering this child that they knew was not alive. And while they were in the hospital, Nathan's mom texted me and sent me a picture of the little whiteboard they have in the hospital where they put the doctor's name, the nurse's name and the patient's name. And up there in a red marker, Nathan, the dad of this little baby had written these words, heaven rules and Samuel is there!

And when I saw that and knowing she was in the middle of the mom was in the middle of delivering this baby. And then in the service, the funeral service that followed about a week later that Robert and I attended, I'm telling you, it was heartbreaking. There's this tiny little casket up at the front of this church, hundreds of people there who love this family. And yet through the grief, through the tears, we watched this family, Katie and Nathan, their three little children and two sets of grandparents all on the front row in a worship service, declaring as we sang together, heaven rules.

They didn't understand. We were heartbroken with them and for them. We walked with them through that horrific grief. But as Nathan had been listening to this study on heaven rules, this was something he and Katie, their parents had taught them. And they were teaching their children, are teaching their children that whatever happens, even in the deepest grief, the hardest thing that a married couple can experience together is this loss of a child. And yet through that, to see these parents say, heaven rules. And here's what I wrote in that dedication to this little boy. You never drew a breath on earth, but with tears streaming down and hands lifted up in a way we will never forget, your heartbroken parents magnificently affirmed that heaven rules. Well, I am sure that a lot of our listeners are probably feeling what I'm feeling right now. And that is a deep sense of God's presence. Because you're right, you know, losing a baby is so painful.

But when you have this perspective, it makes things altogether different. And you know, Gary, I told that story first at a conference with 6000 women we had for Reviver Hearts recently. And I said to those women, there are probably 100 or more women in this audience who are expecting a baby right now.

There are probably that many or more listening to this conversation right now. And I said, don't let this story be used by the enemy to strike fear into your heart. Because you don't have grace today for something that is not your story.

This is somebody else's story. And when it became their story, it was astounding to watch God pour grace into that precious couple. And so I said, you know, this is not a time for fear. This is a time for just lifting your eyes up, though they may be filled with tears and saying, Lord, whatever is going on in my life, or with this baby that you're forming in my womb, or whatever my circumstances are today, I know that you can be trusted, that you are in control, and that I can have courage.

And I can be calm, I can have peace, because I know that heaven rules no matter what. This is Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman. Our guest today is author and speaker Nancy DeMoss-Wagometh, author of Heaven Rules, Take Courage, Take Comfort Our God is in Control. You can find out more and hear our program again at the website buildingrelationships.us.

That's buildingrelationships.us. Nancy, in the first segment, you mentioned that you had done a series in your program on heaven rules. And then, of course, you told us a powerful story of applying that. But where does that phrase come from in your mind originally? Well, it's found one time, that two word phrase in the scripture, Daniel chapter four, verse 26. And I was in the process of doing a long study on the book of Daniel, because the whole theme, not only of Daniel, but really of the whole Bible from Genesis to Revelation, is that heaven rules. And by that, we mean God rules.

He is in control. But it's interesting that that phrase, as it actually appears in Daniel chapter four, is Daniel speaking to a pagan king, Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian, we've all heard his name, and saying to him, Your kingdom, which Nebuchadnezzar had lost because of his pride, your kingdom will be restored to you as soon as you acknowledge that heaven rules. And so this was the message of God's servant to the man in power, was that the things you've lost, the things you forfeited because of your foolishness and your pride and your anger and your resistance of God, as soon as you acknowledge that you're not God, that God is God and that he is in control, then the things that are precious and matter and are eternal, those things will be restored to you. So we're not kings and we don't live in Babylon and we don't have names like Nebuchadnezzar today. But who among us doesn't need to be reminded like every day that there is a God and it's not us, but we can trust him to write our story. He's always doing what is good and what will accomplish, bring about his glory and our greatest good. When we look back on it, we'll see. But right now, as much is often a mystery to us. Yeah. You know, I, in my quiet time, I read through books of the Bible and this morning I read Daniel chapter four. Interesting.

I love that. Yeah. It's powerful. Well, when you're going through disturbing events in your own life or you see disturbing things happening in our world around us, how does this reality help us? Well, we do see things in the world and in our own personal world. So you've got the macro that's the wars, hurricanes, politics, evil laws being enacted, things that we know we really have no control over.

And then you have those things like the loss of a child, the micro, the personal, the personal financial loss or the loss of a job or pain in a relationship, a marriage, a relationship with a child. And in all of these things, we can feel, as you just said, like things are spiraling out of control. But this is where we need to learn to counsel our hearts, to say, regardless of what I feel, regardless of what it looks like to me, here's the fact, nothing is out of God's control. He knows, he cares, he's there.

He's not just like tagging along for the ride. He's not, you know, like the world will mess itself up and then God will come back later and try and put the puzzle back together. No, God is always, always, always in control over everything in heaven, on earth, under the earth, the angels, the demons, the devil himself, pagan human kings and leaders.

He is in control over all of that. So what does that do for us? It lets us just take a deep breath and say, I can take courage. I can have comfort in the midst of my tears and the pain. It doesn't take the pain away, but it says in the midst of that, I can be of good comfort. I can have the confidence that God is not making mistakes, that as the verse that came to my mind, the first scripture that came to my mind when I got the news on the weekend of my 21st birthday that my dad, who I had seen hours earlier, had had a heart attack and was dead before he hit the ground. When I got that news, a call from my mother, the first conscious thought that came into my mind, here I am 21 years old, was something my dad had spent 21 years teaching me.

This is from Psalm 119 verse 68. God is good and everything he does is good. So yes, there were tears. Yes, I loved my dad. It was very close to him.

I still miss him now, decades later. But in the midst of that pain and loss, there's this underlying bedrock assurance that God is not making mistakes, that he knows what he's doing, and that in time I will see that it's all good. Well, all of us have been through situations like that and this reality, and I think that's why this book is going to help so many people.

It's pointing us to that reality. Nancy, give us a little background on the book of Daniel and what happened to him in Babylon. He was put into difficult situations there and so forth.

So give us a little background on that. Well, you're reading through the book of Daniel right now, so you know how timely that whole story is for our day, timely and timeless. So here is Daniel, who probably at the age of 13 or 14, along with some of his friends in Judah, in Israel, they were taken as exiles, taken captives into Babylon. This is not something they chose. This is not a story they wrote. So here they end up under a foreign king with evil laws and mandates and not a God-fearing culture at all. Now, is that where we live?

Pretty much yes. And here they were, and Daniel ends up getting a job being conscripted. He didn't choose this job.

He didn't apply for this job, but he was put in this job in the palace. And he served from his young teenage years till he was well into his 80s through a whole series of kings and empires. And one rose and one fell and one was put in power and the other came in and took over. And you see up and down the rise and fall of different empires.

We might say different parties today that are in control at different times. But here's Daniel, who faithfully serves the God who is in heaven, the God who rules over these kings, the God who is the king of kings. He serves the God of heaven. And what it does is as he faces these circumstances that would send most of us freaking out, we see Daniel having this steady, steadfast confidence that nothing can perturb him. Nothing gets him out of whack.

Nothing gets him off sync because his eyes are lifted up to the God of heaven. So I spent, I don't know, a couple of years just soaking in the 12 chapters in the book of Daniel. And I finally just said, this is the message.

This is a message we need for our time. And the God of Daniel is our God as we live in this very messed up world. So Daniel lived in this hostile environment and God let him live there. God put him there. And God has put us where we are today. Yeah. Because we tend to think, you know, God's going to get his people out of trouble.

That's what the common thought is. Just pray to God. He'll get you out of this. And someday he will. Yeah, he will.

Ultimately he will. You're right. You're right.

Yeah. But understanding that he is in control when we are in those bad situations, man, this is powerful. Well, I'm sure there are people listening who are in difficult situations that they want out of. What does Daniel's story say to that person today? You know, I love the faithfulness of this man.

His steadiness, his calm, under pressure. We see him being a praying man. We see that prayer is not his last resort, but his first resort. We see him looking up to the God of heaven and not being, you know, if we're shortsighted, we're going to go nuts in this world. We're going to say, look at these laws, look at these propositions that have passed, this wicked mayor or governor or president or boss in my company or a difficult husband or a difficult mate or a prodigal child.

And we say, you know, we want to wring our hands or we want to wring somebody else's neck and we want to take control. And what Daniel says, it's not putting your head in, you know, under the, in the sand, like there's nothing wrong. Just pretending everything's okay when you know it's not, that's not what Daniel does. Daniel knows what's wrong. He knows what's going on, but he knows that what's going on in this world is not ultimate, that there's another story that God is writing. And as a result of trusting heaven's rule, Daniel becomes a bright shining light in a dark, dark place to represent the God of heaven that Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar and all these other wicked kings, they would never have seen. They would never have known who the God of heaven is had they not seen him in his servant, Daniel. And that's the challenge to me is that these things that are going on in our world and in our lives and the pain, you know, thinking about walking with Robert through cancer over the last couple of years and then another health issue, not that long ago and thinking like again, and he doesn't have cancer again and he's doing really well right now, but when you're in the middle of it, you think, but then you realize God has put me here and this is not just something to be survived.

This is a place where God by his grace will let me thrive. And it's an opportunity to represent the beauty and the glory and the goodness and the greatness of the God of heaven to a world that desperately needs to see us being not like the world, which is, you know, angry and ranting and fearful, but to see us with composure and with grace and with tears saying this is hard, but God is good. Yeah. You alluded to this earlier, but Daniel remained faithful to God through the reign of several kings. I mean, this was a long-term thing. What kind of impact did Daniel have in that situation?

Well, let me just say this. Nobody names their kid today Nebuchadnezzar or Belshazzar, but you have a lot of them who named their kids Daniel, because, you know, in the moment, Nebuchadnezzar and these other kings were far more powerful than Daniel. Daniel had no power. He was a slave, basically. And in the moment, nobody knew or cared who Daniel was. In fact, he had peers who hated him and his faith and tried to take him under. So he was rejected and scorned and scoffed at and powerless. And there's nothing. What could one man, especially started as a teenager, with Daniel and his teenage friends, what could they do to stand against the massive power of the Babylonian government and then other empires after them?

Nothing. We look back today, centuries later, millennia later, and we say, who was the truly great one? It wasn't Nebuchadnezzar. It wasn't Belshazzar. It wasn't these proud kings who didn't recognize the God of heaven until they were forced to. It was Daniel. And so Daniel was in it for the long haul.

Now, he wasn't in it to get credit. He was in it to give God glory. And if we can have that perspective, then I think it helps us like weather the storms. And yes, the storms, you know, you think back to COVID, we all know people, including godly people who died in that plague. We know good people who've had really hard things happen to them, including my friends, Nathan and Katie Bollinger, whose child was stillborn. And being godly doesn't keep those things from happening to us. But I'll tell you, the testimony of this precious couple, Nathan and Katie, is way out living and outlasting the pain.

You could say, well, yeah, but what about them? You know what? God is giving them inexplicable joy in this journey. In fact, I have to tell you, that's been about a year ago that little Samuel died.

Not long ago, Katie just had another child, this time a little girl, safe, beautiful. You know, and God doesn't promise that all our losses will be made up for in this world. But he does give grace for the journey. And then in the end, he gives us like eternal, never-ending joy that nothing will ever be able to steal from us. We've got to keep that long view in mind, as Daniel did in his day. So Nancy, how do we keep from that expectation? If heaven rules, then I've got to get off the throne myself, or I've got to take my expectations of what God's going to do and allow him to do what he's going to do without me expecting him to act the way I think he should act, right?

Absolutely. And when we put God into our story the way we would want it written, when we become demanding, of course we can pray, we plead with God. We say, Lord, if it's possible, let this cup pass from me. But then we come to what our Savior did and we say, nevertheless, not what I want, but you want. And what we're doing there is saying, I'm not God.

And if I were God, I couldn't be, I wouldn't write this story this way, but I would also, there's no way I could write this story because I'm not God. And so instead of walking by sight, what we can see, what we feel, what it seems like at the moment, we purpose to live by faith and to say, God, I'm going to trust you in the things that have no human explanation yet or now, knowing that you're writing a story that in the end all will be well. And we've got to live for eternity. We've got to live for that future. We've got to live for the glory of God.

We've got to say, as Job did, if he slays me, I will still trust him. I mean, you know, we're talking about things happening in the United States with the economy and governments and various types of kind of first world problems here, but we have brothers and sisters in other parts of the world today that are enduring intense persecution that we cannot begin to imagine. So is this message for them too?

Yes, it is. And they know that better than we do, that it's in the trust that heaven rules, that they're able to go through the storm even as martyrs, some of them, through death, knowing that that's not the end. Death brings life. And in the end, what does Daniel tell us in chapter, what did we learn in chapter 12? That those who trust in heaven's rule will be like the stars of the sky that shine forever and ever. There is beauty. There is glory after the pain and the loss and the suffering. And that's possible.

It's true because heaven rules. We hope today's broadcast is encouraging you. Tell a friend about the program. They can hear the conversation with Nancy DeMoss-Wagometh at buildingrelationships.us. Dr. Gary Chapman is our host, author of the New York Times bestseller, "The 5 Love Languages" . We're discussing Nancy's new book, Heaven Rules. Take courage, take comfort. Our God is in control.

You can find out more at buildingrelationships.us. Nancy, we talked earlier about the kings Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar and others, but and the pride that they had, which today, of course, there are many people who deny God and they're proud about their own accomplishments and what they're going to do in life. How did these kings exhibit pride during their reigns? You know, I think pride pretty much shows up in a lot of the same ways in any era with people who are kings and people who are lowly and people who are men and people who are women. But with those kings, what do you see in those stories of their lives that they wanted self-glory? They wanted attention for themselves.

They're building monuments to themselves because they could. When they're crossed and when people don't go their way, they became angry, out of control angry because they thought they were in control. They were demanding, you know, fall down and worship me. Now, we don't say those words, but what happens when our mate or a child or daughter resists us? What's our natural inclination? Who do you think is in charge here?

Who made you God? It's that resistance that we put up, the violence, the anger, the throwing people in lion's dens and fiery furnaces. This is how these kings operated, but it's really not so different, I think, from how you and I tend to or often react. Robert and I had a little discussion yesterday. It was not the happiest moment of our day. You know, we married older, so we've really purposed. We're not going to waste time in our marriage with shutting each other down or out or becoming rude. But I said something that hurt Robert, and we were kind of both for a little bit there just kind of reacting to each other.

Both of us, I can see the wheels turning in both our heads. It's like, humble yourself. You want to say it to the other person, but what you have to do is say it to your own heart and say, you know, pride, Nancy, in your heart is going to get you nowhere in this discussion. You both saw this differently. You didn't mean to hurt him. He didn't mean to get uptight about this.

I'm not blaming him on this. I'm just saying we had a different perspective on a little nothing incident, but how pride can just cause us to get distant from each other, to want the other one to get hurt, to want to prove something, to want to be in control. We have to do what we did, and that was get to the cross.

I was on my knees next to Robert, who was sitting in his chair and just humbling ourselves, both of us, and saying, I'm sorry. Please forgive me. I shouldn't have said that that way. Just the willingness to humble ourselves. That's what let us go to bed last night holding each other and loving each other. With putting that behind us, it happens. It happens in little ways in relationships. It happens in big ways in relationships. But the pride is what keeps us at a distance from God and from those we love, but it's the humility that causes God to draw near and pour His grace into our lives. It's humility in our marriages, our families, our relationships at work. It's the willingness to even be wronged if necessary. I'm not saying, okay, hit me.

We're not saying that at all. We're just saying a lot of the more contentious situations on social media, in our government, in politics, in our homes. A lot of times it starts out with just these little seeds of pride, wanting to control, wanting to be in charge, and that goes nowhere good.

It produces no good fruit, and it gets everybody hot and bothered in a dither. It's harder and harder to dig out of that. Yeah, you're right. You know, I appreciate you sharing what you shared about your experience yesterday because there are a lot of married couples who are listening to us who've gone through that but haven't handled it well and ended up arguing with each other, and then somebody stomps out and slams the door. You know, if we can hear what you're saying and recognize that we're all going to say things and do things that hurt each other, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not intentionally. But if we're willing to humble ourselves and apologize, then we can go forward in the relationship. If we don't, the emotional barrier sits there between us. So there's the lesson for those of you who are married.

That's my sermon to you today, okay? And really, in any relationships, it's true with siblings. It's true with parents and children and in the workplace. Pride takes us nowhere good. And listen, I don't want to suggest that Robert and I always handle these things well.

I think one of the benefits for us of marrying later in life is that we've both seen other relationships go not happy places when you got two proud people. And so it's helped us to purpose, like, let's not drag this out. Let's just stop. And I don't have to insist that he see it my way. He doesn't have to insist that I see it his way. Let's, you know, some of these things, we can let it go.

And we can take responsibility for our tone or our timing. And just acknowledge, I didn't handle that well. I was wrong. I hurt you.

Or I was being proud. Please forgive me. There's something very powerful about those words. Absolutely. Absolutely. You talk about Daniel's prayer life and how important that was in him being faithful through all those years.

Speak to that issue. Well, stop and think about it. If we really believe that heaven rules, not Nebuchadnezzar, not the president, not the king, not the circumstance, not my boss, not whatever. If we really believe that heaven rules, then wouldn't we be praying people?

I mean, we're talking to the one who rules, right? Who said through Jesus Christ that we can have access to him as new covenant believers. But you see Daniel's prayer life through the book of Daniel.

It really is convicting to me because from the time he was a teenager, all through his life, through many different ups and downs, we find him turning to God, turning to heaven. We find him when the king puts out an edict encouraged by those who wanted to get rid of Daniel that nobody can pray for 30 days or he'll be thrown into a dead alliance. What does Daniel do? The next thing he does, he goes up to his room in his house. He opens the window where he always prayed and looks toward Jerusalem and he prays knowing that there's just been a law passed.

You're not allowed to pray. I mean, he knows. He knows that.

But it was a habit. It was reflexive on his part. And then you see in Daniel chapter 9, you see him praying fervently, like really believing there is a God in heaven, confessing the sin of his people, pleading with God to have mercy. You see him praying in faith that there is a God who hears and who will answer. And the answers to many of Daniel's prayers, some of them were seen right away like, Lord, show me what this king's dream was and what it meant.

God answered that prayer right away. But there are other prayers he prayed that fold into some of the harder to understand parts of Daniel, the last half of the book where you have all these cryptic, apocalyptic prophecies and you say, what in the world is this about? But a lot of the things we're not going to see God do till the end of time, I believe, are answers to prayers that Daniel prayed centuries ago. So we don't know today how our prayers may bring about an answer today or generations from now. The seeds we're sowing in prayer are part of what God in his providence is using to bring about his good purposes in our world. Yeah. So many of our prayers when we are in difficult situations are begging God to change the situation, right?

Of course. And God is merciful. And you see a lot of those kinds of prayers in Scripture. And Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane.

If it's possible, change the situation. But that's not where those prayers end. They end by saying, look, if you choose something different, I trust you. I want your will more than I want my will. And I surrender myself.

I submit myself. I trust you to what you know is good. And I know that you will give grace. Of course, Nathan and Katie, my sweet friends who lost that baby, they wanted that baby to be alive and well until they knew there was no hope of that.

They prayed like crazy, as did their friends. But once God made it clear that his answer was, I'm taking little Samuel home today, that's when the prayer turns to a prayer of surrender and says, Lord, this isn't what I would have chosen, but I trust you. So my answer is, yes, Lord, have your way.

Yeah. Thanks for joining us today for Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman, author of The New York Times bestseller, "The 5 Love Languages" . Nancy DeMoss-Wagomanth is joining us. Our featured resource is her book, Heaven Rules. Take courage, take comfort. Our God is in control.

You can find out more at buildingrelationships.us. Nancy, in the book, you have a list of names or titles and descriptions of God that are found in the book of Daniel. Why are these names important in Daniel's day as well as in our days, the names of God? Well, the names of God tell us who God is and what he is like. You know, you have some books of the Bible that, like the book of Esther, where there is not a single explicit reference to a name of God. And in those kinds of stories, you have to trust that there's a God behind all of this.

Though you can't see him, you have to trust that he is there and moving and working as he clearly is in the book of Esther. You come to the book of Daniel written around the same time, and you have scores of references to God, explicit references, and many different names of God. I went through my Bible as I was studying Daniel, and I just put a little symbol for God in the margins every time I saw one of these names because I think it's not accidental that God inspired the revealing of many different ones of his names through this story. So we would know as we read this that God is active at all times, even when Babylon or Assyria or Persia or the Medes.

When these other kingdoms are in charge on earth, we would realize there's a kingdom that is higher than these kingdoms. There's a God who's over all these gods, and we would trust that he would live up to his name, or in this case, names, many of them revealed. The Scripture tells us that the name of the Lord is a strong tower. The righteous run into it and are safe.

So it's in times of crisis, as Daniel experienced and as we do, that we run to the name of God, to the character of God, to the heart of God, to these names that reveal his good and holy and loving purposes. We say, Lord, I need a refuge. I need a safe place. I'm in trouble. I've got people pursuing me. I've got circumstances pursuing us. It's whether it's a hurricane or a hurricane in the home or hurricanes in our politics or whatever, or our finances to say, Lord, I need a safe place in this storm, and your name is a refuge.

It's a safe place, and that's where I'm going to run. Can you give us some of those names that can help us kind of steady our hearts in times of distress? That's one of them, of course, strong tower. Exactly. And in the book of Daniel, you have, I don't know, a dozen or more of different names.

I think it's maybe a couple dozen. You have, of course, the Lord, Adonai, the Lord, the one who's in charge. He's got the whole world in his hands, the Lord. But then you have names like the Most High. Okay, who is higher than the Most High? God. The Most High, God. There is no one greater. No demons, no Satan, no boss, no mate, no child.

There's no one who is higher than he is. The God of my ancestors. I love that one because my dad and mom, my mom is still living. My dad's been with the Lord for many years, and they were first-generation Christians, but they left for me such a legacy of trusting God in hard times. So sometimes when I'm in my own hard place, I think, Lord, you're the God of my fathers. You're the God of my parents. Here's a long one.

I'll just leave you with this one. It's not exactly a name, but it's a description of God. You find it in Daniel 5, verse 23. It says, the God who holds your life breath in his hand and who controls the whole course of your life. Now, that's a long one, but I'm looking at that in my list in front of me here, and I'm saying, this circumstance I'm facing today, I can turn to the God who holds my life breath in his hand and who controls the whole course of my life. Can I trust that God? You bet I can.

You bet I can. I think for many of us, we hear these various names of God, but we don't necessarily focus on them to sense the meaning and experience the meaning. How can we dig deeper into those words? Well, that's something I had a great joy of doing over a period of months and years as I was studying the book of Daniel, journaling through it, like really paying close attention, putting these names under a microscope, looking at them other places in Scripture. But it was such a rich exercise for me that I added an appendix to the Heaven Rules book with a list of these names.

I'm looking at here, there are 29 of them actually, and with some suggestions about just taking maybe one a day or a week on one. There's some references there, but you can find these names, many of them in other places of Scripture as well, and just to soak in it. I think one of the problems, especially for those of us who've got a lot of familiarity with the Scripture, we've heard these stories, we know about Daniel. Yet when we take these passages and these names of God and the characteristics and the attributes of God and we pause and we meditate and we don't run past them quickly.

With our social media internet world, and I'm as guilty as anyone else, we just do everything fast. We move fast past all these things and we skim through a chapter a day, keeps the devil away in my Bible. We don't just stop to pause, maybe with a pen in hand for those of us who like to journal, but just a thing, maybe to discuss it with somebody else. What did this name mean to Daniel as we read it in the context where it appeared? What difference might knowing God as the God of the heavens, the God who is your God, the God who is the revealer of mysteries, the God we serve?

These are different names. The God who was the ruler over human kingdoms, the King of the heavens. Just taking time with each one of these to focus on it, to dwell on it. And then what happens, Gary, is as we then end up in where you have your quiet time, you can spend time in the words, meditate, and then it can be 30 minutes later and your world is in a tizzy and things are going a little crazy and the home's turned upside down or your world's turned upside down. You get a news or an email or a text that, phew, I wasn't expecting that today.

But these seeds of trust in God's word that we've been planting in our hearts throughout the course of the day, that's what's going to come to the surface. And I'd be reminded, yes, He is the God who controls the course of my life. Lord, this text didn't take you by surprise.

This doctor's report didn't take you by surprise. You're the God of heaven. You're the God of all time and eternity. So as we work these names into the warp and woof of our souls, our hearts, our minds, then as we need them, they're going to be there.

It's not going to be like, yeah, I remember six years ago I read the book of Daniel, but I can't remember anything there. It's going to be this name of God is present because God is present. He's been making Himself known to me and He knows exactly which of these attributes and names I'm going to need today and tomorrow. So I want to just, the people who know their God are the ones who are strong, who are trusting, who weather the storms of life because they have an anchor that no storm can take them under.

Yeah. Well, this has been a deep subject, but one that I think every listener is identifying with. And as I want to thank you for being with us today, and I want to encourage our listeners, this is a book that will help you walk through this, will point you to the God who walks with you through this. Let me encourage you to get it, to read it, to meditate on it.

And I think you're going to find that heaven rules. Thanks again for being with us, Nancy. Thank you, Gary. What an encouraging conversation. That's Nancy DeMoss-Wagamuth. And our featured resource is Heaven Rules.

Take courage, take comfort. Our God is in control. And you can find out more at buildingrelationships.us.

That's buildingrelationships.us. Next week, I'm going to tackle your questions and your comments. Don't miss our January Dear Gary broadcast in one week. Our thanks to our production team, Steve Wick and Janice Backing and Tom Mathis. Building Relationships with Dr. Gary Chapman is a production of Moody Radio in association with Moody Publishers, a ministry of Moody Bible Institute. Thanks for listening.