Friday Features : Women and The Word - 2

Elsie Newell will be our featured teacher through out this month on Fridays, as she teaches the importance of the Word of God, especially for women. She comes to us with a wealth of experience, a true heart for the Lord, and a desire to help women understand the importance of loving, studying, and teaching the Word of God. She has been in ministry for over 30 years; teaching and leading Bible studies. Currently she teaches a weekly study to the women in her church, another to drug addicted women at a local shelter in Anderson, and a third to teenage girls. She has also written a number of small group Bible studies, one of which was published in 2008, The Amazing Promises of God. Elsie has been married to Newt for 50 years, and has 3 children and 12 grandchildren, who she helps home school. She is a member of Christ Reformed Church in Anderson, SC.

Deeply practical, she speaks from a rich experience of knowing God through the Scriptures. Her main thrust is on the discipline of meditation. In the first part, she introduced the discipline of meditation with an emphasis on the wondrous end of meditation, namely knowing the wonderful God of the Scriptures. In this second part, she turns her attention to 2 Peter 1:3, specifically on God's promises and how to apply them in our lives.

God’s Precious and Magnificent Promises  Listen  |  Download 

Friday Features : Women and The Word - 1

Elsie Newell will be our featured teacher through out this month on Fridays, as she teaches the importance of the Word of God, especially for women. She comes to us with a wealth of experience, a true heart for the Lord, and a desire to help women understand the importance of loving, studying, and teaching the Word of God. She has been in ministry for over 30 years; teaching and leading Bible studies. Currently she teaches a weekly study to the women in her church, another to drug addicted women at a local shelter in Anderson, and a third to teenage girls. She has also written a number of small group Bible studies, one of which was published in 2008, The Amazing Promises of God. Elsie has been married to Newt for 50 years, and has 3 children and 12 grandchildren, who she helps home school. She is a member of Christ Reformed Church in Anderson, SC.

Deeply practical, she speaks from a rich experience of knowing God through the Scriptures. Her main thrust is on the discipline of meditation. In this first part, she introduces the discipline of meditation with an emphasis on the wondrous end of meditation, namely knowing the wonderful God of the Scriptures. She wants this and this alone to be our motivation behind our meditation of the Scriptures. Her warmth, wonder and even her wittiness are so evident in this presentation, revealing her humble, genuine and joyful godliness, grown out of years of knowing God through the Scriptures.

The Importance of God’s Word   Listen  |  Download 

Meditating on the Glory of Christ

In the 1680s when the greatest theologian of the English speaking world, John Owen was dying, he came up with his last book, a discourse on the glory of Christ. The book is packed with meditations on the glory of Christ – His person, office and grace. In the preface, Owen notes why meditating on the glory of Christ ought be the diligent business of every Christian.  Owen says,

The revelation made of Christ in the blessed gospel is far more excellent, more glorious, and more filled with rays of divine wisdom and goodness, than the whole creation and the just comprehension of it, if attainable, can contain or afford. Without the knowledge hereof, the mind of man, however priding itself in other inventions and discoveries, is wrapped up in darkness and confusion. This, therefore, deserves the severest of our thoughts, the best of our meditations, and our utmost diligence in them. For if our future blessedness shill consist in being where he is, and beholding of his glory, what better preparation can there be for it than in a constant preview contemplation of that glory in the revelation that is made in the Gospel, unto this very end, that by a view of it we may be gradually transformed into the same glory? [1]

When William Payne, the editor of Owen’s book on the glory of Christ, visited him near the end, Owen said to him, “O, brother Payne, the long-wished for day is come at last, in which I shall see the glory in another manner than I have ever done or was capable of doing in this world.” [2] John Owen thus died meditating on the glory of Christ and with a deep and joyful conviction that death is not the termination but the consummation of his enjoyment of Christ.  Owen describes the kind of restful life one would live if meditating on the gospel glories of Jesus Christ is one’s chief delight,

Our beholding by faith things that see not seen, things spiritual and eternal, will alienate all our afflictions, — make their burden light, and preserve our souls from fainting under them. Of these things the glory of Christ, whereof we treat, is the principal, and in due sense comprehensive of them all. For we behold the glory of God himself "in the face of Jesus Christ." He that can at all times retreat unto the contemplation of this glory, will be carried above the perplexing prevailing sense of any of these evils, of a confluence of them all. "Crux nil sentit in nervo, dum animus est in coelo." (One does not feel the pain of the cross when his mind is on heavenly things.) [3]

Footnotes  

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[1]  John Owen, Meditations and Discourses on the Glory of Christ in His Person, Office, and Grace, in The Works of John Owen, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1965), 275.

[2] Peter Toon, God’s Statesman: The Life and Work of John Owen (1971; reprint, Eugene, Ore.:Wipf & Stock, 2005), 171.

[3] John Owen, Meditations and Discourses on the Glory of Christ in His Person, Office, and Grace, in The Works of John Owen, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1965), 278.