The Bevans

Prepare The Way For The Lord!

More than six million adults belong to Christian churches in the UK, but in comparison our impact in the lives of the people of this nation is very small. In general, the church is seen as having little to offer and being almost irrelevant to ‘real life’. What a contrast to that early band of believers who were accused of "turning the world upside down". For the most part, we’re not even willing to let God turn our own lives upside down!

I believe the heart of the problem is the effective absence of God from most of what we do. It is apparently considered perfectly normal when church newsletters, Christians’ annual Christmas letters, and even missionaries’ prayer letters are full of news of our busyness but lack a single mention of anything God has done or is doing or wanting to do! For most practical purposes we seem to live as if God is absent (unless we decide we want something from Him). ‘God’ has become little more than the principle behind a philosophy of life or a nebulous comforter to call on in our hour of need. But if He is effectively invisible and irrelevant in most aspects of our living — if, in practice, we are atheists — it is no wonder that those outside the church see nothing in us to attract them to Him.

We should be a people for whom God is everything, but somehow we have let Him become almost nothing. Kathryn Kuhlman used to say to those who came to her meetings:

God should be more real to us than all the worthless material goods we surround ourselves with. More real to us even than our friends and family. He should be "all we’ve got", so that it hurts us when we hurt Him or He is wounded by the behaviour of others. Sadly though, we have a church today almost devoid of people who truly know God as their loving heavenly Father, as their best Friend and as their intimate Lover. And so, it is often we who are the ones who are grieving Him by ignoring Him and disobeying Him.

For, in practice, the One whom we call ‘Lord’ often isn’t our Master at all. We don’t let Him direct our lives in any meaningful way. Nominally, He is head over all, but in reality, it is we who make the decisions. We have dethroned and domesticated our heavenly King! Shortly before he died in 1963, A. W. Tozer wrote the following:

Thirty-six years later, it would be difficult to argue that things have changed very much. Sure, there are many new ways of ‘being church’ or ‘doing church’ these days. And in some of them, in certain areas of ministry, God is allowed to be the ‘boss’. However, for most of us, in most of what we do, we seek to retain control of our own lives, using our talents and time as we choose. Our priorities are not His priorities and we don’t take what He has to say about how to go about our daily lives very seriously at all. As David Watson wrote in 1978,

As a result, our way of life and conduct is almost indistinguishable from that of moderately upright unbelievers. Surely, the reason why the church is no longer changing the world is that we have become like the world!

Where are the soldiers of the Great High King, eager to please their Commanding Officer and march to His every order? Where are those who will live their lives doing all and only what their Father asks of them? Where are those who, like Brother Lawrence, would not pick up a straw from the ground against His will, or for any other motive than out of pure love for God? This is what the church of God should be like — a community in which God is GOD. For we may do many good things, but however good they are, if they are not the particular things that God requires of us, done in the way that He requires, in the power of His Holy Spirit, then ultimately they are worthless — wood, hay and straw to be burned up, rather than gold and silver that will last. We need to be God’s people, owned and controlled by Him, not just good people!

This book is an invitation to prepare the way for the Lord to work in our lives and for His glory to be revealed through us to the world by coming humbly to Him and surrendering ourselves to His complete Lordship and rule. The Lord invites us to take upon ourselves the light and easy yoke of His direction that we may be released from the heavy burdens which we place on ourselves and let others place on us. He urges us to be set free from the strongholds of our culture and of our own thinking and to know His sufficiency for all our needs as we seek above everything else His Kingship in our lives. He calls us to be transformed into His beautiful likeness as we increasingly perceive Him as He really is and encourages us to discover that everything else seems like rubbish in comparison to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ in both the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in His sufferings. And, above all, He invites us to know the satisfaction and joy of living like Jesus — seeking to say and do all and only what pleases our loving heavenly Father.

If we are to become people through whom the Lord can reveal His glory to the world, we will need to let Him uproot and tear down, destroy and overthrow all that shouldn’t be there in our lives. And we will need to let Him build and plant what is lacking. Every obstruction in our hearts preventing the Lord doing what He wills will need to be brought down; and every dry and barren valley in our lives will need to be filled with His presence, His love, His power, His purity and the attractive fruit of His Holy Spirit.

Are you willing to let God change your relationship with Him, change the things that matter to you, change your attitudes to the things the world values, and change the way you go about living your life? For this book is for those who are willing to be serious about being passionate for God and His Kingdom and are willing to pay the price of dying to all self-seeking, self-sufficiency and self-pity, and of standing out as different in our increasingly corrupt world (and increasingly compromised church). It is not for those who are satisfied with a superficial spirituality, those who want a Christianity that consists simply of believing the creeds, helping out at church and being a good person generally. Nor will it be of any great benefit to you if you want to be selective as to which parts of God’s revelation you will accept: Modern relativism has little place in Christian discipleship — God’s words are true, not a matter of personal preference! Above all, this book is for all who recognise the emptiness of the world’s promises and have had enough of the ineffectiveness of the church in this country, and are willing to take responsibility for the situation and let God radically change them in order to be able to do something about it — and especially for those in leadership who, having travelled the path first, will guide others into a way of life in which God is absolutely and completely the one and only Master.

"If you hold to My teaching, you are really My disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.", said Jesus. But, as A. W. Tozer said, "Truth that is not experienced is no better than error, and may be fully as dangerous." Much of this book simply consists of the presentation of Scriptural truth to be applied to our hearts and minds and wills so that we become more like Jesus. Unfortunately, many of us approach the Bible in such a way that its impact in our lives is seriously limited. We tend to let our impoverished experience of God control our response to the Scriptures rather than letting our experience be transformed to match what we read in the Scriptures. Here are the comments of three recent authors concerning this problem in the Western church:

In this book, I deliberately attempt to paint a picture of an alternative vision to the one our society offers us: a picture in which God and Christ are centre-stage, not hidden away in some ‘religious’ corner and brought out when desired, and in which the establishment and extension of the Lord’s Kingship in human lives is the purpose of our living. It is a portrait of what we in our everyday lives, as the church of God, should and could be like if we will let the Lord bring about the necessary changes to our hearts and minds and wills. This picture is painted with a fairly broad brush. As you read, allow the Holy Spirit fill in the specific details relevant to your own life and situation.

This book is probably not always an easy read, for the divine medicine is presented fairly neat and without sugar coatings. I suggest you read slowly enough to let the Holy Spirit speak to your heart, prayerfully paying attention to what God is saying to you and, above all, acting on what He says. My greatest fear is that many will claim to ‘accept’ the message of this book without really doing anything about it.

The progression from chapter to chapter is by no means linear. Rather, each seeks to approach the central thesis — that God needs to become the true Master of our lives — from a different angle. Like threads woven together or "variations on a theme", there are recurring motifs that are brought to the fore at different points. Important truths are repeated from different perspectives with different emphasis on different occasions. The work is divided into four Parts: Part One consists of two introductory foundational chapters on the nature of God and of the gospel message. Part Two is the heart of the book and discusses the loving conversational relationship we can have with the Lord. In Part Three, the focus is on attitudes and practices necessary for growth in Spiritual maturity. Finally, Part Four considers our response to the false and empty values of our society.

As I have struggled to write these words, I have often felt like Job that I was writing "of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know". In criticising the current state of the British church, I am well aware of the pitfall of appearing to stand apart and judge from the outside, or of pointing out the speck in another’s eye while ignoring the plank in my own. As a member of the church I criticise I am as much a part of the problem as anyone else. The church, of all bodies, should place a high value on honest self-criticism, but it is very easy for us to reject honest attempts to expose our faults as being unwarranted condemnation. If my passion for the renewal of the church has spilled over into unjustified generalisation or rebuke, I ask for your forgiveness.

As I have been writing God has had to deal with me, sometimes quite deeply, on the matters I have been writing about — woe indeed to the one who seeks to lead others where he is not willing to go himself! Not that I feel the Lord has been able to make anything like as much progress with me as He would have liked, but falteringly, like the apostle Paul, I seek to press on to take hold of that for which Christ has taken hold of me. When I look at myself and my own failings and half-heartedness, and recognise that the church is just made up of feeble sinners like me, I am tempted to lose hope, but the Lord God is more than able to breathe abundant life into the dead bones of our apparently hopeless condition, and is always faithful to His promises. Let us co-operate with Him in order that the glory of the Lord might be revealed through us, and all mankind together will see it.

I am, of course, greatly indebted to those who have walked the road before me, often with "wiser and more eloquent words", many of whom I have quoted and whose names appear in the footnotes. Particularly valuable has been Richard Foster and James Bryan Smith’s Devotional Classics, a selection of readings from sixteen centuries of Spiritual wisdom whose breadth and depth clearly demonstrate the shallowness of most Christian discipleship in our day. My prayer is simply that my own imperfect scribblings will contribute a little to the fulfilment of God’s present purposes in the church in this nation.

He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches.

Chapter 1: How Big is Your God?

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