Bereavement IV:Living Through Grief

Welcome to another episode of the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Matthew Robinson, director of Mediagratiae, and I'm here again this week with Dr. John Snyder, pastor of Christ Church New Albany and the author and teacher and presenter on the Behold Your God study series produced by Mediagratiae.

John Newton and His Marriage to Mary Catlett

We're continuing on in a series on bereavement, the grief that we experience from the loss, the death of loved ones in our lives. And this is the fourth in that series. We've been getting help from our brothers and sisters who've gone before us in Christian history, seeing how they have been sustained by the Lord and their times of grief.

And as we are want to do, we are returning to the life of John Newton in this podcast. We'll be looking at how the Lord sustained him when he lost his wife, his beloved wife of 40 years. And we'll be pulling some quotes from a book that Crossway published by Jonathan Aitken called John Newton, From Disgrace to Amazing Grace.

And we're really just going and pulling the the original quotes that have been collected by Mr. Aitken here in the book. John, why don't you set this up for us?

Newton, we know, late 18th century into the early 19th century, leader among the evangelicals. So the work that God did in the evangelical revival under Whitefield or Wesley or others like that, basically Newton is a second generation effect of that.

And we want to look at his relationship with his wife just a little bit because it was one of those rare happy marriages. Many of the men that were famous in that day traveled a lot and to some degree neglected their marriages.

But Newton stayed put in basically two pastures, Olney out in the country and London. Newton married his childhood sweetheart, Mary Catlett. Now, there's a little confusion there when you start to read his letters because he talks about Polly and Mary.

They're the same girl, right? Polly is his nickname for Mary. In 1750, he married her and he always considered her to be far superior to him in every way. He never got over that. Now, all of his friends were a little confused because they thought, well, as Newton, especially as an older Christian, they thought he was the more mature and deep Christian than his wife.

Newton never thought that. They thought, well, Newton, you're more intellectual, more witty, more amiable. And Newton never thought in any area that he excelled her. He always admired her to the point that throughout his letters, he talks a lot about the fact that he feels that one of the sins of his life as an adult was that he thought too much of her.

He idolized her. After seven years of courtship, during which Newton is a real scoundrel, they do get married. He's converted. They get married and they have decades of a very happy marriage. And through their letters, especially his letters to her, we see an ever deepening spiritually blossoming friendship.

And so it's a very encouraging marriage to look at.

Mary's Illness and Newton's Concern for Her Spiritual State

As you mentioned, they're married for about 40 years. But during that time, Mary doesn't really enjoy robust health. In fact, through the late 1780s, she goes through bouts of poor health that confined her to the bed for weeks at a time.

And this happened in God's providence to occur while John was incredibly busy. This was the period in his life where he's trying to help Wilberforce and the others with the abolition of slavery in the UK.

And so that must have been a tremendous stress on them.

Yeah, we read in Newton's biography that in the year 1788, as you mentioned, Mary had had these bouts of bad health. And so during one of those times, she secretly goes to a doctor. She feels a painful swelling in her breast.

She goes to a surgeon in London. She doesn't want John to worry. So she goes without telling him. She returns home after getting news from the doctor, and she has to break it to her husband. The doctor has located a large tumor, and the doctor said it's inoperable.

So the only option he gave her was to take laudanum. Now, laudanum was the opiate of the day. It was the strongest drug you could give her. So he said, you can take laudanum and try to live kind of a quiet life and enjoy, you know, the next couple of months, but there's nothing more that we could do.

We don't know exactly why, but Mary has a real aversion to the drug, whether it's the side effects or a philosophical version, but she can't take the drug or won't take the drug. And so as a result, the next six months, we find that her life is filled with excruciating pain and Newton trying to nurse her through that.

In 1789, John notes that God had answered his prayers. He was crying out to the Lord that God would grant his wife some relief from the pain. And he writes that that did occur, but the cancer is still there.

Newton is equally concerned, though, about her spiritual life. And one reason that we've chosen to talk about Mary's death and how God walked John Newton through it is because there's a peculiar circumstance here.

At least we don't find it in the others that we mentioned, but we do find it in life. And that is that she goes through a low period spiritually that is so shocking to John that to him, the spiritual struggles she feels at the edge of death are worse than the physical struggles.

A Spiritual Crisis Near Death

Yeah, let me read a quote from that time. From the spring of 1789 to the autumn of 1790, Polly's faith in the face of her impending demise was, in her husband's words, exemplary, cheerful, and wonderful.

She annotated passages in every book of the Bible. She studied Dr. Isaac Watt's versions of the Psalms and highlighted her favorite verses in the only hymns with underlinings. But in October of 1790, she became terrified of dying and she lost her faith.

She also became indifferent to her husband. Her confusion extended to losing a sense of the truth of the Bible and the presence of God. Such dramatic reversals of all that she had previously believed in and loved came at a time when her death was imminent.

Newton was shattered by these things in his wife, which he described as the high watermark of my trial, hard to bear indeed. And you mentioned, John, that she had been in extreme, excruciating pain. Then the pain seems to stop, but then this happens.

And so one can't help but wonder whether this is a physiological phenomenon or it's at least connected to it. It's in no way removed from it. And as you mentioned, this does happen in life. We've seen this.

Some of our listeners may have seen it in their loved ones that they've walked through with terminal diseases or nearing end-of-life care or maybe even early-onset dementia or whatever. I remember hearing an account of Lloyd-Jones.

I think this is in his Romans 6 sermons where he gives an anecdote about a person that he knew was a very gentle, godly man, and he reached a point in his old age where something happened and he would just scream obscenities from his bed.

He would curse and blaspheme and do these terrible things. And so Lloyd-Jones had to go and minister to the family who were shattered and destroyed. What's wrong with our beloved father and husband? And his counsel to them as a medical doctor and as a doctor of the soul was, look, this man, whatever his name was, this is not him.

This is a physiological thing that is happening. As his body's dying, his mind, the blood vessels in his mind, whatever, they're dying. And who he is is hid with Christ. And you can be confident that who he is is not being demonstrated by this.

This is not some change, some fundamental change in who he is. This is an effect of the disease or the dying. And to be comforted by the fact that our identity, if we're believers, is in Christ and it's not subject to these kinds of terrible things that often do happen to us at the end of life.

Yeah, we never want to give the impression that if a person loves Christ enough that there's going to be just this easy sailing and no doubts and fears and you just gloriously go from this life to the next.

I mean Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is a helpful picture there. Pilgrim walks faithfully on the path, but when he gets to death, to that river that he must pass through to go into the celestial city, he almost falters.

It's the last enemy.

John Thornton's Death and Mary's Final Days

Yeah, yeah, and so while Christ is the master of death, that does not mean that it's not an enemy. As we continue to read the account, we find that about a month before Mary dies, a very close friend of Mary and John's, a man named John Thornton died.

He was a wealthy businessman who sacrificially gave to the evangelical cause for 30 years plus. He was the one that helped John get a church through his clout and influence. He was able to encourage the Church of England which at that time was pretty averse to any evangelical.

You have to understand that when Newton was first converted, he followed George Whitefield around and listened to his sermons and Whitefield gave him a lot of counsel and Newton felt called to preach the gospel and Whitefield encouraged him and when Newton went to the church authorities, his church, the Church of England, they knew that he had been friends with Whitefield and they didn't like that and they didn't want any more Whitefields at that time and so they refused him a church anywhere, really without real foundation.

Newton, by the way, was thinking of becoming a dissenter, a preacher in a non-Church of England church and it was Whitefield that kind of kept him there. Thornton helped him get a church. Thornton supported the publication of his literature.

He funded the anti-slavery efforts of Newton and Wilberforce and this godly, consistent, generous Christian man passes away. Newton's wife wanted Newton to go to the funeral. He was worried because she had sunk physically again but she insisted that he go and so he went and spent some time with her before he went and he went ahead and went to the funeral.

That next month that followed, between the death of Thornton and the death of Newton's wife, was pretty grim. Mary loses her eyesight. She loses her ability to speak and her nerves were shattered. She could still hear and Newton writes that if he entered the room and whispered her name, it greatly distressed her and so it was a difficult month for her and him.

Now, I didn't mention earlier that she did rally again around this time, late 1790 and she once again found assurance of God's covenant of grace and that she was a member of that. She was in Christ and she was assured of God's love and his faithfulness to her and she was able to express that to John.

So there was some comfort there.

Right, right.

Newton's Funeral Sermon on Habakkuk 3:17-18

On December 12th, Sunday morning, John's about to go preach and he stops by her bed on the way and he kneels beside her and he can tell that things are getting really close to death now and he weeps and she wants him to go ahead and preach.

He asks her to raise her hand if her heart is at peace. She can't talk. She raises her hand and he goes and preaches. When he gets back, he finds that she's lost her ability not only to speak or to see but also to hear.

She's struggling to breathe and groaning in pain. He thinks that the end is close but actually she lasts Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and all the way to Wednesday evening. The doctor is called, of course, and they try to do what they can to alleviate her suffering.

He writes, I hope her sufferings will soon be over but the Lord's hour and minute must be the best. He sits beside her the last two hours of her life and he really is concerned that his own faith might be overwhelmed by the sorrow of this loss but we find when we read his letters to his friends that follow this time that God did in an extraordinary way sustain him.

Matt, why don't you read us one of the examples of that?

Newton describes the scene at her deathbed. Now, Newton found that God so sustained him with his joy and the fact that she'd been delivered from this terrible period of pain, confidence that she was now safely in the arms of Christ that he was able to sleep better that night than he'd slept during the whole time and that's understandable.

But then he rises the next morning, he goes on to continue with some of his pastoral duties and he even preaches three times in that day and goes and visits the sick in his church. To some who may be looking from the outside, that was hard to understand and he writes later on to his close friend, William Bull, to try to explain his behavior during that time and he writes this.

He says,.

Newton decided that he would take the funeral service. He really wanted to use the opportunity to witness to Christ's goodness even coming from the husband and to preach the gospel. Now, some of the people in that day thought it was inappropriate for the husband to preach the funeral of his wife.

Many of his close friends feared that the emotional strain would be too much and in the middle of the sermon, he would falter. But he didn't. In fact, we have an eyewitness account of some of that sermon.

I remember when a lad of about 15 being taken by my uncle to hear the well-known Mr. Newton, the friend of Mr. Cooper, the poet, preach his wife's funeral sermon in the church of St. Mary Woolnoth in Lombard Street.

Newton was then well-stricken in years with a tremulous voice and in the costume of the full-bottomed wig of his day. He had and always had the entire possession of the ear of his congregation. He began at first feebly and leisurely, but as he warmed, his ideas and words seemed mutually to enlarge.

The tears trickled down his cheeks and his action and expression were at times quite out of the ordinary course of things. To this day, I have not forgotten his text, Habakkuk 3, 17 and 18. Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines, the labor of the olive shall fail and the fields shall yield no meat.

The flock shall be cut off from the fold and there shall be no herd in the stalls. Yet I will rejoice in the Lord. I will joy in the God of my salvation.

An interesting note about that passage is that 25 years prior to that, Newton reading through Habakkuk found that passage to be, what he felt would be so perfectly suited to be preached at a funeral, that he set it aside to be preached at his wife's funeral should he outlive her and be strong enough to speak.

So he never preached on that passage before that service. In the funeral, he wanted to mention his wife's qualities but as he got to preaching, he didn't want to spend the time talking about her qualities instead of the qualities of our Lord.

So he decided then that he would mention her faults and so as to magnify the fact that she needed a savior too and had found a savior. But when he mentioned her faults, he gave this list, things like this.

Faults like excessive devotion to him. So at the end of giving this list of faults and shortcomings in his wife, one of his friends after the funeral said, if these were her chief faults, what were her excellencies?

You know, these aren't faults at all.

Yeah.

Grief, Affliction, and Contentment in Christ

Newton continually referred to her after this point in three ways at least. One, alone from God. So a gift but a temporary gift. Secondly, the hinge on which so much of his life had turned. Providentially, God had placed her in his life in these key ways and really just the hinge on which his life had turned.

And then thirdly, her death being a wound that only God could heal after her loss. On the second anniversary of her death, he wrote this,. Do I not feel myself something more weaned from the world? Have I not been drawn to aim at a closer walk with thee?

Hadst thou left me to myself, I should have either tossed like a wild bull in a net or have sunk under the burden of a broken heart. For during these two years, I have seldom passed two minutes together without feeling a void within that thou alone can supply.

One of the ways that Newton dealt with his grief as it came in waves throughout the months and years that followed is that he edited and published a two-volume set of his letters to Polly. And so here's an old set that I found years ago.

And as I mentioned before, they just cover the early years of their marriage when he's away from her with work for so long at a time. They were not particularly popular when they first came out. A lot of people, especially in Newton's day, felt that they were too personal to be sent out.

Newton didn't. He wanted people to know the girl that he loved. However, they did become more popular through the years. And one of his friends later in life complained that Newton was such a clever and loving letter writer that loving husbands would lose the esteem of their wives when they read these letters and say, why can't you write letters this way?

But in truth, the letters do have a spiritual value. And some of them are very witty. When I bought this set, it was on our anniversary of Misty and me. And I've tried to read a letter at night and I failed many more nights than I've succeeded.

But we try to read a letter at night at times. And I remember reading a letter where, you know, he's in there and he's talking about there's a war within his soul. Brain and heart are at fight, he says.

She kind of complained that he wrote so many letters and he complained that she wrote so few back. And so he says, look, I know I already wrote you a letter this morning, but I've got to write you another.

Brain told heart, we've already written our letter today, but heart won out. So I'm sorry, I'm going to have to write another. You know, he just really funny. It's a unique insight into their love. But I would say about the letters, they aren't his most, they aren't his most spiritual writings.

But as they go along, you do see John more and more using the letters as an opportunity to guide his wife to the fullness of Christ and how to live on that.

Afflictions That Quicken Prayer and Wean Us from the World

Well, Newton later spoke about the right view of the hard times that we go through in the Christian life. None of us are exempt from them, but how do we make good use of them? Newton wrote, afflictions quicken us to prayer.

It is a pity, it should be so, but experience testifies that a long course of ease and prosperity without painful changes has an unhappy tendency to make us cold and formal in our secret worship. But troubles rouse our spirits and constrain us to call upon the Lord in good earnest when we feel in need of that help which we can only have from His almighty arm.

Afflictions are useful and in a degree necessary to keep alive in us a conviction of the vanity and unsatisfying nature of the present world and all its enjoyments, to remind us that this world is not our rest, and to call our thoughts upwards where our true treasure is and where our heart ought to be.

When things go on much to our wish, our hearts are too prone to say it is good to be here, referencing there Peter's words to the Lord at the Transfiguration.

When I was first brought to the Lord, age 20, the man that led me to the Lord recommended that I read a Newton hymn. Now, the only Newton hymn that I had been familiar with was Amazing Grace. So he handed me the hymn that starts like this, How Tedious and Tasteless the Hours.

And it's a great illustration of what you just read. Let me just read two verses from that. How Tedious and Tasteless the Hours when Jesus no longer I see. Sweet prospects, sweet birds, and sweet flowers have all lost their sweetness to me.

The midsummer sun shines but dim. The fields strive in vain to look gay. But when I am happy in Him, December's as pleasant as May. And my favorite verse in the hymn says this, Content with beholding His face, my all to His pleasure resigned.

No changes of season or place could make any change in my mind. While blessed with a sense of His love, a palace, a toy would appear. And prisons would palaces prove if Jesus would dwell with me there.

It's a wonderful summary of Newton's walk with the Lord. And it's not just for Newton,.

It's for us.

Puritan Film, Ministry Updates, and Newton's Final Words

Now that the Puritan film is out and shipping after two years of working together with Reformation Heritage Books and Puritan Reform Theological Seminary, we're here in Tupelo, Mississippi where we've gathered some friends and family together just to screen the film as a way to celebrate.

We spoke to one family who'd come out to see the film. First the father, Scott, and then two teenagers, Claire and John.

I was glad they got exposed to that, but I needed it more probably than as much as they did because a lot of it I didn't know. So hearing the history and the devotion and the work God's done in the Puritans' life is convicting and inspiring and we'll encourage each other to follow the example not to be Puritans but to be true Christians.

For me, I just think the whole thing was very convicting and I got a sweet taste of what it's like to be spiritually minded again.

Because it's so easy.

To just kind of fall into, I don't know,.

I'm just getting caught up.

In things of the world and so I just think to be encouraged in their devotion and their seriousness was just convicting in my life and I know it's going to motivate me in my walk with the Lord to be more careful.

It's convicting to our community especially that we, the Puritans, were what we could call what a Christian should be and we faith in comparison so much to them and to think that what does that mean we are?

Are we good Christians if we aren't what they were and what we believe to be? They were good Christians so it is convicting, of course.

For more information about Puritan All of Life to the Glory of God visit TheMeansofGrace .org.

Newton outlived his wife by nearly 17 years and in the last stages of his own life his health was failing, he was blind but still he served the Lord in his limitations and that was partly by the help of his adult adopted daughter Betsy.

On December 21st, 1807 John Newton lay dying and he was surrounded by loved ones who were concerned that his departure was close and his final words to them were these. I am still in the land of the dying.

I shall be in the land of the living soon.

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