Q&A with Nancy Guthrie, author of Hoping for Something Better

Nancy, you began your professional career as a book publicist, then you became a published author and now you’ve begun teaching the Bible.  Do you feel like God is directing your steps in a new direction?

What I see is that God has been preparing me my whole life for the passion he’s given me to teach his Word. My over twenty years of experience as a publicist who has worked with so many leading Christian communicators has given me a front-row seat to seeing how they use humor, story, organization, exposition, and so many other tools to communicate biblical truth in an effective way. God has blessed me with so many sound Bible teachers to sit under—from my days as a college student in Bible classes, to amazing Sunday School teachers, Bible Study Fellowship teaching leaders, a gifted pastor in my church —as well as several teachers like John Piper that I listen to almost daily on my Ipod. He’s given me a mind that wants to figure out the big picture of who he is and what he is doing in the world. He’s given me a strong marriage and a husband who supports my ministry, and a son who is becoming more independent by the day. He’s given me a love for people and a personality as well as personal experience that helps me connect with them.

But probably the most important thing God has placed into my hands and into my heart is a love for his Word. To me, it is a treasure to mine. The deeper I go, the more I see its wisdom, the more it authenticates itself, the more it reveals to me the amazing mystery of God—his plan to redeem sinful men and women through Jesus.

I still have my media relations business that serves a limited number of clients, and it is thrilling to use the unique gifts and experience God has given me to extend their ministries. But more and more I have a desire and calling to use my own voice to give out God’s Word.

Have you always wanted to teach the Bible and had the confidence to do it?

That dream has been bubbling inside me for a long time. It especially began to grow during the years I was attending Bible Study Fellowship and I saw the power of the Word effectively taught in my own life and in the lives of the women around me. But it was a desire that I hardly wanted to admit to myself and didn’t admit to anyone out loud for a while because it seemed way out of reach for me. I didn’t think I would ever know enough about the Bible or have the personal credibility I would need to stand up in front of people to teach.

What changed?

First, I went through an incredible experience of suffering. I remember being at an event one time where I heard Joni Eareckson Tada speaking and I wondered to myself, “What makes me and these other people want to listen to what she has to say?” And I realized it is her suffering. Suffering responded to in faith gives a person not only a story to tell but credibility to speak. So after I wrote Holding On to Hope and began to be asked to speak, I began using those invitations to not just tell my story, but to use my story as a vehicle to give a message from scripture. And I continued preparing myself to become an effective teacher—which I believe will be a lifetime endeavor for me.

What is that process of preparing to teach the Bible like for you?

I find that I go through a typical pattern. First I feel overwhelmed and inadequate, afraid that I will not be able to figure out the passage. And I ask God to meet me and give me insight and understanding. And he always does. I’m ashamed to admit how often I am faithless, forgetting his past faithfulness when I am at this stage with a passage. But then I slowly remember how he has always met me in the past and I open up His Word and once again listen for his voice.

Then, I love the thrill of figuring out the implications of the passage for myself first, and then for my listeners or readers—looking for ways the truths intersect with our real questions and concerns and sinful tendencies.

And because I know that I, as a listener, most easily engage with a teacher when there is a story that draws me in, I look for stories that will help me to make the central truths of the passage clear and help the listener or reader connect. I have not always been good at that and it is still an area in which I would like to grow, but it was one of the most thrilling parts of teaching through Hebrews which became the foundation for the book, Hoping for Something Better. God met me week-by-week to give me those stories that would connect with the women.

Why Hebrews?

Several years ago I was heading into the summer without the accountability of the Bible Study Fellowship groups I had throughout the school year. And I thought, ‘I can go through this summer and get busy and realize at the end of it I have barely cracked my Bible open.  Or I can study a book of the Bible like I was going to have to teach it this fall.’ When you know you are going to have to teach something, you know you really have to get the big picture and a deep understanding. So that's what I did and I filed away the notes. Then, two years later my church asked me to teach the fall Bible study and I pulled out the work I had done on Hebrews and developed it into an 11-week study.

So how did you choose the title, Hoping for Something Better?

“Jesus is better” is really the theme of Hebrews. Throughout the book, the writer is continually comparing Jesus and what Jesus provides to the shadows and symbols and types that pointed to him in the Old Testament. The writer tells us that Jesus is better than angels, better than Moses, he offers a better hope, a better covenant, he’s a better mediator than the Old Testament priests, he’s a better sacrifice for sin than the blood of animals, he offers better and lasting possessions than this world offers, he is the entry point into a better country—a heavenly one, he has promised a better reward, and a better resurrection.

And I think most of us can relate to wanting something better than we’ve known and experienced so far. As I write in the introduction, “We want something better than the churchianity of our parents and grandparents, something better than the vague and uncertain spirituality of our neighbors, something better than guilt-induced, holier-than-thou morality, something better than here-and-now, health-and-wealth promises, something more than going-through-the-motions religiosity or the latest-fad religious experience. We were hoping for something authentic—something worth opening our hearts to and filling our minds with and giving our lives for.”

Throughout the book of Hebrews we see the very tangible ways Jesus is better, and that genuinely uniting ourselves to Jesus is better that a merely sentimental, superficial spirituality. Throughout Hebrews we learn that there is something better than going through life with a debilitating fear of death, better than becoming bored and burdened by meaningless religious ritual, better than feeling like an unwelcome outsider or an unworthy hypocrite, better than being bound by shame and regret. There is something better that makes problems and persecution worth persevering through, makes heaven worth waiting for—something worth running toward and dreaming of.

Who or what has most influenced your teaching style?

My years in Bible Study Fellowship have given me a commitment to exposition and teaching the text, not using a text as a jump-off place for a talk. I've learned a great deal from my working relationship with Anne Graham Lotz, as I've seen not only her commitment to scripture and ability to speak with a blend of authority and grace but also her deep dependence on the Holy Spirit. I was fortunate to grow up in the Southern Baptist church, which gave me a strong foundation of Bible-learning. I was also fortunate to come under the reformed teaching of the PCA (Presbyterian Church in America) about twelve years ago, which has had a significant impact on my understanding of the sovereignty of God and the power and authority of his Word.

And I’m sure my own life experience, dealing with the loss of two children and deep grief, affects my teaching style. Because I’ve had to ponder hard questions about my faith and my God, I’m aware that other people do as well. I couldn’t stand to be one of those teachers that skip over the hard-to-understand parts or the parts that raise difficult questions. I have to dig until I can put the pieces together to my own satisfaction, and I find that my listeners usually have the same struggles and questions. I also like to laugh and be myself.  I often have people who have heard me teach say that I'm very “real.” I hope that's true.

My desire at this point is to become an excellent expositor of God's Word. While I have worked promoting authors for over twenty years, I don't find myself wanting to promote myself or become somebody. I do want to become excellent in my knowledge of and living out and giving out God's Word. I want to be usable to God, so that he can use me in whatever way he sees fit to use me.

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Hoping for Something Better: Refusing to Settle for Life as Usual

By Nancy Guthrie

Available July 2007 from Tyndale House Publishers

ISBN-10: 1-4143-1307-1    Hardcover, $14.99, 192 pages

Contact Pamela McClure for review copies: 615.595.8321, pamela@mmpublicrelations.com