The Key in My Hand is Gareth Evans’s short, pastoral book on broken relationships in the church — why they happen, how Satan uses them, and how forgiveness and release can heal the wounds they leave. Written by a pastor who spent years counselling hurting believers, it is worth reading for anyone carrying an old offence, anyone who leads a congregation, and anyone who has wondered why the prayers they pray for a loved one never seem to break through.

What kind of book is this?

Evans was a physics teacher before he was a pastor, and it shows in the book’s tidy structure: a diagnosis first, then a remedy, then a set of practical steps. In his foreword Keith Price says the principles have “stood the test of clinical trial,” and that is the spirit of the whole thing. These chapters grew out of pastoral work in Victoria, British Columbia, and out of teaching the same material to groups of churches and leaders in Mexico, Africa, Europe and Australia.

The title comes from the book’s central claim. Jesus gave his disciples “the keys of the kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 16:19), and Evans argues that those keys are not a papal prerogative or a formula for deliverance, but something far more ordinary and far more powerful: the authority every believer has to forgive and release those who have sinned against them. That key is already in our hand. The question the book keeps pressing is whether we will use it.

The upper room: the priorities of Jesus

The book opens not with wounds but with a meal. Evans retells the Passover night in the upper room with an imaginative, affectionate eye — Peter grumbling about the missing servant girl, Jesus rising from the table with a towel, washing the feet of every disciple, Judas included. On the night before he died, Evans says, Jesus did what any of us would do if we knew our time was short: he dealt with priorities.

He finds three of them in John 13–15. The first is servanthood: “as I have done to you, so do you to one another” (John 13:1–20). The second is love: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another” (John 13:34–35), which Evans reminds us is a commandment, not an option. The third is obedience: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15). The promises of peace and full joy in the same chapters, he says, are experienced by those who are servants, lovers, and obedient to his Word.

From there he moves to the Lord’s table. Covenants in the ancient world were sealed over a common drink, and when we take the cup we are covenanting again to live by those three priorities. That is why Paul warns against eating “in an unworthy manner” (1 Corinthians 11:27–30): to take the bread while bearing animosity toward another believer is to fail to recognise the Body. Evans links this with James 5:14–15, suggesting that the elders are called to the sick not for their superior prayer power but for their authority to charge the believer to be reconciled.

The prayer of John 17 completes the picture. Jesus prayed that his people would be one, so that the world might believe. Evans puts it memorably:

We are His Gospel tract! It’s time we got our priorities right and in line with His priorities!Gareth Evans

Paul carries the same theme into his picture of the church as one living Body, into which every believer was baptised by one Spirit (1 Corinthians 12:13). Evans notes that Paul’s call to be “filled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5:18) is followed by three marks of such a life: worship, thanksgiving, and being subject to one another. He does not count denominations as evil, but he will not let our differences become divisions. We may not like one another, he says, but we are commanded to love one another.

The tragic truth and the devices of Satan

If unity is God’s priority, Evans reasons, it is Satan’s priority to spoil it. He does not soften what this looks like: divorce among believers, rebellious children from “Christian” homes, Christian businessmen who are the hardest to deal with, missionaries coming home after one term because of poor relationships, pastors leaving after four years of rising discontent, churches competing for each other’s sheep. After each example comes the same refrain: what kind of witness is that?

He then names the enemy’s devices, drawing on Paul’s claim that “we are not ignorant of his devices” (2 Corinthians 2:11). There is the opportunity given by unresolved anger, which is why we must not let the sun go down on it (Ephesians 4:26–27). There is the roaring lion of 1 Peter 5:8, which, like the chained lions in Pilgrim’s Progress, cannot harm us on the narrow way but frightens many with the accuser’s roar. There is the archer, whose flaming darts are quenched by the shield of faith (Ephesians 6:16). Against these Evans offers a long list of what we are “in Christ,” with a wry prescription: take two of these Scriptures each day and meditate on them.

The next device is offence, which he pictures as the monkeys at a Gibraltar viewpoint that jump on your shoulders and tangle their fingers in your hair. Offence is not the same as sin; Jesus himself was “a rock of offense.” But offences will come (Luke 17:1), and Evans traces what they cost through the sower’s rocky ground, Nazareth, Judas, Peter’s denial and the disciples who walked away in John 6: no fruit, no miracles, no confidence, no testimony, no community. His remedy is simple and bracing: own it, examine it, discard it, forget it.

The wounded soul and the key to release

The deepest device, Evans argues, is the wounded soul. At conversion our spirit is made new (2 Corinthians 5:17), but our soul — mind, will and emotions — still carries old wounds. He gives them names: bruises from years of criticism, stab wounds from a single act of abuse or a careless word, grazes of disappointment, fractures from trauma. Satan, he says, works like an angler, casting his hook into exactly these places. Evans is candid about his own case: a long breakdown of sleep while he was a pastor, which he came to understand as the enemy working on a deep wound of abandonment going back to his mother’s death when he was fourteen.

The remedy is the heart of the book. Matthew 16:19 is echoed in Matthew 18:18, this time spoken to all the disciples, and the whole of Matthew 18 is about restoration, reconciliation and forgiveness. John 20:23 makes the same point: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them.” Evans is careful here. We cannot forgive sins as God does; we can only release sins committed against ourselves. But when we do, he believes, we remove a barrier and “open Heaven” for the person who wronged us, so that God can move on their heart.

His model is Stephen, who prayed as he died, “Lord, do not lay this sin to their charge!” (Acts 7:60) — a prayer Evans suspects opened Heaven for Saul of Tarsus. That is why he insists that forgiveness and release belong together, and why confession is not complete until it reaches the brother we wronged.

His priority is not forgiveness - it is reconciliation!Gareth Evans

The chapter “Heaven is Opened” tells three stories from his counselling: Marie, who released her cold, distant parents and was embraced by her father on a Montreal platform; Angela, whose father took five weeks off work to spend with her; and Tony, a young man who forgave a cruel teacher and went on to be trusted as a foreman. Evans changes names and places, but says he has not exaggerated the outcomes.

Walking out your healing

The last two chapters are the most practical. Where the one who hurt us has died, Evans says, we cannot release them, but Jesus still heals us, because “with His wounds, we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5). He is also wary of blame: he does not assume every recovered memory is accurate, and he writes plainly that his aim is for people to take responsibility for their own actions.

Recrimination never produces freedom, only forgiveness does!Gareth Evans

His closing guidelines follow the pattern of his counselling. Ask the Lord to direct your thoughts. Take your time. Talk through your past in short periods. Recognise honestly if you have been wounded by another’s sin. Write a detailed letter you will never send, then choose to forgive for everything in it, choose to release in Stephen’s words, and burn the letter. Pray each day for the one who wounded you, and so become their servant rather than their emotional slave (Matthew 5:40–41). Be open to reconciliation, put on the armour of God each morning (Ephesians 6:10–18), and give each wound to the Great Physician. He even tells how he wrote to his own daughter asking her forgiveness for a story he had joked about for years.

How to read it

Read it slowly and honestly. The book is short, and its chapters build from the upper room to the counselling office, so it rewards reading in order. Its illustrations are warm and homely, and its tone is that of a pastor talking across a desk rather than a lecturer. Some readers will want to test particular interpretations, such as his reading of James 5 or of “opening Heaven,” against Scripture for themselves; Evans would welcome that. What matters most is the question underneath every chapter: whom do I need to forgive and release?

  • Which of the three priorities of the upper room — serving, loving, obeying — do you find hardest in your own church?
  • Is there an offence you have been carrying like a monkey on your shoulder? What would it mean to own it, examine it, discard it and forget it?
  • Evans distinguishes being offended from being sinned against. Why does that difference matter for Matthew 18:15?
  • Is there someone for whom you have been praying without first forgiving and releasing them?
  • What might it look like to pray daily for the good of someone who wounded you?

The Key in My Hand is a plain, hopeful book. It will not let you settle for managing old hurts, and it will not let you blame others for them either. It points instead to the key Jesus has already placed in our hands — and to the Healer who, as Psalm 23:3 says, restores the soul.