“God has been preparing me my whole life for teaching his Word,” says Nancy Guthrie. “He 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, gifted pastors at my church, Cornerstone Presbyterian Church –as well as teachers and preachers from all over the world that I listen to and learn from online.”
But Nancy says the most important thing God has given her is a love for him and for his Word. “To me, Gods Word is a treasure to be mined,” she says. “The deeper I go, the more I see its wisdom, the more it authenticates itself, the more it reveals to me the beauty of God’s plan to redeem all things through Christ.”
Nancy’s life experience has also significantly affected her teaching. “I’ve had to dig into God’s Word in search of answers to hard questions about God and how he works, and I find that my readers or listeners usually have the same struggles and questions. And while I share openly the deep hurts in my life, I also like to laugh. I often have people who hear me teach say that I’m very real. That’s what I want to be.”
Nancy and her husband, David, have a thirty-year-old son, Matt, who works with his dad creating kids musicals for the church through Little Big Stuff Music. They also have a daughter, Hope, and a son, Gabriel, who were born with a rare genetic disorder called Zellweger Syndrome and each lived six months.
Nancy offered many of the lessons she learned from the loss of two of their children in her first book, Holding On to Hope: A Pathway of Suffering to the Heart of God which was published in 2002. Since then, Nancy has continued to write books that reflect her compassion for hurting people and her passion for applying God’s Word to real life. Her desire to grow in her understanding of God’s Word has prompted her to pursue graduate work in theological studies via Reformed Theological Seminary Global. She and her husband, David, host weekend Respite Retreats for couples who have faced the death of a child. She speaks regularly at conferences nationally and internationally, and is a regular contributor to The Gospel Coalition including hosting the Help Me Teach the Bible podcast.
Most recently, Nancy has been focused on her mission to infiltrate women’s Bible study in the local church with biblical theology. “I regularly have women who have worked their way through all five of my Seeing Jesus in the Old Testament Bible Study series tell me that those studies helped them to see connections in the Bible they had never seen before. And that thrills me,” says Nancy. She wrote Even Better Than Eden to take women a step further into understanding some of the major themes than run from Genesis to Revelation in the Bible. And in the Biblical Theology Workshops for Women she is now offering around the country and internationally, she is training women how to trace these themes for themselves. “The workshops are energetic and fun and women leave telling me that their minds are spinning with all they’ve learned and their hearts are warmed by seeing Christ in new ways. Nothing could make me happier.”
Nancy and her husband, David, make their home in Nashville, Tennessee where, according to Nancy, life is less about professional pursuits than about the ordinary aspects of being a wife, mother, friend, and follower of Jesus, with clothes to wash, e-mails to answer, and a friend to listen to.
